rhetoric, on another espousing evil with reckless cynicism. The variations of such a character are presented with force and lucidity in Appius. Yet the whole play lacks those sudden flashes of illuminative beauty, those profound and searching glimpses into the bottomless abyss of human misery, which render Webster's two Italian tragedies unique. He seems to have been writing under self-imposed limitations, in order to obtain a certain desired effect—much in the same way as Ford did when he composed the irreproachable but somewhat chilling history of Perkin Warbeck.
The detailed criticism of Webster as a dramatist, and the study of his two chief tragedies in relation to their Italian sources, would lead me beyond the limits of this Introduction. He is not a poet to be dealt with by any summary method; for he touches the depths of human nature in ways that need the subtlest analysis for their proper explanation. I am, however, loth to close this introduction without a word or two concerning the peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style.[3] Owing to condensation of thought and compression of language, his plays offer considerable difficulties to readers who approach them for the first time. So many fantastic incidents are crowded into a single action, and the dialogue is burdened with so much profoundly studied matter, that the general impression is apt to be blurred. We rise from the perusal of his Italian tragedies with a deep sense of the poet's power and personality, an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes, and a clear conception of the leading characters. Meanwhile the outlines of the fable, the structure of the drama as a complete work of art, seem to elude our grasp. The persons, who have played their part upon the stage of our imagination, stand apart from one another, like figures in a tableau vivant. Appius and Virginia, indeed, proves that Webster understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able to work one out with conscientious firmness. But in Vittoria Corombona and The Duchess of Malfi, each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a murky background; and the whole play is a mosaic of these parts. It lacks the breadth which comes from concentration on a master-motive. We feel that the author had a certain depth of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art. It is probable that able representation upon the public stage of an Elizabethan theatre gave them the coherence, the animation, and the movement which a chamber-student misses. When familiarity has brought us acquainted with Webster's way of working, we perceive that he treats terrible and striking subjects with a concentrated vigour special to his genius. Each word and trait of character has been studied for a particular effect. Brief lightning flashes of acute self-revelation illuminate the midnight darkness of the lost souls he has painted. Flowers of the purest and most human pathos, like Giovanni de Medici's dialogue with his uncle in Vittoria Corombona, bloom by the charnel-house on which the poet's fancy loved to dwell. The culmination of these tragedies, setting like stormy suns in blood-red clouds, is prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror. No dramatist showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain combined to make men miserable. He seems to have had a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals so powerfully. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds are sought for in the ruined places of abandoned lives, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of sin-haunted conscience, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed, the deaths of frantic hope-deserted criminals. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological elements of tragedy home to our imagination. He makes free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, masques, and nightmares. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature, his profound pity for the innocent who suffer shipwreck in the storm of evil passions not their own, save him, even at his gloomiest and wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists—Tourneur, for example—blundered. That the tendency to brood on what is ghastly belonged to Webster's idiosyncrasy appears in his use of metaphor. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a sinister turn—as thus:
You speak as if a man
Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat, Afore you cut it open. When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders. Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague. I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.
In his dialogue, people bandy phrases like—"O you screech-owl!" and "Thou foul black cloud!" A sister warns her brother to think twice before committing suicide, with this weird admonition:—
I prithee, yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.
But enough has now been said about these peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style. It is needful to become acclimatised to his specific mannerism, both in the way of working and the tone of thinking, before we can appreciate his real greatness as a dramatic poet and moralist. Then we recognise the truth of what has recently been written of him by an acute and sympathetic critic: "There is no poet morally nobler than Webster."[4]
John Addington Symonds.
THE WHITE DEVIL;
OR,
VITTORIA COROMBONA.
The White Divel; or, the Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, With the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona, the famous Venetian Curtizan, was printed in 1612, as acted by the Queen's servants, and again in 1631, 1665, and 1672. In 1707 Nahum Tate published an alteration called Injured Love; or, the Cruel Husband.
Webster founded this play directly on the history of the Duke di Brachiano and his two wives, of whom the second, Vittoria Accorambaoni, was the widow of the nephew of Cardinal Montalto, afterwards Pope Sixtus V.
TO THE READER.
In publishing this tragedy, I do but challenge to myself that liberty which other men have ta'en before me: not that I affect praise by it, for nos hæc novimus esse nihil;[5] only, since it was acted in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting-out of a tragedy) a full and understanding auditory; and that, since that time, I have noted most of the people that come to that play-house resemble those ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books; I present it to the general view with this confidence—
Nec ronchos metues maligniorum,
Nec scombris tunicas dabis molestas.[6]
If it be objected this is no true dramatic poem, I shall easily confess it; non potes in nugas dicere plura meas ipse ego quam dixi.[7] Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted: for, should a man present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious Chorus, and, as it were, liven death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; yet, after all this divine rapture, O dura messorum ilia,[8] the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it; and, ere it be acted, let the author resolve to fix to every scene this of Horace,
Hæc
