What magic can perform: Theatricality and Performativity in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

Abstract

In a context dominated by the iconoclasm of English Anglicanism and by the “textualization” of religious culture, Christopher Marlowe transforms his play Doctor Faustus (1589), staged in the theaters of the London suburbs, into a reflection on the performative and “incarnationalist” capacities of theater. This article studies how the metaphorical inflection of the theological language that the ecclesiastical authorities had used to denounce the perverse effects of theatrical representation allows the English dramatist to formulate a conception of literary art as the creation of a world and no longer as an imitation of nature. Thus, Marlowe resignifies the concept of performativity in theatrical terms: while, in the theater of the world, the performativity of divine predestination condemned the faithful to a situation of existential anguish, artistic performativity gave spectators the opportunity to create their own world, the world of the theater. Therefore, the aesthetic reworking of the theological lexicon and imaginary proves to be Marlowe’s most profound response to the crisis of “theological absolutism”: he turns the theater into a play space where the trauma caused by this crisis could be worked through and eventually overcome by its dramatic resignification. In other words, in Marlowe’s version of the Faustian myth, human self-affirmation is realized mainly through the cathartic power of theatrical illusion.