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In tragic power, Webster approaches nearest to Shakespeare. He loves such gloomy metaphors as the following: "You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat Afore you cut it open." Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy is in Webster's vein, but far inferior to The Duchess of Malfi. Ford's The Broken Heart is a strong, but unpleasant, tragedy.
But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror.
There is around them a thick and clammy moral darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue of maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito; a crypt-like moral stillness, haunted by strange evil murmurs, broken only by the hysterical sobs and laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos.
The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination.
Whether they were as part of the action or as allusions, as in Webster's two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by means of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poisoned lips of a picture, poisoning by a helmet, poisoning by the pommel of a saddle; crimes were multiplied by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary incidents, like the double vengeance of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy," and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and only a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the corpses which strewed the stage.
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