Webster's Tragedies

    The story is loosely based on an event in Italy thirty years prior to the play's composition: the murder of Vittoria Accoramboni in Padua on 22 December 1585.Webster based The White Devil on newsletter versions of the story of the killing of Vittoria Accoramboni. Such recollections detailed how Vittoria, of a proud but poor family.

    Webster's dramatisation of this event turned Italian corruption into a vehicle for depicting "the political and moral state of England in his own day",particularly the corruption in the royal court.

    The play explores the differences between the reality of people and the way they depict themselves as good, "white", or pure.