John Webster and his plays. The White Devil

Little is known about the personal history of John Webster. Webster’s best work is concentrated in his two Italian tragedies, The White Devil (c. 1611) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613). In both plays the action has a melodramatic character, revenge is the dominant theme. It is exacted by means of poisoned pictures, the refinement of cruelty and torture, we witness strangling on the open stage, the dance of madmen, and other horrors. Webster’s plays live by their author’s gift on poetry –not only the poetry of word and image, but the poetry of suggestion and atmosphere, expressing an embittered and tragic view of life. In the words of F. S. Boas, Webster possesses poetic imagination in its quintessential quality, a gift which he shares with Marlowe and Shakespeare alone. Webster’s plays reveal the powerful individualism of the Renaissance together with the despair of its later phase. The nobility of Webster’s tragic outlook has been finely praised by Swinburne. The courage and self-reliance of man in a hostile universe: this is the basis of Webster’s stoic morality.

The White Devil

By contrast The White Devil is a more unequal, if more dynamic, play, with a definite moral ambiguity at its core. The play is based on a tragedy of real life which had made a deep impression in Italy a quarter of a century before. Webster’s heroine, Vittoria Corombona (or Accoramboni, as she was really called) is guilty for adultery and murder; yet when she is at bay, before her judges, the dramatist presents her in a sympathetic light and exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers. This great trial scene is one of the peaks of Elizabethan drama.