All or nearly all of the active characters are black with sin. The extraordinary exploitation of villany in Elizabethan tragedy here reaches its culmination. The arch-villain as ruthlessly devoted to crime as Hoffman, the accomplice assiduous in revolting baseness, the villain touched by remorse, the malcontent reviling human life,--all these appear--sometimes all combined in one person--and play their parts along with unshrinking prostitutes and lustful monarchs. The study of villany, however, has gained intensity and plausibility over the earlier plays. If none of the villains take to themselves much individuality, most of them have moments of dramatic impressiveness, and they are intended to be realistic. They are drawn with an accumulation of detail, a fondness for probing into depravity, with a sense of the dramatic value of devilry, and with a bitterness and cynicism that often seem sincere and searching. It is this cynicism which gives character to the reflective elements of these plays. The Kydian soliloquy on fate has given way to the prevailing satirical and bitter tone that finds its favorite themes in the sensuality of women and the hypocrisy and greed of courts, and its favorite means of expression in the connotation of the obscene and bestial.
The qualities attributed to these four plays recall "Hoffman" and "The Atheist's Tragedy," and still more Marston's plays, and the satirical comedy of the preceding decade as well as the tragedy. Though the four plays are thus classed together, their differences are marked. "The Second Maiden's Tragedy" manifests more than the others the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher. Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," far superior to his earlier "Atheist's Tragedy," surpasses Marston and reveals brilliant dramatic talent. Full of thrills and unspeakable juxtapositions, it is governed by a sheer delight in horror and unrelieved by any moral standard. Webster, on the contrary, made his horrors impressive in both poetry and moral. Dependent at every step on the work of predecessors, he succeeded as did no other poet except Shakespeare in transforming the revenge play into a work of art and truth. Chapman was, perhaps, his chief model, but the processes of his transforming art, though not its results, bear resemblances to Shakespeare's. He was possessed by an interest in the effects of crime upon character, and had the power to realize these momentarily with amazing truth. Hence his great portraits of Vittoria, the Cardinal, and the Duchess, and the ingeniously and vividly though not very consistently drawn figure of Bosola. As Shakespeare in "Macbeth" and "Lear," fascinated by the wickedness of the world, reveled in images of blackness, corruption, and despair, so Webster, more laboriously and inquisitively, was ever seeking fantastic expression for the old truth that all is vanity. In his masterpiece, "The Duchess of Malfi," and in a lesser degree in "The White Devil," his recognition of moral values again recalls Shakespeare. We are moved by the pitifulness of the suffering as well as by the horror of the evil. There is no confusion of good and bad; and if the prevailing view of life is cynical, it is not unrelieved by respect for fortitude and conscience. The tragedy of revenge reached a new altitude in this play, which, though poorly constructed, tells a story of criminal and horrible revenge with a vivid delineation of character, a pervading moral sense, and with flashes of speech that attain both poetic and dramatic sublimity.[23]