John Webster

John Webster was a London coachmaker’s son and a minor playwright for most of his career, collaborating with Dekker and others, who wrote in the years around 1613 the two tragedies that put him beside Shakespeare: The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, in which a widow who marries her steward is destroyed by her brothers and dies with more dignity than anyone who kills her. Eliot said he saw the skull beneath the skin, and the plays are the darkest of the Jacobean stage, with lines that every later reader of the period quotes as its sound. Almost nothing else is known of him.