John Webster

My name is John Leonard.

I'm an independent scholar,

and this courses on the revenge is tragedy starting

in this first module with not by Shakespeare,

because the play isn't

now. That may seem a very obvious thing to say,

but one of the things we have to consider is that both at school and at

university levels were very used to seeing the

world of Jacob Ethan drama through Shakespeare.

And the trouble is that in some ways, that's very misleading,

because Shakespeare was in many ways unusual

and focusing on things through him or having an

expectation based on Shakespeare can become quite distorting.

Really.

Shakespeare's unusual in at least five ways.

The first is that as an actor and shareholder of the King's Men,

he was not dependent on writing plays

for his income. He had another source of income,

and he worked for the same company through his

life so that second he was a resident playwright.

He always knew for whom he was writing,

and those together mean that he was able to write solo

the majority of his place.

Although there's a lot of interest now in the ones that are collaborative,

the majority of them are solo plays, and that was also quite unusual.

Then his friends posthumously collected his plays

some seven years after his death.

So we have a good text and an authorised body of text.

And because of his place as a national blood or the great playwright,

he's also been researched over the centuries very, very intensively,

with the result that we know relatively speaking a lot about Shakespeare.

A lot of little details and things that are very obscure have been dug up over time.

But that's the result of an enormous expenditure of person hours in

searching for things.

And all of that has made Shakespeare the exception, not the rule,

because the fact is that the vast majority of the plays that were performed

in the jack of Ethan period between 15 76 and 16 42 are lost.

We don't have them at all.

The ones that we do have some 300 odd represent only a tiny sample,

and

the great majority of them, so far as we can tell

we're probably written collaboratively,

seems to have been quite normal for 23,

even four playwrights to work together on a piece

in order to up the total rate of production.

And the revenge is tragedy is a case in point because the reason

the place survives is that we have a quarto text from 16 oh seven

very late. It was dated 16 oh seven. It may have been just into what we call 16 oh eight,

and it's anonymous. There's no author given for it at all.

All we have is that text now, in about the mid 17th century, I think it was in 16 59.

The play began to be attributed

to a man called Cyril Turner,

who was known to have written one other play, The Atheists Tragedy from 16 11.

Otherwise, we know almost nothing about Turner,

but there was this attribution

later on From about the late 19th century, people began to say no,

they didn't think it was by Turner.

They thought it was probably by Middleton,

a playwright who was associated with the King's men

and about whom we know a little bit more. But again, not really very much.

And both of those attribution is whether the older one to turn or or the

later attribution to Middleton are on stylistic grounds.

Nobody has any hard evidence. There's nothing that says

this play was definitely by X. We're just guessing,

frankly.

So even if you believe that it's by Middleton say you can't be completely certain.

There's a lot of room for doubt.

And so

what we know about this play

is almost nothing

beyond

the play itself.

We have the text,

but we just don't have

anything else.

No definite attribution. We know one thing,

which is that on the title page of the Quarto.

It says that the play was acted by the King's men.

Now they were a leading company that was Shakespeare's company.

And we can infer one other thing

because somebody bothered to print it in the first place,

which suggests that it had been reasonably successful.

I mean, after all, if something flops,

you don't try to do a whole lot of merchandising on it afterwards.

It's if something has been a success

that you start trying to

print the text and

sell it in that way. So the existence of the text

tells us that the play was successful enough to warrant a printed edition,

and we have this information that it was performed by the King's men,

who were a prestige company.

So we have a reasonable grounds for thinking that the play was a theatrical hit.

But about it we know

absolutely nothing else were left in a vacuum.

And that's actually really quite problematical because

we start projecting into the play other things

that we know about the period

and that can be misleading so that, frankly,

I mean scholars as much as students have often simply been confused by the play,

they've wound up thrashing about

and saying all sorts of odd things about it because they simply don't

know

how to locate it or its contact.

And this is a problem that's really worth thinking about,

because typically we get fed Shakespeare or maybe Ben Johnson or Marlow,

and we do know something about them so we can happily fit it into a slot and say Yes,

okay, it belongs there, and we know this about it.

We had all these other things to it,

and we get to thinking as if that's normative,

as if that's what the situation is most of the time.

But it isn't. That's just the situation with Shakespeare.

The situation with the revenge is tragedy

is actually a better representation in many ways

of how much we don't know about the past,

how little information we have about some things.

We have the text

and that's it.

And that means that we have to come

to the text and

examine it on its own terms.

Now it's just one other thing that we can do,

which is what I'll be looking at in the next section,

which is to locate it definitely as Jacobean

drama and to think about what that means. So we do have an immediate context for it.

The quarto has a date,

and that does give us a locus in time

that we can

use to try to provide some context.

But otherwise we're coming to it innocent

of

knowledge,

and that's a really interesting situation to think about.