Chapter I: Front Matter

PLAYS BY WEBSTER & TOURNEUR

_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

UNEXPURGATED EDITION.

[THE MERMAID SERIES.]

LONDON:

_VIZETELLY & CO._, 16, _HENRIETTA STREET_,

COVENT GARDEN.

1888.

[Transcriber's Note: "The Revenger's Tragedy," attributed here to Cyril Tourneur, is now generally recognised as the work of Thomas Middleton.]

CONTENTS.

THE GLOBE THEATRE.

JOHN WEBSTER AND CYRIL TOURNEUR.

John Webster:

THE WHITE DEVIL.

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI.

Cyril Tourneur:

THE ATHEIST'S TRAGEDY.

THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY. [_Reattributed to Thomas Middleton._]

NOTES.

_THE GLOBE THEATRE._

The first Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, Southwark, "the summer
theatre of Shakespeare and his fellows," is believed to have been built
in 1594, partly of materials removed from the Theatre in Shoreditch,
"the earliest building erected in or near London purposely for scenic
exhibitions." Outside, the Globe was hexagonal in shape, and, like all
the theatres of that epoch, was open at the top, excepting the part
immediately over the stage, which was thatched with straw. The interior
of the theatre was circular. The performances took place by daylight,
and while they were going on a flag with the cross of St. George upon
it was unfurled from the roof. Originally, in place of scenery, the
names of the localities supposed to be represented were inscribed on
boards or hangings for the information of the audience. The sign of the
theatre was a figure of Hercules supporting the globe, beneath which
was written "Totus mundus agit Histrionem."

In 1601, the Globe Theatre was used as a place of meeting by the
conspirators engaged in Essex's rebellion, and next year Shakespeare's
_Hamlet_, following upon other of his plays, was here produced for the
first time. In subsequent years plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Ford,
and contemporary dramatists were performed at the Globe, until in 1613
the theatre was burnt to the ground owing to some lighted paper, thrown
from a piece of ordnance used in the performance, igniting the thatch.
The theatre was rebuilt in the following spring with a tiled roof, and
according to Howes's MS., quoted by Collier in his life of Shakespeare,
"at the great charge of King James and many noblemen and others." Ben
Jonson styled the new theatre "the glory of the Bank and the fort of
the whole parish."

The Globe Theatre was pulled down in 1644 by Sir Matthew Brand with the
view to tenements being erected upon its site, a portion of which at
the present day is occupied by Barclay and Perkins's brewery.

_JOHN WEBSTER AND CYRIL TOURNEUR._

Nothing is known about the lives of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur. We
are ignorant when they were born and when they died. We possess only
meagre hints of what contemporaries thought of them. One allusion to
Tourneur survives, which shows that he was not popular in his lifetime
as a dramatist:--

His fame unto that pitch so only raised
As not to be despised nor too much praised.

A superficial critic speaks of "crabbed Webster, the playwright,
cart-wright," and proceeds, at some length, to deride his laborious
style and obscurity. Commendatory verses by S. Sheppard, Th. Middleton,
W. Shirley, and John Ford prove, however, that Webster's tragedies won
the suffrage of the best judges. None such are printed with Tourneur's
plays.

Webster began to write for the stage as early as 1601. Between that
date and 1607 he worked upon Marston's _Malcontent_, and is supposed
to have collaborated with Dekker in the _History of Sir Th. Wyatt,
Northward Ho,_ and _Westward Ho_. Tourneur began his literary career
by a satire called _Transformed Metamorphosis_, in 1600, which was
followed in 1609 by a _Funeral Poem on the Death of Sir Francis Vere_.
Both he and Webster published Elegies in 1613 upon the death of Prince
Henry.

In this year he was employed upon some business for the Court, as
appears from this passage in the Revels Accounts (ed. Cunningham, p.
xliii.):

To Cyrill Turner, upon a warraunte signed by the Lord Chamberleyne
and Mr. Chauncellor, dated at Whitehall, 23rd December, 1613, for
his chardges and paines in carrying l'res for his Mats. service to
Brussells.... X li.

The amount of this payment renders it improbable that Tourneur's
mission was of any political or diplomatical importance.

