Theatrical Colours: Cosmetics, Rhetoric and Theatre in Webster’s The White Devil

Abstract

The paradoxical title of John Webster’s play The White Devil has often led to attempts to identify one of the characters with the titular devil. This paper argues that the difficulties of identification lie not only in the apparent paradox of the association of “white” with “devil”, but also in the changing role of colour in the Jacobean era. This change was marked by the development of painting techniques as well as by the attacks on cosmetics and the “false colouring” (Quintilianus 8, 3, 7) of rhetoric prevalent during this period. Because it combined optical and rhetorical colour, the stage therefore came to be a particularly contentious institution at which similar arguments were often levelled.Through an examination of the three major female characters in The White Devil, Isabella, Zanche and Vittoria, this paper illustrates the way in which these attacks are defused and become the objects of the author’s irony. As females, these characters have a unique relationship with colour because their (alleged) use of cosmetics and thus the authenticity of their skin colour ultimately determines their standing within society. Traditionally, these three characters have been respectively regarded as representatives of a fair Petrarchan heroine, of a black villain inside and out and of a woman occupying a literal grey area. However, this analysis illustrates how powerful a tool these characters’ use of colour in terms of cosmetics, rhetoric and theatre proves to be in determining their roles. Thus, the division into clear-cut colour categories is dissolved which also serves to repudiate the allegations against “artificial colouring” and the theatre, since none of the parties at work in the play emerges as untinged.