In early seventeenth-century English plays, it is fashionable to portray Italianate locales as rife with intrigue, featuring Italian female characters often depicted as dangerous, living emblems of venomous passion, confederates in complex plots which ultimately destroy the body politic. But the plays also tell another story, as the frequent talk of poison distils its venom through words as much as it does through deadly ointments, perfumes or liquids. In these plays, poison is as much a rhetorical process as it is a deadly substance. Focusing on Marston’s The Malcontent and Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, this paper proposes to study the relationship between poison and rhetoric in early seventeenth-century Italianate plays to show how poison works in a specular fashion, using derivation and discontinuity for dramatic effect. Associated with Italianate passions, talk of poison suggests an underlying socio-political criticism which had (at least partial) topical resonance for Jacobean audiences. These tragic or satirical plays could serve as inverted mirrors for princes, portraying counter-examples of good government, depicting in spectacular fashion the effects of a body politic poisoned by unchecked, warped Italianate (i.e. foreign and Popish) perversions. By highlighting the masculine nature of these fantasies of evil, this paper will also challenge the customary link between women and poison, highlighting instead the vicarious nature of poison. The chapter will ultimately suggest that topicality, gender bias, xenophobic and anti-Catholic sentiment contribute to making poison more a perversion of the Word than a deadly substance in these plays.