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From the hellmouth to the witch's cauldron: cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage

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From the hellmouth to the witch's cauldron: cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage

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Content FROM THE HELLMOUTH TO THE WITCH’S CAULDRON: COOKING AND FEEDING EVIL ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE by M. Barbara Mello _____________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2012 Copyright 2012 M. Barbara Mello ii  I dedicate this dissertation to Mary Vicencia Mello and Manuel David Mello. Both have inspired me throughout my life with their love, kindness, tenacity, and insightful wisdom. I am proud and grateful to call them Mom and Dad. iii  Table of Contents List of Figures iv Abstract vi Introduction Stage Properties, Divine Retribution, and Damnation 1 Chapter 1 The Medieval Hellmouth 16 The English Hellmouth 18 The Winchester Psalter 20 The Harrowing of Hell Pageant 34 Female Labor 49 Chapter 2 Marlowe’s Hellmouth and Cauldron 53 Conjuring on The Early Modern Stage 63 The Jew of Malta 89 Chapter 3 Macbeth: Hellmouth & The Witch’s Cauldron 104 Newes From Scotland 108 Visual Culture of The Witch 113 Macbeth 118 Macbeth’s Hellmouth 128 Hecate: Goddess and Queen of the Witches 132 Chapter 4 Hecate’s Return or Middleton’s The Witch 136 Epilogue Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and The Witch’s Cauldron 157 Bibliography 162 iv  List of Figures 1.1 Anon. The Mouth of Hell. 1476 16 1.2 Anon. “The Tortures of the Damned.” Winchester Psalter. British Museum, Nero C IV Folio 38. 23 1.3 Anon. “An Angel locks the door of Hell.” Winchester Psalter. British Museum, Nero C VI Folio 39. 26 1.4 Anon. The Last Judgment. British Museum, Stowe Ms. 944 7r 28 1.5 Anon. Lincoln Cathedral, West Portal. ca. 1145. from Schmidt, Gary D. The Iconography to the Mouth of Hell. 30 1.6 Anon. Ferrara Cathedral, west portal ca. 1300. from Schmidt, Gary D. The Iconography to the Mouth of Hell. 31 1.7 Anon. Stratford-on-Avon, Chapel of the Holy Cross. ca. 1550s fresco. 33 from Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries from Schmidt, Gary D. The Iconography to the Mouth of Hell. 1.8 Anon. Christ in the Wine Press, ca. 1400s 41 2.1 Lucas, Cranach the Younger. Last Supper of the Protestants and the Pope’s Descent into Hell. (ca. 1540). 57 2.2 Anon. 1616 title page to (1616) Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus 66 2.3 Cast Cooking vessel handles with mottoes 88 3.1 Grien, Hans Baldung. The Witches’ Sabbatt 1510 104 3.3 Anon. “Two Witches Cooking up a Storm.” 114 3.4 Anon. “Rooster and Serpent.” (1490) 114 3.5 Grien, Hans Baldung. Three Witches (1514). 116 v  3.6 The Gunpowder Plot 129 3.7 Imaginia de I Dei (Hecate) 132 vi  Abstract This dissertation interrogates the early modern stage properties of the hellmouth and its cauldron that terrified and fascinated early modern audiences with their performances of damnation and divine retribution. Hell, that fearsome place from which no one but the devil seems to escape, over the course of the sixteenth century becomes reduced to a stage prop, but this stage property has unique powers. It enthralls its audience, first with horrific acts of boiling up the ungodly in a blazing cauldron to feed the sinful souls to the hellmouth, and then in scenes of damnation as those sinners fall into the gaping jaws of the mouth to hell. These stage props of the hellmouth and cauldron are powerfully charged with the Catholic iconography that devised the image, the Reformation ideology that embraced it, and the Post-Reformation theology and practices in which the image produced ridicule, fear and fascination. Specifically, the stage property of the hellmouth gives us a fresh understanding of the ways in which early modern peoples imagined hell and damnation as a spectacle of cooking and feeding. In sacred art, the hellmouth opens up into a process of damnation that is often artistically depicted as kitchen space. Everyday kitchen utensils such as meat hooks, knives, and butcher blocks are instruments with which to torture the damned. The centrality of the cauldron in the visual formula of the hellmouth marks a disturbing relationship between hell’s kitchen and the domestic kitchen space in a household. The religious artists that created the iconography of the hellmouth appropriated kitchen space into their renditions of damnation to use that female violence in the butchering and bleeding of the human soul as food for the hellmouth. This sacred art of divine retribution and damnation uses cultural fears of the female labor of cooking, and exploits social and moral notions of eating. The plays I examine in this study depict these ideas of nurturance vii  and pollution, and focus on the body as a site of constant tension that wavers between deficiency and excess. In these plays, the cooking and eating of food are meditations on the divine retribution and damnation of the protagonist. In each play, a hellmouth emerges to snack on the sinful or a cauldron rises from the trapdoor to boil the ungodly. Thus, this study concentrates on works that theatrically deploy a spectacular hellmouth or the witch’s blazing cauldron. First, I trace the evolution of the hellmouth during the medieval period when it first appears in English psalters. The English renditions of the hellmouth and cauldron gripped the