We do not know when he commenced playwright; but _The Revenger's
Tragedy_ was licensed in 1607 and printed in the same year. _The
Atheist's Tragedy_ was printed in 1611; it had been written almost
certainly at some earlier period. Webster's _White Devil_ was printed
and probably produced in 1612; his _Duchess of Malfi_, produced perhaps
in 1616, was printed in 1623.

It is needful to dwell on the comparison of these dates, since they
give Tourneur the priority of authorship in a style of tragedy which
both poets cultivated with marked effect. Not to class them together
as the creators of a singular type of drama would be uncritical.
They elaborated similar motives, moved in the same atmosphere of
moral gloom, aimed at the like sententious apophthegms, affected the
same brevity and pungency, handled blank verse and prose on parallel
methods, and owed debts of much the same kind to Shakespeare. That
Webster was the greater writer, as he certainly possessed a finer cast
of mind, and surveyed a wider sphere of human nature in his work, will
be admitted. Yet it seems not impossible that he may have followed
Tourneur's lead in the peculiar form and tone of his two masterpieces.

Speaking broadly, the two best tragedies of Webster and the two
surviving tragedies of Tourneur constitute a distinct species of the
genus which has been termed Tragedy of Blood.[1] It was Kyd, in his
double drama called _The Spanish Tragedy_, who first gave definite
form to this type. Those two plays exhibit the main ingredients of
the Tragedy of Blood--a romantic story of crime and suffering, a
violent oppressor, a wronged man bent upon the execution of some
subtle vengeance, a ghost or two, a notorious villain working as the
tyrant's instrument, and a whole crop of murders, deaths, and suicides
to end the action. What use Shakespeare made of the type, and how he
glorified it in _Hamlet_, is well known. Both Tourneur and Webster,
writing after Shakespeare, had of necessity felt his influence, and
their handling of the species was modified by that of their great
master. Yet they reverted in many important particulars from the
Shakespearean method to Kyd's. The use they both made of the villain, a
personage which Shakespeare discarded, might be cited as distinctive.
Kyd described the villain in the character of his Lazarrotto thus:--

I have a lad in pickle of this stamp,
A melancholy, discontented courtier,
Whose famished jaws look like the chap of death;
Upon whose eyebrow hangs damnation;
Whose hands are washed in rape and murders bold;
Him with a golden bait will I allure,
For courtiers will do anything for gold.

The outlines sketched by Kyd were filled in with touches of diseased
perversity and crippled nobleness by Tourneur in his Vendice, and
were converted into full-length portraits of impressive sombreness by
Webster in his Flamineo and Bosola.

When we compare Tourneur with Webster as artists in the Tragedy of
Blood, the former is seen at once to stand upon a lower level. His
workmanship was rougher and less equal; his insight into nature less
humane, though hardly less incisive; his moral tone muddier and more
venomous; his draughtsmanship spasmodic and uncertain. Tourneur seems
to have invented his own plots; they have the air of being fabricated
after a recipe. This flaw--an apparent insincerity in the choice of
motives--corresponds to the more painful moral flaw which makes his
occasional good work like that of a remorseful and regretful fallen
angel. While we read his plays, the line of Persius rises to our lips:--

Virtutem videant intabescantque relictâ.

Webster, as man and artist, never descends to Tourneur's level. He
selects his two great subjects from Italian story, deriving thence
the pith and marrow of veracity. These subjects he treats carefully
and conscientiously, according to his own conception of the dreadful
depths in human nature revealed to us by sixteenth century Italy. He
does not use the vulgar machinery of revenge and ghosts in order to
evolve an action. In so far as this goes, he may even be said to have
advanced a step beyond _Hamlet_ in the evolution of the Tragedy of
Blood. His dramatic issues are worked out, without much alteration,
from the matter given in the two Italian tales he used. Only he claims
the right to view human fates and fortunes with despair, to paint a
broad black background for his figures, to detach them sharply in
sinister or pathetic relief, and to leave us at the last without a
prospect over hopeful things. "One great Charybdis swallows all," said
the Greek Simonides; and this motto might be chosen for the work of
Shakespeare's greatest pupil in the art of tragedy. Yet Webster never
fails to touch our hearts, and makes us remember a riper utterance upon
the piteousness of man's ephemeral existence:--

Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.

