The White Devil

1. I was interested to notice that, of the many corpses which turn up over the course of The White Devil, the only body that remains somehow dangerous or threatening once inanimate is Isabella’s. During the first dumb show, she refuses assistance upon falling ill, presumably because she recognizes that she has been infected with potent poison. Shortly after, Giovanni’s lament to Francisco--
“They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead,
And would not let me kiss her”--
confirms that contact with her body is literally hazardous. On the most basic level, this is a dramatic turn meant to emphasize the disorder of a world that divides a son physically from the mother who once nursed him at her breast, but what are the further thematic implications of Isabella’s “taintedness” in death? And how can we view that type of contamination in light of the other sorts of contamination attributed to female characters in the play?

2. With the arrival of Camillo in I.2, the play seems to return us to the giddy world of the city comedy, populated by duped husbands and wily panders and structured by the rhythms of lusty conspiracy and bawdy jokes. Why might Webster have chosen to embrace/toy with the comedic conventions of his time so fully at the very start of this piece?