John Webster
In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a young boy seen feeding a live mouse to a cat identifies himself as John Webster (1580-1634). When Will Shakespeare asks the boy what he thought of Titus Andronicus, Webster replies, "I like it when they cut the heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives… Plenty of blood. That's the only writing."
While hyperbolic, Hollywood, and of course fictional, the joke about the budding playwright John Webster is grounded in reality. His plays would introduce a new grittiness to the English stage. He was a playwright unafraid to grapple with the darker sides of mankind: whether in The White Devil (1612) or The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Webster was willing to deal out gruesome ends to his characters.
The White Devil tells the story of the affair between the Duke of Brachiano and Vittoria Corombona (both married to other people), encouraged by the pandering of Vittoria's brother Flamineo. Brachiano has his wife and Vittoria's husband murdered, and Vittoria is tried for the murder of her husband and sent to a convent for penitent whores. The banished Count Lodovico, in love with Brachiano's now dead wife, returns and avenges…
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| # | Resource Title | Description | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The White Devil, or the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona | ||
| 2 | English Renaissance Timeline: Some Historical and Cultural Dates | This list offers an overview of some historical and cultural dates from the English Renaissance,… | Kate O'Connor |
| 3 | Course: John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi | An Open University course. Description: "This unit concentrates on Acts 1 and 2 of John Webster’s… | Open University |
| 4 | John Webster: A Darker Playwright for Renaissance England | In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a young boy seen feeding a live mouse to a cat… | Kate O'Connor |
| 5 | Love's graduate : a comedy | Extracted by Spring Rice from "Cure for a cuckold" by John Webster and William Rowley, with the… | |
| 6 | Renaissance Theatre | When John Brayne built the Red Lion Theatre in London’s Whitechapel in 1569, he could hardly have… | Emma Smith |
| 7 | The Duchess of Malfi: John Webster | In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy articulates… | Emma Smith |