In A Cure for a Cuckold, written about 1625, Webster presents us with a strange piece of motivation. The play opens with the wedding of Bonvile and Annabel, but the first characters we meet are Lessingham and Clare. Lessingham has long loved Clare, though his wooing has been without reward. Now he presses her to be kinder, and she promises to send him a message indicating how he may succeed. When it comes, it reads:

Prove all thy friends, finde out the best and nearest,
Kill for my sake that Friend that loves thee dearest.
(I. i.)

Lessingham, sorely distressed, debates in soliloquy the claims of love and friendship, and then determines to find out if he has, among his acquaintances, a real friend. He announces that he is to fight a duel at Calais and needs a second who will also take part in the combat. Each friend finds some excuse, until he tries Bonvile the bridegroom. Bonvile agrees at once to forsake his bride in the interest of friendship. When they arrive at Calais, Lessingham reveals that it is Bonvile, now proved to be his dearest friend, that he must fight and kill. Bonvile tells him that, in adopting this plan, he has indeed killed his friend and bloodshed is unnecessary. Meanwhile Clare has guessed what has happened, and says aside:

I fear my self most guilty for the absence
Of the Bridegroom: what our wills will do
With over-rash and headlong peevishness,
To bring our calm discretions to repentance!
Lessingham's mistaken, quite out o'th way
Of my purpose too.
(II. iv.)

Later, when Bonvile's journey to Calais is known, she has this:

Oh fool Lessingham,
Thou hast mistook my injunction utterly,
Utterly mistook it.
(III. iii.)

And when Lessingham returns and says he has killed his man, she protests that she meant him to kill her:

for I had thought
That I had been the best esteemed friend
You had i'th world.
(IV. ii.)

But then she rejoices that Bonvile is dead, saying that she had loved him and for that reason did not want to live after his wedding to Annabel. But in that case how could she claim to be Lessingham's "best and nearest" friend, "That Friend that loves thee dearest", the victim indicated in her message to him? As Mr. [Frank Laurence] Lucas has pointed out [in his 1927 edition of The Complete Works of John Webster, 1927], the confusion may be the result of collaboration or revision, but I have drawn attention to it here because it seems a particularly striking example of the blurred motivation frequently encountered in the plays associated with Webster.

Often in his plays the dramatic figures seem to obey neither the impulses of their own characters nor the decrees of fate. They are creatures of a plot which is to be worked out, and even the plot does not seem to be thoroughly planned in advance. When we read The Devil's Law Case, we feel that almost anything may happen: Contarino and Jolenta are in love, but Jolenta's mother Leonora and her brother Romelio wish her to marry Contarino's friend Ercole. The wooers are both presentable, high-minded young men, who proceed to fight a duel when Contarino discovers Ercole's suit. We are given a hint that the mother Leonora is herself in love with Contarino, but from all this we could not guess the strange sequence of the events that actually follow. Here are a few of them: Romelio tries to kill the already wounded Contarino, so that Jolenta may inherit the property he has left her; Romelio persuades Jolenta to pretend that she is pregnant by Ercole, so that she may inherit his lands too; Leonora, in revenge for Romelio's apparent murder of Contarino, tries to brand him with bastardy and herself with adultery committed forty years before; there is a final reconciliation of them all, with Romelio marrying a nun he had seduced, Ercole marrying Jolenta (who no longer loves Contarino), and Contarino (who apparently no longer loves Jolenta) marrying the sixty-year-old Leonora. Now if Webster were presenting all this with a Jonsonian detachment, indicating with a lift of the eyebrows the incomprehensibilities of human action—if there were expressed or implied anywhere in the play a hint of puzzlement, a comment on the strangeness of it all—then indeed the playwright's attitude might be clear and acceptable. But Webster gives no such hint or comment. Romelio is a cynical villain, who in the end "Most willingly" marries his ex-nun Angiolella. Leonora, unscrupulous, lecherous, finally gets the young Contarino, whose last words are: "And to you deare Lady, I have entirely vowed my life." Ariosto the judge ends the play thus:

so we leave you,
Wishing your future life may make good use
Of these events, since that these passages,
Which threatned ruine, built on rotten ground,
Are with successe beyond our wishes crown'd.
(V. v.)

If this means anything, it is that everyone has had a narrow escape and must not run such risks again.