imagination of early Christianity, moving into the public sphere as reliefs and frescoes on parish churches, and as a stage prop in the medieval cycle plays for the Corpus Christi Pageant. Next, I look at Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe seems to be one of the first playwrights to deploy both the hellmouth and cauldron onto the early modern stage as instruments of the Christian God’s justice against the reprobate. Pride, avarice, gluttony, and ambition festers in his protagonists’ souls while each fights against the social system that condemns them. In these plays, Marlowe responds to the theater critics who condemn his plays and the early modern stage itself by using the demonic valences of the hellmouth and cauldron to draw attention to the institution of the theater as diabolic space. The hellmouth hiding in the Discovery Space, and the cauldron simmering beneath the stage boards invests the early modern stage with the power to control the demonic energy burning within these stage properties. viii  The first half of my project establishes the rich iconography of the hellmouth and its cauldron, and examines the spiritual and theatrical potency of these props in arguably their debut on the public stage. The second half of this study turns to the important cultural and political work the witch’s cauldron performs on stage. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch continue Marlowe’s demonic experiment. Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s plays demonstrate the power of the cauldron to inflict divine justice as a distinctive act of female labor—cooking. In each of these plays, the cauldron rises up from the hellish space beneath the stage to join the action of the play and perform its part in divine retribution. Finally, I move to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a play that shows us the extent to which the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron mark the early modern stage as the physical location of the supernatural realm of hell. He stages the cauldron off stage, but the blazing vessel’s presence is a palpable force in the play. His character, Ursula, similar to Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s witches, embodies the sweating cauldron on stage, and uses this power to manipulate and disrupt the social and political hierarchy. Scholars have not yet considered the intervention these stage properties make in received ideas about hell, female labor, and the early modern stage, and this study addresses this gap. A study of these stage properties shows us how the early modern theater used the cultural memories of demonic power infused in these objects to assert its authority, however transitory. This study takes as its premise W. B. Worthen’s argument for the performativity of the stage—the potential of a performance to transgress its prescribed boundaries. Theatrical performance is a citational process, and the stage props of the hellmouth and the witch’s cauldron are invested with this performative potential. ix  Thus these objects of sacred and theatre culture are endowed with a fearsome tension that threatens to transgress the seemingly rigid boundaries of the possible with imaginative and chaotic performances of the impossible. Many consumers of the early modern stage believed in the diabolic and witchcraft. Thus appropriating and relocating this fearsome power onto the stage through the theatrical properties of the hellmouth and the witch’s cauldron positions the early modern theater as housing and containing the terrible power of damnation and retribution. The early modern stage consumes this diabolic, witchy, feminized power to empower the institution of the stage and its theatrical productions the stage offers up for public consumption 1  Introduction: Stage Properties, Divine Retribution, and Damnation therefore hel hathe inlarged itself, and hathe opened his mouth. . . (Isaiah 5.14) This biblical text from Isaiah 5.14 is one of numerous scriptural lines that evoke contemplation on the mouth to hell—an image that gripped the imagination of Christian ideology. The hellmouth with its gaping jaws and devils cooking the sinful in a blazing cauldron was a ubiquitous presence in Christian communities in Europe and England. Though the 1540s iconoclastic movement in England destroyed popish iconography, the hellmouth continued to thrive in Post-Reformation England as an image of damnation. For example, a contemporary pamphlet on the Gunpowder Plot uses the voracious hellmouth to gnaw on the traitors of this thwarted scheme against the King of England. Yet it is primarily as a theatrical property on the public stage that both the hellmouth and its cauldron terrified and fascinated early modern audiences with their performances of damnation and divine retribution. Hell, that fearsome place from which no one but the devil seems to escape, over the course of the sixteenth century becomes reduced to a stage prop, but this stage property has unique powers. It enthralls its audience, first with horrific acts of boiling up the ungodly in a blazing cauldron to feed the sinful souls to the hellmouth, and then in scenes of damnation as those sinners fall into the gaping jaws of the mouth to hell. These stage props of the hellmouth and cauldron are powerfully charged with the Catholic iconography that devised the image, the Reformation ideology that embraced it, and the Post-Reformation theology and practices in which the image produced ridicule, fear and fascination. The stage property of the hellmouth gives us a fresh understanding of the ways in which early modern peoples imagined hell and damnation as a spectacle of cooking and 2  feeding. In sacred art, the hellmouth opens up into a process of damnation that is often artistically depicted as kitchen space. 