It has been customary to classify Webster's two Italian tragedies as revenge plays. Certainly they possess many of the expected features—smouldering hatreds, intricate stratagems that recoil upon their inventors, sensational cruelty, courtly depravity, madness (real, feigned, or both), a tone of cynical bitterness and gloom, and, perhaps most importantly, an obsession with mortality. T. S. Eliot [in his poem "Whispers of Immortality"] evokes our popular image of Webster as a dramatist who "was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin." But both plays are equally tragedies of love, plays about romantic passion struggling to create and maintain its world of emotional intensity and sexual fulfillment in the face of hypocrisy, malice, brutality, and Machiavellian power. Webster's special contribution to the development of tragic form was a unique intermingling of conventions from tragedies such as Marlowe's Dido and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with those from the school of Kyd, plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, and The Revenger's Tragedy. The amalgam produced a hybrid genre that not only allowed love to be pitted against death in the most violent and terrifying fashion but could be made to promote unsettling doubts about the validity and safety of romantic emotion itself. Among the multiplying horrors of The White Devil one incident summarizes with cauterizing irony Webster's yoking of the two traditions: Lodovico and his fellow assassins strangle the most egregious romantic of the drama on his wedding day with "a true-love knot / Sent from the Duke of Florence". Such grotesque juxtaposition together with the suffering it implies is the very stuff of which Webster's first great tragedy is made.

The deliberate mixing of forms imparts to The White Devil a disorienting sense of fragmentation and uncertainty, a feeling that experience is puzzlingly discontinuous, its perspectives wrenched and shifting, its values unstable and self-canceling. Webster can therefore present the love between Bracciano and Vittoria as both a heroic passion and a sordid coupling of an ambitious "strumpet" with her lustful victim. One of the many patterns in the play allows us to regard the lovers as criminal descendants of Antony and Cleopatra—he a glamorous prince (unlike his gross original in history), a man of "able hand," "High gifts," and "prime age" who "Neglect[s]" his "awful throne" for "the soft down / Of an insatiate bed"; she a "famous Venetian Curtizan," outbraving "the stars with several kind of lights, / When she did counterfeit a prince's court", and seasoning her "beauty," "merry heart," and "good stomach to a feast" with "a most prodigious spirit". Like Cleopatra, Vittoria is the fatal siren for whom her renowned lover is content to sacrifice his honor and risk his life. As Cyrus Hoy [in his essay "Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time", 1976] has pointed out, both dramas present the death of the male lover first, reserving the heroine's tragedy for an even greater climax later. It is even possible to see a rough analogy to Shakespeare's play in the treatment of supporting characters: Isabella, the insipid, "phlegmatic" wife, recalls Antony's "dull Octavia"; Flamineo, the self-appointed satirist, functions in some respects like Enobarbus, resolved upon detachment but drawn progressively into the tragic world upon which he comments; and the glacial Francisco, supreme master of power politics, has obvious affinities with Octavius Caesar. For instance, Webster's Medici duke, like Shakespeare's Roman emperor, would subject his defeated enemy to ceremonial mockery if he could. Even Flamineo's pretended death, the seriocomic trick by which the brother tries to gain the upper hand over his sister, may owe something to Cleopatra's similar means of attempting to dominate Antony. In both plays the feigned deaths lead directly to the actual deaths of both deceived and deceivers.

But to mention Antony and Cleopatra and The White Devil in the same paragraph is instantly to call attention to differences more profound than any of the superficial resemblances. Webster not only shows passion ranged against politics, he shows it imbedded in a world of violent crime, terror, and madness. By invoking the Machiavellian deceptions, intrigues, and terrors of the revenge play, Webster darkens his effect more nihilistically than even the most skeptical of Shakespeare's dramas, let alone the Roman tragedy from which terror is virtually absent. A glance at the final scene of each play makes the point unmistakable. Whereas Cleopatra rises to a Liebestod of luxurious and transcendental serenity in a scene that converts suicide into art and creates its own supreme sense of wholeness, harmony, and radiance, Webster's corresponding scene almost disintegrates in a clutter of frenzied maneuverings and posturings, of shocking reversals, coups de theatre, and violent intrusions on a stage red with carnage and black with existential angst. If Shakespeare's characteristic image of love transmuted into death is the asp cuddled like a baby at Cleopatra's breast, Webster's is a "matachin" of thugs in monkish garb who trap and butcher the defenseless as they might "some sucking infant".