Elsewhere, too, we find the behaviour of characters controlled by the demands of a particular moment in the play. At times indeed the departure from consistency becomes as flagrant as it often is in Fletcher. In Appius and Virginia, Appius is presented as a lustful hypocrite, an unjust judge, a starver of soldiers, yet in the end he is made to die resolutely and to win praise from the wronged Virginius: he showed, we are told, "a noble strain" and "dy'd like a Roman Gentleman". This is dramatically effective, for it enables Webster to contrast the deaths of Appius and his follower Clodius, as in The Duchess of Malfi he had contrasted the deaths of the Duchess and Cariola. But no violence is done to our previous conception of the Duchess and Cariola by the ways in which they die: along with the intense dramatic shock, we recognise an appropriateness, an inevitability. But in Appius there is no previous hint that he will die bravely. Just as in A King and No King Arbaces changes in Act V into a satisfactory Prince Consort, and in The Maid's Tragedy Evadne grows repentant and anxious to avenge her dishonour, so here we feel that Webster has aimed merely at the effective moment. Similarly he makes Virginius weaken and almost decide to let Appius live, so that the dead body of Virginia may be brought on the stage and definitively harden her father's heart: the Virginius who had killed his daughter rather than let her fall into the hands of Appius would not have been likely to stay the executioner's hand. And after the same fashion Webster introduces a last-act quarrel between Virginius and Icilius, Virginia's betrothed: Icilius has to be persuaded that the killing of Virginia was justified and not "unnatural and damnable": the storm is soon over, and they are allies again. The incident is a mere distraction, like the more elaborate quarrel and reconcilement of Amintor and Melantius in The Maid's Tragedy. There has been much disputing concerning the date of Appius and Virginia, but this sacrifice of coherence in action and character for the sake of a momentarily increased tension is surely evidence that the play came after and not before the two major tragedies.

The same sort of thing is apparent in the two other plays in which Webster's hand has been traced near the end of his career. Thus in Anything for a Quiet Life, which he shared with Middleton, Lady Cressingham is presented for practically the whole of the play as the heartless young wife of an old and doting husband. She makes him sell his land, disinherit his eldest son, send his younger children to be boarded with a London citizen, and finally reduces him to living on an allowance from her. At her penultimate appearance in the play she laughs at Young Cressingham's warning that she will surely be punished for her ill deeds. "Oh! shee is lost to any kinde of goodness," he says. Yet a few pages later she enters "in civil habit", no longer in the rash finery that she has hitherto worn, and announces that her outrageous conduct has been intended simply to cure her old husband of his addiction to gambling and alchemy: he was bankrupting himself by those vices, and now she has destroyed his alchemical apparatus and taught him an inclusive lesson.

But perhaps the most puzzling case of all is provided by The Fair Maid of the Inn, which was published as Fletcher's but has been assigned to Webster, Massinger and Ford by H. Dugdale Sykes. As in The Devil's Law Case, a mother tries to prove her son illegitimate: in this instance, the reason is simply that she fears for his life because of a quarrel between their family and another. This is thin indeed, but is not the strangest piece of motivation in the play. That is to be found in the relations between Cesario, his sister Clarissa, and Biancha, the fair maid of the inn. The play opens with Cesario, like Laertes, advising his sister not to be over-free with her favours. His first words are:

Interpret not Clarissa, my true zeale
In giving you councell, to transcend the bounds
That should confine a brother.
(I. i.)

He loves her, he says, "With more than common ardour." He gives her a ring which she must not part with until she is sure that her choice of husband is the right one and until she has made that choice known to her brother. As a token of agreement she gives him her hand, "Which," he says, "were it not my sisters, I should kisse With too much heate." There is in fact in this first scene every indication of a barely suppressed incestuous passion. Cesario is enraged to find the ring on his friend Mentivole's finger, and these are the terms that he then addresses to Clarissa:

Then shall I ever hate thee, oh thou false one;
Hast thou a Faith to give unto a friend,
And breake it to a brother? did I not
By all the tyes of blood importune thee
Never to part with it without my knowledge?
Thou might'st have given it to a Muliter,
And made a contract with him in a stable
At as cheap a price of my vengeance: never more
Shall a Womans trust beguile me; You are all
Like Reliques: you may well be look't upon,
But come a man to'th handling of you once,
You fall in peeces.
(II. iv.)

When Mariana, his mother, urges him to travel because of the dangerous enmity between him and Mentivole, he refuses because, he thinks, Mentivole would seize the opportunity of his absence to marry Clarissa. When, after this, Mariana claims that he is not really her son but a child that she pretended was hers in order to please her husband, the Duke is so struck by the young man's nobility of bearing that he orders Mariana to marry him or to give him three-quarters of her estate. Cesario urges his mother to the match, and when she refuses suggests marriage with Clarissa: it was only because of their assumed relationship, he says, that

no loose
No wanton heat of youth, desir'd to claime
Priority in thy affections, other
Then nature might commend.
(IV. i.)

