John Webster The Periods Of His Work As Determined By His Relations To The Drama Of His Day

Author : Elmer Edgar Stoll
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330378779
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (787 download)

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Download or read book John Webster written by Elmer Edgar Stoll and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from John Webster: The Periods of His Work as Determined by His Relations to the Drama of His Day The first three chapters of this book, together with the scheme of the whole, formed my doctor's thesis at Munich in the summer of 1904. Since then, these chapters have been revised, and the remaining ones written. Some headings in the scheme, however, I have had to pass over and reserve for future treatment. They are the very interesting ones of the relationship of Webster's style - i. the style of the White Devil and Malfi - not only to Marston's and Tourneur's, but more especially to John Donne's; and of Webster's relationship as a thinker to tendencies other than dramatic in 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 something 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 footnotes, 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 Devil are unfinished. I was (and am still) convinced that one special book or Ms. served Webster; the rare manet alta mente repostum 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.