Wit & Attitude Quote by John Webster

Webster slips a joke into a threat and lets the joke curdle. The speaker isn’t merely anticipating damnation; he’s planning to game it, strolling into hell with a payoff in hand. That’s the Jacobean kick: sin has become so procedural it feels like court business. Even the afterlife, supposedly the one jurisdiction beyond influence, is imagined as corruptible through “good gifts” - the polite euphemism that lets bribery masquerade as generosity. Webster’s diction does the dirty work: “good” and “worst” sit side by side, exposing how moral language gets repurposed to launder moral failure.

The subtext is bleaker than the punchline. If bribes “evermore make way,” then virtue isn’t just unrewarded; it’s structurally irrelevant. The line assumes a world where advancement belongs to the shameless, and where the price of entry is knowing the right transaction. Hell becomes less a metaphysical destination than a satirical mirror of earthly institutions - a place staffed, one suspects, by officials who learned their ethics in the same corridors as Webster’s villains.

Context matters: Webster wrote in a London thick with patronage networks, bought offices, and show-trials dressed up as justice. His tragedies obsess over poisoned courts and compromised consciences, where power doesn’t need innocence; it needs liquidity. The line lands because it’s both extravagant and familiar: an afterlife bribe is absurd, yet the logic behind it feels uncomfortably current. Webster’s intent is not to shock with blasphemy, but to reveal a society so rotten it expects corruption to outlive the soul.