This is the first volume to appear in the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster, beginning with the plays The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The following volume planned for publication will include the other plays as well as the poems and prose. While both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are available in modernized versions, the Cambridge edition incorporates the more recent editorial scholarship including valuable information on Webster's biography, critical methods, and textual theory. In particular, the edition integrates theatrical aspects of the texts with their bibliographical and literary features in a way not previously attempted for a scholarly edition of a Jacobean dramatist. The edition also presents previously unpublished material including a fragment of an otherwise lost play and a hitherto unknown poem and provides a brief biography of Webster, a history of the Webster canon, and reception history for each play.

Over the past two decades there has been a resurgence of theatrical interest in Shakespeare's Pericles, which has been rescued from comparative neglect and is now frequently performed. This development is charted in the introduction to this edition, which differs radically from any other currently available. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond reject the critical orthodoxies of a corrupt text and divided authorship. Instead they show the play to be a unified aesthetic experience. The result is a more enthusiatic view of Pericles than that of other editions.

In a time when greed is good and money talks, one man has had enough of living in the big, rotten apple. 1986 is coming to an end, the economy is booming, Manhattan looks beautifully white and festive from the back of his private limo. From the outside he seems to have it all, the great job, the money, the clothes, the looks, the women but Toby Robinson is having a crisis of conscience. A typical small town guy who just wanted to make it big in the city but no sooner had his dreams came true he started to see how different dreams where once they became reality.