By building their relationship upon open defiance of the savage world that closes upon them, by tearing their pleasures with rough strife from the very jaws of death, Vittoria and Bracciano acquire a certain stature denied their persecutors. His amorous rhetoric is desperate, permeated with the imagery of doom, and it bespeaks a completeness of involvement that all but isolates him emotionally from everyone but Vittoria. When we first meet the duke, he is "Quite lost" in his infatuation, and Webster echoes this portentous quibble at three moments of high intensity. Approaching Vittoria a little later Bracciano begs,

Let me into your bosom happy lady,
Pour out instead of eloquence my vows,—
Loose me not madam, for if you forego me
I am lost eternally.
(I.ii.205-208)

And when his love affair has brought him at last to a lingering death and the contemplation of what "horror waits on princes," his condition provokes Vittoria's desolate cry, "I am lost for ever". Finally, as she faces her own death at the hands of Lodovico, she exclaims once more, "O we are lost".

A residue of courtly love is perceptible in this corrupt relationship. She "is wondrous proud / To be the agent for so high a spirit," and he is "happy above thought" in being happy '"bove merit" of such a lady. Bracciano is transfixed, consumed by his passion in the manner of a Petrarchan lover or of Othello greeting Desdemona on Cyprus:

I could wish time would stand still
And never end this interview, this hour,
But all delight doth itself soon'st devour.
(I.ii.202-204)

And, when Vittoria yields to him, he responds in the vocabulary of the sonneteer:

Excellent creature.
We call the cruel fair, what name for you
That are so merciful?
(I.ii.212-214)

Quickly she becomes the Summum-bonum of his existence, a source of joy who makes reputation, family, affairs of state, and morality itself inconsiderable:

I'll seat you above law and above scandal,
Give to your thoughts the invention of delight
And the fruition,—nor shall government
Divide me from you longer than a care
To keep you great: you shall to me at once
Be dukedom, health, wife, children, friends and all.
(I.ii.263-268)

Bracciano's commitment is obviously blind, rash, and self-destructive; when Francisco and Monticelso urge him to abandon his "lascivious" attachment, he braves the man who will destroy him like a "lion" roaring at a fox and heedless of the peril he is courting. His words are full of unconscious irony:

were she a whore of mine
All thy loud cannons, and thy borrowed Switzers,
Thy galleys, nor thy sworn confederates,
Durst not supplant her.

…..

'Twere good you'd show your slaves or men condemn'd
Your new-plough'd forehead—Defiance!—and I'll meet thee,
Even in a thicket of thy ablest men.
(II.i.60-70)

A violent quarrel with Vittoria, like a similar quarrel between Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's play, only strengthens her magnetic power over him: "Once to be jealous of thee is t'express / That I will love thee everlastingly …". He can still call her his "dearest happiness", speak of her "matchless eyes" as having the brightness to "put out" his, and then crown the reconciliation by offering her "a duchess' title". Even the hostile cardinal acknowledges the posture of chivalric romance by referring to Bracciano as Vittoria's "champion".

Participating fully in the treachery and evil of a world in which assassination is an art, Webster's lovers seem to fuel their passion for each other through acts of physical and verbal aggression. In her first close interview with Bracciano, Vittoria teaches him "in a dream / To make away his duchess and her husband". Then we do not see the couple in conversation again until their individual qualities of assertiveness and egoism have been separately revealed. Not content merely with having Isabella killed, Bracciano must villify his spouse, reject her from his bed, and curse both their offspring and "the priest / That sang the wedding mass". As for Vittoria, she displays her fiery and "brave spirit" in the celebrated scene of her arraignment, overriding the question of guilt by sheer force of personality, by turning a diamond hardness to the "glassen hammers" of her accusers. Not once does Webster allow the lovers to be completely private onstage, and even in the relatively more intimate scenes he stresses the courageous inviolability of their separate identities. Their quarrel dramatizes a complex relationship of oneness and otherness. Bracciano may attack his lady for apparent disloyalty:

Away.
We'll be as differing as two adamants;
The one shall shun the other. What? dost weep?

Procure but ten of thy dissembling trade,
Ye'd furnish all the Irish funerals
With howling, past wild Irish.
(IV.ii.92-97)

But she can respond with a grotesque metaphor that shows how much he has already become a part of her even as she asserts her willingness to be rid of him:

Go, go brag
How many ladies you have undone, like me.
Fare you well sir; let me hear no more of you.
I had a limb corrupted to an ulcer,
But I have cut it off: and now I'll go
Weeping to heaven on crutches.
(IV.ii.118-123).

A moment later he has "drunk Lethe" while she "weep[s] poniards"; as he tries to kiss her (at this point she "throws herself upon a bed"), she speaks of biting off her lip rather than give it to him. The scene is meant to show internal stress, to illustrate a volatile romance in which repulsion and attraction are the two faces of a single coin. Bracciano's first greeting, "Your best of rest," together with her response, "The best of welcome", could scarcely begin matters more ironically.

