![]() ![]() 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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