John Webster

Little is known of Webster's life, and the dates of his birth and death are uncertain. His father, a carriage maker also named John Webster, married in November 1577, and the playwright was probably born not long after, in or near London. He went to Merchant Taylors' School in London, and in 1605 married Sara Peniall.

By 1602 he was writing plays with teams of other playwrights, among them Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. With Dekker he wrote the city comedies Westward Ho and Northward Ho, and later he wrote comedies with Middleton and William Rowley. He was still writing in the mid-1620s, but a book by Thomas Heywood licensed in 1634 speaks of him in the past tense.

Webster is best known for two tragedies based on Italian sources. The White Devil failed at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612, found too unusual and intellectual by its audience. The Duchess of Malfi, the play on this site, was first performed by the King's Men about 1614, published nine years later, and did better. Its heroine is a figure of virtue set against her malevolent brothers, and a strong, virtuous woman at the centre of a play was very rare for the time.

His plays were generally dismissed in the 18th and 19th centuries, but many 20th-century critics and theatregoers came to admire them, and they are still often staged. T. S. Eliot wrote that Webster always saw "the skull beneath the skin". There is no known portrait of him.

Sources: wikipedia.org