The Mysterious Mr Webster: BBC Arts at the Globe

At the dawn of 1614,

a play appeared on the London stage.

A work that was dark, bloody, satirical.

A masterpiece of the English Renaissance.

The new play rivalled the greatest tragedies of the age.

It held its own alongside such masterpieces

as King Lear and Macbeth.

It was called The Duchess Of Malfi.

-Dost know me?

-Yes.

-Who am I?

Thou art a box of wormseed at best.

A horror show of a play full of torment and murder,

with a disturbingly high body count

and a twisted, black humour.

Now he begins to fear me.

Arggh! Arggh!

Doctor, he did not fear you thoroughly.

LAUGHTER

I kept thinking if this was a film,

Tarantino would direct it,

and it would be just blood everywhere.

And a female lead who's the heroine.

A powerful leading lady -

an astonishingly modern take on a real-life Duchess

who married beneath her

and was horribly persecuted for it.

It speaks directly to today's audiences -

just as it spoke to those of the 17th century.

Oooh.

LAUGHTER

A politician is the devil's quilted anvil.

He fashions all sins on him,

and the blows are never heard.

Its author succeeded in capturing the dark excesses

of the Jacobean moment -

the intrigue, the scandal, the malaise,

the fascination with death.

His name was John Webster.

His work is a blend of beauty and cynicism.

We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

Occasionally, you just think he's a little bit sinister

and a little bit pervy,

and he actually gets off on all of this dwelling on evil.

Webster's life is mysterious.

We glimpse it in mere fragments.

And the play he wrote is the result of a brief, brilliant flowering.

The question is - who was this man,

and what in his upbringing and experience

led him to create one of our greatest plays?

As with all great mysteries, there are clues.

Clues from Webster's life story,

from the theatre of the time,

from life in London,

from scandals at court.

As a literary detective,

I'll do my best to gather the evidence

that will help us understand a work of genius,

The Duchess Of Malfi,

and its creator, the mysterious Mr Webster.

A play is not created to be studied in print.

The playwright's words take shape on the stage.

In my investigation,

one stage in particular

holds the secret to The Duchess Of Malfi -

Blackfriars, London's greatest indoor playhouse.

Now, a newly-built theatre

takes us back to that moment of inception in 1614.

This is it,

the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse -

Blackfriars Theatre re-imagined.

Webster wrote The Duchess Of Malfi for a space just like this.

Here, we can get closer to Webster's work

than we have ever come before -

one reason Malfi was chosen as this theatre's inaugural production.

In that space, there's something about the architecture

and relationship with the audience

that just unpeels the play immediately.

It seems as if Webster has a visual vocabulary

that's strikingly different than Shakespeare, or Marlowe's,

or anyone else I've encountered in the period.

I think that's true.

I think there's a lot of arrangement of imagery.

He loves his reveals, he loves his Hammer horror effects,

he loves the focus of the eye on the centre.

Webster matches the visual shocks

with the grimmest of depictions of human nature.

He has a dark reputation.

Do we glimpse John Webster's own obsessions

in his bleakest lines?

Other sins only speak.

Murder shrieks out.

He's often painted as a troubled soul.

In the film Shakespeare In Love,

screenwriter Tom Stoppard plays with this image,

showing Webster as a boy fixated on the gory bits

in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

When I write plays, they'll be like Titus.

You admire it?

I liked it when they cut heads off -

and the daughter mutilated with knives.

What's your name?

-John Webster.

-CAT MEOWS

Here, kitty, kitty.

Was Webster a juvenile mouse-torturer?

Unlikely.

'For those who've spent time with his work,

'he is a more complex character.'

Did you think about or imagine what Webster was like

in the course of playing the play?

What kind of man would write this kind of play?

Webster's got this kind of...

Everyone thinks that he... assumes that he was obsessed

with, you know, incest and darkness and violence -

which he obviously was,

but so was Shakespeare.

In my mind, Webster's kind of introvert,

and quite an odd man.

But quite...quite sort of super-sensitive and intelligent.

And I just always imagined him to be

quite outside of society a little bit.

On the trail of the mysterious Mr Webster,

what do we know for sure?

Born about 1580,

in the 22nd year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Eldest son of John Webster, gentleman, coachmaker.

The family home was on Cow Lane,

next to London's Smithfield cattle market.

Today, not much remains there

but the centuries-old tradition of slaughter.

But it wasn't only livestock that were slaughtered here.

Since medieval times, this had been a place

where criminals and traitors had been executed and dismembered.

And every August, abutting Smithfield Markets,

Bartholomew Fair would be held

not just for cloth and merchandise,

but for every odd bit of humanity you could cram in.

