1- https://doi.org/10.1086/691197
Doctor Faustusand the Art of Dying Badly
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Previous articleNext article FreeDoctor Faustus and the Art of Dying BadlyMaggie VinterMaggie VinterCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFaustus:Lucifer and Mephastophilis! Ah, gentlemen, I gave them my soul for my cunning.All:God forbid!Faustus:God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it.1What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to fix. Critics have plausibly interpreted the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to free-thinking iconoclasm.2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly and the godless, social superiors and inferiors, and angels and devils, all of whom offer different, and sometimes shifting, interpretations of the cosmos. These voices agree on almost nothing. Nothing, that is, except that Faustus’s bad actions will end in damnation.That Marlowe should emphasize the bald fact of Faustus’s badness over the religious context from which it emerges is all the more surprising because badness has traditionally been conceived in terms of privation or distortion. Augustine influentially defined evil as a departure from God.3 The Good is a unitary, positive attribute of divinity, which stands as both the source and the model for all goodness on earth. The Bad, as such, is nothing. Rather, different badnesses represent different, ever-multiplying perversions of the Good. This negative characterization of evil found new expression in the sixteenth century through the theology of Luther and Calvin, who offer broadly similar accounts of agency after the fall. The human will is at once entirely derivative and, when not illuminated by grace, irredeemably vicious.4 When Marlowe emphasizes Faustus’s depravity while obscuring the divinity it rejects, he perversely presents the consequence without the cause, the flawed reflection without the object that it mirrors.Perhaps, though, representational perversity is the point. In this article, I argue that theories of parody can help us understand such free-floating badness. From Julius Caesar Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridicula in 1560, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, parodic techniques have generally been understood as derogatory in intent.5 However, Giorgio Agamben suggests a fruitful alternative approach when he argues that parody might not simply deflate its target but could also function as a strategy for representing mysteries obliquely.6 To assess the value of Agamben’s ideas, I analyze Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus alongside another sixteenth-century dramatization of dying badly, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570). Both plays certainly use derogatory parody to ridicule characters who, at the last, are unable to relinquish worldly things. But they also suggest that parody can function as an investigative and representational tool, akin to a negative theology, that helps us to explicate obscured divinity through avowedly imperfect imitations. Marlowe and Wager share Calvin’s interest in depravity, but they reverse his emphasis.7 Instead of simply asserting that human will is irredeemably vicious, they ask what viciousness can reveal about the scope and limits of human agency or about the gap between fallen perception and divine truth. In particular, parody in their plays becomes a tool for analyzing and representing the approach to death, when the disjuncture between a person’s earthly and spiritual state can appear especially stark and especially in need of resolution.Furthermore, a focus on the affinities between parodic techniques and privative understandings of bad action can clarify the changing fortunes of religious theater in the sixteenth century. Between the publication of Enough Is as Good as a Feast around 1570, the writing of Doctor Faustus in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and the virtual prohibition on religious language onstage under the “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players” in 1606, a growing group of religious thinkers came to understand dramatic representation as an inherently blasphemous practice.8 While there is no necessary link between antitheatricality and predestinarian accounts of the will, both discourses share a common concern with how imperfect human imitations approach an unseen, perfect original. Moreover, many of the same Protestant thinkers who elaborated Augustine’s account of evil to deny the possibility of good works independent of God’s grace also engaged in polemic against drama.9 Enough Is as Good as a Feast can help explain this slippage, since it indicates how hard it is to inoculate any representation of a religious subject from charges of profanation. By the end of the play, the derogatory potential of parody subsumes its use as an investigative strategy, and all forms of mimesis risk being revealed as blasphemous. Wager himself seems to have become disenchanted with religious theater, since he abandoned dramatic writing toward the end of the 1570s even as he remained “active in the Anglican ministry well into the 1580s.”10This context suggests that in writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe was engaged not so much in secularizing religious forms as in reviving a dead genre abandoned by its original practitioners as unsatisfactory. His play, I argue, offers an implicit rejoinder to antitheatrical condemnations of drama. Marlowe appears to agree with the polemicists that dramatic mimesis necessarily offers a distorted, deficient version of what it imitates. But the theater’s representational badness reflects the ingrained badness of human performances generally, all of which are necessarily failed imitations of an inaccessible model. We are all doing what Faustus is doing. By foregrounding the validity of parody as a representational strategy for figuring otherwise unapproachable mysteries, and by attending to the forms of human agency that make such representation possible, Marlowe implies that drama is compatible with theological investigation precisely because of its blasphemous potential. The play encourages us to expand Scaliger, Bakhtin, and Agamben’s understandings of parody to theorize performances on the Elizabethan stage and beyond.Parody, Beside and BelowThe impulse to parody is ancient. The word itself derives from the Greek term parodos, which was probably initially used to describe any variant poem or song written beside an older work but took on particular connotations of comedy by the time Aristotle used it in the Poetics.11 Although the word (transliterated into Latin as parodia) and the concept disappeared from rhetorical manuals by the fifth century, a vigorous European tradition of adapting privileged genres or subjects for new ends persisted through the Middle Ages.12 The Coena Cypriani, celebrations of feasts of the fool, and drunkards’ and gamblers’ masses all manifest a particular appetite for burlesque revision, especially of sacred models. While modern critics have disagreed over the significance of these texts, Martha Bayless is persuasive when she emphasizes their diversity and cautions against any grand theory of medieval parody as prima facie orthodox or heterodox.13 The technique was everywhere, capable of advancing many ends.By the early modern period, though, parodies (especially of religious subjects) were attracting more controversy. Sixteenth-century discussions of parody focalized broader debates about the aesthetic and moral value of imitative art. Humanists revived parodia as a rhetorical term but altered its connotations to imply that imitation of a serious subject necessarily derogates that subject. In 1560, Scaliger influentially defined the word as “Rhapsodia inversa mutatis vocibus ad ridicula sensum retrahens” [rhapsody turned upside down, redirecting the sense toward amusing things with altered words].14 Where the Greek prefix para had suggested juxtaposition, Scaliger describes inversion