Lamb says of Cornelia, "she speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a Webster can do." But if this is all that a Webster can do, and if to do this he needs an accumulation of unnatural horrors—fratricide, the murderer of a brother contemplating the madness which his deed has wrought in his mother; if the slain brother has just been kicking his strumpet sister; then we may ask whether an art that flourishes in these odious and extravagant conditions produces "one of the imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature".
The serene and audacious impudence of Vittoria, when accused of her first husband's, Camillo's, murder; and the Ophelia-like laments and the song of Cornelia; with the all-but imperturbable wickedness of Flamineo, yield the extracts which Charles Lamb made current coin. Webster, in fact, returned, with abundant genius, but without discretion, to the class of Revenge-plays opened by Kyd in "The Spanish Tragedie".
The behaviour of the Duchess of Malfi, in the play of that name (printed 1623), introduced as she is by a noble panegyric, does not prepare us for her sudden wooing of her steward, Antonio. Her brothers, like the brothers of Keats's Isabella, determine to punish her: their instrument, Bosolo, is a character not wholly lost, who deliberately sells himself to guilt; and the scene in which eight madmen are let loose to dance round the Duchess—they do not shake her resolution,—is much admired. She is strangled, the children are strangled on all sides, the servant Cariola is strangled, though "she bites and scratches". The Fifth Act is a scene of the Kilkenny cats; almost everybody, including Bosolo, is stabbed, and Ford, in commendatory verses, applauds Webster, as at least the equal of the Athenian tragedians.
Webster's genius was confessedly "subdued to that it worked in". In the preface to "The White Devil" he complains that the public will not endure a tragedy which observes the critical laws; "the sententious Chorus," and "the passionate and weighty Nuntius," the messenger who, in Greek tragedy, reports the horrors done off the stage. Deprived of the messenger, obliged to work his massacres on the scene, Webster was unsparing in horrors. His "Devil's Lawsuit" is a complicated web of squalid intrigue; the blank verse is utterly degenerate; and "Appius and Virginia" is not remarkable for originality in the representation of that famous Roman story.
Webster's idea of a ghost was rather unconventional; Brachiano's phantasm in "The White Devil" wore no common sheet, but "leather cassock and breeches, and boots; with a cowl, in his hand a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't". Dekker advises his Gull at the play to laugh aloud in the crisis of the tragedy, and probably there were some hardy or hysterical spectators who thus received the too, too solid spirit of Brachiano. The Tragedy of Revenge inspired Cyril Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," and horror has her home in this play and his "Atheist's Tragedy". What in them deserves reading may be found in Lamb's extracts.
Massinger.
Philip Massinger (born 1583) was the son of a gentleman patronized by the noble house of Pembroke. The poet was educated at St. Alban Hall, Oxford, but left without taking a degree (1606). He had fallen into debt, and commenced play-writing in 1614; his earliest known piece, in which Dekker took part, "The Virgin Martyr," was acted in 1622. The period represented is that of the persecution under Diocletian, and the piece is old-fashioned enough; introducing the angelic companion of St. Dorothea, and the devil who attends the persecutor, Theophilus, a very late convert. Torture is introduced on the stage, and Theophilus slays his daughters, whom he had tortured out of Christianity back into the Olympian faith, and whom Dorothea reconverts by arguments with which they must already have long been familiar. There is a tendency to credit Dekker both with the most gracious passages of verse in the piece and with the stupid but energetic ribaldries of Hircius and Spungius.
"The Unnatural Combat" (duel between a son and a father who rivals Cenci in Shelley's tragedy), "The Duke of Milan," with a most unnatural plot, "The Roman Actor," "The Fatal Dowry," are among Massinger's tragedies; some twelve of his plays were burned in manuscript by Betty Baker, or Barnes, the cook of Warburton, the herald. If they contained such scenes as that of "the ghost of young Malefort," slain by his father, "naked from the waist, full of wounds, leading in the Shadow of a lady, her face leprous," our regret for them may not be overwhelming. We have plays enough in which a man is poisoned by the venomed paint on a canvas or on a dead lady's face; plays enough in which victims (as in "The Roman Actor") are cruelly tortured on the stage.
That Massinger has noble passages and great tirades is undeniable, and he is one of the four or five successors of Shakespeare who are said by their admirers to follow most closely in his footsteps. The play which keeps Massinger's memory green in common recollection is his "A New Way to pay Old Debts". The great part is that of Sir Giles Overreach, a financial ruffian, suggested probably by a real character equally nefarious, Sir Giles Mompesson. A victim of Overreach's in his own nephew, Wellborn, and the play shows how Wellborn, with the aid of a rich and virtuous widow, Lady Allworth, cozens Overreach into advancing money; how his creature, Marrall, chouses him; and how his daughter, Margaret, marries young Allworth, and not the peer for whom the usurer designed her. Described as "both lion and fox," Overreach, always ready to fight, is more successful in the furious than in the furtive part of his nature. He bullies man and defies God in seeking satisfaction of his two chief desires, to ruin and humiliate his social superiors and to plunder the widow and the orphan or any other victim whose loss may be his gain.