Lent Reader 2024

Readers Feast | Wednesday 19 June 2024 | Webster, Marston and Ford.

Playwrights John Marston, John Webster and John Ford joined Middle Temple over a 10-year period starting in 1592, and so worked in this Hall, which was completed in 1573, and which is referred to in Twelfth Night, first performed here on Saturday 2 February 1602.  

I will talk about their time here and give a brief outline of their work. Then, the distinguished director Philip Franks will speak about Jacobean drama and directing some of the plays of these playwrights, with extracts read by the incomparable Zoe Waites which will bring their work alive.

The late 16th and early 17th Centuries were a unique time in English theatre. In 1564 when Shakespeare was born, there were no public playhouses. From the 1580’s, playhouses sprang up in London. The public were eager to attend the outdoor public playhouses like the Globe (entrance fee 1p), and the indoor private playhouse like the Blackfriars, with an entrance fee of 6p. 

Acting companies were associated with particular theatres. Shakespeare wrote for The Lord Chamberlain’s Men later known as the King’s Men. In summer, they performed at the Globe and in winter at the Blackfriars. 

There were companies of boy actors such as the ‘Children of the Chapel Royal’ which played at the Blackfriars. 

The repertory system made great demands on actors but the urgent need for new plays benefitted playwrights. In the 1594–1595 season, the Admiral’s Men performed six days a week and staged a total of 38 plays; 21 were new plays, introduced at a rate of approximately one every two weeks – but only eight were acted again in subsequent seasons. 

The Inns were an important source of patronage. They supported a strong tradition of amateur theatre and provided an influential part of the play-going public.

Muriel Bradbrook wrote: 

The three dramatists Marston, Webster and Ford are closely linked in a way which illuminates the great plays, and their significant works follow from a common membership of a society where literature was diligently cultivated.

The Inns were known as the third university of England. Ben Jonson described them as the ‘noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the Kingdom.’ About 10% of members joined intending to practise the law. The others, like our playwrights, learned about literature, singing and dancing. It’s not surprising that they published poetry before writing plays.

Marston’s father joined the Inn in 1570 and, in 1577, built his own chambers.  In 1592, aged 16, Marston junior began at Brasenose College, Oxford and became a member of the Inn. He was able to join at such a young age because his father was Reader. For the same reason, his admission fee was waived.  He lived here from 1595 after he got his degree. He shared rooms with his father from 1597 until the latter died in 1599. In his will, Marston senior left his law books to his son ‘whom I hoped would have profited by them in the study of the law but man proposeth and God disposeth.’ Marston Junior lived in the Inn until at least 1605.

John Webster was born in London in 1578. His father ran a thriving business, building and hiring out coaches from Cow Lane, Smithfield. Webster joined the Inn in 1598.

In the film Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard invented a scene in which Shakespeare sees a young boy playing with rats who says: ‘I was in a play. They cut my head off in Titus Andronicus. When I write plays, they will be like Titus.’ When asked his name, he says John Webster. 

John Ford was born in 1586 in Ilsington, Devon. His father was a magistrate. The Fords were a prosperous and well-established gentry family. His mother was niece to Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice for 15 years from 1592. He was Treasurer of the Inn 1580-1587. As Lord Chief Justice, he presided over the treason trial of Walter Raleigh in which he refused Raleigh’s request to cross-examine his accuser. After a year at Exeter College, Oxford, Ford joined the Inn in 1602. A cousin, Thomas Ford, was already a member. In 1605, he was expelled for failure to pay his bills and was not readmitted until Tuesday 10 June 1608.  

To make money, in 1606, aged 20, he wrote various pieces dedicated to wealthy patrons. One was Honor Triumphant, which defends four courtly love propositions. Another was The Monarchs Meeting, a description in verse of how James I welcomed King Christian of Denmark. 

Like Webster, Thomas Overbury joined the Inn in 1598. He had a meteoric rise at court and was knighted in 1608. However, the King took against him, and he was imprisoned in the Tower where he was murdered in 1613 by supporters of King James and possibly with his knowledge. Overbury wrote a best-selling poem, The Wife, and a series of vignettes called Characters. After Overbury’s death, Webster edited editions of Characters and Webster and Ford added to them. Webster’s additions included An Excellent Actor – a remarkable tribute in which he wrote, ‘he adds grace to the Poets labours: for what in the Poet is but ditty, in him is both ditty and music. He entertains us in the best leisure of our life’.