Vittoria is both the cause of Bracciano's destruction and his only reason for survival. Jealousy makes him recriminate:

Your beauty! O, ten thousand curses on't.
How long have I beheld the devil in crystal?
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice,
With music, and with fatal yokes of flowers
To my eternal ruin. Woman to man
Is either a god or a wolf.
(IV.ii.87-92)

But, when death by poison threatens a more permanent separation, he banishes his son from his side and wants only her:

Then in his final suffering he vacillates between guilty alienation from Vittoria and terrified need of her. In his feverish distraction he even fails to recognize her: "what's she? … Ha, ha, ha. Her hair is sprinkled with arras powder, that makes her look as if she had sinn'd in the pastry". But a dreadful clarity of vision returns when his torturers remind him that he will "stink / Like a dead fly-blown dog" and "be forgotten / Before [his] funeral sermon"; his final cry of desperation is directed not to God but to his fatal partner: "Vittoria? Vittoria!".

Clearly in The White Devil Webster draws upon the traditions of fatal eroticism that had informed the romantic tragedies of Shakespeare and others, but he uses them in such a way as to invoke the terrors of annihilation and despair, not transcendent reunion. Shakespeare's tragic lovers usually reach a point of wishing to sacrifice themselves for each other. Bracciano and Vittoria may be said in some subliminal way to race headlong toward the grave, but, consciously, they resist its encroachments and struggle valiantly for life. Extreme unction can offer Bracciano no solace: "On pain of death, let no man name death to me, / It is a word infinitely terrible,—". Vittoria can make a show of willingness to embrace suicide:

I am now resolv'd,—farewell affliction;
Behold Bracciano, I that while you liv'd
Did make a flaming altar of my heart
To sacrifice unto you; now am ready
To sacrifice heart and all. Farewell Zanche.
(V.vi.82-86)

But this is only a trick to prevent her brother from murdering her. Vittoria uses every wile, every resource of her explosive energy to evade death, and, when doom is not to be cheated, magnificent courage is her only mainstay. She has something of Cleopatra's regal composure, but, unlike Cleopatra, she has no thought of joining her lover. She fails even to mention him.

The famous concluding lines of this passage play a dark and laconic variation on the familiar Petrarchan ship conceit in which the frustrated lover, after a stormtossed interval, arrives ultimately at his haven. Perhaps Webster remembered Bel-Imperia's conventionally extended lines to Horatio in The Spanish Tragedy:

My heart, sweet friend, is like a ship at sea:
She wisheth port, where riding all at ease,
She may repair what stormy times have worn,
And leaving on the shore, may sing with joy
That pleasure follows pain, and bliss annoy.
Possession of thy love is th' only port
Wherein my heart, with fears and hopes long toss'd,
Each hour doth wish and long to make resort,
There to repair the joys that it hath lost,
And sitting safe, to sing in Cupid's quire
That sweetest bliss is crown of love's desire.
(II.ii.7-17)

As presented by Webster the psychological relationship of the lovers is rooted in contradiction. If their attraction to each other spells death for themselves and others, it also affirms their vitality, their quest for self-realization in a world dominated—indeed defined—by hypocrisy, cynicism, loveless marriage, sadism, self-hatred, and casual promiscuity. Both have a flair for theatrical bravado. Bracciano intrudes unbidden upon Vittoria's trial, spreading "a rich gown", since no chair has been provided, and then, as he sweeps out of the room, leaves it behind in a gesture of princely contempt for Monticelso. Meanwhile, Vittoria grandly despises the cardinal, publicly daring him to condemn her:

Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.
(III.ii.137-139)

Bracciano and his lady play not only to their enemies but to themselves in this scene, and each presumably glories in the other's virtuosity. But each also is self-centered, perhaps even warily concerned to protect himself first and the beloved second. Remaining silent throughout most of the hearing, the duke speaks up only once in Vittoria's behalf and then stalks out on a point of injured pride without waiting to learn her fate. Since we know him to be at least as guilty as she, this behavior can only trigger mixed reactions at best. As for the accused, she defends herself not only by displaying her "masculine virtue" but by disparaging Bracciano after he has left the court. Her simile implies that she has been no more than the passive and innocent occasion of his madness:

Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?
So may you blame some fair and crystal river
For that some melancholic distracted man
Hath drown'd himself in't.
(III.ii.203-206)

Vittoria waits until her lover is dying before she echoes his totality of commitment: "O my loved lord,—poisoned? … I am lost for ever". And the context is such that we cannot be entirely certain whether her cries convey desolation for the loss of her heart's desire or alarm for the loss of his husbandly protection and support.

