Fireworks All Over the House

Abstract

In the preface to the reader, affixed to the 1613 edition of The White Devil John Webster praised Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher and ‘lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker and Master Heywood’.¹ In linking the names of Shakespeare, Dekker and Heywood, Webster was referring to playwrights associated with the three most important companies then working in London: the King’s Men at the Globe and Blackfriars, Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune theatre, and Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull, the theatre in which Webster’s play was first performed. Dekker’s and Heywood’s critical fortunes have not equalled those of their illustrious fellow² but, like him, they were professionals, and it is as professionals that their work offers a useful vantage point from which to understand the conditions of theatre as it became firmly established in the artistic and commercial world of London at the turn of the seventeenth century.