Ford’s additions were A Wise Man and A Noble Spirit. He also wrote Thomas Overbury’s Ghost (1614) and a Memorial for Overbury (1616). 

The most significant entertainment at the Inns were the Revels: part of the tradition throughout the country of the Lord of Misrule – a Christmas entertainment which ended on Candlemas Day 2 February, which as I’ve said was when Twelfth Night was first performed here. Each Inn had a different title for the Lord of Misrule. At Middle, he was The Prince D’Amour.

Maston’s first dramatic work, Histriomastix, or The Player Whipped, was a morality play written for the 1598-1599 Revels. It was the opening instalment in the seven plays which make up the War at the Theatres of 1599–1602, in which Marston and Dekker on one side and Ben Jonson on the other satirised each other. Martson’s other plays in this war were Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600) and What You Will (1601). However, Marston and Jonson reconciled. In 1603, Marston dedicated The Malcontent to Jonson and, in 1605, Marston, Jonson and George Chapman collaborated on Eastward Ho, a city comedy. Unfortunately, the Scottish satire in the play offended King James and, although written by Marston, Jonson and Chapman were imprisoned.

The Malcontent (1603) and The Dutch Courtesan (1605) are Marston’s best-known plays. 

All his plays were performed by one of the children’s companies at the Blackfriars. However, in 1604, The Malcontent was played by The Kings Men at the Globe with a new induction by Webster, in which the play’s actors and its onstage spectators comment on the drama to follow. King’s Men actors such as Richard Burbage appear as themselves. 

On Sunday 8 June 1608, Marston was sent to Newgate Prison because of the King’s displeasure at the character of Don Gonzaga in The Fawn, which the King believed was a satire of him. On Sunday 29 June 1608, the King ordered the closure of all the theatres. Marston then gave up the theatre and went into the church. He died on Saturday 24 June 1634 aged 57 and was buried in Middle Temple churchyard. 

Even after his death, Marston was still something of a hero at Middle Temple. In the Revels of 1636, Shakespeare and Marston were referred to as equals.

As Finkelpearl says in his book on Marston, the fact that a wealthy man such as Marston became a playwright shows that such a choice was becoming respectable and created a precedent for other members of the gentry, notably Beaumont (who went to Inner Temple), Fletcher and Ford.

From 1602, Webster served his apprenticeship as a writer collaborating with older playwrights such as Dekker and Heywood. Unfortunately, these are among the lost plays of this period but at least one of them, Christmas Comes but Once a Year, was a comedy.

I told you that Marston was the co-author of Eastward Ho. That was a response to Westwood Ho (1604) written by Dekker and Webster, and Northward Ho (1605) written by the same authors was in response to Eastward Ho. These were popular comedies which were frequently performed. 

The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are Webster’s masterpieces still regularly performed today, over 400 years after they were written. TS Eliot wrote in his poem Whispers of Immortality that ‘Webster was much possessed of death and saw the skull beneath the skin.’

The White Devil was first performed in early 1612 at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell. It was a notorious failure. In the preface to the first edition, Webster blamed the failure on the weather, the theatre and the audience. 

He also dealt with the delay in writing the play as it was seven years since his last play was performed. He said that he did not write with a goose quill winged with two feathers. And he provided this anecdote: Euripides, when criticised by a minor writer for having composed three verses when the minor writer had written 300 in three days, responded that the minor writer would only be read for three days whereas he, Euripides, would be read for three ages. As Stanley Wells writes in Shakespeare and Co, the judgement of posterity has vindicated Webster’s smugness.

The Duchess of Malfi was first performed before December 1614 by the King’s Men first at the Blackfriars, then at the Globe. When published, it was the first time the names of all the actors and the parts they played were identified. The commendatory verses by Middleton, Rowley and Ford were full of praise for the play. Ford described it as a masterpiece.

Webster’s life changed significantly after his father’s death. In June 1615, he claimed membership of the Merchant Taylors Company by patrimony which indicates that he was connected to his father’s business. In her book on Webster, Muriel Bradbrook’s view is that his later writings belong more to theatrical history than to dramatic literature.

After The Devil’s Law Case, Webster returned to collaboration.

An early example of Ford’s apprenticeship is The Witch of Edmonton, written in 1621 with Rowley and Dekker (now released from debtor’s prison where he had been for seven years) and in 1624, a lost play Late Murder in Whitechapel or Keep the Widow Waking written with Rowley, Dekker and Webster. 

