Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria’s attitude as one of ‘innocence-resembling boldness.’  In the trial scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent vixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant.  Her boldness is the audacity of impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of guilt.  Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims whom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished.  Of Camillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano: 

     And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base
     shallow grave that was their due.

IV

It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria’s life to a consideration of Webster’s drama as a whole, especially in a book dedicated to Italian byways.  For that mysterious man of genius had explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling lucidity.  His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents, have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.

Webster’s plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time.  He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a deep sense of the poet’s power and personality, and an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes.  His Roman history-play of ‘Appius and Virginia’ proves that he understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with conscientious calmness.  But the two Italian dramas upon which his fame is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward mannerism.  Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up of these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive.  The characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct of a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a tableau vivant; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of interpenetrative passions.  That this mannerism was deliberately chosen, we have a right to believe.  ’Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted,’ is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model.  He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation they now lack for chamber-students.