Bracciano is capable of authentic concern for Vittoria: "Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee"; but a moment later her vocal grief repels and perhaps frightens him: "How miserable a thing it is to die / 'Mongst women howling!". While distracted he repulses her: "Away, you have abus'd me". Flamineo remarks on the "solitariness" that "is about dying princes", and, in fact, although she tries to comfort him, hoping that a crucifix "settles his wild spirits", Vittoria is not permitted to be present during her lord's final moments. The passionate relationship expires in a total breakdown of communication. A strong undertow of self-interest modifies the romanticism of both lovers, nor is it possible to exclude social ambition from Vittoria's tangle of motives, however "heavily" she may weep for Bracciano's death. After the duke's outburst of jealousy, she angrily refuses to continue as his mistress, but she leaves the way open for the status of duchess that is subsequently offered:

What dar'st thou do, that I not dare to suffer,
Excepting to be still thy whore? for that,
In the sea's bottom sooner thou shalt make
A bonfire.
(IV.ii.144-147)

The duke and his mistress risk much to live together, but they die separately, violently, in extremis, and the drama makes it clear that the forces of separation reside partly within. In the grotesque and terror-ridden universe the pair must inhabit (Vittoria justifiably calls it "hell"), grandeur and pettiness, devotion and selfishness, nobility and crime are somehow compatible. Darkened though their romance is by murder, lust, and arrogance, Webster nevertheless dramatizes it as the one existential experience through which two strong and lonely personalities may locate and preserve their integrities. The stoic postures and bitter denigrations of the tragedy are symptomatic of how far we have come from the Petrarchan formalism and Elizabethan exuberance of a play like Romeo and Juliet. Death defines the cost of love in both plays, but Shakespeare's lovers appear to transcend its boundaries spiritually, whereas Vittoria and Bracciano only expire with the courage of the trapped.

If the psychology of the lovers makes for ambivalence, the dramatic context in which their love is enmeshed complicates responses still further. In the commentary of other characters Webster gives us a persistent chorus of satirical deflation and hostile moralism. Generally speaking, this feeds our pessimism and discourages approval of the romantic values of the play, but it can also reflect negatively upon the detractors themselves, exposing their malice, their frustration, or their emotional and imaginative poverty. Flamineo arranges his sister's seduction with the voyeuristic relish of Shakespeare's Pandarus and the abrasive seaminess of Thersites. Within a minute of his first appearance Webster's go-between is busily puncturing Bracciano's "unwisely amorous" expectations. Like Iago defaming Othello, he sullies our image of Vittoria before her appearance onstage can correct the degrading cartoon: "what is't you doubt [i.e., fear]? her coyness? that's but the superficies of lust most women have; yet why should ladies blush to hear that nam'd, which they do not fear to handle? O they are politic, they know our desire is increas'd by the difficulty of enjoying; whereas satiety is a blunt, weary and drowsy passion …". When Vittoria does enter, Flamineo sneers (for the benefit of the duke as well as of Camillo) at those who take up idealizing or literary attitudes toward romance: "what an ignorant ass or flattering knave might he be counted, that should write sonnets to her eyes, or call her brow the snow of Ida, or ivory of Corinth, or compare her hair to the blackbird's bill, when 'tis liker the blackbird's feather. This is all: be wise, I will make you friends and you shall go to bed together …".

And Bracciano must prosecute his suit to Vittoria in the presence of no fewer than three disruptive commentators who distance audience reaction to the encounter and savagely undercut the exaltation that the duke feels. As the lovers exchange tokens of affection, Flamineo twists his master's earnest eroticism into the salaciousness of the brothel:

The Moorish Zanche is also onstage pruriently to study the "happy union" of her mistress with a nobleman: "See now they close". Lastly we have the ominous Cornelia, a figure of nemesis like Shakespeare's Queen Margaret and a harsh moralist like Richard Ill's mother, who eavesdrops on the lovers, predicts disaster, and curses her own progeny:

My fears are fall'n upon me, O my heart!
My son the pandar: now I find our house
Sinking to ruin. Earthquakes leave behind,
Where they have tyrannized, iron, or lead, or stone,
But—woe to ruin—violent lust leaves none.
(I.ii.216-220)

Woe to light hearts—they still forerun our fall.
(I.ii.269)

Throughout the tragedy Vittoria is repeatedly referred to as a "whore" or "strumpet"—not always by those with a vested interest in her disgrace. Monticelso's "perfect character" of the courtesan, his execration of "her black lust", is as much a comment on the cardinal's bitterness as on his defendant's morals, but Flamineo, called "pander" even by the romantic duke, does not hesitate to compare Vittoria to dogs that are tethered by day but "let loose at midnight" to "do most good or most mischief. When the lovers quarrel, Flamineo coarsely urges that his sister "be turn'd on her back" "as you take tortoises", and even Bracciano notes that "all the world speaks ill of [her]".

