SOURCE: "The World Within," in The World's Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama, Rutgers University Press, 1983, pp. 189-200.

In the following excerpt, Bliss examines Webster's "unheroic" protagonists, focusing on their relationship to society and comparing them with the more traditional, heroic protagonists depicted in the tragedies of Shakespeare and Chapman. He comments: "Webster is an important, yet still transitional figure in drama's waning concern with the public consequences of those private relations that mold both the protagonist and the society he influences."

Webster himself invited comparison with his most famous contemporaries, and if I have not strictly followed the list that prefaces The White Devil, I hope this attempt to read Webster in his chosen context has helped clarify his involvement in some of the most exciting dramatic developments of his period. Old-fashioned neither in form nor content, both Webster's moral attitudes and his experimental dramaturgy grow...