Perverse things, freaks of nature.

The very things that would have appealed to,

or perhaps appalled, the young John Webster.

So, did the character of the place feed an unsettled mind?

Did John Webster grow up delighting in the dark and horrible?

Certainly Webster produces butchery of his own

as the Duchess is tormented by her mad brother Ferdinand -

first with a severed hand.

What witchcraft doth he practise

that he hath left a dead man's hand here?

And then the waxwork cadavers of her husband and child.

He doth present you this sad spectacle,

that now you know directly they are dead.

Hereafter you may wisely cease to grieve

for that which cannot be recovered.

There is not between heaven and earth

one wish I stay for after this.

It's all rendered in language which can be vividly original,

as Harriet Walter found when she played the Duchess in 1989.

Three-quarters of the work preparing myself

was to just let that language seep into my skin,

and see what effect it had on me.

The imagery is nightmarish.

It's like a sort of Bosch painting,

and it's sort of pox, and plague, and necromancy, and nastiness.

He paints the world with these really dark, poetic images.

This poetry of horror

could only have come from the mind of John Webster.

But there was no need to invent the tragedy.

The Duchess of Malfi was a real woman,

and Webster remained remarkably faithful to her tale.

This is a copy of an image that hangs at the Louvre,

which for 400 years was thought to be Giovanna d'Aragona,

the actual Duchess of Malfi.

Turns out it's probably not her, but that doesn't matter much.

In Webster's day, this WAS the Duchess.

This is a tale of intrigue and murder in Renaissance Italy.

Giovanna was of royal blood, daughter of the House of Aragon.

Her first marriage made her Duchess of Amalfi in 1493,

and on the death of her husband she became Regent.

She had two powerful brothers -

a cardinal, and a twin brother, Carlo -

who becomes Ferdinand in the play.

In 1510, she became the talk of Europe

when she revealed that she had made a scandalous secret marriage

to Antonio, her social inferior.

She had concealed the birth of two children.

Now they fled, pursued by her brothers' agents

before she was captured and imprisoned in 1511,

never to be seen again.

There's something absolutely captivating

about the story of the Duchess -

a heady mix of romance, beauty and scandal.

Beyond the Mona Lisa-like gaze,

the portrait contains a number of tantalising clues.

The maid, who may have served as a go-between.

The pair of lions, symbolising the Aragonian brothers.

The two knots in the curtain,

perhaps representing the young Duchess's two marriages.

There's much here to fuel a young writer's imagination.

This was the tabloid sensation of the day.

Just three years after her disappearance,

the Duchess's story had already been published -

a tale to be picked over by the chattering classes

and put under the moral microscope.

In 1567, the story of the Duchess first appeared in English

in this volume, The Palace Of Pleasure.

But it wasn't very kind to her -

moralising about her lustfulness.

Now, we know that this was Webster's primary source,

but we also know that he utterly transformed it,

giving it greater psychological depth,

and resituating it within a murkier, more complicated moral universe.

The Duchess becomes a beacon of virtue,

led by love to deceive her family.

And Webster reinvents her twin brother, Ferdinand,

as a man obsessed with purity of blood,

incestuously infatuated with his sister.

He taunts her and, in the end, destroys her.

Ferdinand employs the cynical malcontent Bosola

to spy on the Duchess and do his dirty work.

I give you that...

to...live in the court here, and observe the Duchess.

To note all the particulars of her 'haviour.

What suitors do solicit her for marriage,

and whom she best affects.

She's a young widow. I would not have her marry again.

-No, sir?

-Do not you ask the reason.

It's one of Webster's great talents -

taking an idea, giving it new form,

looking for the real motivations -

the self-deception, the hypocrisy.

Webster shows us Italian corruption writ large.

A prince's court is like a common fountain,

whence should flow pure silver drops in general.

But if it chance, some cursed example poison it near the head,

death and diseases through the whole land spread.

But ultimately, the outrageous sexual mores

and Machiavellian politics

hint at the political scene in England

at the start of the 17th century.

In 1603, Elizabeth I had died without naming an heir.

The new king was James VI of Scotland,

now James I of England.

Regime change never comes easily,

especially when the Tudors had been in power for over a century.

The new king hadn't been on England's throne for long

before accusations of corruption, extravagance,

and loose sexual morals began to circulate.

The king had favourites -

young men who were promoted to positions of power,

apparently at his whim.

James spent extravagantly,

but failed to feed the people's appetite for royal splendour,

appearing scornful of the crowds who flocked to see him.

And his desire for union with Scotland

seemed to threaten an invasion of ambitious Scots -

dividing, perhaps overwhelming the English Court.

