John Webster wrote two tragedies that outlived everything else he did. The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) take the Italian revenge plot the Elizabethans loved and push it past melodrama into something colder — courts full of intelligencers and hired killers, where the machinery grinds on after the point of any of it has been lost. The Duchess of Malfi gives its heroine a secret marriage to her steward and two brothers who destroy her for it: one a cardinal, one a duke who ends the play believing he is a wolf. Webster tortures her with madmen and a waxwork of her murdered family before he kills her, and gives her the line that survives all of it — "I am Duchess of Malfi still." The plays were written for the indoor Blackfriars audience and are lit accordingly, in candlelight and gloom. T. S. Eliot said Webster saw the skull beneath the skin, which stuck. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond a coachmaker father, membership of the Merchant Taylors, and collaborations with Dekker and Middleton.