It is just this power of blending tenderness and pity with the
exhibition of acute moral anguish by which Webster is so superior to
Tourneur as a dramatist.

Both playwrights have this point in common, that their forte lies not
in the construction of plots, or in the creation of characters, so much
as in an acute sense for dramatic situations. Their plots are involved
and stippled in with slender touches; they lack breadth, and do not
rightly hang together. Their characters, though forcibly conceived,
tend to monotony, and move mechanically. But when it is needful to
develop a poignant, a passionate, or a delicate situation, Tourneur
and Webster show themselves to be masters of their art. They find
inevitable words, the right utterance, not indeed always for their
specific personages, but for generic humanity, under the _peine forte
et dure_ of intense emotional pressure. Webster, being the larger,
nobler, deeper in his touch on nature, offers a greater variety of
situations which reveal the struggles of the human soul with sin and
fate. He is also better able to sustain these situations at a high
dramatic pitch--as in the scene of Vittoria before her judges, and
the scene of the Duchess of Malfi's assassination. Still Tourneur can
display a few such moments by apocalyptic flashes--notably in the
scenes where Vendice deals with his mother and sister.

Both playwrights indulge the late Elizabethan predilection for
conceits. Webster, here as elsewhere, proves himself the finer
artist. He inserts Vittoria's dream, Antonio's dialogue with Echo,
Bosola's Masque of Madmen, accidentally and subserviently to action.
Tourneur enlarges needlessly, but with lurid rhetorical effect,
upon the grisly humours suggested by the skull of Vendice's dead
mistress. Using similar materials, the one asserts his claim to be
called the nobler poet by more steady observance of the Greek precept
"Nothing overmuch." Words to the same effect might be written about
their several employment of blank verse and prose. Both follow
Shakespeare's distribution of these forms, while both run verse into
prose as Shakespeare never did. Yet I think we may detect a subtler
discriminative quality in Webster's most chaotic periods than we can in
Tourneur's; and what upon this point deserves notice is that Webster,
of the two, alone shows lyrical faculty. His three dirges are of
exquisite melodic rhythm, in a rich low minor key; much of his blank
verse has the ring of music; and even his prose suggests the colour of
song by its cadence. This cannot be said of the sinister and arid Muse
of Tourneur. She wears no evergreens of singing, nay, no yew-boughs
even, on her forehead. Her dusky eyes sparkle with sharp metallic
scintillations, as when Castiza says to her mother:--

Come from that poisonous woman there.

_The Revenger's Tragedy_ is an entangled web of lust, incest,
fratricide, rape, adultery, mutual suspicion, hate, and bloodshed,
through which runs, like a thread of glittering copper, the vengeance
of a cynical plague-fretted spirit. Vendice emerges from the tainted
crew of Duke and Duchess, Lussurioso, Spurio and Junior, Ambitioso and
Supervacuo, with a kind of blasted splendour. They are curling and
engendering, a brood of flat-headed asps, in the slime of their filthy
appetites and gross ambitions. He treads and tramples, on them all. But
he bears on his own forehead the brands of Lucifer, the rebel, and of
Cain, the assassin. The social corruption which transformed them into
reptiles, has made him a fiend incarnate. Penetrated to the core with
evil, conscious of sin far more than they are, he towers above them
by his satanic force of purpose. Though ruined, as they are ruined,
and by like causes, he maintains the dignity of mind and of volition.
The right is on his side; the right of a tyrannicide, who has seen his
own mistress, his own father, the wife of his friend, done to death by
the brutalities of wanton princelings. But Tourneur did not choose to
gift Vendice with elevation of nature. In the strongest scene of the
play he showed this scorpion of revenge, stooping to feign a pander's
part, tempting his mother and his sister as none but a moral leper
could have done. In the minor scene of the duke's murder, he made
him malicious beyond the scope of human cruelty and outrage. It was
inherent apparently in this poet's conception of life that evil should
be proclaimed predominant. His cynicism stands self-revealed in the
sentence he puts into Antonio's mouth, condemning Vendice to death:--

You that would murder him would murder me.