It wasn't long before this cynicism and criticism

found its way onto the English stage.

The King did surprisingly little to protect his image.

A year after his accession,

the French Ambassador recorded with horror

that James's wife, Anne of Denmark,

was seen openly laughing

as a comic actor on stage impersonated her husband.

It was the Queen's own company

that staged the most scurrilous attacks on the King.

They performed at Blackfriars Playhouse

in front of members of the power elite.

It must have been an extraordinary space,

the crucible of a new, more biting satire.

So the next step in my investigation

takes me to Worcester College, Oxford,

in search of some rare surviving drawings,

which have allowed the Globe to re-fashion Blackfriars.

This is thrilling.

This is the closest I've ever been

to these 17th-century drawings,

which offer us the best examples we have

of what an indoor Jacobean playhouse looked like.

They were executed by John Webb,

student of the great designer Inigo Jones,

and they show us how radically different

the indoor stages were from the outdoor playhouses

that could hold upward of 3,000 spectators.

Here, only 400, at most 500 spectators

would be crammed into this tiny space.

Like the outdoor theatres,

the seating curves around the sides of the stage.

There are three entrances.

With a balcony above for the musicians.

Unlike the older playhouses,

the audience are within touching distance of the players.

It would have been intimate, and dark.

And this added something new to the playwright's armoury - lighting.

In The Duchess Of Malfi,

Webster shows an acute awareness of the power of illumination.

The Duchess Of Malfi - it's obsessed with light and dark,

it's obsessed with shadows.

There is a whole host of very specific stage directions

which play completely into that space.

Take hence the lights.

Details of lighting find their way into the dialogue,

and allow Webster to conjure up the most dramatic of scenes.

He comes in the night,

and prays you gently neither torch nor taper shine in your chamber.

He will kiss your hand, and reconcile himself,

but for his vow, he dare not see you.

At his pleasure, put out the lights.

And it says, "Turn all the lights out, and any tapers.

"I don't want to see a single one."

So you just follow the direction of the text, and there you have it.

But we read the play, and we read those stage directions,

but we don't experience the darkness.

What happened the first time you just killed the candles there?

Well, it's... You get very purist about dark.

Actually, the first time we took everything out, it wasn't quite dark enough.

So much light bleeds into our lives without us realising it.

You try and take the light out,

and there's a little thin bit of light there.

There's a thin bit of light there, a thin bit of light there.

We ended up like light-hunters,

just killing light all round the auditorium

to get it as dark as it possibly could be.

But when you got to the place, it was extraordinary.

And then a huge number of other games open up

the moment you go to complete black,

because then any form of light -

be it a single candle lighting a face,

be it a blaze of votive candles,

as there are underneath the corpses of Antonio and son -

they all have this profound

and very deliberate, very exciting effect.

THEY BOTH SING

In this glowing jewel box of a space,

Webster could write with a new emphasis.

He could draw the eye, change the focus.

He was fascinated by realism in acting,

and some of his scenes would have felt shockingly intimate -

like this one in the Duchess's bedchamber.

Bring me the casket hither, and the glass.

You get no lodging here tonight, my Lord.

Indeed, I must persuade one.

Very good.

I hope in time 'twill grow into a custom

that noblemen shall come with cap and knee

to purchase a night's lodging of their wives.

LAUGHTER

The boudoir setting turns the focus to the Duchess

as a modern woman of fashion.

In Jacobean England,

elite ladies brushed their faces with pearl dust

to give an extraordinary luminosity.

With added candlelight,

make-up becomes a vital ingredient in the play.

You kind of twinkle in the playhouse,

and so far, some of the experiments we've done,

and certainly in the plays that we've staged,

we've seen actors twinkling.

You don't need a huge amount of white make-up

when you've got pearl dusting on your face.

I'm curious whether anything having to do with cosmetics

changed your understanding of the play at all.

Yes. Being in such an intimate space,

you feel like you're in the Duchess's room,

particularly when she's sitting at her dressing table,

at her vanity table,

and looking in the mirror and talking about her appearance.

Doth not the colour of my hair 'gin to change?

-Softly.

-SHE GASPS

When I wax grey,

I shall have all the court powder their hair with arras to be like me.

She's kind of a vain character,

in a really positive way, though.

I think Webster's saying something about vanity

maybe not being as bad as you think it is.

-GEMMA ARTERTON:

-For me, she is the ultimate chick.

She's not perfect, and at the beginning

she's young, and impetuous, and sexual,

and sensual, and a young woman that's kind of...

And as the play progresses, she becomes a woman.