12 Everyday kitchen utensils such as meat hooks, knives, and butcher blocks are instruments with which to torture the damned. The centrality of the cauldron in the visual formula of the hellmouth marks a disturbing relationship between hell’s kitchen and the domestic kitchen space in a household. Wendy Wall, in Staging Domesticity, shows us that there is a subversive violence in the female domestic space of the kitchen that trembles beneath the struggle with male control over this female domain. As she explains, “[p]art and parcel of physic was the transformation of the kitchen into a slaughterhouse strewn liberally with blood and carcasses.” 3 I argue that the religious artists that created the iconography of the hellmouth appropriated kitchen space into their renditions of damnation to use that female violence in the butchering and bleeding of the human soul as food for the hellmouth. This sacred art of divine retribution and damnation uses cultural fears of the female labor of cooking, and exploits social and moral notions of eating. In Food, Morals and Meaning: The pleasure and anxiety of eating, John Coveney discusses the social history of the concerns for the body’s appetite for food that produces enjoyment and gratification as well as apprehension of the food and its effects on the body. Coveney develops a genealogy of                                                               22 The visual culture of the hellmouth is immense. For example, hell is depicted as a pit and as circles that correspond to the sin of those damned within its circular space. This study concentrates on a selection of artistic renditions that use the kitchen space as a model for hell space. 3 Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 3. 3  nutrition from which emerges Western cultural ideas of food as both nurturing and polluting that calls for both social and self control of the body. 4 The plays I examine in this study depict these ideas of nurturance and pollution, and focus on the body as a site of constant tension that wavers between deficiency and excess. In these plays, the cooking and eating of food are meditations on the divine retribution and damnation of the protagonist. In each play, a hellmouth emerges to snack on the sinful or a cauldron rises from the trapdoor to boil the ungodly. Some early modern plays represent a hellmouth, including Thomas Middleton’s The Game of Chess or as in Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England (ca. 1598) the stage property of the hellmouth is used for Jonah’s whale. 5 Nevertheless, these plays do not recognize the image or prop as a powerful spiritual site of damnation. Nor do these plays understand the culinary aspects invested in these props of divine punishment. Thus, this study concentrates on works, which theatrically deploy a spectacular hellmouth. I first look at Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe seems to be one of the first playwrights to deploy both the hellmouth and cauldron onto the early modern stage as instruments of the Christian God’s justice against the reprobate. Pride, avarice, gluttony, and ambition festers in his                                                               4 Coveney, John. Food, Morals and Meaning: The pleasure and anxiety of eating. London: Routledge, 2000. vii-xiv, x-xi. 5 Sager, Jenny. The Whale, the Hell Mouth and the Aesthetics of Wonder in Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England (ca. 1589). Jesus College, University of Oxford. http://www.academia.edu/. June 2012. Sager explains that the stage prop of the hellmouth was used for Jonah’s whale, and she compares the thrilling effect of shocking the audience with both this prop and the one used in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (Universal Pictures, 1975) 4  protagonists’ souls while each fights against the social system that condemns them. In these plays, Marlowe responds to the theater critics who condemn his plays and the early modern stage itself by using the demonic valences of the hellmouth and cauldron to draw attention to the institution of the theater as diabolic space. The hellmouth hiding in the Discovery Space, and the cauldron simmering beneath the stage boards invests the early modern stage with the power to control the demonic energy burning within these stage properties. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, the plays I turn to in the second half of the project, examine the ways in which both playwrights continue Marlowe’s demonic experiment. Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s plays demonstrate the power of the cauldron to inflict divine justice as a distinctive act of female labor—cooking. In each of these plays, the cauldron rises up from the hellish space beneath the stage to join the action of the play and perform its part in divine retribution. Finally, I move to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a play that shows us the extent to which the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron mark the early modern stage as the physical location of the supernatural realm of hell. He stages the cauldron off stage, but the blazing vessel’s presence is a palpable force in the play. His character, Ursula, similar to Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s witches, embodies the sweating cauldron on stage, and uses this power to manipulate and disrupt the social and political hierarchy. Scholars have not yet considered the intervention these stage properties make in received ideas about hell, female labor, and the early modern stage, and this study addresses this gap. A study of these stage properties shows us how the early modern theater used the cultural memories of demonic power infused in these objects to assert its 5  authority, however transitory. Equally significant is how this assertion of power, through the nexus of the cauldron, reveals the ways in which early modern women resisted and revised the demonizing of their labor. The hellmouth invests the cauldron with significant and powerful meanings that complicates the multiple valences embedded in this artifact as a domestic tool. This study examines the ways in which the early modern stage comments on the witching of this female labor. Official historical narratives and records omit information on women participating in the craft of public cooking, and fictional and alternative literature often presents negative images of this female labor. These negative representations points to this culture’s fear and concern of this female labor of cooking. As Coveny argues, food and food preparation are causes of anxiety in Western culture. This study investigates several important questions. When did the artists begin to envision the mouth to hell as an act of cooking and feeding? How did this iconic image circulate within the social system? What is the spiritual efficacy of this stage property? How might the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron inform our understanding of the female labor of cooking? Why does a cauldron read as a witch’s instrument of power? The plays I study call attention to the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron through the staging of banquets, the gifting of food, and food preparation. How might the staging of cooking and eating further invest the stage as a locus of demonic power? How do these plays exploit and contain this diabolic power through the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron? This project joins the conversation on stage properties that has been taken up by several recent critical works on early modern drama. Francis Teague’s important study, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, analyzes stage properties as “image clusters,” 6  focusing on their symbolic meaning within the text. 6 In Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda contend “stage properties encode networks of material relations that are the stuff of drama and society alike.” They posit that stage props should be read as part of a larger cultural circulation of material goods inscribed with multiple social and political codes. 7 Andrew Sofer also turns a critical lens on stage props to examine their supernatural potency in The Stage Life of Props. 8 Sofer contends that properties operate as “material ghosts,” and he looks at how props “animate stage action,” question, and revitalize the practice of theater. Concurring with Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis on the Play of the Blessed Sacrament, Sofer argues that the staging of the Catholic host or “obloe” collapses the divine presence into representation, and Sofer further posits that the subjective experience of this stage prop demonstrates the brewing contention regarding the Catholic notion of transubstantiation. As these critics demonstrate stage properties can sometimes work to undermine religious ideologies while also enforcing and stabilizing the authority of other dominant beliefs of faith. There is, however, a tendency in this critical discourse to empty these stage properties of their potential for religious and supernatural efficacy. My project endeavors to reinvest the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron with their sacred significance, and to recover the polyvalent meanings invested in these objects of faith.                                                               6 Teague, Frances. Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. London: Bucknell UP, 1991. 10. 7 Harris, Jonathan Gil and Natasha Korda, eds. “Introduction: towards a materialist account of stage properties.” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 1-10. 8 Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 1, 32-33. 7  These stage properties are also invested with occult powers. The received scholarship on the notions of occult practices such as conjuring, and witchcraft in the medieval and early modern periods examines the intersection of magic with religion, science and popular culture. This scholarship looks at the ways in which occult belief systems interact with social, political and cultural institutions. Scholars have analyzed the continuing practice of conjuring and witchcraft in early modern England despite the condemnation of these magical arts by state and religious authorities. Social historians Richard Kieckhefer, Keith Thomas, K.M. Briggs and Stuart Clark examine the tension and tenuous boundaries between religious and magical practices and the effects of these conflicting yet sometimes comparable systems on the differing social classes (Kieckhefer and Thomas), and examine the witch as a social and political phenomenon (Briggs and Clark). 