Such relentless disvaluing of the love between Orsini and Corombona creates a weary skepticism about the possibility of sexual or emotional happiness in the world of the play. The passionate love-hatred of a deeply flawed romance flames out against a background of unrelieved frustration, misery, and spiritual death in the other relationships. All of the institutions of a theoretically Christian society—family, palace, church, court of law—are seen to be in an advanced state of disintegration, honeycombed by viciousness, corruption, and hypocrisy. In this climate, those who seek to order or fulfill their lives through human bonds reap only cruelty and disaster. Symbolically, Bracciano himself invites his murderers to participate in his nuptial festivity, thus "invent[ing] his own ruin". It is equally significant that, in addition to the self-destructiveness, not one but a trio of revengers range their forces against the lovers, and that all three spread their nets of death in the name of love.

Francisco de Medici may feel a momentary pang for the murdered Isabella, but implacable commitment to the code of "honor" instantly replaces personal affection. He conjures up the image of his sister, not for love of a lost relative but to "fashion [his] revenge more seriously", spurred on by the visual aid. Hatred masquerades briefly as romance, and dissembled love, first for Vittoria, later for Zanche, becomes an instrument of policy and in fact the prelude to both women's destruction. In one case his object is only to sow dissension, in the other to gather intelligence. The poisoning that he commissions is carried out by assassins who ironically disguise themselves as "Franciscans", who torture their victim by pretending to administer the spiritual comforts of the Commendatio Animae, and then throttle him with a cord sent as by one great prince to another for a wedding present. The duke's own disguise as Mulinassar, an imposing Moorish soldier turned Christian, is emblematic of the barbarism that can present itself as "honourable service" and be welcomed enthusiastically by those it has come to ruin. The lethal danger that he embodies is masked by a public bearing that matches his handsome "personage" and betokens international sophistication in "state affairs" and "rudiments of war," a presence that combines "a stern bold look" with "a lofty phrase" and advertises his reputation of having been "chief / In many a bold design". That he shuns both flattery and self-praise, moralizing stoically on distinctions between a man's rank or appearance and his true merit, only intensifies the irony of his unique villainy.

Francisco is a kind of Vindice, cloaked for the final act as an Othello of sorts, but his most frightening attribute, lacking in both the Tourneur and Shakespeare figures, is detachment. He can relish the terror of Bracciano's "last gasp", but he is typically the looker-on, the apparently dispassionate observer of emotion. Affecting to be profoundly moved, he notes with almost scientific precision that grief has made Cornelia "a very old woman in two hours" and that Flamineo's visit to her will increase her tears. Even when physically present, he seems curiously removed from the action he initiates, and he leaves the stage entirely before the "glorious act" of Vittoria's stabbing and the general slaughter that accompanies it. As Gasparo reminds Vittoria, "Princes give rewards with their own hands, / But death or punishment by the hands of others". Webster presents the Florentine duke as the ultimate horror—the spirit of carefully nurtured hatred, inhumanly Machiavellian and bloodlessly disengaged, a sort of death's head who presides quietly, aloofly, efficiently, and invulnerably over the lives of virtually everyone in the play. The metaphor by which he commits himself to his sister's memory, "Believe me I am nothing but her grave", encapsulates an irony that defines the essence of Francisco.

Monticelso, the second great enemy of the lovers, makes a show of Christian virtue, officially condemning violence and pretending an inclination to "noble pity". But he reveals his true nature to Duke Francisco, whom he backs in everything until he achieves the papacy: "For my revenge I'd stake a brother's life, / That being wrong'd durst not avenge himself. He not only urges the duke to "Bear [his] wrongs conceal'd … till the time be ripe / For th' bloody audit, and the fatal gripe", but he also lends him in aid of their common purpose his famous "black book". This antithesis to a work of devotion is "a list of murderers, / Agents for any villainy". The cardinal feels even less emotion for Camillo than Francisco feels for Isabella. His nephew's death is no more than an excuse for vengeance against the lovers, and he contemptuously sends his kinsman on a wild goose chase (an expedition against pirates) for the purpose of emboldening the adulterers and so creating a situation by which their reputations may be more easily poisoned. After becoming pope the churchman seems to shift course, insisting to Francisco's subordinate that revenge is "damnable" and moralizing about those who "slide on blood". But the new piety jars ostentatiously with the cynical portrait built up thus far, and, in any case, the pontiff does nothing to dissuade the duke from murders that he knows are in prospect. Like Francisco, to whom he allies himself, Monticelso is essentially a figure of death. He is the official face of a church that can excommunicate Vittoria and Bracciano but in which the aggrieved "ta[ke] the sacrament to prosecute" their "intended murder". If we could set aside the popularly antipapist response of a Jacobean audience, his ecclesiastical robes might suggest the law of love, but his actions disclose the power broker—a man absorbed by dissimulation, malice, and worldly ambition. It is hardly surprising that the penetrating Francisco refuses to trust him, and can so easily maneuver Lodovico into thinking that, privately, the new pope encourages revenge.

