Webster exercised the dramatist’s privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants.  He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess Isabella, sister to Francesco de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, should be murdered at the same time as her own husband, Camillo.  Brachiano is struck by this plan, and with the help of Vittoria’s brother, Flamineo, he puts it at once into execution.  Flamineo hires a doctor who poisons Brachiano’s portrait, so that Isabella dies after kissing it.  He also with his own hands twists Camillo’s neck during a vaulting-match, making it appear that he came by his death accidentally.  Suspicion of the murder attaches, however, to Vittoria.  She is tried for her life before Monticelso and De’ Medici; acquitted, and relegated to a house of Convertites or female reformatory.  Brachiano, on the accession of Monticelso to the Papal throne, resolves to leave Rome with Vittoria.  They escape, together with her mother Cornelia, and her brothers Flamineo and Marcello, to Padua; and it is here that the last scenes of the tragedy are laid.

The use Webster made of Lodovico Orsini deserves particular attention.  He introduces this personage in the very first scene as a spendthrift, who, having run through his fortune, has been outlawed.  Count Lodovico, as he is always called, has no relationship with the Orsini, but is attached to the service of Francesco de’ Medici, and is an old lover of the Duchess Isabella.  When, therefore, the Grand Duke meditates vengeance on Brachiano, he finds a fitting instrument in the desperate Lodovico.  Together, in disguise, they repair to Padua.  Lodovico poisons the Duke of Brachiano’s helmet, and has the satisfaction of ending his last struggles by the halter.  Afterwards, with companions, habited as a masquer, he enters Vittoria’s palace and puts her to death together with her brother Flamineo.  Just when the deed of vengeance has been completed, young Giovanni Orsini, heir of Brachiano, enters and orders the summary execution of Lodovico for this deed of violence.  Webster’s invention in this plot is confined to the fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo, and Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo, with the further consequence of Cornelia’s madness and death.  He has heightened our interest in Isabella, at the expense of Brachiano’s character, by making her an innocent and loving wife instead of an adulteress.  He has ascribed different motives from the real ones to Lodovico in order to bring this personage into rank with the chief actors, though