Heywood's most celebrated play, "A Woman Killed with Kindness," reads as much like a modern novel as a Jacobean drama. There is no ribaldry, no horrors, only a duel between two sets of men over a disputed hawking match. The hero, Frankford, shelters and entertains a broken gentleman who flees from the field, and the man, though thoroughly conscious of his own villainy, seduces Frankford's wife, who is beautiful and hitherto a pearl of virtue. She yields at a word: Frankford discovers and spares them, the lady makes a pathetic end, and, dying of remorse (of which her lover has his full share), she is "killed with kindness".
The pathos and the details of manners are entirely in the style of many modern novels, and the underplot, also serious, if improbable, has the favourite stainless heroine, Susan; a girl of great nobility.
There is a most amusing list of the practising "Mediums" of the day, in "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon". They have their specialities, one "doth pretty well for a thing that is lost." Mother Sturton deals in prevision—"is for fore-speaking"; another "practised the book and key" (an automatism, the key is tied into the book, the fingers hold it up under the handle of the key, and the book turns in answer to questions). "All do well," says the witch, "according to their talent. For myself, let the world speak There are some good speeches and good blank verse in "The Iron Age," one of four dramas on the "Four Ages of Hesiod's Mythology". In "The Rape of Lucrece" is an extraordinary set of popular songs, some coarse enough, one in Dutch, and among them the beautiful lyric,
Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day,
which, more than his twenty-four surviving dramas, keeps Heywood's memory green and fragrant. He wrote miscellaneous pamphlets and books with enormous industry.
There is something sympathetic in his very carelessness,—what Lamb precisely meant when he called Heywood "a prose Shakespeare" is disputed. Possibly he meant that Heywood has sweetness of nature, humour, and knowledge of character, without much poetry.
Webster.
Concerning the life and adventures of John Webster next to nothing is known. In 1602 the account books of Henslowe, the financier of the stage, mention two lost plays as being, the first by Dekker, Drayton, Middleton, Munday, and Webster; and the second by Webster, Chettle, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and Dekker. Dramas by so many hands cannot be masterpieces. Webster was a great and busy collaborator; in the bustling "citizen comedies," "Northward Ho" and "Westward Ho" he worked with Dekker. He is best known by Lamb's extracts from his "White Devil" and "Duchess of Malfi".
"The White Devil" (printed in 1612) is a chronicle play of the career of Vittoria Corombona, but Webster has altered the facts as he pleased. The more tragic humours of the betrayed husband (our liberal fathers gave him a shorter name) are exemplified in her lord Camillo, who, in the interests of her lover, the Duke of Brachiano, is murdered in a manner intended to disguise the crime: the device is about as subtle as the blowing up of Darnley with gunpowder. The Duchess, another patient Grizel, except so far as Vittoria is concerned, men slay by poisoning the portrait of her faithless husband, which she kisses, and thus imbibes the infection. Cornelia, the mother of Vittoria and of her leading murderer Flamineo, is a pathetic figure, and it is she who sings the beautiful lyric.
Call for the robin red breast and the wren.