ABSTRACT
Both playwrights indulge the late Elizabethan predilection for conceits. Webster, here as elsewhere, proves himself the finer artist. He inserts Vittoria's dream, Antonio's dialogue with Echo, Bosola's Masque of Madmen, accidentally and subserviently to action. Tourneur enlarges needlessly, but with lurid rhetorical effect, upon the grisly humoufs suggested by the skull of Vendice's dead mistress. Using similar materials, the one asserts his claim to be called the nobler poet by more steady observance of the Greek precept 'Nothing overmuch'. Words to the same effect might be written about their several employment of blank verse and prose. Both follow Shakespeare's distribution of these forms, while both run verse into prose as Shakespeare never did. Yet I think we may detect a subtler discriminative quality in Webster's most chaotic periods than we can in Tourneur's; and what upon this point deserves notice is that Webster, of the two, alone shows lyrical faculty. His three dirges are of exquisite melodic rhythm, in a rich low minor key; much of his blank verse has the ring of music; and even his prose suggests the colour of song by its cadence. This cannot be said of the sinister and arid Muse of Tourneur.... [Webster] is not a poet to be dealt with by any summary method; for he touches the depths of human nature in ways that need the subtlest analysis for their proper explanation. I am, however, loth to close without a word or two concerning the peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style. Owing to condensation of thought and compression of language, his plays offer considerable difficulties to readers who approach them for the first time. So many fantastic incidents are crowded into a single action, and the dialogue is burdened with so much profoundly studied matter, that the general impression is apt to be blurred. We rise from the perusal of his Italian tragedies with a deep sense
of the poet's power and personality, an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes, and a clear conception of the leading characters. Meanwhile the outlines of the fable, the structure of the drama as a complete work of art, seem to elude our grasp. The persons, who have played their part upon the stage of our imagination, stand apart from one another, like figures in a tableau vivant. 'Appius and Virginia', indeed, proves that Webster understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able to work one out with conscientious firmness. But in 'Vittoria Corombona' and 'The Duchess of Malfi1, each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a murky background; and the whole play is a mosaic of these parts. It lacks the breadth which comes from concentration on a master-motive. We feel that the author had a certain depth of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art. It is probable that abl$ representation upon the public stage of an Elizabethan theatre gave them the coherence, the animation, and the movement which a chamber-student misses. When familiarity has brought us acquainted with Webster's way of*working, we perceive that he treats terrible and striking subjects with a concentrated vigour special to his genius. Each word and trait of character has been studied for a particular effect. Brief lightning flashes of astute self-revelation illuminate the midnight darkness of the lost souls he has painted. Flowers of the purest and most human pathos, like Giovanni de Medici's dialogue with his uncle in 'Vittoria Corombona', bloom by the charnelhouse on which the poet's fancy loved to dwell. The culmination of these tragedies, setting like stormy suns in blood-red clouds, is prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror. No dramatist showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain combined to make men miserable. He seems to have had a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals so powerfully. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds are sought for in the ruined places of abandoned lives, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of sin-haunted conscience, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed, the deaths of frantic hope-deserted criminals. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological elements of tragedy home to our imagination. He makes free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers,
masques, and nightmares. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature, his profound pity for the innocent who suffer shipwreck in the storm of evil passions not their own, save him, even at his gloomiest and wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists — Tourneur, for example — blundered. That the tendency to brood on what is ghastly belonged to Webster's idiosyncrasy appears in his use of metaphor. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a sinister turn — as thus:
you speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffn'd in a bak'd meat, Afore you cut it up.
