The White Devil

The White Devil
Title page of the 1612 edition of The White Devil
Written by	John Webster
Date premiered	1612
Place premiered	Red Bull Theatre, Clerkenwell
Original language	English
Genre	revenge tragedy
Setting	Padua and Rome, Italy, 1585

The White Devil is a revenge tragedy by English playwright John Webster (1580–1634). According to Webster's own preface to the 1612 Quarto Edition, "To the Reader", the play's first performance in that year was a notorious failure; he complained that the play was acted in the dead of winter before an unreceptive audience. The play's complexity, sophistication, and satire made it a poor fit with the repertory of Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre, where it was first performed. It was successfully revived in 1630 by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre and published again in 1631.

In 1707 Nahum Tate published an adaptation of Webster's play titled Injured Love which was not performed.

The story is loosely based on an event in Italy thirty years prior to the play's composition: the murder of Vittoria Accoramboni in Padua on 22 December 1585. Webster's dramatisation of this event turned Italian corruption into a vehicle for depicting "the political and moral state of England in his own day", particularly the corruption in the royal court.

The play explores the differences between the reality of people and the way they depict themselves as good, "white", or pure.

Webster based The White Devil on newsletter versions of the story of the killing of Vittoria Accoramboni. Such recollections detailed how Vittoria, of a proud but poor family, married the nephew of Cardinal Motalto. In 1580, she met Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, previously married to Isabella Medici of the famous Medici family.

Upon meeting Vittoria, the Duke fell desperately in love with her and arranged for the Cardinal's nephew to be killed in order that he might secretly marry Vittoria. Pope Gregory soon found out and ordered Vittoria and the Duke to part and even resorted to having Vittoria imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo under the suspicion of having killed her husband.

In 1585 a new pope was elected and amid the confusion of change Vittoria and Bracciano married and left Rome. In the play the Pope is misnamed Paul IV (he was Sixtus V, Paul IV having died in 1559). Eight months later the Duke died and the Medici family, wishing to protect their family interests, challenged his will, which placed Vittoria to be in charge of his fortune. When Vittoria refused to co-operate, the Medicis arranged for her to be killed. She was stabbed to death in Padua by Ludovico Orsini.