and institutes a hierarchy between serious literature and comic travesty. Though ridicula may neutrally connote an amusing subject in Latin, Margaret Rose suggests Scaliger’s early modern English readers largely understood parody as derogatory.15 Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), for instance, describes parody as what would make something “absurder then it was.”16And this revaluation of parody was not confined to rhetorical theory. Over the same period that Scaliger’s construction of parody started to gain more widespread acceptance in literary contexts, religious reformers came increasingly to reject comic adaptations and inversions of religious motifs as blasphemous by definition. The Henrican state suppressed festivals of boy bishops in 1541, objecting that “boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit … rather to the derision than any true glory of god, or honour of His saints.”17 In 1583, Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses condemned surviving festivals of the Lord of Misrule in similar terms as “horrible prophanation[s] of the Sabboth.”18 Significantly, Stubbes’s objection to misrule immediately follows his more famous condemnation of theater on the grounds that “the blessed word of God, is to be handled reverently, gravely, and sagely with veneration to the glorious Majesty of God, which shineth therein, and not scoffingly, floutingly, and jybingly as it is upon Stages in Playes and Enterludes” (236). Stubbes’s direct intellectual inspirations are the antitheatrical Church Fathers, including Augustine, whom he cites in his own support (237). However, when he denies the possibility of any genuinely sacred theater, he evokes an older Platonic logic that sees all imitation as inherently duplicitous. Plato’s Republic depicts Socrates condemning the tragic poet as “in his nature three removes from the king [i.e., God] and the truth, as are all other imitators.”19 For Stubbes, the problem is not that playwrights sometimes choose to mock God. Rather, he suggests that it is impossible to talk about God on stage without mockery. Any attempt to represent a religious truth dramatically, no matter what the motive, will necessarily fall into blasphemy. Imitation is parody.Modern critics trying to account for the character of parody in the early modern era, or to explain the hostility it increasingly inspired, have most often drawn on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.20 Bakhtin essentially accepts Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridiculing inversion but revalues ridicule as a folk challenge to elite monoculture and a spur to social and aesthetic change. Parody provides “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them.”21 It defamiliarizes the object of representation and anticipates the development of novelistic heteroglossia by revealing the power of language as language (60–61). Applied to Elizabethan theater, Bakhtin’s account would align dramatic parody of religious models with subversive and secularizing impulses. Though elements of Bakhtin’s historiography have been questioned, the theoretical framework he proposes has remained powerfully influential and (superficially, at least) feels consonant with the iconoclastic, scoffing Marlovian persona evoked by documents like the Baines note.22Descriptions of parody as inversion, however, are by themselves inadequate to explain texts like Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Doctor Faustus. These plays sometimes exploit the deflationary capacity of imperfect imitation but at other points employ dramatic parody to explore theological problems or even to model orthodox behavior. As a corrective to Scaliger and Bakhtin, we might consider Agamben’s strikingly different claim that “parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance … parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing.”23 Departing from Scaliger—and effectively dismissing the dialogical play celebrated by Bakhtin as mere “fiction”—Agamben instead follows Plato in focusing on the relationship between the representation and the distanced reality it purports to stand for. However, he crucially revalues Platonic concepts. Where Plato asserts the hierarchical inferiority of representations, Agamben notes the prefix para implies a horizontal arrangement of original and copy. And where Plato rejects mimesis on the grounds of its imperfection, Agamben argues that avowed distortion has a sacralizing effect. When parody draws attention to its inability to display an object directly, it reverently casts that object as a mystery. Viewed in this light, the “liturgy of the mass, the representation par excellence of the modern mystery, [is] parodic,” and medieval scatological reworkings are respectful elaborations, rather than profanations, of liturgical form (42). Agamben rejects Bakhtin’s suggestion that parodies contest privileged forms and ideas from below and claims instead that they offer esoteric avenues to otherwise inaccessible truths.24 Reworking the terms that Stubbes uses to condemn the theater, we might say the scoffing, flouting, and jibing of players does not misappropriate or dampen the light of God’s majesty shining within his word, so much as it veils that light so that it can be looked on indirectly, without the risk of blindness.Although Bakhtin and Agamben’s accounts of parody are markedly different, I do not think we necessarily need to choose between them in all cases. Parody is capable of being deployed for many purposes and of appearing in many forms and many locations. It can emerge reverently beside or profanely below the object it mimics.25 Superimposing these two theoretical models, moreover, might be particularly helpful for understanding sixteenth-century texts. During this period, the reemergence of parodia as a topic of explicit consideration in rhetorical studies and the increased religious scrutiny of representation combined to render parody’s true position especially uncertain. Moreover, this uncertainty seems to have been recognized by at least some Elizabethan writers, who responded to it in markedly different ways. The ambiguous place of parody contributes to Stubbes’s distrust of scoffing mimesis. But to other writers struggling to depict ambiguous or dangerous subjects, the very instability of parodic forms might prove useful. To see just how useful, I now turn to representations of the bad death.Dying like a ProtestantIn many Christian traditions, death is something you do. Popular ars moriendi texts present death not just a misfortune to be suffered but also as a discipline to be studied or an action to be performed.26 From its inception in the fifteenth century, this homiletic literature of the good death troubled easy distinctions between activity and passivity and considered complex interactions between divine and human will.27 However, questions of how to die well became charged in new ways after the Reformation. The art of dying, like other devotional practices, became a site of sectarian controversy. Protestant reformers challenged many Catholic rituals such as the anointing of the sick and intercessory prayers.28 And polemicists from both confessions politicized the moment of death through highly publicized accounts of victorious martyrdoms29 and propagandistic accusations that dying leaders of rival sects had despaired or recanted.30 More fundamentally, popular predestinarian theologies threatened the conceptual basis of conduct books. The deathbed renders this theoretical challenge especially pressing, first, because the dying person’s diminished mental and physical capacity can make problems of human will more apparent and, second, because the moment of death was commonly understood to unmask the true distribution of agency between the human and the divine. Death reveals whether a person was always already saved or damned, and this revelation has two effects that are somewhat in tension with one another.31 On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of grace to salvation and the insufficiency