The White Devil is a tragedy by English playwright John Webster. According to Webster's own preface to the 1612 Quarto Edition, "To the Reader", the play's first performance in that year was a notorious failure; he complained that the play was acted in the dead of winter before an unreceptive audience.
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped William Shakespeare's.