#John Webster

[weirdlookindog]

Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers, 1930

illustration for John Webster's 'The Duchess of Malfi'

source

[gifcity]

Colin Morgan as John Webster in The Killing Kind

Colin looking gorgeous as always

[atdawn]

THE KILLING KIND Season 1, Episode 4

[lovesicklobotomy]

Colin Morgan as John Webster in The Killing Kind

[h50europe]

Trailer No. 2 for The Boy That Never Was. It's a bit longer and has many new scenes in it. The beginning is gorgeous!

Thanks to @godmerlin for pointing me in the right direction

[myvinylplaylist]

Alice Cooper: Hey Stoopid (1991)

2017 European Vinyl Reissue

Music On Vinyl

[shadowcats4]

I often wake up with random lyrics in my head that then sometimes stay with me all day and I just sing them to myself or other times different songs come to my mind and I sing those, but anyway. I wanted to do a sort of 'lyrics of the day' thing.

Yesterday it was 'My White Devil' by Echo and the Bunnymen

I looked up who John Webster was and actually understood the lyrics even though I've known this song for over 10 years, but yeah..

Today the first words that came to my head were: Words are very unnecessary. They can only do harm.

Feel free to add your own if you want:)

[anghraine]

dontstandmedown replied to this post:

re:tags could you share the playwright you're talking about? :0

No problem! For others, the tags in question are this:

#thinking about this partly because the softer & gentler versions of fanfic discourse keep crossing my dash #and partly because i've written like 30 pages about a playwright i adore who was just not very good at 'original fiction' as we'd define it #both his major works are ... glorified rpf in our context but splendid tragedies in his #and the idea of categorizing /anything/ in that era by originality of conception rather than comedy/tragedy/etc would be buckwild

I am always delighted to share the good news of John Webster! If you're not familiar with him, he was an early seventeenth-century English playwright known for being a slow, painstaking, but reliable writer. He did various collaborations with other playwrights (and acknowledges a bunch of his peers in an author's note to The White Devil, including Jonson and Shakespeare) and wrote some middling plays in various genres that could be more or less termed "original fiction," but he's remembered for two brilliant, bloody tragedies.

The basic premises/plots of both of these were essentially ripped from the headlines of the previous century, and Webster makes zero attempt to conceal that fact.

I couldn't shut up about my guy so more under a cut!

The White Devil is based on the actual murder of Vittoria Accoramboni in the late sixteenth century and the characters in the play are generally given the same or similar names as the real life people in the story as known at the time, so there's no attempt to conceal the play's origins (the anti-heroine/villain???[debatable] is named Vittoria Corombona in the play, for instance).

The original production of The White Devil largely failed, which Webster blamed mainly on bad weather and an audience who just didn't get his ~vision and what he was trying to do. It would not be unsurprising for a contemporary audience to struggle with it given that it's a complicated play in which, among other things, Vittoria is put on trial and rhetorically shreds the underlying misogyny of the entire legal process.

The Duchess of Malfi, generally considered a still greater achievement, is based directly on the murder of Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi by her brothers (it was presumed, likely correctly). Lope de Vega also wrote a play about this tragedy not long before Webster did, though the plays are very different and it's unlikely that Webster would have had the time or linguistic knowledge necessary to read Lope's version. Probably part of the reason for the differences between Lope's and Webster's takes is that Lope had to be careful about the reception by the Catholic Church given that one of the murderers was a cardinal, while obviously an English Protestant like Webster could say whatever he wanted about eeeeevil cardinals.

Webster takes a lot of artistic license, a normal approach at the time to adapting previously-established narratives, but the source material is very recognizable. One of the commendatory verses at the beginning of the play (blurbs in poetic form from other playwrights) is like "I'm sure the real duchess was cool but she couldn't be as cool as Webster's heroine, wow <3". (One of the other commendations is by another fave of mine, John Ford.)

Bosola, the historically mysterious minion of the Duchess's murderous brothers (=Bozolo in the historical narrative) gets an elaborate quasi-redemption arc in the play. And the play is extremely critical of various characters' obsession with and attempts to control the Duchess's sexual behavior (a fixation that is often extremely normalized in early modern British drama, but which comes off really badly here).

Ultimately this obsessiveness leads to her brothers, the Cardinal (=the historical Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona) and Ferdinand (=Carlo d'Aragona) orchestrating her torment and murder in which she emerges with her sanity and integrity intact and dies with dignity. Meanwhile, the Cardinal is exposed as a remorseless villain (he proceeds to murder his mistress with a Bible) and Ferdinand's already-shaky sanity snaps under the realization of what he's done.