But Clarissa's obduracy defeats this project too, and he turns again to Biancha, the fair maid of the inn who is of course really of noble lineage. In I.i he told Clarissa of his love for Biancha, assuring her that it was as virtuous as the maid herself was. Yet in III.i we find him attempting to seduce her: she will listen, however, only to a marriage-proposal. Then in IV.i. Biancha, having heard that he is no longer a nobleman's son, says she is now ready for the marriage which previously the disparity in their conditions prevented. For the moment he has higher game in view, and sends her away with a contemptuous kiss. But when Mariana and Clarissa both reject his advances, he goes again to the inn and would marry Biancha post-haste: now she will have none of him, as his last refusal made her vow to live a single life. In the last act the Duke urges that the now ladified Biancha shall marry Cesario: he rejoices, and her comment is "Kneele not, all forgiven". It may well be that these odd twists of inclination in Cesario, these inconsistencies in the behaviour of both Cesario and Biancha, may be due to the collaborative method used in the writing of the play. Indeed, no single dramatist in a waking state could contradict himself so often and so flatly. Yet the three writers who were probably concerned acquiesced in this mode of composition, knowing full well that it must lead to inconsistencies of behaviour, an inadequacy of motive, a stress on the scene-unit and on the momentary dramatic effect. About 1625, then, when this play was written, Webster could be more or less indifferent to the preservation of a motive-pattern. Any motive could be taken up and quickly dropped. He and his collaborators did not ask themselves or each other awkward questions about the manner of men and women they were presenting. Clare in A Cure for a Cuckold, Romelio in The Devil's Law Case, Appius in Appius and Virginia, Lady Cressingham in Anything for a Quiet Life, Cesario in The Fair Maid of the Inn: all were, to a greater or lesser degree, not human portraits but actors' parts.

If we turn back to The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, we find of course a great difference. Here Webster, in dedication and prefatory address, makes it clear that he is engaged in a serious task; here there is consistency of behaviour in the major figures, as we can see at a glance by comparing the deaths of Vittoria and the Duchess and noting how each is appropriate to the woman who suffers it. We have seen a minor inconsistency in Monticelso's giving his black book to Francisco and then trying to dissuade Lodovico from the accomplishment of revenge. We have seen Bosola experiencing a change of heart, yet the character remained all of a piece, a coherent emblem of the Malfi world. Yet we have seen too that, in its structural defects and in the unresolved contradictions of its thought, The Duchess of Malfi does anticipate the later plays. Indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. According to Mr. Lucas's dates, five years separate The Duchess from Webster's next surviving play, The Devil's Law Case: the only intervening dramatic work seems to be The Guise, which is lost. But the dramatic style of Webster's decline was not likely to come altogether unheralded. Just as Timon of Athens, despite its kinship with Lear, anticipates Shakespeare's final romances in its black-and-white characterisation, its relentless treatment of even minor evil-doers, so The Duchess of Malfi in one important instance anticipates Webster's later handling of dramatic character. This is in the figure of Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, brother of the Duchess of Malfi, murderer, madman and (I think) lover.

Not that we find strange variations in Ferdinand's conduct, as we do with Appius dying nobly after an infamous career, Lady Cressingham revealing a virtuous intent hitherto well concealed, or Cesario transferring his affections haphazardly between his sister and the fair maid of the inn: rather, Ferdinand is puzzling in the way that Clare is puzzling in A Cure for a Cuckold or Cesario in his attitude towards Clarissa. We do not understand why Clare bade Lessingham kill his dearest friend, we are not sure whether or not Cesario is conscious of an incestuous inclination. We are similarly in the dark concerning Ferdinand's motives in the persecution of the Duchess. We should note, indeed, that Webster puts the whole weight of the persecution on him. Certainly in I.i the Cardinal joins him in forbidding their sister to marry again, it is the Cardinal who procures her banishment from Ancona, and it is made abundantly clear that the Cardinal is privy to her death. But when the two men appear together there is no question which is the more deeply moved: in I.i the Cardinal is content with general comment on the frailty of widows, but Ferdinand's words are as gross, as full of thwarted passion, as Iago's in the first scene of Othello: he threatens the Duchess with his father's poniard in a speech where the phallic implications are not disguised:

You are my sister,
This was my Fathers poyniard: doe you see,
I'll'd be loth to see't looke rusty, 'cause 'twas his:
I would have you to give ore these chargeable Revels;
A Vizor, and a Masque are whispering roomes
That were nev'r built for goodnesse: fare ye well:
And woemen like that part, which (like the Lamprey)
Hath nev'r a bone in't.
(I. i.)

It is Ferdinand who controls the slow tormenting and execution in Act IV. It is Ferdinand who suffers lycanthropy when his sister is dead. If the action of the play is to be comprehensible, we must assume in Ferdinand an incestuous passion of which he is not fully aware. After his sister is dead, he tries indeed to examine his own motives:

For let me but examine well the cause;What was the meanenes of her match to me?