of human endeavor. On the other hand, it encourages a reconceptualization of individuals’ earthly actions as direct expressions of their ultimate spiritual status. Their earlier moral vacillations must be retroactively reclassified either as true expressions of their election (or depravity) or as temporary and misleading departures from their essential nature. Sectarian disputes and doctrinal innovations did not destroy the genre of ars moriendi; indeed more, and more were by both Catholics and over the sixteenth and than But altered the nature of the moriendi from a broadly for the good work of a Christian to a site of over what both a Christian and a work could disputes about also had for the form of religious drama. The link between deathbed conduct and drama is in the of which itself as a how of to … in of a the approach to death the in ars moriendi texts by who between good and bad impulses. Elizabethan Protestant to this tradition to account for the that spiritual is William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast how this The play is a of a by earlier medieval had and claims that in the 1570s and predestinarian some focus to Their “the for a tragic within the of moral of the earlier a comedy into its of spiritual and the that there are between homiletic and earlier plays is in focusing on he the to which these plays or even the forms they as they new doctrinal Is as Good as a Feast on the between the by the Man and he himself with a and with his help is a and a As the to the Man is by God’s to with and a but he to On his deathbed he to a will but he the the and is by a between the saved and the that is but obscured for much of the toward appear he offers God the of all will not the death of as hath to the true I the from the I for to Enough which to in and and all other I do Man is a as such by his in this he scarcely like claims to with And his that God has the true implies a in position and about through the is by the term which implies that Man godly through to the word by itself does not prove Man is in bad of worldly and spiritual language is especially in texts focusing on things. Sixteenth-century for religious and documents had devotional while sometimes in religious devotional The in offers an to Wager’s the godly at the of his religious by a will to his and and even for the of The need for the godly to with the in in to for the of the fallen to themselves with spiritual character such as Man in the of a impulse the same as And the questions about whether the two can be end of the play they Wager uses a parody of the of the good death to the apparent between saved and with a is because it reveals a more The dying Man his through of godly behavior. he is by and However, most of them are the even a concern for his spiritual like he is with his However, Man a will that would help his to as she rather than support of The its as Man is from a spiritual simply as a once he himself of God’s initially of Man had like one of the by the end of the play his of godly is itself a of his Enough Is as Good as a Feast rejects the apparent of godly and in will to a hierarchy between The worldly death is as a failed imitation of the godly This of worldly and in which the parodies the the where the in the earlier of the play that Man is then then are that and goodness to the same and become to the For the between dramatic models on a and a predestinarian becomes perfect and of to predestinarian His moral indicates how earthly uncertainty of election the between the saved and the damned, while his fall into explicit parody the of that the of the the implicit understanding of parody Wager increasingly variant imitations as not comic but and then encourages the to retroactively an of inferiority to earlier implicit understanding of parody Agamben’s is by one more like first, to through seems like a for it appears like a departure from true Christian the ridicule evoked by death is to his earlier what had beside becomes is there is any necessary to this or Enough Is as Good as a Feast to suggest that all imitations are parodic and even can be as it is hard to what imitation could accusations of and to have a turn by religious writers from the turn in as I Wager may have Faustus these like older forms to new doctrinal and parody to between and However, his play from Enough Is as Good as a Feast in it is that there are to Where Enough the with Doctor Faustus to in terms of privation that the distorting effects of human for how the Good is or by Faustus and to appear more like a of uncertainty than a link to the The often as the version of the play, to Faustus’s perception of Christian through that the To the then I the And In the context of Faustus’s can be almost as a of negative theology that the divine through what it is any attempt to Faustus’s simply as a blasphemous inversion is by the variety of ways that he divine truth. Man a bad Faustus of dying His imitations of religious never their on a divine original. alternative to rather than that could But in their diversity and their to explicate their to that they focus attention toward what fallen human Faustus may even a of not to but to choose between different to parodic to death in Doctor Faustus a investigation of the and of Wager’s of parody with depravity into a condemnation of all Marlowe’s of between parodic religious and what can be for imitation or even because its distortion of its or Faustus in the to Enough Is as Good as a from parody as inversion to parody as Marlowe the play by as the of dramatic and then whether mimesis can be either as a or as a tool for representing religious The Faustus as an intellectual and the privileged of the sixteenth-century As Marlowe’s by two of the word and the of the as their The fact that Faustus has to for instance, he has and can its because Faustus it to any positive While he that the scope of its is by “the of his own seems by the he already and His does not into new but other of and the religious he from the mass that to the as he his with Significantly, Faustus’s performances initially stand
- Research Article
- 10.1353/cdr.2021.0011
- Jan 1, 2021
- Comparative Drama
“Thou shalt knowen of oure privetee / Moore than a maister of dyvynytee”: Devils and Damnation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Darragh Greene (bio) Now this Doctor Faustus had somewhat in it that was beyond itself and attached to Kit as it were a nimbus that was more than atheistic, being truly devilish or demonic.—Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford1 In Shakespeare and the Medieval World, Helen Cooper makes the case that “the world in which Shakespeare lived was a medieval one,” and “the culture [he] inherited was still grounded in the medieval, however conflicted that culture was becoming.”2 Naturally, the same is true of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. One salient aspect of this culture was the tradition of late-medieval English narrative and poetry, including in particular the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. While there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Chaucer, it has been less obvious whether Marlowe did. Yet it would be surprising indeed if he did not read the English author considered in his day to be the pre-eminent poet in the language.3 Moreover, it is possible that Marlowe’s mighty line, his mastery of iambic pentameter verse, owes something to the dramatic speeches Chaucer puts into the mouth of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and other loquacious pilgrim characters of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s works were in print throughout the sixteenth century, and the folio edition that Shakespeare likely first read, John Stow’s 1561 revised [End Page 166] version of William Thynne’s The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, is equally likely to have been the same one Marlowe would have read, possibly as a schoolboy. Marlowe was enrolled in the King’s School, Canterbury, around Christmas 1578, and his first headmaster was John Gresshop. As