Webster's Duchess is often considered the first real female tragic hero in British drama—the tragic is especially significant because tragedy was typically considered a higher art form than comedy and the truly great female characters from that era of drama are often restricted to comedies or secondary roles in tragedy (a marked trend in Shakespeare, for instance). The Duchess in the play is virtuous, strong-willed, witty, and fairly unabashedly sexual in the context of the time, a concept that several hundred years of critics have struggled with. (My favorite OTT complaint is from Martin Sampson, an early 20th century critic who lamented the conspicuous absence of a "strong active man, following righteous things" in Webster's work, to which I say l m a o.)

Anyway, among scholars of early modern British drama, Webster is often considered second only to Shakespeare as a tragedian, on the basis of those two plays. And the modern obsession w/ originality and novelty makes this kind of fascinating, given that his "original" work (in our sense—again, the original vs fanfic dichotomy was not a thing in that cultural context) is sort of meh but his work with pre-existing sources turns them into these staggering dramatic achievements.

[gldnstrngs]

guys how do we feel abt the killing kind bc i forgot about it until js now

obvi i only watched it for colin morgan and it was entertaining ig??? i think the ending kinda just made me go🧍

[hegodamask]

Denise Gough as Julia in The Duchess of Malfi (2014)

[fundieshaderoom]

Alyssa and John Webster QnA (Reddit is mentioned)

I bolded the ones I found most interesting!

Do you have the same blood clotting issue?

It is genetic from Gil’s side of the family. Once they discovered it was a family issue, she had already had a couple of kids. Since she has no complications, she has not been tested.

Have you visited Erin at her place?

Yes, several times.

Do you take the kids on family vacations?

Not really. They go to TN and SC with the kids though. John considers that a family vacation but Alyssa does not. They do go with the Websters to the beach every year. They mostly do dad and mom vacations. They want to wait for the kids to get older to do actual vacations like skiing. 

Which of the kids is most like you?

Allie has Alyssa’s organizational skills. Alyssa said Lexi looks the most like her at that age. Lexi and Zoey are most like John.

Will you have a sixth child?

No, the pregnancies were too tough. John said accidents can happen.

Who is the last Duggar you have spoken to?

James and Jana. Alyssa talked to them the other day. John was only on the call with James.

Have you ever drank alcohol?

No

Will you continue the vlog in 10-15 years?

Probably not. Their children would be about 11-19 and that is so far in the future.

Is John still working from home?

No. He has been training people and one of their guys got hurt and is out. He will likely go back to WFH.

Did you picture yourselves with 5 kids?

They wanted a large family and to do it pretty early to mitigate risks to mother.

Redditors speculate you only take the kids to church and Costco. Is this true?

John got a lil laugh out of that. Alyssa said the girls do karate two nights a week. John does softball two nights a week and the kids tag along. They are also in church programs on Sundays. They do co-ops once a week and playdates. They also sometimes go to Publix instead of Costco. John said “who reads Reddit anyways?” Um, Carlin lol. John says he can’t remember the last time he read a Reddit post (idk if this means r/BringingUpBates or in general) and Alyssa claims to have never read one.

Do you have non-Christian friends?

Alyssa said they have friends from all backgrounds and religions. Alyssa does admit people gravitate to those who are similar. John said he has always had non-Christian friends. 

How does John’s relationship with Rhett differ from his relationship with the girls?

John is “rougher” with Rhett because he loves to tease and wrestle and chase. The girls don’t like that as much. 

[weirdlookindog]

Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - The Ghost of Isabella, c. 1930

illustration for John Webster's 'The White Devil'

source

[regulusrules]

oh my fuck, he does know how to play an obsessive lover, doesn't he?

[modernmrsdarcy]

This what my books have started to look like.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thinking again about Bloom's claim of Shakespeare 'inventing the human'. Even if we reduce this to 'merely' being the most significant writer of the modern era, who would you say is the first notable author that really couldn't have done what they did without Shakespeare? What came to mind for me is Milton, but I'm not at all well-read in, shall we call it, 'Brit Lit From the Death of Shakespeare to William Blake' (a good topic for a future IC perhaps?)

I'm reaching back to my undergrad days, and my memory isn't good enough to reproduce the argument, but I'm pretty sure the answer is John Webster, if he's notable enough. His notoriously gruesome Jacobean tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are clearly modeled on Shakespeare's tragedies, and their very language is often reminiscent of Shakespeare's. I enjoy Webster's plays, or enjoyed them when I was 20, but the Shakespearean influence is much more superficial than what Bloom has in mind. Milton's portrayal of Satan's bottomless interior life is for that reason a more serious answer—or Milton is for that reason more notable than Webster.

[h50europe]

Because we can never have enough Colin on our timelines