Parenting & Family Quote by John Webster

A line like this doesn’t just moralize; it weaponizes genealogy. By calling sorrow “the eldest child of sin,” Webster borrows the logic of inheritance - primogeniture, bloodlines, the inescapable passing down of debt - and turns emotion into a legal heir. Sorrow isn’t a random weather system that rolls over the soul. It is what sin produces first, what it recognizes as its rightful successor, what it sends ahead as proof of paternity.

That framing matters in Webster’s theatrical world, where private vice metastasizes into public catastrophe. In the Jacobean imagination, sin is never merely personal; it’s a contaminant that leaks into households, titles, and statecraft. “Eldest” implies precedence and authority: sorrow comes before all the later offspring (shame, paranoia, violence), and it often governs them. The line also contains a dark pragmatism. Webster isn’t promising redemption through suffering; he’s suggesting sorrow is the most predictable dividend of wrongdoing, the one payment sin always makes on time.

As a playwright, Webster understood how tragedy needs a credible engine. This metaphor supplies one: sin begets sorrow as reliably as a family line. It flatters the audience’s moral intuition (yes, actions have consequences) while unsettling it with fatalism (consequences arrive as lineage, not choice). In his dramas of corruption and revenge, sorrow isn’t an interruption to the plot. It’s the firstborn, already in the room, claiming the estate.