She's alive, she's vibrant, she's young and fresh.

And that's her - she's somebody that loves life and beauty.

For Webster, the Duchess's inner virtue

is mirrored in her outer radiance.

I think we all recognise that she's this virtuous character,

and what's interesting is that she doesn't adhere to the ideals

of Renaissance womanhood.

She's not chaste, really.

She's not silent, and she certainly isn't obedient.

-Right.

-But she's virtuous.

I think Webster's very concerned with the issue

of what you can see, and what's beneath.

Appearances were vital at Blackfriars.

Webster was a regular here.

He understood a space

where the audience was every bit as visible as the players.

In a traditional theatre now, you wouldn't see the audience.

They wouldn't be lit. We would be lit.

But they were lit as much as we were,

and, um...and the fact that they are observing one another,

even from before we come on stage,

means that this sort of tension is created.

The Duchess Of Malfi is about oppression -

about being boxed in, and caged -

and everybody's sort of observing one another,

and so therefore the fact that the audience

were so very much there felt right.

This was, for the most part, a more elite audience.

Actors playing courtiers on stage

might find themselves addressing real ones.

Well-heeled gentlemen and their wives,

law students, aristocrats, crammed together.

Admission was steep.

The cheapest seat, at sixpence,

cost six times more than admission

to a public playhouse like the Globe.

You could pay even more and sit on a stool at the edge of the stage,

a great way for a well-dressed gallant to see and be seen.

Here, fashion played a starring role.

Even the actors were luxuriously dressed -

not in costumes, but in clothes that might,

not so long ago,

have graced the backs of the very nobles now watching.

So I'm trying to imagine how a garment like this

would have ended up on the Jacobean stage.

Rich Englishmen would sometimes give clothes away to their servants,

um, as a gift,

and of course the servant might not be of the sort of status

where he would feel he could wear the garment.

So the servant might then go to a company of actors

and sell it to them.

As the indoor stage came to prominence,

elite fashions were also changing,

becoming better suited to evening revels.

I remember Sir Francis Bacon saying something about

"what shows best by candlelight".

He writes this in a piece called "On Masques",

and the colours that Bacon thought worked best by candlelight

were things like... he mentions white, carnation,

and a kind of sea-water green,

which obviously, in dim lighting,

are very effective and more visually arresting.

So this garment would fit that category.

Yep, absolutely.

This is made of an off-white linen

with floating silk threads,

and then it's striped with silver.

-So...

-So, the silver's faded a bit.

-Well, now, the silver threads are almost black.

-Mm-hm.

But I've brought here some modern silver thread,

and if I just sort of hold this close

you can see it was bright silver and off-white,

and the silk threads would have shone.

The Duchess could glisten in her gowns of pale satin.

Spangles and lace could catch the light,

and the white of ruffs frame the face.

SHE LAUGHS MIRTHLESSLY

Webster enlisted these details in his careful staging.

What I love about this is it's precisely the kind of garment

that the Duchess might have worn in a more informal scene,

and I love the flare of it as well.

It is a loose garment,

so it's suitable for disguising a pregnancy.

Webster uses clothing to explain

how the Duchess could keep two pregnancies a secret

in the enclosed world of the Malfi court.

I observe our Duchess is sick a-days.

And, contrary to our Italian fashion,

wears a loose-bodied gown.

Bosola is the keen-eyed observer who brings us this information.

He's the melancholy spy seeking out the Duchess's secrets

on behalf of her brothers.

He's part Iago, part Hamlet -

introspective, but also dangerous.

It's tempting to see something of Webster in Bosola -

the clever man, the outsider,

existing on the margins of the court.

Webster, more than most of his fellow playwrights,

seems to have lived a divided life.

Webster's family were coach-makers,

and he appears to have kept up the day job,

leading one satirist to mock him as the "Playwright Cartwright".

In fact, it was an exciting field.

Coaches had only appeared in England in the 1560s,

at first as an expensive novelty.

By the start of the 17th century, business was booming.

Aristocrats and well-to-do merchants

were favoured customers.

So too were prostitutes,

who saw the potential for providing services on the move.

Webster's family business thrived on tragedy.

They made much of their money providing coaches and carts

for elaborate and expensive funeral processions.

Young John Webster must have thought that life

revolved around sex, status and death.

And perhaps it did.

These were the dark obsessions of the age.

Death stalked the people of London.

Plague had swept away one out of seven in 1593,

and would again a decade later in 1603.

Survivors had to walk past houses,

their plague-stricken inmates entombed inside

with red crosses painted on their doors

under the chilling warning "Lord have mercy".

