Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/133

Rh A far greater poet and dramatist was John Webster. Of his life we know, as usual, next to nothing. His name emerges in Henslowe's diary in the year 1601 as the author of The Guise, or the Massacre of Paris, a play which he claims in a later dedication, but which is lost. Throughout 1602 he seems to have collaborated in three or four plays with Drayton, Dekker, Middleton, and others. In 1604 Marston's The Malcontent was produced and published with additions by Webster. The White Devil appeared in 1612, The Duchess of Malfi in 1623, and The Devil's Law Case in the same year. These are probably all the extant plays which were published during his lifetime. A Roman tragedy, Appius and Virginia, appeared in 1657, and in 1661 A Cure for a Cuckold and The Thracian Wonder were published as by Webster and Rowley. The serious plot in the former is obviously Webster's work.

Webster's fame rests on two tragedies, The White Devil, or Vittoria Corrombona, and The Duchess of Malfi. They belong to that very distinctive and somewhat melodramatic type of tragedy which might be called the Senecan-Machiavellian. It is Senecan in its sententious morality and choice of revenge as the leading motive. The influence of Machiavelli is seen in the principal