Charles Nicholl writes: “An inventory of Gresshop’s library, drawn up on his death in 1580 . . . offers a glimpse of the intellectual world opening up to the cobbler’s son. Among its 350 volumes were editions of Ovid, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.”4 Chaucer’s enduring fascination with Ovid’s poetry as well as his persistent return to the tragedy of Dido seem to have resonated with Marlowe, who was also interested in these works, having translated Ovid’s Amores and written Dido, Queene of Carthage during his student years at Cambridge. Indeed, a recent article by Loren Cressler makes a detailed case for Marlowe’s knowledge of Chaucer by exploring the late-medieval English vernacular tradition as a probable source for his first play; he argues that Dido, Queene of Carthage “structurally” quotes Chaucer’s sympathetic treatment of Dido—at the expense of Aeneas’s reputation—as presented in both The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women.5 This raises the question as to what else in Chaucer’s oeuvre might have caught Marlowe’s attention. This article will demonstrate that Chaucer’s treatment of devils, damnation, and hell in The Canterbury Tales resonates in Doctor Faustus. Based on a medieval folktale, Doctor Faustus in some regards harkens back to the morality plays of the late Middle Ages. However, Marlowe’s representation of the devil Mephistopheles bears little resemblance to the devils of medieval drama; as Douglas Cole points out, Mephistopheles “has a seriousness and intensity which is unparalleled in any previous theatrical representation of the diabolic, and unmatched in the Faust-Book as well.”6 Yet, if one looks at English literary history beyond the domain of drama, such seriousness and intensity can be found in Chaucer’s representation of the yeoman-devil of The Friar’s Tale. This Chaucerian devil’s manner is friendly, yet just like Mephistopheles, he is an exploiter of words who takes a special interest in the force and binding implications of illocutionary acts—that is, speech that performs an action—for promises and curses. In addition, David Lawton has noted that Faustus’s resolute questioning of Mephistopheles resembles that of Chaucer’s fictive summoner, who insistently questions the devil in The Friar’s Tale.7 In both cases, heedless curiosity leads to perdition. [End Page 167] Aside from matters infernal, there are other possible echoes...
- Research Article
- 1
- 10.1080/13574175.2019.1665269
- Jul 3, 2019
- Reformation
ABSTRACTJohn Calvin and other religious moralists wrote against astrology in the sixteenth century, yet the astrological arts flourished over the course of the long Reformation in England. This essay confronts that paradox through an analysis of the representation of astrology, free will, and predestination in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and in contemporary sermons, Protestant religious tracks, and polemical works for and against astrology. The essay demonstrates how astrological and theological controversial works disputed a similar Gordian knot concerning fate and free will, as they denied that the Stoic concept of fatal necessity described the apparent determinism of astrological fortune (on the one hand) and Calvinist predestination (on the other). It argues that one reason astrology and religion became strange bedfellows in the long Reformation is that they both worried similar questions concerning fate, free will, fortune, and man's moral culpability for sin.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/shb.2006.0003
- Mar 1, 2006
- Shakespeare Bulletin
Reviewed by: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Alan Armstrong The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the Elizabethan Theatre, Ashland, Oregon. June 8–October 7, 2005. Directed by James Edmondson. Set by Richard L. Hay. Costumes by Marie Anne Chiment. Lighting by Robert Peterson. Sound by Todd Barton. Fights by John Sipes. With Demetra Pittman/Robynn Rodriguez (Chorus), Jonathan Haugen (Doctor Faustus), Ray Porter (Mephistophilis), Shad Willingham (Wagner), Juan Rivera LeBron (Robin), Julia Pace Mitchell (Good Angel), Catherine Lynn Davis (Evil Angel), Kenneth Albers (Valdes), Abdul Salaam El Razzac (Cornelius), Brent Harris (Lucifer), James J. Peck (Beelzebub), Josiah Phillips (Pope Adrian), Laura Morache (Lechery, Helen of Troy), Sarah Rutan (Envy, Old Woman), Tyrone Wilson (Second Scholar, Gluttony) and others. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival waited twenty-five years to begin performing the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. After a 1960 performance of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, OSF went on to produce plays by Jonson, Marlowe, Dekker, Beaumont, Ford, and Tourneur, until a fine 1993 production of Webster's The White Devil failed to fill the Elizabethan Theatre on weeknights. OSF has since avoided Shakespeare's contemporaries altogether, judging even Shakespeare plays with numbers in their titles to be better box-office bets than plays that lacked his name. On learning that Artistic Director Libby Appel would break the drought by including a Marlowe play in the 2005 repertory, I was disappointed that Doctor Faustus (a play already staged by OSF, in 1979) had gotten the nod rather than Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, or Edward II. But the production realized by the company's actors, designers, and director James Edmondson (an actor in the 1979 OSF production) richly justified the choice. From the outset the show's technical demands taxed the resources of a repertory company even as large as OSF, with ten other plays in various stages of production. Nineteen people took part in the design meeting to determine how to build the show. Edmondson decided early on to scratch the horse-courser and leg-stealing scenes and to cut much of the Benvolio/Frederick material for want of actors (despite a cast of twenty-six). Five devils were pulled because of costume-shop limitations, and only in rehearsal did it become apparent that the production had exceeded the resources needed for the "headless Faustus" scene, which Edmondson reluctantly cut. Audiences watching Doctor Faustus were delighted nevertheless by special effects which shared the exuberant spirit of the play's original staging, with its roaring devils, firecrackers, artificial thunder and lightning, and Henslowe's dragon-machine. The production turned the center-stage trap into a frightening Hell mouth, from which a fiery glow and billowing smoke emanated. To thin the congealing blood Faustus needed to sign his fatal pact, Mephistophilis casually shot a flame from his hand. The production used its enormous, spectacular dragon to represent not Lucifer but Mephistophilis in his first hideous apparition, before he [End Page 78] returned in the guise of a Franciscan friar. The equally astonishing Lucifer, appearing on the balcony with Mephistopheles and Beelzebub, above, looked like a rock star, resplendent in Rod Stewart hair, a feathery white cape, mid-thigh white boots, and an enormous lime-green codpiece. The Good and Evil Angels, too, appeared initially in alcoves above the stage, like paired, static illustrations in a medieval diptych. A few actors created the impression of a large swarm of agile devils, as menacing as the smaller raptors in a Jurassic Park movie. Their fancifully varied costumes, in darker hues of brown and green with leather masks and scattered hints of fur, tails, and oversized ears, shared a bestial theme. Several of these actors doubled as the Seven Deadly Sins, in equally ingenious costumes unified by vivid gold, yellow, and brown fabrics. The dress of mortal characters also pleased the eye with splashes of brilliant color, such as the red robes of the Roman cardinals and the ermine-shouldered dark purple cape of Pope Adrian, trimmed like his glittering crown in gold and colorful jewels. Faustus, too, appeared occasionally in a richly embroidered gown, but his basic costume was black trousers and jacket and white...
