In The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster reworked the idea of a female tragic protagonist explored in his earlier and less well-received play, The White Devil. In the play, Webster’s character is a widow who decides to remarry, thus dramatizing a situation of social and family conflict, which reveals the problematics of gender hierarchy both in the family and the state. The essays in this volume not only acknowledge but also foreground the questions of gender raised by feminist historiography, and in this they represent an important intervention in a critical tradition which has deflected issues of gender and sexuality.