Onely I must confesse, I had a hope
(Had she continu'd widow) to have gain'd
An infinite masse of Treasure by her death:
And that was the mayne cause; her Marriage—
That drew a streame of gall quite through my heart.
(IV. ii.)

Ferdinand's hope to gain an infinite mass of treasure was inconsistent with the reference in the play to the Duchess's son by her first husband: either, then, Webster wished here to emphasise Ferdinand's uncertainty about his own motives, or the dramatist was himself not fully conscious of the springs of action in his play. If this second theory seems fanciful, we can remind ourselves again of Clare's never properly explained message to Lessingham in A Cure for a Cuckold. But, whether or not Webster knew it, he drew Ferdinand as a man who could not rid himself of his sister's image. When in II.v he has learned that a child has been born to the Duchess, his mind conjures up frenzied pictures of her lust, while the Cardinal rebukes him for his "intemperate anger". When she has become his prisoner, Bosola taunts him with the suggestion that her mind yet dwells on the pleasures of her marriage:

this restraint
(Like English Mastiffes, that grow feirce with tying)
Makes her too passionately apprehend
Those pleasures she's kept from.
(IV. i.)

From this Ferdinand turns in horror:

Curse upon her!
I will no longer study in the booke
Of another s heart.
(IV. i.)

Saying "informe her what I told you", he leaves the stage as the Duchess enters. When he comes into her presence, it is in darkness and with a dead man's hand thrust between them: the mad symbolism needs no underlining. At the end of the scene he is again alone with Bosola, who in asking mercy for the Duchess uses terms that make Ferdinand's passion flame more dreadfully:

'Faith, end here:
And go no farther in your cruelty—
Send her a penetentiall garment, to put on,
Next to her delicate skinne, and furnish her
With beades, and prayer bookes.
(IV. i.)

The mention of "her delicate skinne" brings this from Ferdinand:

Damne her, that body of hers,
While that my blood ran pure in't, was more worth
Then that which thou wouldst comfort, (call'd a soule).
(IV. i).

He does not appear again until the Duchess is dead. Then he speaks like a man exhausted, and his famous words "Cover her face: Mine eyes dazell: she di'd yong" are the utterance of one whose passion is spent. Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy finds in murder a substitute for his mistress's love. So here Ferdinand is momentarily free from his consuming rage, he can feel pity and remind himself that he and his sister were twins. Very soon he is to experience a wild remorse, but for an instant memory brings back a gentle affection. That memory becomes intolerable, and from then until his death he is to see himself as a wolf. His sanity returns with his final words in the play:

My sister, oh! my sister, there's the cause on't.
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like Diamonds, we are cut with our owne dust.
(V. v.)

The last two lines form a sententious generalisation, and perhaps we should not attach too much importance to the rhyming of "dust" and "lust", but we cannot overlook the anguish of lost affection in "My sister, oh! my sister".

When one goes through the play in this fashion, isolating the part of Ferdinand and weighing his speeches, there seems only one explanation of his conduct. There is no "motiveless malgnity" here, as is plain if we compare him with Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd wanted a villain for his play, and Lorenzo was a man who could hang or stab with a shrug. At the end he must be despatched, but there is no long agony for him, no ungovernable rage before the commission of crime or remorse after it. Ferdinand is not a casual and convenient villain but a tragic figure. Yet, we must ask, if Ferdinand is tragic, why does he not more successfully carry the burden of Act V? Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ends in tragic splendour, though Antony dies in the fourth act. Cleopatra by herself can sustain the tragic theme, but the virtue has gone out of Ferdinand and Webster's play ends in tedium.

One might partially explain this by pointing to the element of strain in Ferdinand's ravings. Webster could draw madness powerfully, as he did with Cornelia in The White Devil; he could heart-rendingly show us the Duchess crossing for a moment into the borderland of the mind's darkness; yet the lycanthropy of Ferdinand is mere rage and bluster. He has none of that quality of vision that preserves the stature of the mad Lear or of Hieronimo in the interpolated painter's scene in The Spanish Tragedy; until his last moment he shows no awareness of his own condition. In this last act, indeed, he is not tragic but sub-human, beyond the reach of our sympathy because his thought-processes never for an instant come near ours. It is difficult but not impossible to have a tragic figure with restricted powers of understanding: Shakespeare contrived this in Othello, but he was careful to preserve the character's impressiveness of demeanour. Ferdinand in Act V has no understanding, no dignity: he has become only a horrible illustration of the effects of crime. In fact, Ferdinand is not even the central figure of the last act: Antonio, Bosola, the Cardinal, Julia are given at least equal prominence with him.