- Research Article
- 10.1353/cat.0.0351
- Apr 1, 2009
- The Catholic Historical Review
Reviewed by: Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) Thomas Tentler Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528). By Austra Reinis. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2007. Pp. viii, 290. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65439-1.) Luise Klein’s Göttingen dissertation in theology, Die Bereitung zum Sterben: Studien zu den frühen Reformatorischen Sterbebüchern (Göttingen, 1958), called attention to the centrality of the preparation for [End Page 383] death (especially in the final hour) in the propagation of a Lutheran theology of consolation. An opening quotation from Melanchthon said as much. Klein observed that almost every Lutheran theologian in the first decades of the Reformation promised a cure for the terrors evoked by a late-medieval religion of works. Since Klein’s study, the early-modern preparation for death—Protestant and Catholic—has received much attention, as Austra Reinis’s ample bibliography attests. Reforming the Art of Dying continues this research with a detailed study of a selection of literature from Lutheranism’s first decade. Like Klein, she argues that while the reforming authors preserve features of the late-medieval artes, they consistently offer a radically different evangelical belief and practice. Underlying the study, once again like her predecessor, is a sound appreciation of the importance of printing and the campaign to propagate devotional literature and teaching to a wide audience—beginning in the late Middle Ages and dramatically expanding in the sixteenth century. Reinis is attentive to the individual biographies of her authors and their political and social settings, but her most original contribution is the analysis of classical rhetorical structures and techniques, and her attempt to find in them the reasons for these works’ persuasive force. While admitting the ambiguities inherent in classifying early modern literature, Reinis identifies three genres, selecting sixteen works by fourteen authors: (1) sermons on preparation for death (Luther, Johannes Oecolampadius, Agricola, Georgius Mohr, Georg Spalatin, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Thomas Venatorius; (2) manuals for use at the deathbed (Oecolampadius, Wenzel Linck, and Johannes Odenbach); and (3) catechetical instruction (Johannes Diepold, Kaspar Güttel, Johannes Borner, and Jakob Otter). In each group one work is selected for extensive analysis, while the others are treated more briefly. Her careful literary and doctrinal analysis of these works, along with some attention to their particular historical settings (pp. 47–242) is a considerable contribution to our understanding of the appeal of Protestant theology and practice. For those pages alone this expensive volume would be a useful addition to a Reformation historian’s library. How much rhetorical analysis adds to the appreciation of the message and power of these parenetic works will probably depend on the interpretive preferences of the reader. Reinis’s insistence that the authors in question were trained in rhetorical arts seems indisputable, and most historians will profit from an introduction to a different and more technical way of evaluating these texts. More important for historians is her documentation in Protestant literature of the massive presence of theological commonplaces—medieval and evangelical. Especially welcome is her brief attention to Wenzel Linck’s approval of shouting in the ear of the dying—a medieval custom that Luther noted and one that makes evangelical sense. Not surprisingly, however, Reinis’s main [End Page 384] concern is to show that markers of evangelical authenticity dominate all genres: constant reiteration of a justification pro me; exaltation of Baptism and the Last Supper; a reduced role for a thoroughly transformed confession; an attack on superfluous, “legalistic” conditions for forgiveness; and a general recourse to a language of passivity and salvation extra nos. But aside from a few specific disagreements with Luise Klein, Susan Karrant-Nunn, and Craig Koslofsky (whom she misreads), Reinis’s argument is familiar. She begins with a recapitulation of what she accepts as “the late medieval death culture” (p. 2). Europe is in crisis—angst pervades—medieval religion makes things worse. After describing the contents of the late-medieval artes moriendi (the picture Ars, the longer prose Ars, Gerson’s Opus tripartitum, Stefan von Landskron, the anonymous Versehung leib sel er vnnd gutt...
