John Webster

This Norton Critical Edition of John Webster’s 1612–13 tragedy offers a newly edited and annotated text together with a full introduction and illustrative materials intended for student readers. The Duchess of Malfi’s themes of love, loyalty and betrayal have resonated through the centuries, making this a perennially popular play with audiences and readers alike.

"The White Devil", by John Webster. John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist (1580-1634).

"The Duchess of Malfi", by John Webster. John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist (1580-1634).

These four plays, written during the reigns of James I and Charles I, took revenge tragedy in dark and ambiguous new directions. In The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, John Webster explores the role of women and issues of power, sex and corruption in the Italian court, creating two unforgettable anti-heroines. In The Broken Heart, John Ford questions the value of emotional repression as his characters attempt to subdue their desires and hatreds in ancient Greece. Finally, Ford's masterpiece 'Tis Pity She's a Whore explores the taboo themes of incest and forbidden lust in a daring reworking of Romeo and Juliet.Jane Kingsley-Smith has edited the plays from the earliest quartos and added invaluable editorial material, including explanatory glosses and a new introduction that discusses how the playwrights used the theatre to explore issues around women, sex, power and violence. Together with the Penguin volume of Five Revenge Tragedies, edited by Emma Smith, this is the essential sourcebook for drama in the period. 'Revenge, hatred, villainy, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes ... and they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience ... We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to see such representations' - Charles KingsleyJOHN WEBSTER was born in about 1578 in London. He studied law at the Middle Temple before embarking on a career in the theatre, collaborating on many plays with contemporary dramatists. But it was his two solo-authored tragedies, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) which sealed his reputation. In 1606 he married Sara Peniall, who was seven months pregnant, and they went on to have at least four children. He died in the 1630s.JOHN FORD was born in 1586 in Devon. His early career was wholly concerned with poetry and philosophical works, and it was not until the 1620s that he began collaborating on stage plays. In the late 1620s, he began writing alone, producing the eight plays on which his reputation would be based, including The Broken Heart (1620) and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c.1630). Nothing more is known of Ford after the performance of his last play in 1638. JANE KINGSLEY-SMITH completed her PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and is the author of two monographs:Shakespeare's Drama of Exile (2003) and Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2010). She is a Reader at Roehampton University, London, and a regular guest speaker at Shakespeare's Globe.

A violent tragedy, regarded as one of the great works of Jacobean theatre. Duke Bracciano is besotted by the beautiful Vittoria. When he makes her an indecent proposal she can't refuse, she enlists the help of Flaminio to fool her husband, and begins an illicit affair. But Vittoria and Flaminio soon find themselves snared in a web of corruption, passion and retribution as their single-minded pursuit of personal gain reaches an epic and bloody conclusion. This Prompt Book edition of The White Devil was published alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of the play in 2014, and features the text edited for the RSC production, and introductions by key members of its creative team.

Francis Bacon described revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out.In Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy a grieving father seeks public justice for the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the ‘real’ thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, The Revenger’s Tragedy (anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and cruel. Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore represents an innovative re-working of the genre as a brother’s love for his sister leads to his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In Webster’s The White Devil crimes of passion ignite revenge in the courts of the Italian city states.This student edition contains fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play, focusing on its action and play of ideas.

Excerpt from The Works of John Webster: With Some Account of the Author, and Notes In the Introduction to his edition of The Dramatic Works of John Webster, 1857, Mr. Hazlitt announces his intention of including among them, not only The Thracian Wonder (which he justly describes as a stream of dulness but The Weakest goeth to the Wall. The latter play he assigns to Webster upon the authority of Winstanley not being aware that when Winstanley wrote as follows in his Lires of the most famous English Poets, 1687, p. 137, he was merely transcribing the blunders of Phillips in the Theatmm Poetarum, 1675 He dekker] was also an associate with John Webster in several well eutertain'd Plays, viz. Northward, hoe? The Noble Stranger New Trick to cheat the Devil ll'cstward, hoe The Weakest goes to the Wall; and A Woman will have her will. Here we have three plays confidently attributed to Dekker and Webster, of which we are certain that they did not write a word The Noble Stranger is by Sharpe A New Trick to cheat the Devil, by Davenport; and A Woman will have her will, by Haughton So much for the authority of Winstanley, or rather, of Phillips. As to The Weakest goeth to the Wall, - from beginning to end it is written in a style utterly unlike that of Webster. For verses by Sheppard on Webster's White Devil, see p. 2 for verses by Middleton, W. Rowley, and Ford, on his Duchess of Malfi, see p. 56. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The book brings together a set of related studies on the nature of Scripture and of Christian theology by one of the most prominent representatives of Protestant theology of our time. After a brief introduction on the setting of the book and its major themes, the first part of the volume examines topics on the nature and interpretation of Scripture. A comprehensive proposal about Scripture and its interpretation is followed by a study of Scripture as the embassy of the risen Christ, and by three related chapters analyzing the ways in which widely different major modern theologians (Barth, T.F. Torrance and Rowan Williams) have understood the nature and interpretation of the Bible. The second part of the volume makes a cumulative proposal about the nature and tasks of Christian theology, examining the fundamental principles of systematic theology, the distinctive role and scope of reason in Christian theology, the relation of theology to the humanities, and the vocation of theology to promote the peace of the church.