Count Lodovico, the henchman of Francisco and the executioner, so to say, of both Bracciano and Vittoria, also cites love as the pretext for his vengeance. In an almost parodic inversion of the rite of penance, he confesses his motive to the pope:

Sir I did love Bracciano's duchess dearly;
Or rather I pursued her with hot lust,
Though she ne'er knew on't. She was poison'd;
Upon my soul she was: for which I have sworn
T'avenge her murder.
(IV.iii.111-115)

But unrequited passion is but the peg upon which an embittered failure can hang his multiple frustrations and discontents. Lodovico's grief for the lady's death is objectively represented in dumbshow, and the conjurer tells Bracciano that the count "did most passionately dote / Upon [his] duchess"; but everything that Lodovico says or does in the play confirms our impression of an unloving and unlovable solitary, a twisted outcast and sadist. His threat to "make Italian cutworks" in the "guts" of his enemies and his scream against Vittoria, the "damnable whore" with whose blood he could "water a mandrake", typify his emotional imbalance. And his enraged "Banish'd?" not only opens the play on a note of personal violence and alienation; it also symbolizes a class—indeed, a whole society—that is fragmenting explosively. Deported for murder, profligacy, and debt—for having "in three years / Ruin'd the noblest earldom", Lodovico turns pirate and ends humiliatingly as a courtly beggar and hired thug. He seems a composite of the "notorious offenders" in Monticelso's "general catalogue of knaves", for indeed most of the categories mentioned ("intelligencers," "pirates," "politic bankrupts," "murderers") apply literally to him.

Associated from the beginning with images of disruption (thunder, earthquakes, meteors, vomiting, butchery), Lodovico justifies the pope's designation of him as "a foul black cloud" threatening "A violent storm". It is therefore richly ironic that this embodiment of chaos—emotional, moral, and civic—should specialize in the aesthetics of revenge. A connoisseur of the poisoner's art who especially favors prayer books, beads, saddles, looking-glasses, and tennis-rackets, he would have his plots "be ingenious" and "hereafter recorded for example". Though he has been forced to become the duke's creature and is deceived into thinking he is also the pope's, his dying words are an assertion of psychic independence and a brag about his artistry as a revenger:

I do glory yet,
That I can call this act mine own:—for my part,
The rack, the gallows, and the torturing wheel
Shall be but sound sleeps to me,—here's my rest—
I limb'd this night-piece and it was my best.
(V. vi. 293-297)

Lodovico is the third person of a mortal trinity that hunts the lovers to their gruesome deaths. Like Francisco and Monticelso, he may believe that he acts out of love for a deceased person, but the only face Webster shows us is the one his victims must confront—a face of pitiless hatred and death.

The revengers of The White Devil pretend to authorize or condone their savagery in retribution for injuries to love; but the marriages that Bracciano and Vittoria adulterously destroy are both presented as sterile relationships, emotionally arid and sexually incomplete. Webster portrays Vittoria's first husband as little better than the brainless wittol of city comedy, a deliberate caricature from whom sympathy is withheld. It is instantly clear that his wife is no more to him than a possession who might, if she were more favorably disposed, satisfy the "itch in's hams". Camillo, in truth, is a parcel of foolishness whose principal dramatic function is to serve as target for Flamineo's scarifying satire. Obsessive jealousy is the most salient trait, but he is also stupid, gullible, ugly, impotent, venereally infected, and a parvenu. Flamineo's characterizations of his brother-in-law are merciless, and, as they accrete, form a portrait of Overburian grotesquerie: "The great barriers moulted not more feathers than he hath shed hairs … " ; he is "So unable to please a woman that like a Dutch doublet all his back is shrunk into his breeches"; "this fellow by his apparel / Some men would judge a politician, / But call his wit in question you shall find it / Merely an ass in's foot-cloth"; he is "a lousy slave that within this twenty years rode with the black guard in the duke's carriage 'mongst spits and dripping-pans"; he "hath a head fill'd with calves' brains without any sage in them"; "when he wears white satin one would take him by his black muzzle to be no other creature than a maggot". It is hardly surprising that Camillo cannot "well remember … When [he] last lay with" his wife and that, when they did lie together, there always "grew a flaw between [them]".

It is also not surprising that a woman of beauty, passion, and intelligence such as Vittoria should find her "capon" husband so contemptible beside the romantic duke; she readily tolerates her brother's verbal abuse of Camillo, and, when Flamineo is arranging the meeting with Bracciano, her only concern is how to "rid [her spouse] hence". Nor is the comic victim capable even of suffering. Having accepted a military assignment that will separate him from Vittoria, he can shrug off the fear of "stag's horns" with a joke about selling "all she hath" and a resolve "to be drunk this night". Camillo is a foil to Bracciano, a parody of sexual desire, a burlesque of jealousy, and a travesty of death by violence. Flamineo pretends to work the reconciliation of the foolish husband with Vittoria ("I will make you friends and you shall go to bed together …") by words and actions that actively promote the duke's cuckolding of him; then he murders him at the behest of the adulterers by pitching Camillo "upon his neck" when he leaps over "a vaulting horse"—a form of exercise often facetiously associated with sexual conquest. Camillo's love-death, a significant departure from the death by shooting that the historical Peretti suffered, is a tragicomic extension of his impotent frustration in life and a grim comment, made grimmer by the objective detachment of the dumbshow, on the hollowness of his relationship with Vittoria.

