Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stage devils and oppositional thinking
- 2 The devil and the sacred in the English mystery plays
- 3 Stage devils and sacramental community in non-cycle plays
- 4 Stage devils and early social satire
- 5 Protestant devils and the new community
- 6 The devils of Dr. Faustus
- 7 Reacting to Marlowe
- 8 The devil and the sacred on the Shakespearean stage: theatre and belief
- 9 Traditional morality and magical thinking
- 10 New directions
- Appendix. Devil plays in English, 1350–1642
- Notes
- Index
6 - The devils of Dr. Faustus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stage devils and oppositional thinking
- 2 The devil and the sacred in the English mystery plays
- 3 Stage devils and sacramental community in non-cycle plays
- 4 Stage devils and early social satire
- 5 Protestant devils and the new community
- 6 The devils of Dr. Faustus
- 7 Reacting to Marlowe
- 8 The devil and the sacred on the Shakespearean stage: theatre and belief
- 9 Traditional morality and magical thinking
- 10 New directions
- Appendix. Devil plays in English, 1350–1642
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Chambers found the evolutionary goal of early drama in the London commercial theatre, for in his view Marlowe and Shakespeare threw off the rusty shackles of religious tradition so that drama could flourish as fully secular. He was surely right that what happened in the late sixteenth century was different from what preceded it, but incremental secular evolution is not the only possible explanation. We have just seen that devils in Protestant plays retain the same kind of moral and spiritual vitality as traditional stage devils until well into the 1570s, and many elements of traditional dramaturgy, including specific features of the morality play, persisted into the commercial theatres. Richard Tarlton, the famous clown, is thought to have written two plays about the seven deadly sins in the mid-1580s, and shortly afterwards Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge used biblical characters and a “ruffian” disguised as a devil in a moral diatribe against urban vice in A Looking Glass for London and England. For the most part, however, it is clear that playwrights favor mimetic human characters, rather than personified abstractions, and the stories in which the characters are caught up seldom emphasize the state of one's immortal soul; they are stories of mundane destiny.
The question, then, is not whether drama was secular, but how to evaluate its secularity and how to describe the process of secularization.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 , pp. 107 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000