- Research Article
- 10.1353/shb.2012.0042
- Jan 1, 2012
- Shakespeare Bulletin
Reviewed by: Doctor Faustus Kirk Melnikoff Doctor Faustus Presented by Little Goblin Productions at The Rose Bankside Theatre, London. June 19, 2011. Directed by Vince Tycer. Produced by Claire Craig. With Christopher Diacopoulos (Faustus), Cheska Moon (Mephistophilis), Zimmy Ryan (Devil, Evil Angel, Seven Deadly Sins, Friar, Emperor, Duchess, Helen of Troy), Mark Kavanagh (Devil, Good Angel, Clown, Beelzebub, Friar, Alexander the Great, Duke of Vanholt, and Third Scholar), Chris Slater (Devil, Second Schlolar, Lucifer, Lord of Lorrain, Knight), Tim Fordyce (Devil, First Scholar, Pope, Horse-Courser), and Holly Clark (Chorus, Wagner, Devil, Paramour, Old Man). On the face of it, the present Rose Bankside theatre has no business being anything other than a kitschy labor of love bolstered by a dankly illuminated past and an etch-a-sketch future. Advertised by a diminutive sandwich board 150 yards from the glitzy, overrun New Globe, this newly launched venue can only offer an oblong 40' by 15' seating-area/stage perched under a huge office building and alongside the Rose's cavernous archeological remains. Coffee, tea, stolid pastries, postcard history, and membership info for the anti-Stratfordian "Marlowe Society" (not to be confused with the Marlowe Society of America) greet patrons in the theatre's cramped waiting area, as do enthusiastic docent musings and paper flyers advertising the coming of a fabulous new Rose Theatre (funding yet to be determined). And like Henslowe's venue, this Rose lacks a resident troupe, and is compelled instead to populate its scaffold with small start-up theatrical companies from around London. But despite all of this, the Doctor Faustus that I saw on a Sunday afternoon amid sanguine Renaissance theatre buffs, lost Globe patrons, and friends and families of the cast, did not disappoint. It offered a provocative portrait of Faustus and the world amidst smart doubling and inspired choreography. Eschewing even two hours of traffic, this Faustus ran 75 minutes without intermission, and it enacted a cut A text (sans Robin, sans Rafe) with no borrowings from the B. Performed by a company with only seven actors, the production was also heavily doubled, with five of the seven performers playing multiple roles. From the opening, all of the players remained visible on stage, making costume changes, scene "exits," and set changes in full view of the audience. Given the limitation of the Rose's one-exit stage, this was undoubtedly a choice born of practicality, but it also helped underscore Faustus's predicament as a man living his life on a scaffold ever manipulated by dark forces from without. And with few exceptions, scenes flowed seamlessly from one to the next, giving the [End Page 218] production a forward momentum that well complimented this Faustus's inevitable progress towards damnation. Whereas many of the best productions of Marlowe's masterpiece have fully committed to the play's incessant ironies, Tycer's Faustus proved more one-dimensional in its approach. Here, a familiar good struggled with a familiar evil, but even before Faustus sold his soul, Hell's denizens were shown enjoying a stark rule, confidently lounging in Faustus's chair and desk at the protagonist's first entrance. Neither the promises of the Good Angel nor the pleas of the Old Man could do much in Wittenberg's gothic mis-en-scene, dominated as it was by the Devil and his minions. At times, this evil had a distinctly vampirish feel, with Mephistophilis and the demons hissing and staring at Faustus with aplomb in the grand tradition of Hollywood's Stoker; at other times, this threat was more Night of the Living Dead, the demons moving around Faustus with the fits, starts and moans of zombies past and present. If there ever was a moment of suspense in the production it came during the Helen of Troy scene when Holly Clark's bag-lady Old Man rose up to plead loudly for Faustus's attention. Thirty seconds of light, however, ended quickly with Clark being pounced upon by demons while Mephistophilis prepared Faustus for the entrance of Helen. Faustus's move to embrace "the face that launched a thousand ships" was ultimately accompanied on the other side of the stage by the Old Man...
- Research Article
- 10.1086/724116
- Jan 24, 2023
- Modern Philology
:<i>Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England</i>
- Research Article
- 4
- 10.1080/0015587x.1980.9716157
- Jan 1, 1980
- Folklore
TO whatever source one seeks to trace the English folk-play, the absence of early texts and records is a serious obstacle. The earliest text of a folk-play performance is from 17801, the earliest chapbook text from the middle decades of the eighteenth century,2 while the earliest reliable description of a performance resembling the modern folk-play takes us back only as far as 1737.3 Beyond this there is a baffling silence. The denunciations of various types of folk-revelry by medieval ecclestiastics and sixteenth-century Puritans contain nothing similar to the modern folk-play or any plausible progenitor of it,4 and early students of popular antiquities such as John Aubrey and Henry Bourne have likewise nothing useful to offer.5 This silence is broken only by occasional hints and reminiscences in literary sources. There are echoes of folk-play motifs and characteristics in early stageplays like Mucedorus, The Taming of the Shrew, and perhaps A Midsummer Night's Dream, in some masques, and in interludes.6 These parallels are generally of a limited and sporadic nature, however, making it difficult to determine the direction of the borrowing. More interesting is the fifteenthcentury morality, Mankind, in which five or six substantial parallels are concentrated in a single sequence, making it likely that the author had as a model some kind of performance resembling the folk-play as we know it today.7 An even better example of the same kind, which seems hithertoe to have passed unnoticed, occurs in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.8 The parallels here are of such a kind as to make it virtually certain that something closely resembling the modern folk-play in its central significant action was in existence in England by the end of the sixteenth century. In Act IV of the 1616 text of the play, Faustus, demonstrating his magical powers to the German Emperor, is twitted by the courtier Benvolio. In response, Faustus makes horns sprout from Benvolio's head. Thirsting for revenge, Benvolio, aided by his friends Martino and Fredericke, ambushes Faustus on a lonely path:
- Research Article
- 1
- 10.1353/jem.2021.0014
- Jan 1, 2021
- Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
This article examines the influence of Ovid's Heroides and ethopoeia on characterization in Christopher Marlowe's plays. In the sixteenth century, students often performed exercises in ethopoeia, "character making." In such an exercise, the schoolmaster placed a character from literature or history within a rhetorical situation, and students wrote speeches that reflected that character's emotions and social background. Ovid's Heroides, which features figures like Dido lamenting Aeneas's perfidy or Hero Leander's absence, exemplified this practice, and authors like Christopher Marlowe frequently employed characterization techniques learned from the Heroides as a model for ethopoeia. This article traces the development of his tragic characters from Dido Queene of Carthage (c.1586) to Doctor Faustus (c.1592), arguing that Marlowe uses techniques including ethopoeia's tria tempora structure and Ovid's speakers torn between the "voice of the self" and "the voice of the culture" to fashion a unique brand of "interiority" that invites empathic identification with his tragic protagonists. These protagonists consciously struggle against the narrative structures in which they are trapped by ethopoetically lamenting their frustrated desires and even repressing memories, and Marlowe invites his audience to sympathize regardless of the character's ethical decisions.
