John Webster(c. 1578–c. 1632)

John Webster was born in the City of London about 1578, the son of John Webster the elder, a coach-maker of substance whose workshop stood at the corner of Cow Lane and Hosier Lane in the parish of St Sepulchre, just outside the Newgate. The family business made and rented out coaches, including the carts in which condemned prisoners rode from Newgate to the gallows at Tyburn, and the coaches in which the London livery companies processed at civic ceremonies. The boy grew up in sight of both ends of London public life. He was admitted to the Merchant Taylors' School about 1587, went up to the Middle Temple to read law in 1598, and is in the Henslowe records by 1602 as a paid contributor to the playhouse repertory at the Rose and the Fortune.

The first six years in the playhouse were collaborative. He worked alongside Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, Henry Chettle and the young Thomas Heywood on the standard Jacobean writing-by-committee model: scenes written to deadline, paid by the act, revised by hands he sometimes did not know. *Caesar's Fall* (1602), *The Two Harpies* (1602), *Lady Jane* (1602, with Dekker, surviving only as the print *Sir Thomas Wyatt*), the unascribed touches on *The Malcontent* prologue (1604), and the two prose city-comedies he wrote with Dekker, *Westward Ho* (1604) and *Northward Ho* (1605), were the apprenticeship. They were also commercially mid-level. He was thirty when he wrote the first of the two tragedies that would carry his name out of the Jacobean repertory and into the canon.

*The White Devil* was performed by Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell in the early winter of 1611 or 1612. The Red Bull was the wrong house for it. The audience there preferred swashbuckling adventure plays of the *Tamburlaine* and *Tom-a-Lincoln* type and the play was, by Webster's own complaint in the preface to the first quarto of 1612, *acted in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted a full and understanding auditory*. He took the second play to the King's Men at the Blackfriars, the indoor private playhouse where Shakespeare had retired, and Burbage's company first performed *The Duchess of Malfi* there in the autumn of 1613 or 1614. The Blackfriars audience was the candle-lit court-and-Inns-of-Court audience of senior lawyers, courtiers and university men, the right room for a long, slow, claustrophobic play of a Duchess strangled in a chamber by her own brothers' hired killers. The Duchess of Malfi was a success there in a way the White Devil at the Red Bull had not been.

Two plays carried him out of the repertory and into the canon. He wrote at least three more after the Duchess: *The Devil's Law-Case* (1617, a tragicomedy that survives), *A Cure for a Cuckold* with William Rowley (1624 or 25), and *Appius and Virginia* with Thomas Heywood (1625), plus a number of collaborations and a Lord Mayor's pageant. The two great tragedies stand on their own. They share the same anatomy: a Catholic Italian or papal court setting that gave the Protestant English audience licence to watch dynastic murder at one remove, a virtuous central woman destroyed by the men who command her family's politics, set-piece scenes of torture and madness, and a moral arithmetic in which the survivors at the end of the fifth act are mostly minor characters. The dramatic poetry is, by line-for-line consensus, the densest of any non-Shakespeare playwright of the period. Charles Lamb in 1808, the Romantic critics through the nineteenth century, and T. S. Eliot in the twentieth re-canonised him.

The end of his life is, like the beginning, almost entirely undocumented. He paid his Merchant Taylors' subscription as a freeman in 1615. He wrote elegies on the death of Prince Henry in 1612 and on Queen Anne's funeral in 1619. He is referred to in a 1634 commendatory verse as *the late and worthy Master John Webster*, which gives the death-date as before 1634, probably about 1632. He is not in any of the parish burial registers. Where he is buried is unknown. The Webster name in its dominant English form, the feminine -ster occupational marker for she-weaver, sits in the West Riding and East Anglian cloth trades; he carried it from a Smithfield coach-maker's family into the canon of English dramatic poetry where it has been since.