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
Introduction
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
Histories of the devil abound, and I do not claim to be familiar with more than a fraction of them. Histories of stage devils in English drama, however, are more manageable. The earliest are nineteenth-century dissertations in German, which is the model adopted by the first study of the subject in English, L.W. Cushman's The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare. Cushman's book in fact originated as a doctoral dissertation at Goettingen in 1899 and was published the following year by Max Niemeyer in Halle, when Cushman was teaching English at the University of Nevada. I have often wondered if Cushman's going from Goettingen to Reno in 1900 was not, perhaps, a little like meeting the subject of his book in person.
In any case, previous histories of the devil in English drama were swept aside by the magisterial work of E. K. Chambers' The Medieval Stage, published in 1903. Chambers read Cushman and dismissed him. What Chambers offered for the first time was a narrative so coherent and persuasive that it continues to influence critical thinking about early English drama, even though Chambers' assumptions have long since been recognized and dismissed in their own turn. One task of the present book is to retell the story of English stage devils for the first time since Chambers but with different assumptions.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000