May 1608 - a Jacobean domestic tragedy,

one that tells the story of a man who buried one wife,

then a second.

The third widow outlives him,

the three women together having been preceded

by three children to the grave.

Looking at this,

you get a sense of how palpable death was for the Jacobeans,

how close.

You could hold it in your hands.

The swaddled babies' heads rest on skulls.

It calls to mind Ferdinand's line in The Duchess -

"Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle.

"She died young."

For all the apparent beauty of that line,

it comes at a horrific moment in the play.

The Duchess's brother Ferdinand has finally had her killed.

Cover her face.

Mine eyes dazzle.

She died young.

Simon Russell Beale played Ferdinand in 1995,

and found the part especially disturbing.

"Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."

It's the "dazzle" that's the...

I mean, it's such an odd...

Did it turn the character for you?

Sometimes when critics talk about that line,

they feel that Ferdinand's snapped out of it, or there's a...

No, because I think that word "dazzle" is pathological.

It's wrong.

It's not...

It's not how you react to a dead body, I don't think.

There's an association in my mind

with sort of various religious iconography -

you know, ascensions, and...

It's like she becomes Elijah, or Christ ascending, or...

Or...

It's a weird line.

In this honour killing,

Ferdinand takes his final revenge on his sister

for her covert marriage.

But the carnage doesn't end here.

By the end of the play, all the major characters will have died.

The Duchess Of Malfi represents perhaps the most extreme example

of a genre that took the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage by storm -

revenge tragedy.

It all began in the 1580s with a hugely successful play.

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd,

the most popular and influential tragedy of the age

for a stage when Webster was just a boy.

I'm holding in my hands

an incredibly rare early printed quarto of the play,

and its woodcut illustration tells it all -

murder, grief, madness

and revenge.

The Spanish Tragedy was revived time and again,

and Webster must have seen it.

But it was joined by new plays.

Around the turn of the century,

Shakespeare gave us Hamlet,

which also leaves a stage full of corpses,

but added deep psychological introspection.

And when Webster brought revenge tragedy into the Jacobean age

he could draw on a growing culture of suspicion,

much of it linked to religious hatred.

In the 16th century,

England had been shaken by religious change -

veering from Catholicism to Protestantism and back,

riven by persecutions and burnings.

Now, in Protestant England,

fear of religious terror was once again on the rise.

Religion plays its role in The Duchess Of Malfi.

The Catholic Cardinal is conspiratorial, corrupt,

and openly consorts with his mistress Julia,

whom he eventually murders by having her kiss a poisoned Bible.

A Venetian Catholic priest found himself in the audience

for one of the early performances, and complained,

"All this they do in derision of ecclesiastical pomp,

"which in this kingdom is scorned and hated mortally."

In an age of scandal and plot,

the most famous terrorist incident of them all -

the attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament -

gave Catholicism an even more threatening face.

There it is - the iconic image of the Gunpowder Plot, 1605.

The end of the honeymoon for King James, I'm afraid.

What changed after this moment?

What I think it did was create a sense of an enemy within,

of people you couldn't be sure of.

Now, for somebody like Webster, or for the dramatists,

it became an easy button to press -

the anti-Catholic button -

and plays have those suspicious cardinals

and all the rest of it,

which feed off this kind of culture of suspicion.

-And paranoia, almost.

-Mm.

So we have a sense of how The Duchess Of Malfi

fits into its times.

But how did Webster, son of a coachmaker,

come to write this play that so brilliantly spoke to the moment?

A vital clue to his experience and interests

is here at the Middle Temple,

where Webster studied law.

So we're looking at a great document here -

John Webster's entry in August 1598.

"Master John Webster admitted to the Middle Temple."

Tell me what this document tells us,

and what it would have meant for John Webster

to have come to this society at the Middle Temple.

Well, it would have been stellar for him.

It was a way of moving up the social ladder.

And this was a place to make connections.

This was Facebook, Twitter - the lot - of the time.

And there were lots of people who came here

who had absolutely no intention of practising the law.

The elderly benchers who ran the inn

complained frequently that they're not studying enough,

and they're not wearing sober clothes, and their hair's too long.

So if they're not hitting the books, they're not studying law,

what are they spending their days doing?

Well, they went to the theatre a lot.

Their poems explain how they would go

and watch a law case in Westminster Hall in the morning

and then in the afternoon

they would make their way down to the South Bank,

maybe watch a bear-baiting, have a bit of a beer.

Maybe resort to a prostitute.

And then they'd watch a play.

-Perfect for a playwright in training, then?

-Absolutely.

The Middle Temple gave Webster access to a literary culture

with other young playwrights,

writers experimenting with satirical, political themes.

