John Webster Influences

Very little is known about John Webster's childhood. Much of the information about his family was destroyed when the parish to which his father's family belonged burned down in 1666, during the Great Fire of London (1). The records destroyed in that fire would have been invaluable in piecing together Webster's youth. What is known is that Webster was born in what is estimated to be 1590 or earlier (2), to the son of a carriage-maker. His father's business often supplied rental coaches for the nearby prison and courthouse, as well as corpse collectors during the years the Black Plague ravaged England (3). This likely contributed to Webster's preoccupation with death that becomes evident in several of his other plays. Two conflicting theories have surfaced as to Webster's activities during this time. The first is a tenuous connection to a John "Wobster" who was touring with Robert Browne's troupe of actors in Cassel, Germany in 1596 (4). This would have permitted Webster to begin a life in theatre at a young age, but would have most likely led Webster to become an actor rather than a playwright. The

One of these collaborative efforts, Anything For A Quiet Life, was originally attributed solely to Middleton, who had died 1627, several years prior to the play's publication in 1662 (8). The play remained credited to Middleton for over 250 years, until 1921, when scholar H. Dugdale Sykes discovered similarities between Webster's writing style and Anything For A Quiet Life (9). The omission of Webster's writing credit is widely attributed to the play's publisher, Francis Kirkman, who had a history of misattributing the plays he published to more well-known playwrights