We are driven to the conclusion that Webster was not aware of the potentialities of this character, and that strengthens our doubt concerning the motivation of Ferdinand's conduct. Are we to assume that Webster, needing a villain, did not at first consider too curiously why Ferdinand should be strongly opposed to the remarriage of the Duchess? Certainly the Cardinal is given no motive. But from the beginning Ferdinand takes the lead, and perhaps almost insensibly Webster was led to suggest in him the one set of feelings that could adequately explain his violence. It is notable that Bosola, though he speaks words that provoke Ferdinand's passion, never overtly comments on his attitude towards his sister. Yet Bosola is often Webster's chorus, and the opportunities for comment were many. It is as if the matter remained blurred in Webster's mind, as the behaviour of so many later characters apparently did.

Thus The Duchess of Malfi appears defective not only in its general structure, in the consistency of its details, in the coherence of its underlying thought, but in the conception of a major character. It remains, of course, for its best scenes near the peak of Jacobean achievement, but we should not neglect the implications of its shortcomings. We are made to realise not only how much in the dark a great dramatist can work but how necessary for complete success is a firm grasp of characterisation. This grasp Webster had in The White Devil. Vittoria, Flamineo and Brachiano are figures whose inner coherence becomes clearer as we examine them more deeply. Even, for example, Flamineo's fantastic trickery with the pistols in the final act, his bizarre pretence of death, are logically consequent on his reaction to Cornelia's madness and Brachiano's ghost: he is goading himself, as it were, into sensation, straining after the feelings that he cannot quite reach. And the Duchess of Malfi herself is drawn with the same sure hand, as is the dim, fluctuating shadow called Bosola. But Ferdinand leaves us perplexed, not quite certain of the dramatist's purpose. We have seen it possible to dig from the play the elements of his character and bring them into coherence, but even then we have a sense of potentialities imperfectly realised. We are reminded once again of the hand of Fletcher, the dramatist who manipulated even his main characters according to the requirements of the individual scene. The old way of regarding an Elizabethan play as a gallery of character-portraits was wrong in that it rested often on the kind of excavation work we have done with Ferdinand here: we must try always to see a dramatic character as it appears within the context of the whole play. But if that is remembered, characterisation remains an important concern of the critic of Shakespeare or Webster or any other tragic dramatist. The action of a tragedy has a cosmic significance, it symbolises the general condition of humanity. But it will not make an impact upon us unless the playwright's chief characters are acceptable representatives of our own kind. They may be highly complex, puzzling at first, but we must feel that the playwright knows what he is about. When the character is amorphous, insufficiently thought out, it cannot effectively act as the medium through which the dramatist's vision of the universe is conveyed to us. And in The Duchess of Malfi Ferdinand's part in the action constitutes him a major character.

But if in characterisation Webster's grasp is uncertain except in The White Devil, we can I think find inequalities of style in every one of his plays. This perhaps can be seen most clearly if we turn first to his non-dramatic work, especially to the thirty-two "characters" added to the sixth edition of the Overbury collection, published in 1615, and to the elegy on Prince Henry, called A Monumental Column and written immediately after the Prince's death in 1612. The prose of the characters is tough and sinewy, with much play with antithesis and classical allusion. The matter is generally satiric and, when occasion is, bawdy. "An ordinarie Widdow", "A Distaster of the Time", "A Roaring Boy", "An Intruder into favour", "A Buttonmaker of Amsterdame" are some of the titles which give the writer grounds for castigation. But sometimes his theme is praise, as in this character of "A vertuous Widdow":

Is the Palme-tree, that thrives not after the supplanting of her husband. For her Childrens sake she first marries, for she married that she might have children, and for their sakes she marries no more. She is like the purest gold, only imploid for Princes meddals, she never receives but one mans impression; the large jointure moves her not, titles of honour cannot sway her. To change her name were, shee thinkes, to commit a sin should make her asham'd of her husbands Calling: shee thinkes shee hath traveld all the world in one man; the rest of her time therefore shee directs to heaven. Her maine superstition is, shee thinkes her husbands ghost would walke should shee not performe his Will: shee would doe it, were there no Prerogative Court. Shee gives much to pious uses, without any hope to merit by them: and as one Diamond fashions another; so is shee wrought into workes of Charity, with the dust or ashes of her husband. Shee lives to see her selfe full of time: being so necessary for earth, God calles her not to heaven, till she bee very aged: and even then, though her naturall strength faile her, shee stands like an ancient Piramid; which the lesse it growes to mans eye, the nearer it reaches to heaven: this latter Chastity of Hers, is more grave and reverend, then that ere shee was married; for in it is neither hope, nor longing, nor feare, nor jealousie. Shee ought to bee a mirrour for our yongest Dames, to dresse themselves by, when shee is fullest of wrinkles. No calamity can now come neere her, for in suffering the losse of her husband, shee accounts all the rest trifles: shee hath laid his dead body in the worthyest monument that can be: Shee hath buried it in her owne heart. To conclude, shee is a Relique, that without any superstition in the world, though she will not be kist, yet may be reverenc't.

