Concerning the life and adventures of John Webster next to nothing is known. In 1602 the account books of Henslowe, the financier of the stage, mention two lost plays as being, the first by Dekker, Drayton, Middleton, Munday, and Webster; and the second by Webster, Chettle, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and Dekker. Dramas by so many hands cannot be masterpieces. Webster was a great and busy collaborator; in the bustling "citizen comedies," "Northward Ho" and "Westward Ho" he worked with Dekker. He is best known by Lamb's extracts from his "White Devil" and "Duchess of Malfi". "The White Devil" (printed in 1612) is a chronicle play of the career of Vittoria Corombona, but Webster has altered the facts as he pleased. The more tragic humours of the betrayed husband (our liberal fathers gave him a shorter name) are exemplified in her lord Camillo, who, in the interests of her lover, the Duke of Brachiano, is murdered in a manner intended to disguise the crime: the device is about as subtle as the blowing up of Darnley with gunpowder. The Duchess, another patient Grizel, except so far as Vittoria is concerned, men slay by poisoning the portrait of her faithless husband, which she kisses, and thus imbibes the infection. Cornelia, the mother of Vittoria and of her leading murderer Flamineo, is a pathetic figure, and it is she who sings the beautiful lyric. Call for the robin red breast and the wren. Lamb says of Cornelia, "she speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a Webster can do." But if this is _all_ that a Webster can do, and if to do this he needs an accumulation of unnatural horrors--fratricide, the murderer of a brother contemplating the madness which his deed has wrought in his mother; if the slain brother has just been kicking his strumpet sister; then we may ask whether an art that flourishes in these odious and extravagant conditions produces "one of the imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature". The serene and audacious impudence of Vittoria, when accused of her first husband's, Camillo's, murder; and the Ophelia-like laments and the song of Cornelia; with the all-but imperturbable wickedness of Flamineo, yield the extracts which Charles Lamb made current coin. Webster, in fact, returned, with abundant genius, but without discretion, to the class of Revenge-plays opened by Kyd in "The Spanish Tragedie".