Even justice, in his view, rests on egotism. And yet Tourneur has
endowed Vendice with redeeming qualities. The hero of this crooked play
is true to his ideal of duty, true to his sense of honour. He dies
contented because he has perfected his revenge, preserved his sister's
chastity, and converted his mother at the poniard's point. Where all
are so bad and base, Vendice appears by comparison sublime. If we are
to admire tone and keeping in a work of art, we certainly find it here;
for the moral gradations are relentlessly scaled within the key of sin
and pollution. The only character who stirs a pulse of sympathy is
vicious. Castiza is a mere lay figure, and her mother one of the most
repulsive personages of the Jacobean drama.

Webster presents a larger mass of dramatic work to the critic.
Beside the tragedies included in this volume, he wrote another
tragedy, _Appius and Virginia_, a tragi-comedy entitled _The Devil's
Law-case_, and is said to have had a share in the history-play of
_Sir Thomas Wyatt_, and in three comedies, _Northward Ho, Westward
Ho,_ and _A Cure for a Cuckold. The Devil's Law-case_ shows how
much this playwright depended on material supplied him, and how
little he could trust his own inventive faculty. It starts with an
involved plot of Italian deceit and contemplated crime, which Webster
develops in his careful but not very lucid manner. We feel that we
are working toward some sinister _dénouement_, when suddenly, by a
twist of the hand, a favourable turn is given to events, and the play
ends happily--violating probability, artistic tone, and the ethical
integrity of the chief character, Romelio. From _The Famous History
of Sir Thomas Wyatt_ in its present mangled and misshapen form it is
impossible to disengage Webster's handiwork with any certainty. The
same may be said about the brisk and well-wrought pieces _Northward Ho_
and _Westward Ho_. Yet I see no reason to dispute Webster's share in
these three plays. _A Cure for a Cuckold_[2] requires more particular
comment. This comedy was ascribed by the publisher Kirkman to John
Webster and William Rowley. But the ascription stands for absolutely
nothing, unless we can discover corroborative internal evidence of
Webster's collaboration. Such evidence I do not find, although there
is certainly nothing in the play to disprove Kirkman's assertions. It
should be added that a delicate little piece of serio-comic workmanship
lies embedded in the otherwise trashy _Cure for a Cuckold_. Mr. Edmund
Gosse early saw and twice pointed out how easily this play within the
play could be detached from the rest; and the Honourable S. E. Spring
Rice has recently printed, at Mr. Daniel's private press, a beautiful
edition of what, following Mr. Gosse's suggestion, he calls _Love's
Graduate_. I should like to believe that "piece of silver-work," as
Mr. Gosse has aptly called it, to be truly the creation of Webster,
"the sculptor whose other groups are all in bronze." Indeed, there
are no reasons why the belief should not be indulged, except that
Kirkman's ascription carries but a feather's weight, and that there is
nothing special in the style to warrant it. _Love's Graduate_, rescued
from _A Cure for a Cuckold_ by pious hands, is one of the unclaimed
masterpieces of this fruitful epoch.

The great length of Webster's two Italian tragedies rendered it
impossible to print _Appius and Virginia_ in this volume. That is much
to be regretted; for without a study of his Roman play, justice can
hardly be done to the scope and breadth of Webster's genius. Of _Appius
and Virginia_ Mr. Dyce observed with excellent judgment: "this drama
is so remarkable for its simplicity, its deep pathos, its unobtrusive
beauties, its singleness of plot, and the easy, unimpeded march of
its story, that perhaps there are readers who will prefer it to any
other of our author's productions." Webster, who was a Latin scholar,
probably studied the fable in Livy; but its outlines were familiar to
English people through Painter's "Palace of Pleasure." He has drawn
the mutinous camp before Algidum, the discontented city ruled by a
licentious noble, the stern virtues of Icilius and Virginius, and the
innocent girlhood of Virginia with a quiet mastery and self-restraint
which prove that the violent contrasts of his Italian plays were
calculated for a peculiar effect of romance. When treating a classical
subject, he aimed at classical severity of form. The chief interest
of the drama centres in Appius. This character suited Webster's vein.
He delighted in the delineation of a bold, imperious tyrant, marching
through crimes to the attainment of his lawless ends, yet never wholly
despicable. He also loved to analyse the subtleties of a deep-brained
intriguer, changing from open force to covert guile, fawning and
trampling on the objects of his hate by turns, assuming the tone of
diplomacy and the truculence of autocratic will at pleasure, on one
occasion making the worse appear the better cause by rhetoric, on
another espousing evil with reckless cynicism. The variations of such
a character are presented with force and lucidity in _Appius_. Yet the
whole play lacks those sudden flashes of illuminative beauty, those
profound and searching glimpses into the bottomless abyss of human
misery, which render Webster's two Italian tragedies unique. He seems
to have been writing under self-imposed limitations, in order to obtain
a certain desired effect--much in the same way as Ford did when he
composed the irreproachable but somewhat chilling history of _Perkin
Warbeck_.