If this is Webster's, we should do well to remember it as a gloss on The Duchess of Malfi. Indeed it is heavily sententious and on the side of conventional thought. It does, I think, strengthen our view that, on the surface of Webster's mind, The Duchess of Malfi was a warning to the rash and the wanton. His sympathy with the Duchess, his intuitive understanding of the conduct appropriate to her, welled up from deeper levels than were touched by these "characters". As a necessity of the character-form, the portraits are built up in a series of commonplaces or comparisons, just as in this speech of Monticelso during the arraignment of Vittoria:

Shall I expound whore to you? sure I shal;
Ile give their perfect character. They are first,
Sweete meates which ot the eater: In mans nostrill
Poison'd perfumes. They are coosning Alcumy,
Shipwrackes in Calmest weather. What are whores?
Cold Russian winters, that appeare so barren,
As if that nature had forgot the spring.
They are the trew matteriall fier of hell,
Worse then those tributes ith low countries payed,
Exactions upon meat, drinke, garments, sleepe,
I even on mans perdition, his sin.
They are those brittle evidences of law
Which forfait all a wretched mans estate
For leaving out one sillable. What are whores?
They are those flattering bels have all one tune
At weddings, and at funerals: your ritch whores
Are only treasuries by extortion fild,
And emptied by curs'd riot. They are worse,
Worse then dead bodies, which are beg'd at gallowes
And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man
Wherin hee is imperfect. Whats a whore?
Shees like the guilty conterfetted coine
Which who so eare first stampes it, brings in trouble
All that receave it.
(III. ii.)

Here we have blank verse, and a dramatic point is made by the repetition of "What are whores?" But in other respects the speech resembles the "character" closely. The action of the play stands still while the writer builds up his set-piece. We can admire the ingenuity of the figures, and at the same time feel that the playwright's schoolmasterly sentiments are his own rather than Monticelso's. We have something similar in the first scene of The Duchess of Malfi, where Delio has commented that the Cardinal is said to be "a brave fellow" who has gambled, courted ladies and fought single combats. Antonio replies:

Some such flashes superficially hang on him, for forme: but observe his inward Character: he is a mellancholly Churchman: The Spring in his face, is nothing but the Ingendring of Toades: where he is jealious of any man, he laies worse plots for them, than ever was impos'd on Hercules: for he strewes in his way Flatterers, Panders, Intelligencers, Atheists, and a thousand such politicall Monsters: he should have been Pope: but instead of comming to it by the primative decensie of the church, he did bestow bribes, so largely, and so impudently, as if he would have carried it away without heavens knowledge.

(I. i.)

Here indeed the prose is very similar in its rhythm and its figures to the prose of the "characters".

These are illustrations of a tendency towards the generalised utterance, which is indeed common in Jacobean drama as a whole but particularly so in Webster. We have only to turn over the pages of his plays to find many examples of the sententious line or passage preceded by inverted commas. Within less than twenty-five lines of the scene where Vittoria and Flamineo die, we have:

Prosperity doth bewitch men seeming cleere,
But seas doe laugh, shew white, when Rocks are neere.
Wee cease to greive, cease to be fortunes slaves,
Nay cease to dye by dying.

While we looke up to heaven wee confound
Knowledge with knowledge.

O happy they that never saw the Court,
Nor ever knew great Man but by report.
This busie trade of life appeares most vaine,
Since rest breeds rest, where all seeke paine by paine.
(V. vi.)

Often, as in some of these, the rhymed couplet is used, which emphasises the semi-choric nature of the utterance. When similar gnomic passages occur in Shakespeare, they are either in soliloquy, thus standing apart from the play and functioning almost as chorus-passages pure and simple, or they are used as a means of deliberately lowering the dramatic tension. For example, at the end of Act III of Measure for Measure the Duke has a soliloquy of twenty-two lines in octosyllabic couplets which begins as follows:

He, who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More nor less to others paying
Than by self offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking!
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice and let his grow!
(III. ii.)

The passage is appropriately inserted at this point, for the Duke has a little come down from his pedestal in arranging the Mariana-device, and Shakespeare apparently wishes to raise him once more to a sovereign and divinely sanctioned eminence: the remoteness of his speech from the manner of common utterance, and its generalising tone, remove the speaker from the other characters in the play and make explicit the playwright's governing idea in the drama. In Othello, I. iii, we find the Duke and Brabantio exchanging flat, sententious couplets at the point where Brabantio has despairingly withdrawn his opposition to the marriage of Othello and Desdemona: the dramatic interest is to turn to affairs of state and the preparation for the Cyprus voyage, and it is well for the tension to be momentarily lowered. But in Webster the sententious passages are commonly not thus separated from the action or used for purposes of relief: they come in death-scenes, in the final utterances of major characters. The result is an effect of distancing when immediacy would be better. Any dramatist undertaking a serious play will have more or less consciously in mind a general view of human life to communicate, but it will be most successfully conveyed to us if its presentation is largely indirect—especially at key-moments of the dramatic action. Each of the tragic figures in Shakespeare's major plays dies thinking of his own concerns—Hamlet of the succession to the throne of Denmark, Othello of his long service to the state, Lear of his hope that Cordelia is alive, Macbeth of his death-struggle with Macduff—and this makes their deaths more convincing, more eloquent than if their last words had the preacher's touch. Indeed, one of the reasons why the death of the Duchess of Malfi constitutes the most moving passage in Webster is that her thoughts, though incorporating a general truth, are concentrated on her own fate:

Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength,
Must pull downe heaven upon me:
Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arch'd
As Princes pallaces—they that enter there
Must go upon their knees: Come violent death,
Serve for Mandragora, to make me sleepe;
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feede in quiet.
(IV. ii.)

On the other hand, the deaths in Act V of that play are liberally besprinkled with quotation marks. In this respect Webster is nearer to Chapman than to Shakespeare, and he is of course the lesser dramatist for that. But he differs from Chapman in that his generalised utterances are more commonplace, more an expression of a conventional morality: sin must be avoided, greatness corrupts, blood will have blood, man lives in ignorance, ambition is vanity—these are the sentiments which Webster's spent tapers illuminate in their last flash.

As A Monumental Column is an elegy on the hopeful Prince Henry, it inevitably contains its quota of "sentences", duly marked by inverted commas and sometimes by italics as well. But in other respects too the elegy throws light on Webster's character as a poet. One of a number of verse tributes hurriedly produced, it has little or no distinction. Its rhetoric and its conceits are strained, as when the warlike prowess of the Black Prince is alluded to: he, we are told,

jestingly, would say it was his tradeTo fashion death-beds, and hath often madeHorror look lovely, when i' th' fields there layArmes and legges, so distracted, one would sayThat the dead bodies had no bodies left.

Mr. [F. L.] Lucas is moved to describe these as "surely the most detestable lines in all Webster", and there is indeed a strange lack of sensitivity here. When, as often happens, physical horrors are mentioned in The White Devil or The Duchess, it is with a proper sense of the horrible. But in the later plays we have already seen a strain of crassness, a blunting of sensibility, a lack of discrimination which makes it possible for the dramatist to end The Devil's Law Case with the marriage of Contarino to Leonora, of Romelio to his seduced nun. We should note too that A Monumental Column was written just after the probable date of The White Devil and earlier than The Duchess of Malfi: we are not dealing here with a product of Webster's later years. If, however, we look back to his collaborations with Dekker, we shall see in Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! a crudeness of temper that cannot be solely Dekker's. I have already referred to the madhouse-jesting of Northward Ho!, and both plays are full of dull cuckoldry and duller threats of cuckoldry among the citizens of London, interspersed with the self-congratulations of wives who decide to preserve their virtue. In fact, except on those occasions when Webster's mind is deeply disturbed by the human condition, it is a mind remarkable neither for sensitivity nor for nimbleness of thought. It is likely enough that he was to some extent affected by the death of the young Prince, but the experience did not set his mind working at top-pressure: he strained to impress, and the result is not merely conventional but tasteless. If it be objected that this is to apply too rigorous standards to a mere occasional poem, we may recall that The Phoenix and the Turtle was perhaps also written for a ceremonial occasion.

A Monumental Column illustrates, besides, a stylistic device common in Webster. That is the use of the barely relevant fable. He breaks off his lamentations over Prince Henry to tell how Pleasure once came down into the world and, when she was recalled to heaven by Jupiter, she left her robe behind: it was found by Sorrow, so that since then men "have entertain'd the divill in Pleasures cloaths". The fable takes up forty of the poem's 328 lines, and it is difficult to see how it relates to the brevity of Prince Henry's life. In The White Devil, IV.ii, when Vittoria and Brachiano are reconciled in the house of convertites and are about to depart to Padua, Flamineo interrupts the proceedings with a prose account of the crocodile, the worm that breeds in its teeth, and the bird that flies into the crocodile's jaws and removes the worm, escaping from the crocodile's ingratitude by wounding it with a "quill or pricke" that its head is armed with. Brachiano interprets this as a reproach that he has not rewarded Flamineo for his services, deducing that Flamineo is the bird and he himself the crocodile; Flamineo replies that Vittoria is the suffering crocodile, Brachiano the bird that relieves her: she is to beware of ingratitude. Both explanations are forced, and the second singularly pointless. Similarly, in The Duchess of Malfi, III.ii, Ferdinand, in the moment of great stress when he has entered his sister's bed-chamber and threatened her with his dagger, breaks off to tell how Reputation, Love and Death came into the world and were about to separate until Reputation said that, once he parted from a man, he was never found again. This, like the sudden intrusion of a gnomic passage, lowers the tension, and that was by no means the effect required here. We feel a lack of self-criticism, of mastery of the playwright's craft.