- Research Article
- 10.1080/00193089.1975.9932254
- Oct 1, 1975
- Improving College and University Teaching
More than once upon a time I, like you, took some graduate seminars that were not taught at all (never mind taught badly). Mine were in English. Our professor lectured us as a group ; we worked alone, es tranged from the ideas of our fellows until, late, we read each other our lonely papers, dug out and written up in isolation. Our relationship or responsibilities to the sem inar were so vague that we managed only to bore each other. A graduate seminar not only should not be handled this way, but need not. If a seminar is anything, it is a shared study of a common problem. And it can be a lively, mutually profitable adventure in scholarship. It can advance knowledge, provoke inquiry, supply experi ence in working closely with other budding scholars, and provide the stimulation of a common cause. So saying to myself, I mapped out a seminar to do the job, and conducted it. What follows is a record of what I planned, how it proceeded, and what success (or failure) it seems to have had. At last I shall speculate with you on what the experience suggested to me about seminars for graduate students, yours and mine. To begin one needs a subject for a seminar, a subject determined in part by one's training, interests, and de sires, but also by the needs of one's Department and its students. We had need of a seminar offering in my area of concentration, 17th century English nondramatic lit erature. We had more than enough students who were interested in the period. I was beginning a large project on John Donne, to be called A Donne Dictionary, and beyond that had a book in my head called The World of John Donne. I had, of course, already read the published materials on Donne and had read widely in the period. So I knew the problems and their dimensions. It might not have been so; moreover, it might not have been well to have been so, for not all topics one is schooled in make good seminar choices. They are too narrow or special or dull. But, as I said, one need not have been working in detail on the topic, and indeed new ground breaking for professor and students can be more lively. The key to good selection of a topic is its capacity to provide significant knowledge, to function as a mean ingful part of the students' general field of study, and to offer exercise in a variety of scholarly problems. Of course the topic should be small enough so that it can be explored reasonably in the time available. The World of John Donne was indeed significant, encompassing 1572-1631, the years not only of Donne but of Shakespeare's plays, the Spanish Armada, the first telescope, of Rubens, Drake, William Harvey, Ra leigh, Sidney, Franz Hals, of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, of the founding of Virginia, of constant visitations of the plague. And the writings of those years included, to name but a few, The Lusiads, Euphues, North's Plutarch, The Arcadia, Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, The Faerie Queen, Astrophel and Stella, Richard III, Every Man in His Humour, Hamlet, Don Quixote, The Alchemist, Chapman's Homer, The Duchess of Mai ft, the Novum Organum, and The Anat omy of Melancholy. And Donne was a man involved in the center of that world, as courtier, soldier, poet, schol ar, politician, theologian. If a student could know the world of John Donne, he could very nearly know per haps the most significant period of English literature. Moreover, the events of those years straddling the year 1600 turned much that was medieval to what we call modern in science, politics, religion, philosophy, and literature. To a student of literature it was a vital part of his study. The trouble was that the Donne years, if a seminar tried to study them in full prospect, would be too full to provide in one semester or quarter more than a shared survey. And that would not be graduate study. The focus would have to be on Donne; more specifically, it would have to be on how Donne's literary artistry developed out of the world he lived in. Even this was going to prove too large for the time we had, but no seminar worth its salt seems to fit a so-many-weeks academic term. The more important thing is that the seminar place its mem bers in contact with problems with which they can work together toward understanding of the seminar's topic, an understanding which will not be complete by term's end ing but whose later pursuit will have been planned for and made attractively possible by the seminar.
- Research Article
- 2
- 10.2307/456763
- Jan 1, 1906
- PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.
- Research Article
- 5
- 10.2307/3817787
- Jan 1, 1997
- Huntington Library Quarterly
T_ Vhough women in the sixteenth century were always considered to be subordinate to their male counterparts, they were not regarded as all that different spiritually. Their religious concerns, like those of men, focused on sin and redemption, how best to worship and serve God, and how to attain heaven and avoid hell. For this reason, women's devotional material in the sixteenth century was for the most part the same as men's: the Bible first and foremost, the Book of Common Prayer for public worship, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Thomas Becon's Works for home reading, as well as various general devotional books, such as Henry Bull's Christian Praiers and Holie Meditations (ca. 1566) and Richard Day's A Booke of Christian Prayers (1578). Many of these works only acknowledged the concerns of women by including one or two prayers for childbirth. Even among the four books discussed here, The Monument ofMatrones (1582) is exceptional in addressing conditions specific to women other than childbearing. Suzanne Hull's now classic study of printed books directed to an Englishspeaking female audience, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Booksfor 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982), lists 163 titles on her Basic List of for Women, of which eighteen are classified as devotional. Of these, nine were religious treatises, sermons, and the like; four mixed prayers with other materials; and five were actually prayer books. The first three she lists are [A Tabletfor Gentlewomen] (1574; STC 23640), Anne Wheathill's A Handfull ofHolesome Hearbs ( 584; STC 25329), and Nicholas Breton's Auspicante Jehova (1597; STC 3632). Thomas Bentley's The Monument ofMatrones (1582; STC 1892-93), chronologically second on Hull's list, mixes prayers with biblical extracts and other devotional material, but as its collection of prayers is comprehensive, we have included it here. Hull's chapter Devotional Books and her list provide little more than bibliographical description and some suggestion of content. A closer look at these four books reveals them as rich sources for the
- Research Article
- 10.61424/jlls.v3i2.253
- Apr 1, 2025
- Journal of Literature and Linguistics Studies
This research analyzes the divided psyche of Dr. Faustus. He was a brilliant German scholar and the protagonist of the Elizabethan tragedy Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Dr. Faustus’ psyche was conflicted between id and superego, a theory by Sigmund Freud. Throughout the story, we see that Dr. Faustus is mostly ill-motivated by his instincts and is indifferent about morality. Though the Good Angel tried to guide him toward the right path, the Bad Angel misled him. The Good Angel and the Bad Angel both reflected the conscience and the evil instinct that he already had in him. Faustus's struggle was between the pursuit of worldly desires and moral considerations. By analyzing the text through the content analysis method, this paper made a connection between Faustus’ divided psyche and his ultimate fate. . His prioritization of the id over the superego led him towards damnation. Faustus only cared about his own amusement his whole life. At the last moment of life, he realized his mistakes and wanted to go on the path of morality, but it was already too late for salvation. The paper serves as a powerful commentary on the inner turmoil arising from the psyche’s conflict between desires and moral values.
