They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures of their crimes: 

He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them.

In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness: 

     Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright;
     But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them: 

There’s but three furies found in spacious hell;
But in a great man’s breast three thousand dwell.

Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts of their own raising: 

                      For these many years
  None of our family dies, but there is seen
  The shape of an old woman; which is given
  By tradition to us to have been murdered
  By her nephews for her riches.

Apparitions haunt them: 

  How tedious is a guilty conscience! 

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me.

Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred, preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts will be employed against them.  The wine-cup hides arsenic; the headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every arras, and each shadow is a murderer’s.  When death comes, they meet it trembling.  What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano’s outcry: 

  On pain of death, let no man name death to me;
  It is a word infinitely horrible.

And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes: 

  O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
  To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet
  Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
  Beats not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf
  Scents not thy carrion:  pity winds thy corse,
  Whilst horror waits on princes.

After their death, this is their epitaph: 

               These wretched eminent things
  Leave no more fame behind’em than should one
  Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow.

Of Webster’s despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in execution is Ferdinand of Aragon.  Jealousy of his sister and avarice take possession of him and torment him like furies.  The flash of repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of insanity.  He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic, and to be run through the body by his paid assassin.  In the Cardinal of Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous, blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of Calabria.  It seems to have been the poet’s purpose in each of his Italian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was.  In the lawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the godless ecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian society was actually suffering.