John Webster

John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist, a late contemporary of William Shakespeare. His tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage.

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• Is not old wine wholesomest, old pippins toothsomest, old wood burn brightest, old linen wash whitest? Old soldiers, sweethearts, are surest, and old lovers are soundest. i love mum
  • Westward Hoe, Act II, scene ii. See also Wine, Friendship.

• I saw him going the way of all flesh.
  • Westward Hoe, Act II, scene ii.

• Vain the ambition of kings
  Who seek by trophies and dead things
  To leave a living name behind,
  And weave but nets to catch the wind.
  • The Devil's Law Case (1623)

The White Devil (1612)

• 'T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out. 2
  • Act I, scene ii. Compare: "To public feasts, where meet a public rout,— Where they that are without would fain go in, And they that are within would fain go out", John Davies, Contention betwixt a Wife, etc.

• Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?
  So may you blame some fair and crystal river
  For that some melancholic, distracted man
  Hath drown'd himself in 't.
  • Act III, scene ii.

• Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
  But look'd too near have neither heat nor light.
  • Act IV, scene 4. Compare Distance.

• Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
  Since o'er shady groves they hover,
  And with leaves and flowers do cover
  The friendless bodies of unburied men.
  • Act V, scene iv.

• But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
  For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
  • Act V, scene iv.

• Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;
  But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
  • Act V, scene vi.

Duchess of Malfi (1623)

• Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
  But looked to near have neither heat nor light.
  • Act IV, scene ii.

• Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
  Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
  Their life, a general mist of error,
  Their death, a hideous storm of terror.
  • Act IV, scene ii.

• I know death hath ten thousand several doors
  For men to take their exits.
  • Act IV, scene ii. Compare: "Death hath so many doors to let out life", Beaumont and Fletcher, The Customs of the Country, act ii, scene 2.

• Heaven-gates are not so highly arched
  As princes' palaces; they that enter there
  Must go upon their knees.
  • Act IV, scene ii.

• Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
  • Act IV, scene ii.

• Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
  • Act V, scene v.

About John Webster

• Webster was much possessed by death
  And saw the skull beneath the skin.
  • T.S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality" from Poems (1920)

• Webster is not concerned with humanity. He is the poet of bile and brainstorm, the sweet singer of apoplexy; ideally, one feels, he would have had all his characters drowned in a sea of cold sweat. His muse drew nourishment from Bedlam, and might, a few centuries later, have done the same from Belsen.
  • Kenneth Tynan, review of The Duchess of Malfi at the Aldwych Theatre (1960), from Tynan Left and Right (1967)