This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by insightful commentary notes, while its lively introduction explains why Webster's interests in complex female lead characters and questions of social tension related to sexuality, gender, race, and law and equity - unusual for the play's time - have led to its increasing relevance for modern audiences and readers. Exploring the challenges of staging this highly melodramatic play, Lara Bovilsky guides you through the most interesting points of its rich performance history, and explores the onslaught of recent productions with race-conscious and regendered casts. Analysing its masterful poetry, she shows how the work can be harnessed to engage debate about the abuse of political and religious authority, the troubling fruits of economic desperation, and personal freedom, and empowers you to do likewise. Supplemented by a plot summary, annotated bibliography, production images, and essential contextual grounding in the court scandals that inspired Webster's tragedy and Webster's unusual composition practices, this edition is the most enlightening and engaging you will find.

The White Devil depicts the murderous results of an adulterous liaison against the backdrop of Renaissance Italy imagined as dominated by court and Papal intrigue, sorcery and poison, and families driven by ambition and revenge. This newly revised edition, edited by Lara Bovilsky, focuses on power, gender, race and law, and enables you to bring your own interpretation to the text.

About the Author
Lara Bovilsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon, USA. She is the author of Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (2008) and of articles published in ELH, Renaissance Drama, and elsewhere that explore early modern English understandings of gender, sexuality, class, nation and race.


Book Information
ISBN 9781350059948
Author John Webster
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Methuen Drama
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Weight(grams) 186g