Life and Works of Webster
It is generally assumed that Webster was born in the latter half of the sixteenth century and the conjectural date of his birth is 1580. The first official reference to him is in 1602, when he was working with a group of hack playwrights under Philip Henslowe, a theatrical manager who employed a number of minor dramatists and who is best-known for his Diary which contains valuable information on the theatre, stage and the playwrights of the times.
Webster was the son of a London tailor who also, incidentally owned a fleet of horse-carriages (coaches) and was himself a freeman of the Merchant Taylor's Company. Webster was an odd genius who wrote slowly. He says of himself, 'I confess I do not write with a goose quill winged with two feathers' and he borrowed freely from other writers. In this, he was like other Elizabethan writers who used to keep 'commonplace' books or notebooks where they would jot down striking passages from other people's writings that appealed to them. Webster was particularly notorious in this respect and he has borrowed freely, but always transmitting the passages into his own. He has borrowed freely from Sydney's Arcadia and Montaigne's Essays, and we find in his plays echoes of many other writers as well, including Chapman and Jonson.
There are innumerable other sources which have been tracked down by recent scholars. The famous passage in The Duchess of Malfi (V. v. 5-7) where the Cardinal says:
When I look into the Fish ponds in the Garden Me thinkes I see a thing arm'd with a Rake That seems to strike.
was presumed to have been taken from a passage in Lavater's Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night: 'Pertinax...... sawe a certayne shadowe in one of his fish ponds......' This has now been traced back to its original source, Capitolinus' life of the vertuous Pertinax. Another famous passage where the Duchess says, early in the death scene,