John Webster (1580 – 1634)
English Jacobean dramatist, a late contemporary of William Shakespeare.
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Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
Is not old wine wholesomest, old pippins toothsomest, old wood burn brightest, old linen wash whitest? Old soldiers, sweethearts, are surest, and old lovers are soundest.
I saw him going the way of all flesh.
Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?
So may you blame some fair and crystal river
For that some melancholic, distracted man
Hath drown'd himself in 't.
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But look'd too near have neither heat nor light.
'T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out. 2
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near have neither heat nor light.
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin.
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
Their life, a general mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storm of terror.
Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits.
Heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees.
Webster is not concerned with humanity. He is the poet of bile and brainstorm, the sweet singer of apoplexy; ideally, one feels, he would have had all his characters drowned in a sea of cold sweat. His muse drew nourishment from Bedlam, and might, a few centuries later, have done the same from Belsen.
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
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