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John Webster
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Webster: The White Devil
In this course, we explore John Webster’s ‘The White Devil’, beginning by thinking about John Webster himself, before moving on to consider the play itself – its setting in Italy, and the presentation of the various male and female characters in the play. In the last module, we think about how Webster’s play might best be staged – an issue that Webster himself commented on when he complained (in the preface to the printed version of the play) that the original production had been “presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted a full and understanding auditory”
John Webster
In this module, we introduce the playwright John Webster, a part-time playwright who wrote his first plays only when he had already turned thirty, and the reception of his play ‘The White Devil’, which was most likely first performed in the period 1608-11.
My name is John Leonard.
00:00:03I'm an independent scholar,
00:00:04and this courses on the revenge is tragedy starting
00:00:05in this first module with not by Shakespeare,
00:00:07because the play isn't
00:00:11now. That may seem a very obvious thing to say,
00:00:13but one of the things we have to consider is that both at school and at
00:00:16university levels were very used to seeing the
00:00:21world of Jacob Ethan drama through Shakespeare.
00:00:24And the trouble is that in some ways, that's very misleading,
00:00:29because Shakespeare was in many ways unusual
00:00:32and focusing on things through him or having an
00:00:37expectation based on Shakespeare can become quite distorting.
00:00:40Really.
00:00:44Shakespeare's unusual in at least five ways.
00:00:45The first is that as an actor and shareholder of the King's Men,
00:00:49he was not dependent on writing plays
00:00:54for his income. He had another source of income,
00:00:58and he worked for the same company through his
00:01:01life so that second he was a resident playwright.
00:01:03He always knew for whom he was writing,
00:01:06and those together mean that he was able to write solo
00:01:08the majority of his place.
00:01:12Although there's a lot of interest now in the ones that are collaborative,
00:01:13the majority of them are solo plays, and that was also quite unusual.
00:01:16Then his friends posthumously collected his plays
00:01:21some seven years after his death.
00:01:25So we have a good text and an authorised body of text.
00:01:27And because of his place as a national blood or the great playwright,
00:01:32he's also been researched over the centuries very, very intensively,
00:01:37with the result that we know relatively speaking a lot about Shakespeare.
00:01:43A lot of little details and things that are very obscure have been dug up over time.
00:01:47But that's the result of an enormous expenditure of person hours in
00:01:52searching for things.
00:01:58And all of that has made Shakespeare the exception, not the rule,
00:02:00because the fact is that the vast majority of the plays that were performed
00:02:04in the jack of Ethan period between 15 76 and 16 42 are lost.
00:02:09We don't have them at all.
00:02:15The ones that we do have some 300 odd represent only a tiny sample,
00:02:17and
00:02:25the great majority of them, so far as we can tell
00:02:26we're probably written collaboratively,
00:02:29seems to have been quite normal for 23,
00:02:32even four playwrights to work together on a piece
00:02:35in order to up the total rate of production.
00:02:38And the revenge is tragedy is a case in point because the reason
00:02:43the place survives is that we have a quarto text from 16 oh seven
00:02:48very late. It was dated 16 oh seven. It may have been just into what we call 16 oh eight,
00:02:54and it's anonymous. There's no author given for it at all.
00:03:01All we have is that text now, in about the mid 17th century, I think it was in 16 59.
00:03:06The play began to be attributed
00:03:15to a man called Cyril Turner,
00:03:17who was known to have written one other play, The Atheists Tragedy from 16 11.
00:03:20Otherwise, we know almost nothing about Turner,
00:03:26but there was this attribution
00:03:30later on From about the late 19th century, people began to say no,
00:03:32they didn't think it was by Turner.
00:03:36They thought it was probably by Middleton,
00:03:37a playwright who was associated with the King's men
00:03:40and about whom we know a little bit more. But again, not really very much.
00:03:44And both of those attribution is whether the older one to turn or or the
00:03:50later attribution to Middleton are on stylistic grounds.
00:03:55Nobody has any hard evidence. There's nothing that says
00:03:58this play was definitely by X. We're just guessing,
00:04:01frankly.
00:04:05So even if you believe that it's by Middleton say you can't be completely certain.
00:04:05There's a lot of room for doubt.
00:04:12And so
00:04:15what we know about this play
00:04:16is almost nothing
00:04:20beyond
00:04:22the play itself.
00:04:23We have the text,
00:04:25but we just don't have
00:04:27anything else.
00:04:28No definite attribution. We know one thing,
00:04:30which is that on the title page of the Quarto.
00:04:33It says that the play was acted by the King's men.
00:04:36Now they were a leading company that was Shakespeare's company.
00:04:39And we can infer one other thing
00:04:44because somebody bothered to print it in the first place,
00:04:46which suggests that it had been reasonably successful.
00:04:51I mean, after all, if something flops,
00:04:53you don't try to do a whole lot of merchandising on it afterwards.
00:04:55It's if something has been a success
00:04:58that you start trying to
00:05:00print the text and
00:05:02sell it in that way. So the existence of the text
00:05:04tells us that the play was successful enough to warrant a printed edition,
00:05:08and we have this information that it was performed by the King's men,
00:05:14who were a prestige company.
00:05:17So we have a reasonable grounds for thinking that the play was a theatrical hit.
00:05:18But about it we know
00:05:24absolutely nothing else were left in a vacuum.
00:05:26And that's actually really quite problematical because
00:05:31we start projecting into the play other things
00:05:35that we know about the period
00:05:39and that can be misleading so that, frankly,
00:05:41I mean scholars as much as students have often simply been confused by the play,
00:05:44they've wound up thrashing about
00:05:50and saying all sorts of odd things about it because they simply don't
00:05:52know
00:05:57how to locate it or its contact.
00:05:59And this is a problem that's really worth thinking about,
00:06:02because typically we get fed Shakespeare or maybe Ben Johnson or Marlow,
00:06:06and we do know something about them so we can happily fit it into a slot and say Yes,
00:06:11okay, it belongs there, and we know this about it.
00:06:16We had all these other things to it,
00:06:19and we get to thinking as if that's normative,
00:06:21as if that's what the situation is most of the time.
00:06:25But it isn't. That's just the situation with Shakespeare.
00:06:28The situation with the revenge is tragedy
00:06:31is actually a better representation in many ways
00:06:32of how much we don't know about the past,
00:06:37how little information we have about some things.
00:06:42We have the text
00:06:47and that's it.
00:06:49And that means that we have to come
00:06:50to the text and
00:06:52examine it on its own terms.
00:06:54Now it's just one other thing that we can do,
00:06:56which is what I'll be looking at in the next section,
00:06:59which is to locate it definitely as Jacobean
00:07:01drama and to think about what that means. So we do have an immediate context for it.
00:07:05The quarto has a date,
00:07:10and that does give us a locus in time
00:07:12that we can
00:07:15use to try to provide some context.
00:07:16But otherwise we're coming to it innocent
00:07:19of
00:07:22knowledge,
00:07:23and that's a really interesting situation to think about.
00:07:24
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Lennard, J. (2018, August 15). Webster: The White Devil - John Webster [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/webster-the-white-devil/those-scheming-italians
MLA style
Lennard, J. "Webster: The White Devil – John Webster." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/webster-the-white-devil/those-scheming-italians