Webster
Reading The Duchess of Malfi for A-Level , my English class was much possessed by Webster, by his unrelentingly bleak vision of human nature, by the frankness of the play, by the mounting body count, by the fact that Webster was new to us, was fresh, and was not quite as precious as Shakespeare, did not need to be treated with kid gloves.
DUCHESS Diamonds they say, are of most value,
That have passed through most jewelers' hands.
FERDINAND Whores, by that rule, are precious.
I am revisiting The Duchess of Malfi this week. My first anniversary present consisted in part of tickets to see the play (1st anniversary is traditionally paper, you see, so it fits very nicely), and I will be re-reading it before the performance next Saturday night. I think I'm a little more 
sensitive to things that are horrible these days, so I hope that I have the stomach for it. Perhaps it is not as gruesome as I remember; my memories are partly founded on a scene in Shakespeare in Love in which Webster plays a kind of cameo role. When he is not engaged in acts of betrayal, or feeding mice to a cat, Webster is asked which parts of Titus Andronicus he likes best. "I like it when they cut heads off", he replies, "and the daughter mutilated with knives". Being referenced in Shakespeare in Love doesn't make you very cool, however obscure the reference may be to a general audience, but figuring in the open line of a TS Eliot poem does give you a great deal of (adolescent?) kudos, so here are the immortal lines from 1920:
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backwards with a lipless grin.
I'll be reporting on how the reading goes later next week.
Becca
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