Bracciano's marriage is seen to be as unfulfilled and death-oriented as Vittoria's, a point that Francisco acknowledges by implication when he reproaches his brother-in-law so bitterly for his unfaithfulness to Isabella:

Thou hast a wife, our sister,—would I had given
Both her white hands to death, bound and lock'd fast
In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee
But one.
(II.i.64-67)

The lusty Orsini is not only bored with his "phlegmatic" wife but openly and brutally hostile to her. When she arrives unexpectedly in Rome after a separation of two months, he taxes her with jealousy, refuses to kiss her on the lips, and puts the worst construction upon her movements:

O dissemblance!
Do you bandy factions 'gainst me? have you learnt
The trick of impudent baseness to complain
Unto your kindred? …
Must I be haunted out, or was't your trick
To meet some amorous gallant here in Rome
That must supply our discontinuance?
(II.i.171-177)

Riding rough shod over her protestations of affection, he rejects her in the cruelest and most absolute terms, literally unsaying his nuptial promises:

Your hand I'll kiss,—
This is the latest ceremony of my love,
Henceforth I'll never lie with thee, by this,
This wedding-ring: I'll ne'er more lie with thee.
And this divorce shall be as truly kept,
As if the judge had doom'd it: fare you well,
Our sleeps are sever'd.

…..

Let not thy love
Make thee an unbeliever,—this my vow
Shall never, on my soul, be satisfied
With my repentance: let thy brother rage
Beyond a horrid tempest or sea-fight,
My vow is fixed.
(II.i.192-205)

Under this fusillade, Isabella can scarcely fail to come off as a figure of pathos, and, indeed, looked at simply, she impresses us as the martyred wife, a saintly woman who absorbs injury from her husband like a sponge, selflessly pardoning when pardon is not asked and praying for her wronger. At first appearance we see her urging Francisco to deal mildly with her husband, and almost everything she says from this point onward contributes to a general impression of purity, devotion, meekness, and Christian charity. But such unalloyed virtue in the jaundiced context of the play seems cloying and disconcertingly out of key. The posture of self-sacrifice becomes especially saccharine when Isabella goes so far as to feign a jealousy she has denied and to claim to have authored a divorce that she regards as the prelude to her death—both charades undertaken for the purpose of muting Francisco's wrath toward a man who accepts her gestures without gratitude. There is a touch of the self-deceiver as well as of the manipulator in Isabella, and she is less passive than she appears. Webster implies that she has indeed complained of Bracciano to her brother despite her disclaimer, for why else travel to the Medici palace without telling her husband? And she is determined, if she can, to control rather than be controlled by her wayward spouse:

these arms
Shall charm his poison, force it to obeying
And keep him chaste from an infected straying.
(II.i.16-18; italics added)

Moreover, her performance as the jealous woman, echoing, as it does, Bracciano's callous rhetoric of divorcement, is anything but halfhearted. Her words have a hyperbolical intensity about them that suggests a measure of genuine feeling. Francisco wonders indeed whether she has "turn'd Fury":

Are all these ruins of my former beauty
Laid out for a whore's triumph?

…..

O that I were a man, or that I had power
To execute my apprehended wishes,
I would whip some with scorpions.

…..

To dig the strumpet's eyes out, let her lie
Some twenty months a-dying, to cut off
Her nose and lips, pull out her rotten teeth,
Preserve her flesh like mummia, for trophies
Of my just anger: hell to my affliction
Is mere snow-water: by your favour sir,—
Brother draw near, and my lord cardinal,—
Sir let me borrow of you but one kiss,
Henceforth I'll never lie with you, by this,
This wedding-ring.

…..

And this divorce shall be as truly kept,
As if in thronged court, a thousand ears
Had heard it, and a thousand lawyers' hands
Seal'd to the separation.

…..

