Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/525

 *mendatory Verses by Stephanus Broelmannus, [Greek: Iôannês Kôkos], Philip Harrison, Francis Yomans, Christopher Atkinson, C. Downhale, G. Camden.]

JOHN WEBSTER (?- > 1634).

There is little clue to the personal history of John Webster beyond the description of him on the title-page of his mayoral pageant Monuments of Honour (1624) as 'Merchant-Taylor', and his claim in the epistle to have been born free of the company. The records of the Merchant Taylors show that freemen of this name were admitted in 1571, 1576, and 1617, and that one of them was assessed towards the coronation expenses in 1604. A John Webster, Merchant Taylor, also received an acknowledgement of a 15s. debt from John and Edward Alleyn on 25 July 1591 (Collier, Alleyn Papers, 14). A John Webster married Isabel Sutton at St. Leonard's Shoreditch on 25 July 1590, and had a daughter Alice baptized there on 9 May 1606. It has been taken for granted that none of the sixteenth-century records can relate to the dramatist, although they may to his father. This presumably rests on the assumption that he must have been a young man when he began to write for Henslowe in 1602. It should, however, be pointed out that a John Webster, as well as a George Webster, appears amongst the Anglo-German actors of Browne's group in 1596 (cf. ch. xiv) and that the financial record in the Alleyn Papers probably belongs to a series of transactions concerning the winding up of a theatrical company in which Browne and the Alleyns had been interested (cf. ch. xiii, s.v. Admiral's). It is conceivable therefore that Webster was an older man than has been suspected and had had a career as a player before he became a playwright. Gildon, Lives of the Poets (1698), reports that Webster was parish clerk of St Andrew's, Holborn. This cannot be confirmed from parish books, but may be true. As a dramatist, Webster generally appears in collaboration, chiefly with Dekker, and at rather infrequent intervals from 1602 up to 1624 or later. In 1602 he wrote commendatory verses for a translation by Munday, and in 1612 for Heywood's Apology for Actors. In 1613 he published his elegy A Monumental Column on the death of Prince Henry, and recorded his friendship with Chapman. His marked tendency to borrow phrases from other writers helps to date his work. He can hardly be identified with the illiterate clothworker of the same name, who acknowledged his will with a mark on 5 Aug. 1625. But he is referred to in the past in Heywood's Hierarchie of the Angels (1635), Bk. iv, p. 206, 'Fletcher and Webster neither was but Iacke', and was probably therefore dead. Collections

1830. A. Dyce. 4 vols. 1857, 1 vol. [Includes Malcontent, ''Appius and Virginia, and Thracian Wonder''.]

1857. W. C. Hazlitt. 4 vols. (Library of Old Authors). [Includes