“The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,” produced in 1612, and the “Duchess of Malfi,” in 1616, are the two works by which Webster is remembered. In these plays there is almost something like a fascination of crime and horror. Our eyes dazzle with them. The imagination that conceived them is a ghastly imagination. Hell is naked before it. It is the imagination of nightmare, but of no vulgar nightmare. I would rather call it fantasy than imagination, for there is something fantastic in its creations, and the fantastic is dangerously near to the grotesque, while the imagination, where it is most authentic, is most serene. Even to elicit strong emotion, it is the still small voice that is most effective; nor is Webster unaware of this, as I shall show presently. Both these plays are full of horrors, yet they do move pity and terror strongly also. We feel that we are under the control of a usurped and illegitimate power, but it is power. I remember seeing a picture in some Belgian church where an angel makes a motion to arrest the hand of the Almighty just as it is stretched forth in the act of the creation. If the angel foresaw that the world to be created was to be such a one as Webster conceived, we can fully understand his impulse. Through both plays there is a vapor of fresh blood and a scent of church-yard mould in the air. They are what children call _creepy_. Ghosts are ready at any moment: they seem, indeed, to have formed a considerable part of the population in those days. As an instance of the almost ludicrous way in which they were employed, take this stage direction from Chapman’s “Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois.” “Music, and the ghost of Bussy enters leading the ghosts of the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatillon; they dance about the body and _exeunt_.” It is fair to say that Webster’s ghosts are far from comic.