But just as important must have been the leisure time

those student days gave him.

Time he could spend, if he chose,

at the most famous theatre of all -

built the year after Webster started his studies -

The Globe, Shakespeare's playhouse.

Webster was not only a budding playwright

but, like many at the Middle Temple, a passionate playgoer.

In his plays, especially his early ones,

he borrows so much and so closely

from what he had heard in the theatre

that he must have been taking notes.

It's easy to imagine a 20-year-old Webster

going to the newly built Globe

and seeing Hamlet and Julius Caesar,

and transcribing memorable passages into his commonplace book.

Another book gives us our next clue -

an extraordinary document that provides rich insight

into the workings of the Elizabethan Theatre.

Impresario Philip Henslowe recorded in meticulous detail

the purchase of props and costumes,

box office takings,

and payments to playwrights.

In May 1602, we find Anthony Munday and Michael Drayton

collaborating with Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, age 22 -

our first glimpse of him working on a play, now sadly lost,

called "Caesar's Fall".

Webster caught a huge break in 1603.

Until now, he'd been writing collaboratively,

a wonderful apprenticeship with a group of veteran playwrights

over at the Rose Theatre across the road.

But this would be his first shot

at writing for the greatest group of actors in the land,

Shakespeare's company at the Globe.

Here's how it happened.

Fellow playwright John Marston wrote a runaway hit,

The Malcontent, for a rival company.

That company then made the mistake of stealing a play

from Shakespeare's company,

who retaliated by stealing The Malcontent.

And Webster was given the job

of reworking the play for its new airing.

His main contribution

was a brilliantly self-referential introduction

in which the famous actors of Shakespeare's company

appear on stage as themselves.

Maybe Webster was even mocking himself

in the character of an enthusiastic playgoer -

a bit of a fan of the actors,

and such a regular at performances

he'd written down all the jokes.

The play appeared in print with Webster's name on it,

and he must have thought he had arrived -

his moment had come.

Soon, he had two successful comedies under his belt,

written with Thomas Dekker,

satirising the lives and loves of London citizens.

Webster had followed a well-trodden path

from law to the playhouses.

He'd worked with some of the best.

But he wasn't really cut out for the world of comedy.

His vision was too subtle.

And back at Middle Temple

we can find intimations of the kind of theatricality

that really inspired him.

This picture almost surely hung here

when Webster was a student at the Middle Temple.

Feels like a scene from an indoor Jacobean play,

with its rich colours, stylised gestures and tight composition.

It's The Judgment Of Solomon.

Solomon has to resolve a case where two women each claim

that the living child is hers.

He orders that the child be cut in half,

then closely observes the reactions of both mothers

to determine who the true mother is.

A strikingly dramatic image,

and a child cut in half -

just Webster's style.

But as to the message?

The text panels advise the students to look at the biblical scene

and learn "this mighty lesson of just decision".

I can imagine Webster looking past this pious moralising

about wisdom and judgement.

The poet TS Eliot famously described Webster

as a man who saw the skull beneath the skin.

It's easy to imagine Webster looking at this painting

and seeing the grief and suffering just below the surface.

Two desperate mothers,

and a ruler so eager to show how smart he is

he's the willing to risk the life of a child.

And I wonder if that dead child,

that waxy figure at the centre of this painting,

didn't lodge in Webster's memory.

Webster would be at his greatest

when he delved into moments of human torment.

But he wasn't quite there yet.

The years of Webster's late 20s ought to be revealing,

showing the writer's transition to maturity.

We know a little of his life.

In 1606 he married the pregnant, 16-year-old Sara Pennel.

But as to writing, after 1605, nothing.

No new plays appeared for an almost biblical seven years.

It's one of the great puzzles in Webster's life story.

What was he doing at this time?

At least Shakespeare's lost years took place

before he became a dramatist.

Webster's occurred at the crucial moment in his playwriting career.

Perhaps he was pulled back into helping out

with the family coach business.

Or he might have been wrestling with a massive writer's block.

We just don't know.

As frustrating as they are,

these years seem to have been pivotal for Webster.

Because when he came back his writing was darker,

more powerful, revelling in death, madness, and depression.

I do account this world but a dog kennel.

I'm always wary of trying to crawl into the mind of somebody

writing a play written 400 years ago.

But let's allow ourselves a bit of speculation,

can you write a play like The Duchess Of Malfi

and not suffer from depression?

There's a line, "Life's a dog kennel."

It seems like every line in that play is some version of that!

And I remember, after about four weeks of playing it,

thinking, "Is it?"

I'm coming up to that particular line and every night thinking,

"Is that really true?"

