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Updated: May 5, 2025
Look, then, at Webster's two masterpieces, 'Vittoria Corrombona' and the 'Duchess of Malfi. A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare's time. The whole story of 'Vittoria Corrombona' is one of sin and horror.
And so the play ends, as does 'Vittoria Corrombona, with half a dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge, in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day.
The play which I spoke of as his, in my last letter, was Ford's "White Devil," of which the notorious Vittoria Corrombona, Duchess of Bracciano, is the heroine.
The tragical story of Vittoria Corrombona, eminently tragical in that age of dramatic lives and deaths, has furnished not only the subject of this fine play of Ford's, but that of a magnificent historical novel, by the great German writer, Tieck, in which it is difficult to say which predominates, the intense interest of the heroine's individual career, or that created by the splendid delineation of the whole state of Italy at that period the days of the grand old Sixtus the Fifth in Rome, and of the contemporary Medici in Florence; it is altogether a masterpiece by a great master.
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