The White Devil

This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by insightful commentary notes, while its lively introduction provides an essential contextual grounding in the court scandals, anti-Catholic sentiment and Senecan drama that formed a backdrop to Webster's tragedy. Exploring the challenges of staging this highly melodramatic play, Lara Bovilsky guides you through the most interesting points of its rich performance history, and analyses 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 in contemporary social debates about privacy, torture, surveillance, and personal freedom, and empowers you to do likewise.

Supplemented by a plot summary, annotated bibliography and a companion website providing thought-provoking podcasts, production images, useful web links and sample questions and essay ideas, this edition is the most enlightening and engaging you will find.

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.