The purpose of this paper is to present a clearer picture of Johann Weyer's conception of possession and exorcism by synthesizing various elements of his De Praestigiis Daemonum, and comparing these elements with Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Finally, such a revision of demonic agency in the play also holds important clues for a new assessment of the play’s treatment of predestination and how it relates to contemporary orthodoxy. However, while the devils’ role in Faustus’s downfall is constantly undermined in the A-text, the B-text is at pains to restore their credibility.
This paper argues that by putting devils center stage, Marlowe exposes them to widespread anxieties concerning the visual representation of the supernatural, which further highlights the play’s heterodox, spiritualising tendencies. Elizabethan drama in general, and Doctor Faustus in particular, likewise entertained a fraught relationship with its own, visual mode of representation which was not free from contemporary anxieties about visual representation. While obsession with the Devil reached a high-water mark with the large-scale witchcraft persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, representatives of the Radical Reformation, such as Anabaptists, Libertines, or the Family of Love, began to question the existence of the Devil as part of a rigorous rejection of idolatry. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus powerfully epitomises the uncertainties and contradictions of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century.
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