Webster excels in the sudden flash, in the intuitive but often unsustained perception. At times he startles us by what may be called the "Shakespearian" use of the common word. In the dark night of The Duchess of Malfi, at the high point of tension when the Duchess is about to die, her last words are:

Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,They then may feede in quiet.

The bareness of "feede" increases the force of the lines, for it suggests an animal's engrossment. It has too that kind of authority peculiar to the common word unexpectedly introduced. Its impact is like that of "bread" in Hamlet's

He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
(III. iii.)

and like that of "eat" in the last stanza of Herbert's "Love bade me welcome":

"Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them; let my shameGo where it doth deserve.""And know you not," says Love, "Who bore the blame?""My dear, then I will serve.""You must sit down," says Love,"and taste My meat."So I did sit and eat.

Webster indeed shares with the best of his contemporaries this gift of bringing the common word fully to life.

In general it is his short rather than his long speeches that impress us: we do not find in him, as in Chapman, the elaborate development of an image, the impassioned analysis of an idea; he has nothing that we could put beside the splendidly rhetorical defence of the actor's craft that Massinger gives us in The Roman Actor. When he was "thinking things out", his mind was not so different from the common run. Compared with Jonson's or Chapman's, his thought-processes were clumsy and of the surface. He was no philosophical poet, and in his relaxed moments had not even much feeling for the appropriate manner. When he deliberately aimed at the impressive, he achieved often only the ponderous. He was perhaps too easily influenced by other dramatists. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi show him at Shakespeare's feet, both in their general themes and in the handling of particular scenes and speeches: The White Devil stems from Macbeth, the tragedy of unlawful action, as The Duchess of Malfi from Lear, the tragedy of suffering; the scene of Cornelia's madness echoes passages from Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear; the Duchess's momentary return to life is a clear echo of Desdemona's. Later it was Fletcher who became the dominant influence, and we can, if we wish, blame him for the haphazard theatricality of Webster's minor plays. Webster's two great tragedies come at the end of the splendid years of Jacobean drama: they are almost the last illustrations of its superb temper, the depth and frankness of its vision. The stories of Vittoria and the Duchess kindled his mind, and when writing these plays he had the major work of his contemporaries to give him firm footing. But new fashions were in the theatrical atmosphere, and it was those that largely determined the character of his later work. He had not that authority of mind which enabled Jonson to plough his individual furrow into the reign of Charles I.

Nevertheless, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are two of our major English tragedies. Perhaps Webster did not fully understand what he had achieved, but that may be no uncommon characteristic. Dramatists are rarely the wisest men of their generation. Almost the best of them may say more than they realise or wish, and leave blemishes on their work which puzzle and distract us. Even Shakespeare's feelings sometimes appear to run counter to the governing ideas of his plays, as I think in Measure for Measure and The Tempest, and he has often scenes and speeches which we cannot regard as helpful to the play's effect. But Shakespeare and Webster and lesser men are writers for the theatre, where we have neither time nor inclination for the sifting processes of chill criticism. In a theatrical production we should treat a dramatist's text with a discriminating respect, a respect proportionate to his stature. Webster's text is no more sacred than Shaw's will become. A serious dramatist is the principal artist of the theatre, but his utterance will not always be wise or skilfully contrived. He is no prophet, no complete philosopher, no omnicompetent magician. It would be as heinous to abbreviate Act IV of The Duchess of Malfi as it is to cut the "degree" speech from Troilus and Cressida, for in these passages the dramatists' minds are working at full pressure, are giving us moments of vision. But we should not deny that there is lumber in Webster, even in The Duchess and The White Devil.

But theatrical production can do more than prune these unequal masterpieces. They excel the general run of plays because of their passionately apprehended major characters and their superb flashes of great verse. The characters will live more surely if enacted by living players, the verse when spoken with the accent of authority will bite deeper into our minds. In mental stature Webster may stand lower than Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, and of course Shakespeare; in craftsmanship Middleton may excel him, in emotional complexity Ford; but, Shakespeare alone excepted, Webster dominates the stage. He gives good parts to actors capable of them. His lines at their best are both majestic and intimate. He has a poet's fancy, and at times a poet's austerity. "Fate's a Spaniell, Wee cannot beat it from us." "I have caught an everlasting cold." "Looke you, the Starres shine still." These words demand the stage, as the Duchess demands a body of living flesh. In the theatre we have a sharper impression of the words and of those who utter them, we come closer to that vision of suffering humanity which Webster experienced in fits and starts. And when the fit was on him, his intuitions were sure and deep.