The White Devil

John Webster's tragedy in five acts centres on the love affair between the Duke of Brachiano and Vittoria Corombona, two of the play's many unscrupulous characters. Both evil and good characters are drawn into schemes of political intrigue, adulterous desire and bloody revenge.

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An acute reader of contemporary drama and a consummate parodist, Webster achieves in his plays a density of allusion that often produces moments of brilliant psychological insight and theatrical ingenuity. Working with the established conventions of revenge tragedy, the malcontent youngster and dark sexual intrigue, he created in The White Devil (1612) an exciting, if dramatically flawed, version of a recent Italian scandal involving the Montalto, Orsini and de' Medici families. The introduction to this edition disentangles the various plotlines, illuminates Webster's interest in women as an exploited group with innate heroic potential and shows how he dissects the misogynist rhetoric of his male characters.