The Art of John Webster

Ralph Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317311287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The Art of John Webster, first published in 1972, is a study of the three extant plays of Webster known to be solely his work. These plays are seen as attempts to achieve in literature the effects of the baroque, a term which related Webster to the larger developments of European art. Their content is analysed in terms of a consistent opposition between evil and the law. The book seeks to re-establish a base for the claims that must be made for Webster as a serious artist. This title will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

Part One

TECHNIQUE

I

INTRODUCTION: WEBSTER AS BAROQUE ARTIST

WEBSTER is, notoriously, a figure of critical controversy. A recent reviewer has written of the ‘extraordinary hostility’¹ that one of his latest censors manifests towards Webster. The phrase, apt enough in its context, could well have been applied to numerous other writers on Webster. How can this hostility be explained? The possible defences enable us to locate the line of the attack. One can say, with Auden, that ‘Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character … One cannot attack a bad book without showing off….’² This is a comforting assurance that some mauvais sujets are to be found among critics hostile to Webster, but does not exclude the possibility that they may be, on occasion, right. Or one can embark on a laboured disputation on each point of the argument; this is tedious, and leads speedily to the conviction that no real dialogue is possible where no language is shared. Between those who see in Webster a morally bankrupt, theatrical trickster (and who take a pious satisfaction in Webster’s borrowing, to give it no worse a name) and those who find an ethical coherence reflected in a consistent artistic design, no compromise seems possible. It is clear, as one reads the cries of denunciation that ring out from Canon Kingsley down to the present day, that a central issue is involved. But what is it?

We can give it a name: the myth of decadence. We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British critical public in one of its periodic fits of morality—as Macaulay might well have said. I cite two instances of the genre, one mid-Victorian, one precisely a century later: plus ça change: first, Canon Kingsley:

We believe that … dramatic art had been steadily growing coarse from the first years of James; that instead of the arts advancing to perfection under Charles I they steadily deteriorated in quality though the supply became more abundant … as the staple interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple interest in the tragedies is crime. Revenge, hatred, villainy, incest, and murder upon murder, are their constant themes and (with the exception of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting or amusing the audience, and of displaying their own power of delineation in a way which makes one but too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans.³

Into this scene of decline Webster fits, neatly and predictably: ‘The strength of Webster’s confest mastership lies simply in his acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save to ask “Cui bono?” Was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind?’⁴ We can note the intertwined strands of aesthetic and moral judgement. All critics agree that the plays of the decade 1620–30 are inferior in quality to those of 1610–20; and those again are inferior to 1600–10. This deterioration is linked, for the Canon, with the sensationalism of the subject matter and the plays’ lack of moral purpose. Now Mr. L. G. Salingar: ‘Webster is sophisticated: but his sophistication belongs to decadence. The poet’s solemnity and his groping for a new basis for tragedy only serve to expose his inner bewilderment and his lack of any deep sense of communion with his public.’⁵ As is usual with this genre of criticism, ‘decadence’ is not defined; but one would still like to know what precisely is meant by it. One must assume that the sentence that follows does not explain ‘decadence’. If it did, one would normally regard ‘solemnity and … groping for a new basis for tragedy’ as commendably honest traits in a playwright. The same applies to ‘inner bewilderment’, not, one would have thought, so obviously pejorative as Mr. Salingar assumes. As for ‘lack of any deep sense of communion with his public’, one is at a loss to know what to make of this. Surely this is not to erect box-office success as a valid critical principle? Again, with what portion of his public is Webster deemed to be out of touch? He was well enough thought of by his contemporaries. And can one accept the implicit conclusion that the successful Fletcher—who achieved an all-too-deep rapport with his public—is the non-decadent antithesis to the guilty Webster

The Kingsley-Salingar school of thought points to an attitude that is also, I believe, shared by those who from Archer on have more astutely directed their criticisms towards the technical accomplishment of Webster. That attitude, I suggest, is perfectly comprehensible: it is a simple distaste for the concerns and stylistic traits of the era that Webster represents. Either the critics are neo-classicists (Archer is still the most notable example) in which case Jonson, awkwardly yoked with Shakespeare, is advanced as the model playwright for the times; or they distrust the violence, the emotional excess, the philosophical doubt of the early seventeenth century. The latter attitude finds ready refuge in the myth of decadence; it assumes that a moral decline, of the playwrights and audience, went hand in hand with a decline in quality; though it is not nowadays so foolish as to spell the matter out, it regards the theme of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore as proof positive of decadence.

Those not under the spell of the myth might, more rationally, conclude that after the achievements of the early seventeenth-century drama nothing other than a decline of sorts could be looked for. No useful critical purpose is served in terming this decline ‘decadence’ unless the full implications of the term are clearly spelled out. Moreover, even a neutral term such as ‘decline’ is a generalization that must cover a large number of dramatists. It is not a stick with which to beat any one of them. In this situation, the argument runs: ‘X flourishes in a period of decline; therefore X is a decadent; therefore he is, in a rather interesting but unverifiable way, bad.’