The detailed criticism of Webster as a dramatist, and the study of his
two chief tragedies in relation to their Italian sources, would lead me
beyond the limits of this Introduction. He is not a poet to be dealt
with by any summary method; for he touches the depths of human nature
in ways that need the subtlest analysis for their proper explanation.
I am, however, loth to close this introduction without a word or two
concerning the peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style.[3] Owing to
condensation of thought and compression of language, his plays offer
considerable difficulties to readers who approach them for the first
time. So many fantastic incidents are crowded into a single action, and
the dialogue is burdened with so much profoundly studied matter, that
the general impression is apt to be blurred. We rise from the perusal
of his Italian tragedies with a deep sense of the poet's power and
personality, an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent
scenes, and a clear conception of the leading characters. Meanwhile the
outlines of the fable, the structure of the drama as a complete work
of art, seem to elude our grasp. The persons, who have played their
part upon the stage of our imagination, stand apart from one another,
like figures in a _tableau vivant. Appius and Virginia_, indeed, proves
that Webster understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was
able to work one out with conscientious firmness. But in _Vittoria
Corombona_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_, each part is etched with equal
effort after luminous effect upon a murky background; and the whole
play is a mosaic of these parts. It lacks the breadth which comes from
concentration on a master-motive. We feel that the author had a certain
depth of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational
effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art.
It is probable that able representation upon the public stage of an
Elizabethan theatre gave them the coherence, the animation, and the
movement which a chamber-student misses. When familiarity has brought
us acquainted with Webster's way of working, we perceive that he treats
terrible and striking subjects with a concentrated vigour special to
his genius. Each word and trait of character has been studied for a
particular effect. Brief lightning flashes of acute self-revelation
illuminate the midnight darkness of the lost souls he has painted.
Flowers of the purest and most human pathos, like Giovanni de Medici's
dialogue with his uncle in _Vittoria Corombona_, bloom by the
charnel-house on which the poet's fancy loved to dwell. The culmination
of these tragedies, setting like stormy suns in blood-red clouds, is
prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror. No dramatist
showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in
laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain combined
to make men miserable. He seems to have had a natural bias toward the
dreadful stuff with which he deals so powerfully. He was drawn to
comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The
materials with which he builds are sought for in the ruined places of
abandoned lives, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms
of reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance,
the tempests of sin-haunted conscience, the spasms of fratricidal
bloodshed, the deaths of frantic hope-deserted criminals. He is often
melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological
elements of tragedy home to our imagination. He makes free use of
poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, masques, and
nightmares. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased
and guilty human nature, his profound pity for the innocent who suffer
shipwreck in the storm of evil passions not their own, save him, even
at his gloomiest and wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances
into which less potent artists--Tourneur, for example--blundered.
That the tendency to brood on what is ghastly belonged to Webster's
idiosyncrasy appears in his use of metaphor. He cannot say the simplest
thing without giving it a sinister turn--as thus:

You speak as if a man
Should know what fowl is _coffined_ in a baked meat,
Afore you cut it open.

When knaves come to preferment, they rise _as gallowses
are raised_ in the Low Countries, one upon another's
shoulders.

Pleasure of life! what is't? only the _good hours of an
ague_.

I would sooner _eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of
the feet of one sick of the plague_ than kiss one of you
fasting.