I know it's a dangerous game, but I don't know how you invest it,

and make it so good, without feeling it.

I know no other play in which so many characters

are crippled with depression and madness.

Ferdinand slides into a madness so severe he thinks himself a wolf.

His brother the cardinal has nightmarish visions.

And Bosola's every word and deed is shaped by his chronic depression.

It's fitting, then, that these depressed tormentors

try to drive the Duchess to distraction

through the singing and dancing of madmen.

HARPSICHORD PLAYS

In a brilliant piece of stagecraft,

Webster, anticipating the Duchess's own swansong,

writes a haunting lyric, "Oh, let us howl."

And for the dismal music he required,

turned to Robert Johnson,

whose music for this song miraculously survives.

# Oh, let us howl

# Some heavy note

# Some deadly dogged howl... #

He penned something that's full of weird harmonic changes,

abrupt changes of tempo,

again, something that we're quite used to these days,

but imagine a time when if you start a pattern

it starts in the same tempo that it ends,

and you're playing a piece that switches mood so abruptly

and so dramatically.

That's how he suggests this madness.

'Music was a defining feature of the Jacobean indoor theatre,

'not just influencing the mood of the audience

'but also shaping the entire theatrical experience.'

You could hear music for up to an hour before the performance.

At Blackfriars?

Yeah, at Blackfriars, just extemporised by the ensemble.

And then, during the production, the ensemble might provide music

for dancing, in-between the acts,

because they had to trim the candles,

so the music would provide some cover.

Which is something that they weren't accustomed to

in the outdoor theatre.

The outdoor theatre was a very short play

and everything ran pell-mell,

without break, from one end to the other, as fast as they could.

RAUCOUS CROWD SHOUT AND JEER

In the outdoor playhouses, it wasn't only the music that lacked subtlety.

The crowd often had rather different expectations of the play itself,

as Webster found to his cost.

In 1612 the first of Webster's two great plays

first appeared on stage.

The White Devil.

The play tells the story of a Venetian lady

put on trial for murder,

after her lover, The Duke of Brachiano, has her husband killed.

It's based on a series of sensational real-life murders

that took place 27 years earlier.

Like The Duchess Of Malfi, it was a revenge tragedy

with a powerful female lead,

full of corruption, sex, and murder.

Unlike The Duchess Of Malfi, it was a box-office disaster.

Webster's introduction to the printed edition of The White Devil

is deeply revealing of what went wrong

and how defensive he was.

As far as Webster was concerned, the problem wasn't with his play

but with everything else.

He blamed the wintry weather, the theatre -

the Red Bull in Clerkenwell -

an outdoor playhouse with a reputation for rowdiness.

And he even accused playgoers of being insufficiently discerning.

Most of the people who come to that playhouse

resemble those ignorant asses, who, visiting stationers' shops,

their use is not to enquire for good books,

but new books.

Webster also took the unusual step

of praising one of the actors by name.

But as for the rest of the company - Queen Anne's Men -

he didn't think them good enough to do his play justice.

Actors were important to Webster.

Their talents helped to shape a play.

When it came to Webster's masterpiece,

The Duchess Of Malfi, everything came together.

The new, indoor theatre, the light, the music,

and of course, The King's Men, Shakespeare's company.

Here's evidence that Webster was working with

the best actors in the land, if not the world.

The first printed quarto of The Duchess Of Malfi, from 1623,

which amazingly contains an actors list,

the first time any quarto had done so.

And what an all-star cast it is - Lowen, Condon, Burbage.

And here, Richard Sharpe, an 18-to-20-year-old

who's the first actor we know to have played the Duchess.

That's right - a young man, playing a woman.

Real women wouldn't appear on the public stage in England

for another 50 years.

But things were changing for the boy actors.

Where once they had been mere children,

now the female roles were played by young men

who had matured in the public eye.

It meant they could take on more challenging parts,

like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra.

And now the Duchess of Malfi, written for a man to perform,

but which has become one of the greatest roles for women actors.

The way he's written the Duchess is so advanced,

in terms of how he thought,

and if you think a man would have played that part...

But it's so complex - it's a brilliant female part

written with great sensitivity.

And even when you play her you never quite can reach her,

and so I think that's why the play continues,

because she's like a Goddess, but without being perfect.

I think what Webster's really trying to do

is put a real, flesh-and-blood human female centre stage.

Which is unusual.

And someone who isn't just somebody's wife or lover

or mother or daughter - which I have to say Shakespeare tends to do.

You know, and I can't think of a Shakespeare play

who has the title role of a female...

Who doesn't share one.

