Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known—the “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day—a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and
“do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.”
When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.
John Ford[25] was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days with that of Webster; he was indeed associated with him in some of his work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good family;—a little over-boastful of being above any “want for money;” showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never—to my mind—making head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of pathos—of quiet contemplative brooding—lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do not compensate—at least do not compensate me—for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.
Marston—another John[26]—if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his Image of Pygmalion had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson on Eastward Hoe! won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from What you Will; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning:
“I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept;
And still I held converse with Zabarell,