Supernatural Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Anthony Harris

Critical Essay by Anthony Harris

SOURCE : "Spectacles of Strangeness: The Staging of Supernatural Scenes," in Night's Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama, Manchester University Press, 1980, pp. 149-72.

In the essay below, Harris elucidates Elizabethan and Jacobean methods of staging supernatural scenes in the theater.

I

The portrayal of supernatural phenomena had been established as one of the main sources of spectacle on the English stage long before the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Demonic figures were frequently represented in the mediaeval miracle and morality plays and magicians were stock figures in the pastoral romances of the early sixteenth century. These two traditional elements survived and were indeed intermingled in many dramas of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

For example, both Doctor Faustus and The Devil's Charter conclude with magicians being carried off to Hell by devils. Before Faustus's final speech the stage direction reads 'Hell is discovered' (xix. 115.1) whilst...
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