There's double billing - there's Juliet and Romeo,

Anthony and Cleopatra,

but I can't think of a Shakespeare play

that's called The Countess Of This or The Princess Of That.

There's no doubt that the role of the Duchess

holds the key to the power of The Duchess Of Malfi as a play.

It's easy to be drawn into Webster's dark cynicism,

his mastery of staging and his distinctive way with words.

But to solve the mystery

of the creation of Webster's masterpiece

we need to understand where the Duchess herself came from.

We know that she was based on a real woman,

but the inspiration for Webster's Duchess

came not only from Renaissance Italy,

but also from his own time and place.

Once again, part of the answer comes from the theatre itself.

The audience at Blackfriars would have contained

a higher proportion of women -

or at least, more respectable ones -

than the outdoor theatres.

They must have enjoyed seeing female protagonists on the stage.

And, in the years before Malfi appeared, a series of scandals

helped to change the popular image of women's motives and desires.

Take Frances Howard,

daughter of one of the most powerful families in the land.

In May 1613 she filed for an annulment of her marriage

to the Earl of Essex.

She claimed he was unable to consummate the match.

Soon word spread that she was planning to marry

the King's favourite, Robert Carr.

The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke out against her -

but the King intervened, and her petition was granted.

There's something both alluring about her gaze,

and, I suspect, threatening.

This is a different kind of woman

than we've seen in Tudor portraiture.

In her own conduct we might see her right to self-assertion.

Others might have seen the immorality of the court writ large.

So I think the divided perception that one might have of her

really says something about the way in which she

epitomises not just the court, but the attitudes to the court.

It would connect perhaps with what Webster's dealing with

in The Duchess Of Malfi, with women who are problematic,

who are asserting their independence, asserting their rights.

Frances Howard and Robert Carr were married in December 1613,

just as The Duchess Of Malfi hit the stage.

Early playgoers may well have been tempted to draw parallels

between the play and this scandalous match at the English court.

Fie, madam. Forget this base, low fellow.

Were I a man

I'd beat that counterfeit face into thy other.

But the Duchess is a figure of rich ambiguity.

Whatever her private desires, she's also a powerful woman,

the ruler of Malfi,

drawing on the memory of one woman in particular.

For me, the Duchess captures a profound sense of nostalgia

for Elizabeth I, ten years dead,

when the Duchess came to life.

By the end of Elizabeth's long reign,

the English had - as one contemporary put it - grown weary

of an old woman's government.

But a few years under James changed that.

His unpopularity soon made Elizabeth seem, in retrospect,

truly, a glorious virgin queen.

In 1606, Elizabeth was reinterred

in a glorious tomb in Westminster Abbey.

And printed images of it soon circulated across the land.

It was said each devoted subject

created a mournful monument for her in his heart.

And, on the stage, a rash of powerful women soon appeared,

with The Duchess Of Malfi the last and probably the greatest of them.

In her defiance against detractors,

her determination, strength and fortitude,

she called to mind the idealised image of England's beloved queen.

A flesh and blood woman with loves and desires,

a shining icon of regal virtue,

surrounded by the darkest of oppressors.

Out of these ingredients,

Webster created a Duchess who could be timeless.

For me, she seems sort of like...

Within the painting of the Duchess of Malfi,

if there was one, there would be a beautiful light,

and all this darkness around it,

but the darkness is most of it.

And she's just one sort of strand, and that's how I saw it.

No wonder her most famous line, in all its layers of meaning,

stays with us.

I am Duchess of Malfi still.

I think that "I am Duchess of Malfi still" is about,

"I haven't gone mad."

You know, it would be easier to bear all of this

if I could just escape through insanity

but I'm actually holding...

I still have the heart and soul

of this woman I was born, and always will be.

Webster's story doesn't end with The Duchess Of Malfi, of course.

He died around 1638.

But in the quarter-century left in his writing career

he never again reached the heights he did in 1613.

So who was John Webster?

He will always be seen in the light of his greatest play.

A creator of bizarre and bloody scenes,

yet also of an almost modern female lead.

A writer able to bend the English language in unique,

unsettling and unforgettable ways.

What's this flesh?

Little crudded milk?

Fantastical puff paste?

In the final scenes of The Duchess Of Malfi,

Webster offers a grimmer version

of Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage."

Such a mistake as I have often seen in a play.

Not the open, outdoor stage,

but the intimate, enclosed one of Blackfriars.

Ah, this gloomy world.

In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness

doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

Webster saw life through the prism of theatre.

The flickering darkness and shadowy world

of the candlelit, indoor stage.

A world we can now reconnect with and a fitting metaphor still

for our own existence.