Webster's authorship has generally been accepted, but Stoll, 197,
who put the play 1623-39, because of resemblances to Julius Caesar and Coriolanus which he thought implied a knowledge of F_{1}, traced a dependence upon the comic manner of Heywood. Similarly, Sykes is puzzled by words which he thinks borrowed from Heywood and first used by Heywood in works written after Webster's death. He comes to the conclusion that Heywood may have revised a late work by Webster. There is much to be said for the view taken by Brooke and Clark, after a thorough-going analysis of the problem, that the play is Heywood's own, possibly with a few touches from Webster's hand, and may have been written, at any date not long after the production of Coriolanus on the stage (c. 1608), for Queen Anne's men, from whom it would naturally pass into the Cockpit repertory.
The White Devil. 1609 < > 12
1612. 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. Acted by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants. Written by Iohn Webster. N. O. for Thomas Archer. (Epistle to the Reader; after text, a note.] 1631. . . . Acted, by the Queenes Maiesties seruants, at the Phœnix, in Drury-lane. I. N. for Hugh Perry.
1665; 1672.
Editions in Dodsley^{1-3} (1744-1825) and by W. Scott (1810, A. B. D. iii) and M. W. Sampson (1904, B. L.).—Dissertations: B. Nicholson, Thomas Adams' Sermon on The W. D. (1881, 6 N. Q. iii. 166); W. W. Greg, W.'s W. D. (1900, M. L. Q. iii. 112); M. Landau, Vittoria Accorambona in der Dichtung im Verhältniss zu ihrer wahren Geschichte (1902, Euphorion, ix. 310); E. M. Cesaresco, Vittoria Accoramboni (1902, Lombard Studies, 131); P. Simpson, An Allusion in W. (1907, M. L. R. ii. 162); L. MacCracken, A Page of Forgotten History (1911); H. D. Sykes, The Date of W.'s Play, the W. D. (1913, 11 N. Q. vii. 342).
The epistle apologizes for the ill success of the play, on the ground that 'it was acted in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and blacke a theater, that it wanted . . . a full and understanding auditory', and complains that the spectators at 'that play-house' care more for new plays than for good plays. Fleay, ii. 271, dates the production in the winter of 1607-8, taking the French ambassador described in III. i. 73 as a performer 'at last tilting' to be M. Goterant who tilted on 24 March 1607, since 'no other Frenchman's name occurs in the tilt-lists. It is nothing to Fleay that Goterant was not an ambassador, or that the lists of Jacobean tilters are fragmentary, or that the scene of the play is not England but Italy. Simpson found an inferior limit in a borrowing from Jonson's Mask of Queens on 2 Feb. 1609. I do not find much conviction in the other indications of a date in 1610 cited by Sampson, xl, or in the parallel with Jonson's epistle to Catiline (1611), with which Stoll, 21, supports a date in 1612. The Irish notes which Stoll regards as taken from B. Rich,
