The behaviour of the Duchess of Malfi, in the play of that name (printed 1623), introduced as she is by a noble panegyric, does not prepare us for her sudden wooing of her steward, Antonio. Her brothers, like the brothers of Keats's Isabella, determine to punish her: their instrument, Bosolo, is a character not wholly lost, who deliberately sells himself to guilt; and the scene in which eight madmen are let loose to dance round the Duchess--they do not shake her resolution,--is much admired. She is strangled, the children are strangled on all sides, the servant Cariola is strangled, though "she bites and scratches". The Fifth Act is a scene of the Kilkenny cats; almost everybody, including Bosolo, is stabbed, and Ford, in commendatory verses, applauds Webster, as at least the equal of the Athenian tragedians. Webster's genius was confessedly "subdued to that it worked in". In the preface to "The White Devil" he complains that the public will not endure a tragedy which observes the critical laws; "the sententious Chorus," and "the passionate and weighty Nuntius," the messenger who, in Greek tragedy, reports the horrors done off the stage. Deprived of the messenger, obliged to work his massacres on the scene, Webster was unsparing in horrors. His "Devil's Lawsuit" is a complicated web of squalid intrigue; the blank verse is utterly degenerate; and "Appius and Virginia" is not remarkable for originality in the representation of that famous Roman story. Webster's idea of a ghost was rather unconventional; Brachiano's phantasm in "The White Devil" wore no common sheet, but "leather cassock and breeches, and boots; with a cowl, in his hand a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't". Dekker advises his Gull at the play to laugh aloud in the crisis of the tragedy, and probably there were some hardy or hysterical spectators who thus received the too, too solid spirit of Brachiano. The Tragedy of Revenge inspired Cyril Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," and horror has her home in this play and his "Atheist's Tragedy". What in them deserves reading may be found in Lamb's extracts. Massinger.