ABSTRACT
Langbaine only informs us of this writer, that he was clerk of St. Andrew's parish, Holborn, and was esteemed by his contemporaries. He wrote his two comedies, the Thracian Wonder, and the Cure for a Cuckold, in conjunction with Rowley, Dekker, and Marston. Few other pieces, entirely his own, are Vittoria Corombona, the tragedy of Appius, the Devil's Law Case, and the Duchess of Malfy. From the advertisement prefixed to his Duchess of Malfy, the piece seems not to have been successful in the representation. The author says, 'that it wanted that which is the only grace and setting out of a tragedy, a full and understanding auditory.' The auditory, it may be suspected, were not quite so much struck with the beauty of Webster's horrors, as Mr. Lamb seems to have been in writing the notes to his Specimens of our old Dramatic Poetry. In the same preface Webster deprives himself of the only apology that could be offered for his absurdities as a dramatist, by acknowledging that he wrote slowly, a circumstance in which he modestly compares himself to Euripides. In his tragedy of the Duchess of Malfy, the duchess is married and delivered of several children in the course of five acts.
