Stage devils thrived on what Andrew Gurr calls “the Shakespearean stage,” from the 1570s to the end of the London commercial drama's first phase in 1642, when all the theatres were closed by act of parliament. Devils appeared in about forty new plays that we know of during this time, with the latest of them being performed for the first time as late as 1641. This is an average of a little under one new play a year, and that figure does not reckon with the repeated revival of popular plays like Dr. Faustus or The Merry Devil of Edmonton. It is not unreasonable to assume that in those years one could almost always have found a devil play in performance somewhere in London.

This remarkable record indicates that traditional dramaturgy survived well beyond the time that it is usually assumed to have disappeared. To be sure, playwrights were endlessly inventive, and competition among the commercial theatres produced innovations in stage devilry, as in everything else. Prominent among these was a satirical distance and self-conscious theatricality that has led to almost complete neglect of stage devils in the seventeenth century, on the assumption that no one took them seriously any longer. This assumption fits well into a teleological narrative of accomplished secularization in English drama, and it also reinforces the oppositional thinking that pits enlightened secularity against benighted superstition.