Stoll, E: John Webster -

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Résumé :
Excerpt from John Webster: The Periods of His Work as Determined by His Relations to the Drama of His Day

It would have been interesting to attempt some investigation of his life. That I renounced at the start: my task was large enough without it. And a long stay in London was out of the question. But I hope that in Chapter I. I have done some thing in a negative way. By determining that the dramatist was not the John Webster. Clothworker. Who made his will and died in 1625. Nor a tailor at all.' The book is merely for the Elizabethan scholar. I have not scrupled, in the foot notes. To turn for a moment to this side or to that, in order to clear up a problem in authorship or to settle a date. Even though the matter did not concern Webster. I have suffered footnotes. Appendices. And index of plays and authors to swell to more than half of the whole. And I have deliberately omitted to give the stories of the plays treated. Or summaries of my own argument at the end of chapter or section.

Some of the references, I fear. May prove incorrect. I have verified them. In all possible cases. In the final copy; but many of the works cited were then inaccessible - beyond sea, and. As for the rest. Our old dramatists -even Bullen's - are generally printed so carelessly that one can never be sure of the numbers of act and scene.

My researches upon the source of the White Dem? Are unfinished. I was (and am still) convinced that one special book or Ms. Served Webster: the rare manet alta manta repastam was my main clew; but. After months of travel and labor, many of the earliest and best accounts of Vittoria still eluded me.' The gentleman who alone has dealt with the story of Vittoria like a historian, the Prefect of the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele. At Rome. Told me he himself had copies of all the contemporary accounts. And offered to put them at my disposal. This he never did; and a very interesting point in the relations of English and Italian literature lies. Tantalizingly, still in the dark.

There seems to belittle hope for Webster. Dyce had investigated pretty thor oughly. And I myself have found no trace of him in the Register of the Merchant Taylors' School (ed. By C. J. Robinson. Lewes. 1882) where one would expect him. As born free of the Company, to have been educated.

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