Both were inspired by events which had happened very shortly before the plays were performed. For The Witch, it was the execution of a woman for witchcraft. For Murder, it was the murder of a woman by her son and the purported marriage by a young man to a wealthy widow whom he had got drunk. These two incidents came together when, at the same court, the son was tried for murder and the young man for felony. The widow’s son-in-law tried unsuccessfully to prevent further performances, but only after Decker had been summoned to appear before the Star Chamber.

It was not until 1627, when Ford was in his forties, that he became a sole author and so wrote his eight plays when Charles I was king. Among these, the two that have secured his reputation are The Broken Heart written in 1629 and Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a play about incest, in 1631. Both were performed in indoor theatres: The Broken Heart at Blackfriars and Tis Pity at the Cockpit Theatre. 

In both plays, although male characters claim to love the women characters, it is the women who suffer, and the characters die in horrific circumstances. In Tis Pity, Anabella is not only killed by her brother, he cuts her heart out. But, as one critic wrote: ‘His skill in describing the passions of a woman whose heart told her to do one thing when convention told her to do another was unsurpassed.’ 

One of Fords last plays was Perkin Warbeck, about the man who claimed to be Richard Duke of York’s son of Edward IV. TS Eliot considered it be Ford’s best play.

Our playwrights did not become lawyers, but their knowledge of the law is evident in their work, particularly Webster in his trial scenes and the lawyers in The White Devil and in The Devil’s Law Case. Finally, here is a speech from The Devil’s Law Case which may seem familiar to anyone who has heard counsel exaggerating their case:

May it please your lordship And the reverend court
to give me leave to open to you a case
So rare so altogether void of precedent
That I do challenge all the spacious volumes 
of the whole civil law to show you the like.

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Readers Feast

(The readings were performed by Zoe Waites)

London in the early 17th Century is one of those spectacular intersection points where it appears that everybody knew everybody, even if they loathed each other. Like the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s or the left bank of Paris in the 1950s, the writers and theatre people of the time seem to have struck enough sparks off each other to light up the sky. Apart from Shakespeare, who has never really gone out of fashion despite the best efforts of Nahum Tate in the 17th Century and Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler in the 19^th Century, to sweeten and sanitise his work. Presumably the other Jacobeans, especially our three playwrights, were considered too disgusting to bother with. Their work fell into neglect, effectively, until the 20th Century.

Even TS Eliot, who did much to revive interest in the plays with his various essays on Jacobean drama, while praising the poetry is often pretty sniffy about the morality and inappropriateness of the content. He is particularly disapproving of Ford and Marston – maybe passages like this, from the Dutch Courtesan, put his nose out of joint. We have Crispinella, the heroine’s sister, holding forth about love and marriage. 

From The Dutch Courtesan

CRISPINELLA: Do not talk of kissing! My stomach of late stands against kissing extremely – ‘tis grown one of the most unsavoury ceremonies! If a nobleman or a knight with no hair visit us, though his unclean goose-turd green teeth have the palsy, his nostrils smell worse than a petrified marrowbone and his loose beard drops into our bosom yet we must kiss him with a curtesy. I would rather they would break wind in my lips.

You say I speak too broad? Let us never be ashamed to speak what we be not ashamed to think. We pronounce boldly robbery, murder, treason which deeds must needs be far more loathsome than an act which is so natural, just and necessary as that of procreation. A hypocritical vestal Virgin speaks that with closed teeth publicly which she will receive with open mouth privately.

As for marriage – faith, husbands are like lots in the lottery. You may draw 40 blanks before you find one that has any prize in him. A husband generally is a careless domineering thing, that grows like coral, which as long as it is underwater is soft and tender but as soon as it has got its branch above the waves is presently hard, stiff, and not to be bowed. So, when your husband is a suitor, Lord how supple he is and at your service! Once married, a stiff crooked knobby inflexible tyrannous creature he grows. 

I’ll live my own woman and if the worst comes to the worst, I had rather prove a wit than a fool. 

There was a brief revival of interest, especially in Webster, after the Second World War – a production of The Duchess of Malfi with Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud frightened the horses with its themes of incest and murder but was certainly popular. 

