The frequent and regular staging of devils in Jacobean and early Stuart drama belies the prevailing narrative that increasing secularization had effectively killed their credibility in the sixteenth century by reducing them to rare, risible, and empty vestiges oftraditional dramaturgy on the Shakespearean stage. On the contrary, acting companies staged devils in ways that are generally consistent, either dramaturgically or morally or both, with the way devils had been staged during the previous two centuries of English drama. This is not to say, however, that nothing changed. The demand for variety in the commercial theatres was a powerful impetus to innovation, and playwrights responded accordingly. To be sure, not every new attempt was successful, and some are represented in only one or two plays. More enduring sources of innovation were Stoicism and Fletcherian tragicomedy, but the most striking change in the seventeenth century involves the social function of stage devils: increasingly, they are identified with those at the lower end of the social scale, in contrast to the formative tradition, which had associated devils almost exclusively with the nobility.

EXPERIMENTS

An early experiment with few imitations is William Haughton's The Devil and His Dame (1593–1601), which is extant only in a Restoration edition, renamed Grim the Collier of Croydon.