- Research Article
- 2
- 10.7190/jms.v2i0.121
- Jan 1, 2021
- Journal of Marlowe Studies
“Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” argues that demonic beings and their temporal experiences serve as useful ways to conceptualize human beings existing in multiple timelines in Marlowe’s play. Plotting Satan’s histories in the Bible, demonology, and the ars moriendi tradition, the essay trace how early modern authors attempted to outline precisely how demonic temporality differed from humanity’s own constricted timescapes. Marlowe’s play, however, undercuts any confidence that early modern readers might have gained from these traditions, and I show how Mephistopheles furthers Faustus’s flawed conception of time as strictly earthly. Mephistopheles, too, is bound by certain temporal demands, particularly when he is forced to arrive upon the clowns Robin and Rafe’s ludic conjurations. Ultimately, Mephistopheles manipulates Faustus’s sense of temporality altogether, and the magus only learns at the very end of the play the true import of “everlasting” and Mephistopheles’s role, his experiences, within that sense of infinitude. In staging an aborted death scene that echoes the first half of ars moriendi texts, Marlowe’s disengagement from the genre rests on differences in understanding demonic temporality.
- Book Chapter
- 10.1007/978-1-349-89053-8_20
- Jan 1, 1969
[Doctor Faustus] has come down to us unhappily in a fragmentary and imperfect text. Faustus tells the world-story of the man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come. The motive, like much of the conduct of this tragedy, is that of the old moralities, witness the alternate promptings of the good and bad angel and the dance of the seven deadly sins. More important is the typical character of Faustus who is any man and every man. But Faustus is, none the less, an individual in whose pathetic plight we are interested for himself, and the appeal of the work is primarily artistic. Doctor Faustus is a better play on the stage than the careless reader might suppose it; and it is worthy of note that what the old story has gained in other hands in variety of incident, by the infusion of the love story of Margaret for example, it has lost in the singleness of purpose with which Marlowe concentrates attention on his unhappy protagonist. Even the wide allegorical significance, the masterly obliteration of time and space of the second part of Goethe's Faust with the hero's redemption, scarcely compensate for this loss.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/pgn.2006.0059
- Jan 1, 2006
- Parergon
Reviewed by: The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources Judith Collard Driver, Martha W. , The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources, London, The British Library, 2004; cloth; pp. xii, 302; 178 b/w illustrations; RRP US$80; ISBN 0712348336. Martha Driver has published a substantial range of articles on printing, literature and the use of imagery in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, much of which has focused on books for an English market. She has also worked on the role of nuns and lay women as patrons of both illuminated and printed books. She is one of the founders of the Early Books Society and the editor of its journal, [End Page 155] and is ideally situated to tackle the subject of this book. In her introduction she sets out a bold and ambitious programme. Woodcuts are an important and overlooked resource in the history of book illustration. She writes: 'they have much to tell us about how books were produced and for what purposes, about reading habits and developments in literacy, and about the part that books played in social, political and religious change'. Driver suggests that the study of woodcuts and their texts can be used to argue for 'a radically new understanding of book illustration'. This seems an overstatement. One reason is that Driver does herself a disservice by not providing us with a sense of how these woodcuts have been discussed by other scholars, thus disguising her important contribution. Much of the previous discussion of this material has been in relation to iconographical issues, or as illustrations to particular themes. The work of Charles Zika and Keith Moxey has demonstrated the value of woodcuts for such approaches. Scholars of printmaking have looked at woodcuts as independent artefacts, as many were, while historians of the book, as Driver indicates, have tended to overlook their role. In bringing together these elements into one study Driver is, indeed, embarking on an ambitious project. Exploring the emergence of a new medium highlights both the speed of the spread of innovation as well as the lingering influence of what preceded it. In her first chapter Driver writes about the early printed illustration. She emphasizes that not only was the printed book quickly accepted but that this acceptance did not mean that manuscripts ceased to be equally valued or produced. Print took up texts that were already popular in manuscript and distributed them to a wider market. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was this very affordability and ubiquity that led to print being devalued. Sonnets were circulated amongst an aristocratic audience in manuscript form, possibly never originally intended to appear in a printed format. She also reminds the reader that block prints with their xylographic texts and other single-leaf woodcuts were produced concurrently with typeset books and were sometimes pasted into books. The Ars moriendi, a particularly popular work, was first produced typographically and then abridged in block-book form. Both were ultimately derived from the Tractatus artis bene moriendi written in the early fifteenth century. To illustrate these points reference is also made to European examples such as the documentation of the use of woodcuts in paintings of figures like Petrus Christus or devotional prints made in Germany. One impression that is quickly gained is that English printing was dependent in its early phases upon the major [End Page 156] printing centres in Germany, the Netherlands and France. Caxton, for example, initially began experimenting with printing on the continent and imported type, wood-blocks and even his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde. English printed books were regarded as inferior to those produced by continental printers. Many books, including Henry VIII's Great Bible, were produced, at least initially, in places like France. What Driver does not point out is that this practice of manufacturing English books abroad was not unique to the printing trade. In the fifteenth century the Netherlands and France were already supplying mass-produced manuscripts for the English market. Printed books were reflecting the general cultural dominance of the Low Countries. This is not to say that English books were completely without innovation...
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