It was not until the late 1960s though that the Jacobean drama really found its place on the British stage. Joan Littlewood typically was way ahead of the game, producing Jonson, Marston and Middleton at Stratford East in the 1950s, but it was Trevor Nunn’s extraordinary production of The Revenger’s Tragedy in 1969 – all silver and black and as hilarious as it was terrifying, that really turned the tide. It also coincided with the start of my love affair with the theatre and with those plays. I managed to persuade my English teacher to cast me as Vindici in The Revenger’s Tragedy at school (he drew the line at Hamlet, which is what I really wanted to play) and my friends and I had a great time prancing around in front of a baffled and sullen audience of grumpy schoolboys. 

At university I managed to play Bosola and design a post-apocalyptic version of Malfi directed by Doug Lucie, soon to be a successful playwright. We were very pleased with ourselves; corrugated iron set, torn costumes, lashings of makeup – all very 1970s. It was my first meeting with this great masterpiece of fear and anxiety and although we probably revelled too much in the horrors, nonetheless it got under our skin. 

The Duchess of Malfi

DUCHESS: Farewell Cariola
In my last will I have not much to give;
A many hungry guests have fed upon me, 
Thine will be a poor reversion.
I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers, ere she sleep. Now what you please,
What death?

BOSOLA: Strangling. Here are you executioners. 

DUCHESS: I forgive them.
The apoplexy, catarrh or cough of the lungs
Would do as much as they do.

BOSOLA: methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you,
This cord should terrify you?

DUCHESS: Not a whit. 
What would it pleasure me, to have my throat cu
With diamonds? To be smothered
With cassia? Or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and tis found
They go
On such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them
Both ways: any way, for heavens sake, so I were out of your whispering.
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet . 

Brilliant productions of these plays started to spring up. Frank Dunlop’s The White Devil in 1969 was designed by Fellini’s designer Roberto Gerhardi, with the characters portrayed like insects slithering between huge rocks either nearly naked or trapped in huge, jagged ruffs and towering wigs. 

Peter Gill directed an austere Malfi at the Royal court in 1970 with the action watched by a baleful chorus in mustard yellow lab coats. 

Adrian Noble’s Malfi in 1980 with Helen Mirren had Mike Gwyllim as Ferdinand memorably jumping out of a pram and biting Bob Hoskins’ ear off most convincingly.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Glasgow Citizens Theatre produced many of these plays, all designed by Philip Prowse and all looking sexy, dangerous and spectacular. It was of course also the decade of Glamrock, sexual transgression, freedom from theatre censorship, Lindsay Kemp and of course, The Rocky Horror Show. Jacobean drama fitted right in. 

The Citizens’ aesthetic became pretty standard for productions of these plays – a colour scheme of black, white, red and gold, dark towering sets, the obligatory white faces and khol smeared eyes. Perhaps there was less attention to the text than there should have been. Philip Prowse said in an interview, ‘the words of an author are as important as the work of an usherette. No more no less.’ 

Well, perhaps. I saw one production there which was a mashup of Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Malfi and The White Devil – it was quite difficult to follow but there was lots of blood and cheekbones and it was the first time that I’d heard John Ford. 

If Webster is the master of anxiety, Ford is the poet of conscience and guilt. Here is the incestuous sister Annabella in Tis Pity: 

Tis Pity she’s a Whore

ANNABELLA

Pleasures, farewell, and all ye thriftless minutes
wherein false joys have spun a weary life. 
To these my fortunes now I take my leave. 
Thou, precious time, that swiftly rides in post 
over the world, to finish up the race
of my last fate, here stay thy restless course,
and bear to ages that are yet unborn
A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy. My conscience now stands up against my lust
with depositions charactered in guilt and tells me I am lost: now I confess beauty that clothes the outside of the face
is cursed if it be not clothed with grace
here like a turtle mewed up in a cage unmated, I converse with air and walls,
and descant on my vile unhappiness. Oh, Giovanni, that hast had the spoil
of thine own virtues and my modest fame,
would thou hadst been less subject to those stars 
that luckless reigned at my nativity: 
O would the scourge due to my black offence
might pass from thee, that I alone might feel
the torment of an uncontrolled flame. 

I’ve never directed a play by Marston – indeed I’ve only seen one – The Malcontent – and that only once. I’ve directed The Witch of Edmonton, at least partly by Ford, along with Dekker and Rowley. It’s a terrific play based on a real contemporary case – an old woman convicted and hanged for witchcraft. The apparently tabloid subject is treated with great and unexpected sympathy and a parallel plot (probably by Ford, and certainly centring on conscience and guilt) is an imagined one of bigamy and murder. I did a modern dress production with students from Rada and enjoyed it hugely. 

