Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/130

 ‘Theatrum Poetarum,’ but Phillips was certainly in error. The plot appears to be drawn from Barnabe Riche's ‘Farewell to Militarie Profession’ (1581). The younger Hazlitt included it in his edition of Webster's works.

Two other plays in which Webster had a hand are lost. On 13 Sept. 1624 there was licensed for publication ‘a new tragedy’ called ‘A late Murder of the Son upon the Mother’ by Ford and Webster. Webster was also the author of a play called ‘Guise,’ which was doubtless a tragedy founded, like Marlowe's ‘Massacre of Paris,’ on contemporary French history. Webster refers to the work when dedicating his ‘Devil's Law Case’ to Sir Thomas Finch. Mention of a play of the name is made by Henslowe in his ‘Diary’ in 1601, and Collier unwarrantably inserted the word ‘Webster’ after this entry. Webster's play has not survived, and nothing is positively known of its date of composition.

The best collection of original editions of Webster's plays belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. In 1830 Webster's works were collected in four volumes by Alexander Dyce. A new issue of Dyce's edition, revised and corrected, appeared in 1857, and in one volume in 1866. William Hazlitt, the critic's son, edited an edition in four volumes in 1856.

Although Nathan Drake and some other eighteenth-century critics had detected in Webster ‘a more than earthly wildness,’ it was Charles Lamb who first recognised his surpassing genius as a writer of tragedy. Subsequently Hazlitt, and at a later period Mr. Swinburne, bore powerful testimony to Lamb's justness of view. Webster is obviously a disciple of Shakespeare, and of all his contemporaries Webster approaches Shakespeare nearest in tragic power. But his power is infinitely circumscribed when it is compared with Shakespeare's. His knowledge of his master's work, too, is sometimes visible in a form suggestive of plagiarism. His masterpieces are liable to the charge that they present the story indecisively and at times fail in dramatic point and perspicuity. Many scenes too strongly resemble dialogues from romances to render them effective on the stage. Webster lacked Shakespeare's sureness of touch in developing character, and his studies of human nature often suffer from over-elaboration. With a persistence that seems unjustifiable in a great artist, Webster, moreover, concentrated his chief energies on repulsive themes and characters; he trafficked with an obstinate monotony in fantastic crimes. Nevertheless he had a true artistic sense. He worked slowly, and viewed with abhorrence careless or undigested work. ‘No action,’ he wrote in the preface to ‘The Devil's Law Case,’ ‘can ever be gracious where the decency of the language and ingenious structure of the scene arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.’ It is proof of his high poetic spirit that he was capable of illuminating scenes of the most repellent wrongdoing with miraculous touches of poetic beauty such as only Shakespeare could rival. Furthermore, Webster, despite all the vice round which his plots revolve, is rarely coarse. In depicting the perversities of passion he never deviated into pruriency, and handled situations of conventional delicacy with dignified reticence. Webster's dialogue (he seldom essayed soliloquy) abounds in rapid imagery. His blank verse is vigorous and musical. In its general movement it resembles that of Shakespeare's later plays. It is far less regular than Marlowe's, but somewhat more regular than Fletcher's. At its best his language has something of the ‘happy valiancy’ which Coleridge detected in Shakespeare's ‘Antony and Cleopatra;’ it has consequently no small share of the obscurity which characterises Shakespeare's later work. This feature in Webster impressed his contemporaries, one of whom, Henry FitzGeoffrey, applied to him the epithet ‘crabbed,’ and declared that he wrote ‘with his mouth awry.’ But, as another contemporary, Middleton, suggested with surer insight, the force of Webster's tragic genius, despite the occasional indistinctness of his utterance and other defects of execution, allows no doubt of the essential greatness of his dramatic conceptions.

The fame of Webster has spread to France and Germany. The ‘Duchess of Malfy’ and ‘The White Devil’ were published with an appreciative preface in French translations by Ernest Lafond at Paris in 1865, and Frederick Bodenstedt devoted the first volume of his ‘William Shakespeares Zeitgenossen und ihre Werke’ (Berlin, 1858) to a German rendering of extracts from all Webster's plays.

[Dyce's Introduction to his edition of Webster's Works, 1866; Genest's Account of the Stage, x. 16–17; Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature, new edit. 1899, iii. 51 seq.; Fleay's Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama; Lamb's Selections; Hazlitt's Elizabethan Dramatic Literature; William Hazlitt's (the younger) introduction to his edition of Webster's Works, 1857; Mr. J. A. Symonds's preface to the ‘Mermaid’ edition of Selections from Webster; Mr. Gosse's Seventeenth-Century Studies containing an admirable essay on Webster; Mr. Swinburne's extravagantly eulogistic essay in the Nineteenth Century, June 1886; Mr. Wil- William