The White Devil, along with Webster’s other great play The Duchess of Malfi, assures Webster of canonical status in Jacobean drama. The White Devil, however, has not always been well received by audiences and critics. Webster himself complained about the first staging of the play and its reception, blaming the weather, the venue, and the audience.

Nevertheless, the play continued to be performed throughout the seventeenth century with success. This was not the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when, Margaret Loftus Ranald notes in John Webster that there were no performances of the play at all.

The chaotic, bleak world of The White Devil appealed to audiences and critics alike in the twentieth century; over ten major productions were mounted, including one by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1996. Likewise, scholars who study the play have found much to write about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to Don D. Moore in his book John Webster and His Critics: 1617–1964, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis did much to bring Webster into the critical spotlight. Indeed, Moore writes, ‘‘Almost all of the important later Webster criticism owes something to their doctrines.’’ Specifically, Eliot looked to Webster for atmosphere, an atmosphere that found its way into Eliot’s famous work The Waste Land.

In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, new historicist (sometimes called cultural materialist) and feminist critics in particular have found much to occupy themselves in the text of The White Devil. Dympna Callaghan, for example, examines the way the white Vittoria and the black Zanche mirror each other. Further, she argues that ‘‘it is untamed sexual desire that leads to Vittoria’s imprisonment.’’

Others, such as Sheryl Stevenson and Laura Behling, are concerned with the importance of sexual difference in the play. Stevenson, writing in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, argues that it is through ‘‘their sudden accession to unrestrained language [that] these women are perceived by male characters as not simply unwomanly but inhuman.’’ Likewise, Behling, writing in an article for English Language Notes 33, demonstrates that Vittoria’s use of masculine language initiates an ‘‘anxiety of alternative sexualities.’’

Cultural materialist critic Jonathan Dollimore, in an alternative reading, examines the way that the power structure of a society both defines and destroys identity. He argues, ‘‘It is in the death scene that we see fully the play’s sense of how individuals can actually be constituted by the destructive social forces working upon them. . . . Vittoria and Flamineo refuse subservience even as they serve and in so doing are destroyed as much by their rebellion as that which they rebel against.’’

Although the text of The White Devil has not changed significantly since its first publication, the way critics view the play has changed dramatically, from a straightforward critique of the plot of the play, to a consideration of the violation of the unities, to finally a full consideration of the bleak and shifting world Webster creates for his characters. In this, critics use their own historical contexts to find meaning in The White Devil.