CHAPTER V

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF
WEBSTER

IT happens, with some writers, that when you come to examine their less-known works, your idea of them suffers considerable change, and you realise that the common conception of them is incomplete, distorted, or even entirely wrong. This is not the case with Webster. He is known to everyone by two plays-The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. The most diligent study of the rest of his authentic works will scarcely add anything of value to that knowledge of him. He is a remarkable dramatist, with an unusually individual style and emotional view of the world. What "Webster," the literary personality, means to us, its precise character, and its importance, can be discovered and explained from these two plays. So I shall chiefly consider and quote them, with an occasional sidelight from The Devil's Lare-Case.

It is one task of a critic, no doubt, to communicate exactly his emotions at what he is criticising,

to express and define the precise savour. But it is not a thing one can go on at for long. Having tried to hint once or twice what "Webster" precisely is, I had better analyse various aspects of him, and not tiresomely, like some political speaker, seek about for a great many ways of saying the same thing. And after all, Webster carries his own sense and savour. A showman, "motley on back and pointing-pole in hand," can but draw attention, and deliver a prologue. If I can explain briefly to anyone the sort of plays Webster was writing, the sort of characters that he took delight in, the kind of verse he used, the kind of literary effect he probably aimed at— as I see all these things-I can then only take him up to a speech of the Duchess and leave him there. One cannot explain

"What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smothered

With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them both ways:

To paraphrase it, or to hang it with epithets, would be silly, almost indecent. One can only quote. And though quotation is pleasant, it is a cheap way of filling space; and I have written

this essay on the assumption that its readers will be able to have at least The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil before them.

So I shall only attempt, in this chapter, to mention some of Webster's most interesting characteristics, and to analyse one or two of them.

His general position, as the rearguard of the great period in Elizabethan drama and literature, I have already outlined. He took a certain kind of play, a play with a certain atmosphere, which appealed to him, and made two works of individual genius. Beyond this type of play and the tradition of it, there are no very important "influences" on him. Shakespeare's studies of madness may have affected him. The Duchess,

"I'll tell thee a miracle;

I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow;

The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad,"

has a note of Lear in it, but also, and perhaps more definitely, of Antonio and Mellida. From Ben Jonson and Chapman he borrowed. And something of their attitude to drama became his. But he does not imitate them in any important individual quality. He pillaged Donne, too, as much of him as was accessible to a middle-class dramatist, and occasionally seems to emulate the

extraordinary processes of that mind. The characters in Webster's plays, like the treatment of the story, in as far as they are not his own, are the usual characters of the drama of eight years before. Once only does he noticeably seem to take a figure from the popular gallery of the years in which he was writing. The little prince Giovanni, like Shakespeare's Mamillius, is adopted from the Beaumont and Fletcher children. He has the same precocity in wit (it seems a little distressing to modern taste), and more of their sentimentality than Hermione's son. But, against that background, he is, on the whole, a touching and lovely figure.

The one influence upon Webster that is always noticeable is that of satire. His nature tended to the outlook of satire; and his plays give evidence that he read Elizabethan, and in some form Latin satire with avidity. Hamlet, the Malcontent, and all the heroes of that type of play, "railed" continually. But with Webster every character and nearly every speech has something of the satirical outlook. They describe each other satirically. They are for ever girding at the conventional objects of satire, certain social follies and crimes. There are several little irrelevant scenes of satire, like the malevolent discussion of Count Malatesti (D.M., III.

3). It is incessant. The topics are the ordinary ones, the painting of women, the ingratitude of princes, the swaggering of blusterers, the cowardice of pseudo-soldiers. It gives part of the peculiar atmosphere of these plays.

He

This rests on a side of Webster's nature, which, in combination with his extraordinary literary gifts, produces another queer characteristic of his -his fondness for, and skill in comment. is rather more like a literary man trying to write for the theatre than any of his contemporaries. Theatrically, though he is competent and sometimes powerful, he exhibits no vastly unusual ability. It is his comments that bite deep. Such gems as Flamineo's description of Camillo:

"When he wears white satin one would take him by his black muzzle to be no other creature than a maggot;"

or of the Spanish ambassador:

"He carries his face in's ruff, as I have seen a serving man carry glasses in a cipress hat-band, monstrous steady, for fear of breaking: he looks like the claw of a black-bird, first salted, and then broiled in a candle;"

or Lodovico's of the black woman Zanche in love:

"Mark her, I prithee; she simpers like the suds
A collier hath been washed in;"