The reputation of the English dramatist John Webster (ca. 1580-ca. 1634) rests on two blank-verse tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. He was a painstaking literary craftsman, much concerned with the philosophy and the psychology of...

Despite his seminal importance in Jacobean drama (most critics rank him as second only to William Shakespeare as a tragedian), very little was known about John Webster's life until recently. However, the researches of Mary Edmond and the discovery in...

Despite his seminal importance in Jacobean drama (most critics rank him as second only to Shakespeare as a tragedian), very little was known about John Webster's life until recently. However, the researches of Mary Edmond and the discovery in 1985 of a...

John Alden Webster, 96, a Navy officer and a Washington area property manager, died of renal failure Feb. 14 at his home in Chevy Chase. Capt. Webster was born in Town Line, N.Y., and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He...

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In the following excerpt, Bliss examines Webster's "unheroic" protagonists, focusing on their relationship to society and comparing them with the more traditional, heroic protagonists depicted in the tragedies of Shakespeare and Chapman. He comments: "Webster is an important, yet still transitional figure in drama's waning concern with the public consequences of those private relations that mold both the protagonist and the society he influences."

In the excerpt below, Jack maintains that there is no correspondence between the moral axioms of "degree"—the hierarchical ordering of nature and society—and the Machiavellian life presented in Webster's drama. This disassociation, the critic maintains, is the dramatist's fundamental flaw.

In the excerpt below, Callaghan contends that traditional "masculinist" criticism has erroneously focused on the dramatist's "defective dramaturgy" rather than "regarding Webster's play as a demonstration of certain flaws in the critical construction of tragedy," particularly those associated with the roles for women.