Reading the White Devil in Thomas Adams and John Webster

Abstract

Standing in the pulpit at Paul’s Cross on 7 March 1613, looking down on the Londoners below, Thomas Adams declared himself ‘haunted’ by the white devil.1 No doubt Adams was primarily referring to the ‘inflammations and impostumes’ of hypocrisy which, he claimed, assailed him as he entered London from the country (Adams, 1615a, 25). But it seems likely that Adams’s sermon was also being haunted by another more specific white devil. Less than a year before Adams mounted the pulpit to preach the sermon entitled The White Devil, the London public had, in the winter of 1612, been exposed to a play bearing precisely the same title, John Webster’s The White Devil. The white devil was originally of biblical origin, derived by Luther from 2 Corinthians 11:14 (‘And no marvaile: for Satan himselfe is transformed into an Angel of light’) in his Commentary on Galatians (1535). But like many such biblically derived images it was not long before it broke free of the limited arena of biblical exegesis and by the time Adams was preaching his sermon in 1613 the white devil had become a highly popular, even commonplace, image for hypocrisy. The appearance in one year of two White Devils in such strikingly different contexts does, however, make the mobility of the image peculiarly visible.