Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Webster's The White Devil explores its relation to legal representation and adjudicatory principles. In doing so, it shows unflinchingly that both legal and theatrical evidence are artful. But it is to the superior artifice of rhetorical and performative evidence that persuasion belongs; and it is with these that the play aligns its own art. It uses law as a tool not only to explore its own medium but actively to vindicate and privilege it, and to offer a radical hierarchy of proofs that defies institutional morality. The specific notion of artificial reasoning, familiar in rhetoric and jurisprudence, is deployed in this theatrical self-assertion.
This chapter approaches the issues of evidence and judgement through an examination of ‘colour’ in its legal, rhetorical, theatrical, theological and physiognomical senses, all of which are brought into play against one another in The White Devil, and define its engagement with, and position on, ‘evidence’ – image-making, legal proof and rhetorical tool. ‘Colour’, thus, provides a hermeneutic tool for the critic to explore the relation between legal and theatrical persuasion in the play, with rhetoric linking the two. After all, rhetoric was the discipline which engaged most systematically and centrally with the notion of evidence outside the law in the early modern period. But while the argument largely rests on the intricate links between the legal and rhetorical meanings of colour, and their ramifications in related discourses, it does not suggest that this nexus is already present in the audience's consciousness, though much of it would have been more familiar to Webster's audience than to us.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama , pp. 135 - 173Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006