Lord, this was macabre!

I haven’t read a play in a while, and I really gave myself a challenge with this one!!

Webster’s language is beautiful, and can be really funny at times. He can play with words so well, yet still get across what is happening, which I think some people can struggle with when reading Elizabethan and J

A startling classic play from London, 1612. ‘‘Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

Of course, no one in this play is either fortunate or wise, caught in the passions of jealousy as good as Shakespeare and as bloody and dramatic, as well.

For a modern reader with modern sensibilities, I’m shocked and

Deeply bizarre and deliciously entertaining, but/and for what it's worth, I can't imagine reading it without at least some background in medieval and early modern theories of medicine and alchemy. I couldn't help thinking that Webster mocks audience expectations of a moral conclusion; the unscrupulo

Why do universities only want to make us read and study very depressing and tragic stuff

John Webster's language is extraordinary. In the peculiarly special field of grotesque melancholy and pessimism, he achieves a style which is not matched in Shakespeare or indeed by anyone, although Beddoes tried, years later. He did not seem much consoled by thoughts of an afterlife, death taking t

T.S. Eliot aptly said that Webster was “a very great literary and dramatic genius directed toward chaos." I love this play almost as much as I love The Duchess of Malfi, but I find both of them difficult to write about. Each scene sings with poetic power and pulses with dramatic effect, but what the