I have however directed quite a lot of Webster – The White Devil at the Lyric Hammersmith, in which Zoe was marvellous as Vittoria, and The Duchess of Malfi twice. First at Greenwich, which transferred to the West End – it had a starry cast: Juliet Stevenson, Simon Russell Beale, Robert Glenister et cetera, but my second try, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse with Imogen Stubbs as the Duchess was better. I hope Melanie Jessop, who is here tonight and was excellent as Julia in both productions, will agree.

I think I was too timid the first time, trying too hard not to be the Glasgow Citizens, whereas the second time, when the play was set in 1950s Italy (Fellini again but less grotesque), had more of the necessary feeling of dread and was clearer about the transformation of the Duchess herself from a selfish, rather silly, headstrong privileged woman to a proper heroine. Grace under pressure indeed. Here is her turning point, when she has been arrested by her crazy brother’s thugs.

The Duchess of Malfi

DUCHESS:

Man is most happy, when his own actions
be arguments and examples of his virtue.
I prithee who is greatest, can you tell? sad tales befit my woe: I’ll tell you one.
A salmon, as she swam unto the sea, met with a dogfish, who encounters her 
with this rough language: why art thou so bold 
to mix thy self with our high state of floods 
being no eminent courtier, but one that for the calmest and fresh time of the year
Dost live in shallow rivers, ranks thy self 
with silly smelts and Shrimps? And darest thou 
pass by our dog -ship without reverence?
oh, quoth the Salmon, sister be at peace:
thank Jupiter we both have passed the net,
Our value never can be truly known,
Till in the fisher’s basket we be shown;
in the market then my price may be the higher,
Even when I am nearest to the cook and fire.
So to great men the moral may be stretched. 
Men oft are valued high when they are most wretched.
But come, wither you please. I am armed against misery,
bent to all sways of the oppressor’s will.
there’s no deep valley but near some great Hill. 

My White Devil was very much a companion piece, also set in the 1950s Italy of La Dolce Vita. A great cast: Zoe, Anthony Valentine, Dilys Laye, Timothy Walker among others and a set by Rae Smith that had a concealed blood pump under the floor, so that at the end poor Zoe lay dead with blood pooling around her and running down a raked stage to a gutter at the front – we had a gratifying number of people fainting. 

These plays are tough, frightening and horrific. They are also moving, funny, psychologically complex and challenging. I’m afraid that as we enter a new Puritan age of cancel culture and somewhat incoherent fear of giving offence, they are out of fashion again, appearing, when they appear at all in ‘versions reimagined for a contemporary audience.’ This is too often arrogant, patronising and reductive – these are great plays from a dark, thrilling period of incredible creativity and they deserve to be heard.  

To finish, and to link up with the legal theme, an extract from The White Devil. Vittoria Corrombona, accused of murdering her husband, is arraigned in court by Cardinal Monticelso, soon to be made Pope.

The White Devil – Trial scene

LAWYER: Most literated judges, please your Lordships 
so to contrive your judgements to the view
of this debauched and diversolvent woman
who such a black concatenation 
of mischief has affected, that to extirp
the memory of it must be the consummation
of her and her projections

VITTORIA: What’s all this? 
This is worse than Welsh, or Latin.

CARDINAL: I shall be plainer with you and paint out 
your follies in more natural red and white than that upon your cheek.

VITTORIA: O, you mistake – you raise a blood as noble in this cheek as ever was your mother’s. 
It does not suit a reverent cardinal to play the lawyer thus.

CARDINAL: Your trade instructs your language. Were there a second paradise to lose, this whore would soon betray it.

VITTORIA: Ha? Whore? what’s that? 

CARDINAL: you know what a whore is. Next to the devil adultery
enters the devil murder. Her unhappy husband
is dead – she comes not like a widow.

VITTORIA: had I foreknown his death, as you suggest
I would have bespoke my mourning.

CARDINAL: Oh, you are cunning.

VITTORIA: You shame your wit and judgement to call it so. What, is my just defence
by him by him is my judge called impudence? 

CARDINAL: She scandals our proceedings!

VITTORIA:  Humbly thus, 
thus low to the most worthy and respected
leiger ambassadors, my modesty and womanhood I tender. 
Find me but guilty, sever head from body;
We’ll part good friends. I scorn to hold my life 
at yours or any man’s entreaty sir.

Philip Franks

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