ABSTRACT
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was Webster!s most enthusiastic champion in the late nineteenth century, and his extravagant and impressionistic praise led to fierce rejoinders from theatrical critics such as Archer and Shaw. For although Swinburne writes that Webster*s fame 'assuredly does not depend upon the merit of a casual passage here or there*, an examination of dramatic structure has little place in Swinburne*s view of Webster as moral poet. He stands as the chief spokesman for the line of Victorian critics who celebrate Webster*s poetic imagination and who place him at Shakespeare's right hand in the creation of poetry, rather than drama. The legacy of Lamb continued
Extracts from (a) John Webster, * Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets' (*The Complete Works of A.C. Swinburne*, ed. Edmund Gosse and T.J. Wise (1925), V, p. 177) and (b) John Webster, 'The Nineteenth Century', XIX, pp. 861-81. The essay was slightly revised for his last work, 'The Age of Shakespeare' (1908).
