‘Faustus’ and the Politics of Magic

Charles Nicholl

• Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Roma Gill
  Black, 109 pp, £3.95, December 1989, ISBN 0 7136 3231 3
• Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare by John Mebane
  University of Nebraska Press, 309 pp, £26.95, July 1989, ISBN 0 8032 3133 4
• Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance by William Huffman
  Routledge, 252 pp, £30.00, November 1989, ISBN 0 415 00129 3
• Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England by Patrick Curry
  Polity, 238 pp, £27.50, September 1989, ISBN 0 7456 0604 0

Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was an Elizabethan spine-chiller. People came for thrills, and early productions pulled out all the stops to provide them. ‘Shagge-hayred devills’ ran ‘roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouthes’. Drummers thundered backstage. Stage-hands hung aloft to ‘make artificiall lightning in their heavens’. At times the play seemed to generate a power more than dramatic. At one performance in Shoreditch the wooden walls of the theatre suddenly ‘crackt’ and ‘frighted the audience.’ At another, in Exeter, the players stopped dead in the middle of the conjuration scene, ‘for they were all perswaded there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled – ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ – and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation.