John Webster(c. 1578–c. 1632)

John Webster was born in the City of London about 1578, the son of a coach-maker of substance whose workshop stood near Newgate in the parish of St Sepulchre. He was admitted to the Merchant Taylors' School, went up to the Middle Temple to read law in 1598, and appears in the theatre records by 1602 as a paid contributor to the playhouse repertory at the Rose and the Fortune.

The first years in the playhouse were collaborative, the standard Jacobean model of scenes written to deadline alongside Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton and the young Thomas Heywood. The two prose city-comedies he wrote with Dekker, Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho (1605), were the apprenticeship. He was about thirty when he wrote the first of the two tragedies that would carry his name into the canon.

The White Devil was performed by Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell about 1612. The Red Bull audience preferred swashbuckling adventure plays, and the play found its full readership only later, but the writing announced a new voice: dense, fierce, and unlike anyone else then working.

He took his next play to the King's Men at the Blackfriars, the indoor private playhouse, where Burbage's company first performed The Duchess of Malfi about 1613. The candle-lit Blackfriars, with its audience of senior lawyers, courtiers and university men, was the right room for a long, slow, claustrophobic tragedy, and the play was a success there. The two great tragedies share one anatomy: an Italian court setting, a virtuous central woman, and a dramatic poetry that line for line is the densest of any non-Shakespeare playwright of the period.

He wrote at least three more plays, including the tragicomedy The Devil's Law-Case (1617) and A Cure for a Cuckold with William Rowley. He was a freeman of the Merchant Taylors' Company by 1615 and is referred to as the late Master John Webster by 1634. Charles Lamb in 1808, the Romantic critics through the nineteenth century, and T. S. Eliot in the twentieth re-canonised him. The Webster name, the occupational marker for a weaver, sits in the West Riding and East Anglian cloth trades; he carried it from a Smithfield coach-maker's family into the permanent canon of English dramatic poetry.