Such an argument, plainly, lacks intellectual distinction. Our concern here, however, is with Webster. The true direction for a study of Webster is to see him as he is: as a playwright whose methods are the reverse of classical, but which are based on a coherent artistic design. And to comprehend the nature of this design, we have to examine his work without preconceptions as to ‘decadence’ or ‘decline’. A true appraisal of Webster would include an understanding of him in the context of the baroque. To achieve this we must move outside the restricted field of the drama.

It is desirable to view Webster as a part of the main stream of the arts, in Europe, in the early seventeenth century. To this period, beginning roughly in 1600, the art historians have accorded the term baroque. It is generally agreed that baroque art is, in Friedrich’s phrase, ‘European in scope’.⁶ And its usage has spread to other historians, especially of ideas. Nowadays one does not dream of applying the term in a depreciatory, or polemic sense. It is in the first place historically descriptive, and hence neutral in tone. Since Winckelmann’s day, historians of art have learned not to regard ‘baroque’ as synonymous with ‘bad taste’ and ‘error of artistic judgement’, together with such adjectives as ‘sensational’ and ‘grotesque’ used in a pejorative sense. Nobody is compelled to like the baroque style; but it would today be accounted a strange form of naïveté to attack it, as a style.

The case of John Webster brings into focus the situation with historians of literature. Too many still tend to be afflicted with a double form of provincialism: an unawareness of the situation in the contemporary arts, and a desire to pass stern judgement upon the style of a man—when it is quite considerably the style of his period—instead of accepting it for what it is. Value judgements of a period masquerade as relative judgements concerning Shakespeare, Middleton, Tourneur, and others of Webster’s colleagues. The comparative method has its uses, but it is subject to a caveat: Webster was an extremist. He embodied certain tendencies of his time to a greater extent than any of his contemporaries. But he did this in a strange, and highly individual way. Instead of moving with the avant-garde, he produced his great tragedies (in 1612–14) as developments of what the avant-garde were writing half a dozen years earlier: the work of Tourneur, Marston, the Shakespeare of King Lear. Thence arises the paradox that The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi were distinctly old-fashioned at the time of their appearance (Chapman tells us, in 1610, that tragedy was no longer the mode) yet exhibit in extreme form the tendencies of the early baroque era. But this does not affect the main argument. Since style as such is neutral, anyone wishing to attack a baroque artist is committed to a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ baroque. The present argument seeks to establish first that Webster is a baroque artist, and secondly that he uses its characteristics justifiably.

The main concerns and stylistic traits of the baroque era must now be briefly considered. First, however, a term has to be disposed of: Mannerism. Unlike baroque, Mannerism is still the subject of an art historians’ colloquy. It is possible, with Arnold Hauser and Wylie Sypher for example, to regard Mannerism as a descriptive term covering the whole of the period separating the classic Cinquecento from the baroque.⁷ Such an approach stresses the tensions, questionings, and dynamism of the period c. 1525–c. 1600. It regards Tintoretto as a leading example of the Mannerist era. It reaches out to include Shakespeare as a largely Mannerist playwright. But this view is not generally favoured by art historians. For most, Mannerism denotes a style within a period. It is a form of anti-classicism in some (by no means all) Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture from about 1520 to the end of the sixteenth century. This is a virtuoso style, the ‘stylish style’ (to use Shearman’s phrase);⁸ poised, sophisticated, exalting art over nature. It is the style of Rosso, Bologna, Parmigianino. Tintoretto is excluded from this concept of Mannerism as too dynamic. The proper literary extension of Mannerism is thus Euphuism; and Shakespeare’s relations with Euphuism are one aspect only of his work, whose importance is most obvious in the early part of his career. The matter is by no means stabilized as yet among the art historians, but the reception accorded to John Shearman’s authoritative Mannerism (1967), the most recent important work of scholarship on the subject, makes it clear that one should adhere to the latter approach. I therefore regard ‘Mannerism’ as a term that has little or no relevance to the problems of style posed by Webster; and I adopt the customary usage of ‘baroque’ to describe the period in European artistic development that begins in about 1600.

That date is much more than a point of convenience. It signifies, for example, the beginning of Don Quixote and quite possibly of Hamlet: it is the date of the earliest surviving opera, the Eurydice of Peri and Caccini, presented at the Pitti Palace in Florence for the nuptials of Henry IV and Maria de’ Medici: it is the date of the main work of the Carracci, the frescoes in the Farnese Palace in Rome: it marks the arrival of Rubens, the great representative of the baroque, at Rome. The year 1600 is in fact a turning point in the development of the arts, and in thinking about the arts. Tatarkiewicz has shown that around 1600 a definite shift in aesthetic thinking took place, a move from classical aesthetics to a subjectivist, pluralist, in a word Romantic aesthetics.⁹ Aesthetic values begin the move away from the object—the repository of beauty—to the spectator.

‘Baroque’ denotes the inner stylistic unity of the era. It bears the implication that analogies of subject matter, techniques, and orientation exist among the arts. Essentially it is an allembracing term, and belongs to no one province of historiography. The term was invented and developed by historians of art, however, and in practice it is proper that it should be used to draw parallels with the visual arts. For the literary historian, it offers a methodological opportunity to analyse a work of literature in the categories of a contemporary art. The purpose o...