“’Tis Magic, Magic that Hath Ravished Me” Passionate Conjuring in Doctor Faustus and The Devil’s Charter

Abstract

Magic on the early modern English stage was a cause of strong feeling, from the disapproval of anti-theatrical writers, who found it doubly reprehensible that the sinful theatre would depict magic, to alleged outbreaks of panic among actors and audience alike when there were rumours of the devil himself appearing on stage during a magical scene. 1 But feelings play a role not only in the reception of plays: they are an integral part of dramatic action and theatrical performance. This paper will focus on the depiction of one particular kind of early modern magic, learned ritual magic involving the evocation of spirits, or in this case, devils. It will then situate it both within the early modern dramatic tradition of writing emotions into texts for the stage and within the wider discourses sur-rounding emotions at the time. At the core of the analysis are two plays centred entirely on characters who practice ritual magic: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (published first in 1604 and in a longer version, the so-called B-text, in 1616 but assumed to have been written around 1590) and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter , first published in 1607, and in particular the scenes in which the conjurers call up spirits and those centred on their final torment and death.