In his dialogue, people bandy phrases like--"O you screech-owl!" and
"Thou foul black cloud!" A sister warns her brother to think twice
before committing suicide, with this weird admonition:--

I prithee, yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.

But enough has now been said about these peculiarities of Webster's
dramatic style. It is needful to become acclimatised to his specific
mannerism, both in the way of working and the tone of thinking, before
we can appreciate his real greatness as a dramatic poet and moralist.
Then we recognise the truth of what has recently been written of him by
an acute and sympathetic critic: "There is no poet morally nobler than
Webster."[4]

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

_THE WHITE DEVIL; OR, VITTORIA COROMBONA._

_The White Divel; or, the Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of
Brachiano, With the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona, the famous
Venetian Curtizan_, was printed in 1612, as acted by the Queen's
servants, and again in 1631, 1665, and 1672. In 1707 Nahum Tate
published an alteration called _Injured Love; or, the Cruel Husband_.

Webster founded this play directly on the history of the Duke di
Brachiano and his two wives, of whom the second, Vittoria Accorambaoni,
was the widow of the nephew of Cardinal Montalto, afterwards Pope
Sixtus V.

_TO THE READER._

In publishing this tragedy, I do but challenge to myself that liberty
which other men have ta'en before me: not that I affect praise by it,
for _nos hæc novimus esse nihil_;[5] only, since it was acted in so
dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that
it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting-out of a tragedy)
a full and understanding auditory; and that, since that time, I have
noted most of the people that come to that play-house resemble those
ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to
inquire for good books, but new books; I present it to the general view
with this confidence,--

Nec ronchos metues maligniorum,
Nec scombris tunicas dabis molestas.[6]

If it be objected this is no true dramatic poem, I shall easily confess
it; _non potes in nugas dicere plura meas ipse ego quam dixi_.[7]
Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted: for, should
a man present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that
ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style,
and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious Chorus, and, as
it were, liven death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; yet, after
all this divine rapture, _O dura messorum ilia_,[8] the breath that
comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it; and, ere it be
acted, let the author resolve to fix to every scene this of Horace,

Hæc porcis hodie comedenda relinques.[9]

To those who report I was a long time in finishing this tragedy, I
confess, I do not write with a goose quill winged with two feathers;
and if they will needs make it my fault, I must answer them with that
of Euripides to Alcestides,[10] a tragic writer. Alcestides objecting
that Euripides had only, in three days, composed three verses, whereas
himself had written three hundred, "Thou tellest truth," quoth he,
"but here's the difference,--thine shall only be read for three days,
whereas mine shall continue three ages."

Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance: for mine own part, I have
ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men's worthy labours;
especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson; the no less worthy
composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master
Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy
and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master
Heywood; wishing what I write may be read by their light; protesting
that, in the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so worthy,
that though I rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs I dare
(without flattery) fix that of Martial,

Non norunt hæc monumenta mori.[11]

_DRAMATIS PERSONÆ._

MONTICELSO, a Cardinal, afterwards Pope.

Francisco de Medicis, Duke of Florence.

BRACHIANO, otherwise Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, Husband
of ISABELLA.

GIOVANNI, his Son.

COUNT LODOVICO.

CAMILLO, Husband of VITTORIA.

FLAMINEO, Brother of VITTORIA, Secretary to BRACHIANO.

MARCELLO, Brother of VITTORIA, Attendant on FRANCISCO DE MEDICIS.

HORTENSIO.

ANTONELLI.

GASPARO.

FARNESE.

CARLO.

PEDRO.

Doctor.

Conjurer.

Lawyer.

JAQUES.

JULIO.

CHRISTOPHERO.

Ambassadors, Physicians, Officers, Attendants, &c.

ISABELLA, Sister of FRANCISCO DE MEDICIS, Wife of BRACHIANO.

VITTORIA COROMBONA, married first to CAMILLO, afterwards to BRACHIANO.

CORNELIA, Mother of VITTORIA.

ZANCHE, a Moor, Waiting-woman to VITTORIA.

Matron of the House of Convertites.

SCENE--ROME and PADUA.

_THE WHITE DEVIL; OR, VITTORIA COROMBONA._