Dying Badly

Abstract

This chapter traces how arts of dying migrate from devotional texts into homiletic dramas and finally to the commercial playhouse between 1570 and 1590, around the same time that anti-theatrical condemnations of the stage as inherently blasphemous come to cultural prominence. Theater constitutes an important site of religious instruction and theological investigation not despite, but rather because of, its blasphemous potential. William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus all employ parodies of ars moriendi ideas to represent evil action. Parody arts of dying help dramatize a predestinarian cosmos where distinctions between the elect and the reprobate are fundamental, yet invisible to humans. The bad deaths in these plays function like negative theologies, manifesting and explicating divine will through attempted departures from it. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe brings the reprobate parodist into focus alongside the divine parodied and makes the magician’s vicious death a site for analyzing human agency. As practices of dying are inverted into theatrical arts of dying badly, Elizabethan dramatists discover occasions to explore the nature of action and the forms of agency available in situations of extreme constraint or privation.