The White Devil Analysis

Webster sets his play in 16th Century Italy—only in the recent past, as far as Webster was concerned, since he was writing at the beginning of the 17th Century. Remember, Webster was living in Pr...

The play doesn't have a narrative technique—it's a play, after all. This helps Webster heighten certain effects that might have been different in a novel: he's able to remain non-commital towards...

Webster's play is a tragedy—more specifically, a revenge tragedy (a hot genre at the time). Simply put, a revenge tragedy is a tragedy about…revenge. Hamlet is a classic example. But revenge is...

The critic Clifford Leech points out that in Shakespeare's tragedies, there is always a time before the play when everything was great: Hamlet had a living dad; King Lear wasn't pitting his daughte...

Webster isn't afraid to throw around some advanced SAT prep words—also, he's not too concerned if his audience doesn't know Latin, or what "limn" means, or what some specific reference to Greek m...

The White Devil is the title of the play—but the term "white devil" isn't actually used in the text of the tragedy. Who is the "white devil" anyway? Is it Vittoria? That seems like the strongest...

In the end, everybody dies… Well, not literally everybody. Technically, Giovanni and a few others are still hanging out—but the main characters we've grown to know and…love (?)...are dead. Or...

The White Devil isn't meant to be a complex Rubik's Cube play—it's meant to be fast moving and intense…yet thoughtful. Nonetheless, for modern readers, it's pretty tough—the same way Shakespe...

An Irrepressible Bad Boy Webster opens the play with some very exposition-y exposition: we meet Count Lodovico, who's not even a super-major character, after he's been banished from Rome. He and hi...

The Duke is looking love, and so is Vittoria, while Flamineo is jonesin' for a step up in the world. These characters are all possessed by desire in one way or another—and that's exactly what wil...

"Act I" (actually Acts I and II) is about the initial schemes and dreams that ends up destroying everything for the main characters (which will happen in "Act III," which is actually Act IV and Act...

We don't know anything about John Webster, aside from extremely basic biographical info…but he might have been a coachmaker and an actor, in addition to being a playwright. Just maybe. (Source)In...

There's plenty of sexy dialogue in The White Devil—innuendoes and insinuations—and the whole thing is about adultery, in the first place. But there are no full-on X-rated sequences or simulated...

Democritus (1.1) Lodovico references the "gods" of the Greek philosopher Democritus. This might be an ironic joke—Democritus apparently didn't deny the gods (although he said they weren't immorta...