Let not my former dotage
Make thee an unbeliever,—this is my vow
Shall never, on my soul, be satisfied
With my repentance,—manet aha mente reposturn.
(II.i.238-263)

Isabella's assumed role permits her, whether consciously or not, to release aggressions and compensate frustrations in a way that does violence to her self-image as the patient sufferer. It would be an overstatement to insist that she should be played as a hypocrite, but Webster (as so often) deliberately blurs the distinction between the mask and the face behind it so that a certain skepticism about her motives necessarily modifies our response. We might perhaps invoke Friar Laurence's precept, "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied …" (Romeo and Juliet, II.iii.2I). As the pliable Camillo is foil to Bracciano, so the ostensibly supine Isabella is foil to Vittoria, but both women are actresses and both love the same man tenaciously, only to gain separation, suffering, and death as their ultimate guerdon. Isabella's love-death, in neat parallel with Camillo's, is a mute emblem of frustration and logically consistent with her wretched life. Again the irony of the dumbshow is pointed. The stifler of his wife's love "suffocate[s] her spirits" through the agency of Dr. Julio, and the lady, having tried to "charm his poison" by returning love for hate, dies kissing a poisoned portrait: she "feed[s] her eyes and lips / On the dead shadow" of her murderer.

Apart from "romances" that on the male side are merely instruments of Machiavellian policy (Francisco's feigned attraction to both Vittoria and Zanche), the only erotic relationship of the play yet to be examined is that between Flamineo and his sister's Moorish servant. Webster makes this a scabrous, quasi-satiric illustration of the selfishness, fickleness, and cynicism that corrupt sexual mores in the tragedy as a whole. If Vittoria is conceived as the "white devil" of the title, Zanche complements her as a more obvious and less dignified figure of female depravity—the "black Fury" whose face matches "the black deed" of double murder in which—unlike her mistress—she confesses having "had a hand". Although the color symbolism is more ethical than racial, it has the effect (as in the case of Aaron in Titus Andronicus) of darkening the sexual ambience of the play almost hellishly. The language of diabolism is repeatedly invoked for Zanche: she is "that witch" or "the infernal, that would make up sport", and, when Marcello tries to shame his brother into casting off the "devil" that "haunt[s]" him, Flamineo jests bawdily that the "cunning" required "To raise the devil" in female shape is less than that required "to lay him down" in a man's codpiece.

Zanche is both lecher and opportunist. She "claims marriage" of Flamineo but quickly abandons him for Mulinassar, "a goodly person" of her own race (as she believes) and of greater worldly importance. Her sexual gravitation from a lesser to the master villain of the tragedy is not without irony, for in this action, of course, she literally courts her own death. Again Webster underlines the concept of emotional engagement as a trap, as a dangerous exposure of what is most vulnerable in the self. Her declaration to the disguised duke, "Lovers die inward that their flames conceal", brings her into direct contact with her nemesis. In furtherance of this new attachment, she is ready not merely to rob Vittoria of a large fortune but to betray both Flamineo and her by giving information about the murders. Yet she does die gamely beside her mistress with a loyalty that, in Webster, the imminence of death so often instills.

As for Flamineo, his involvement is a sour mingle of attraction and repulsion. He admits loving Zanche "very constrainedly," but he rightly fears her knowledge of his villainy: "I do love her, just as a man holds a wolf by the ears. But for fear of turning upon me, and pulling out my throat, I would let her go to the devil." He adds that, "in seeking to fly from" his "dark promise" of matrimony, he "run[s] on, like a frighted dog with a bottle at's tail, that fain would bite it off and yet dares not look behind him." Webster shows us a "love" that "rather cools than heats", a sexual experiment between a dyspeptic misogynist and a "gypsy" that degenerates fast into an intensity of loathing. Flamineo's irritable pride is such that it can prompt him to kill his younger brother for presuming to moralize and for daring to kick Zanche as "a strumpet"; yet he despises his sexual partner as much as Marcello does: "Lovers' oaths are like mariners' prayers, uttered in extremity; but when the tempest is o'er, and that the vessel leaves tumbling, they fall from protesting to drinking". The mock-tragic episode in which the couple pretend suicide exposes the relationship in all its egotistical ugliness and defines its futility. They exchange romantic endearments to deceive each other ("my best self Flamineo"; "O most loved Moor!"), but their machinations are the product of mistrust, fear, and desperate self-interest. By shooting Flamineo, Zanche thinks she is saving herself and sending him "To most assured damnation"; he in turn confirms his worst suspicions: "Trust a woman?—never, never; Bracciano be my precedent: we lay our souls to pawn to the devil for a little pleasure, and a woman makes the bill of sale. That ever man should marry!".

However limited or blinkered we may judge Flamineo to be, Webster forces us to grant a measure of assent to his pessimism, for there are no happy marriages in the play to confute him. Even such ambivalence as we are encouraged to feel about the love of Bracciano and Vittoria is negatively shaded by the anti-romantic penumbra that surrounds it. The White Devil dramatizes a world in which sustained and peaceful mutuality seems impossible and in which attraction between the sexes is indissolubly wedded to psychic disruption and violent death. And what is true of the sexual relationships is almost equally true of the nonsexual ones as well. As in King Lear, which seems to have influenced The White Devil philosophically as well as stylistically, love cools, brothers divide, and the bond is cracked betwixt parent and child.