Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
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 sex in the play. As for the dialogue, it can be pretty overt—like, Flamineo asks, "…why should ladies blush to hear that named, which they do not fear to handle?" Yet, by modern standards, this is still kind of tame.
A lot of male characters rant about "whores" or "strumpets" at one point or another: Brachiano, Monticelso, Francisco, Flamineo, Marcello… That's not supposed to be "steamy", however—just bitter and misogynistic. Still, if someone is going to rant about promiscuous women so intensely and frequently, it stops seeming like PG-13 fun and games: it crosses over into R territory, if only for thematic, adult-content kind of reasons. Maybe that's a little lame, but it makes sense.