Gender, Rhetoric and Performance in The White Devil

Abstract

John Webster’s The White Devil has long provoked anxiety among its critics. The arraignment scene, in which Vittoria defends herself magnificently against charges of murder and adultery, has been widely celebrated as ‘one of the great moments of the English stage’.¹ Yet unlike Desdemona in Othello or Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, Vittoria is clearly implicated in the crimes of which she is accused. Her response to Bracciano’s importunities has not in fact been ‘frosty’ (III.ii.202), as she claims it has; indeed, she has eschewed the ‘loathed cruelty’ (I.ii.209) of the Petrarchan mistress by embracing her lover openly in the first Act (I.ii. 213). And, while her agency is never entirely clear, she goes on to recount a dream in which (at least according to Flamineo) she instructs Bracciano to ‘make away his Duchess and her husband’ (I.ii.256). Male villain-heroes may not be uncommon in Jacobean tragedy (viz. Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy), but female figures such as Vittoria who arouse admiration and reprehension are rare indeed. In most early modern drama, as Bracciano puts it, ‘Woman to man / Is either a god or a wolf’ (IV.ii.89–90). Critics therefore continue to dispute the meaning of Vittoria’s performance in the trial scene.