Powerful, dark, violent and sad. Read for Open Uni studies and I have just purchased a ticket to go see it in London next year at the Globe.

I was talking about the detective FD James "Close Her Face", the name of which was a phrase from the tragedy of the Elizabethan playwright John Webster, not having in mind to ever get acquainted with the play - where are we, where are the gloomy Elizabethans? But books have this ability to talk to e

Life is a desperate business carried on by demented apes and ending in a welter of blood and shit. Everybody knows this, more or less, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded now and then. That, as I take it, is one of the modest functions of literature, reassuring us that we're all down here in the hole

This play, the finest Jacobean drama outside the Shakespeare canon, is not only a gem of poetry and wit, but also a meditation on the vanity of public life and the inevitability of death. The satiric prose is filled with such poetic imagery and the subtle verse is so sharp in its commentary that eac

Other sins only speak, murder shreiks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

Oh mercy, revenge upon the cursed Vengeful in five sumptuous acts of poetry, racy bits and bloodshed. The initial revengers are a creepy pair of powerful brothers miffed t

A great play, I have been lucky enough to see it performed twice. The most recent was with the wonderful Gemma Artherton playing the lead role at the Wannamaker theatre.

"Black-birds fatten best in hard weather"

It’s a still-performed play in our days. Though its best place for representation had been, for long, the Blacks Friars Theater. According to scholar James Shapiro, it’s a “story of intrigue and murder”…”a bloody dark work”of 1623.

Webster surely based h