9 This discourse on magic has been enriched with the literary study of Linda Woodbridge who explains the vestiges of magic and folk ritual in early modern popular culture as a process of “magical thinking.” Feminist scholars such as Deborah Willis, Karen Newman, and Barbara Traister show us how the sign of witch is read as a metaphor against women, a threatening mother figure, or the unruly woman. Conjurers or                                                               9 Kiekhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Briggs, K.M. Pale Hecate’s Team. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962. Clark, Stuart. Languages of witchcraft: narrative, ideology, and meaning in early modern culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Woodbridge, Linda. The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. 2-3. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 14. Newman, Karen. “‘And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor. Methuen, New York, 1987. 56 8  stage magicians are “ a self contained paradox,” or “realistic and mundane.” 10 This study draws on this rich collection of social and critical literature to explore the staging of magic and the supernatural in the early modern theater. I enter into this discussion on the intersection of conjuring and witchcraft with religious and popular culture by examining the cultural work of the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron that are read as sacred and supernatural artifacts. These stage properties waver between the natural and the unnatural and are a material location in which competing religious codes of faith pull and tug, endowing and divesting these props of sacred meaning. The stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron invokes a sensuous experience thus these properties can be read as containing a web of social and cultural relationships. Kieckhefer suggests that magic participates with the supernatural when it is demonic (religious) as opposed to natural (scientific). Yet the distinction between demonic and natural was often blurred. Kieckhefer’s cross-cultural analysis of the history and development of magical belief systems shows us how the magical practices of early modern England were a fusion of Germanic, Celtic and Catholic rituals as well as influences from Jewish and Muslim cultures. 11 This cultural mix might have contributed to the condemnation of magic by state and religious authorities. A study of the material culture of hell with its devils, and the staging of hell with the hellmouth and cauldron will develop new insights into the cultural meanings of the contentious relationship between religious authorities, conjuring, witchcraft, and the theater. The theatrical props from                                                               10 Traister, Barbara Howard. The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Day of Simon Forman. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001. 1. Reed, Robert R. Jr. The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1965. 8 11 Kieckhefer 2. 9  which the spirit world is materialized can potentially show us how the burgeoning theater industry used this transgressive power to promote its own autonomy and influence. This study explores early modern concepts of the supernatural, particularly hell and damnation—that which is below, beyond, and beside the natural. The prepositional positioning of the supernatural suggests an interesting correspondence with stage properties that are, as Harris notes, placed “beneath or against a structure.” 12 The stage property repositions the supernatural from beyond to beneath, against or beside, giving material structure to the immaterial. Stage properties are defined as “any portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play; a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory” (OED 1a). Stage props are “requisite” to performance, and essential to the staging of magic and the supernatural. Properties denote ownership or the possession of an object. Defining properties as possessions, objects that are possessed, has a possible correlative link to magic and the supernatural that suggests the complex material interconnections contained within stage properties. To analyze these interconnections, I use a new historicist approach that is concerned with “tracking the social energies that circulate very broadly through a culture, flowing back and forth between margins and center.” 13 This study also takes as its premise W. B. Worthen’s claim that dramatic performance cites its own stage practices as well as “social and behavioral practices that operate outside the theater and that constitute contemporary                                                               12 In Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama, Harris argues that this definition of props is limiting (1). I find the positioning meaningful when linked to the representation of the supernatural. 13 Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2000. 13. 10  social life.” Worthen argues for the performativity of the stage—the potential of a performance to transgress its prescribed boundaries. 14 David Riggs considers ideas of performance and points to Christopher Marlowe’s use of the word “perform” when the connotations for the term retained the older sense of “to complete” as well as current notions of “to play a part.” To play or form a part, for Riggs, adds a sense of “illusion or trickery” 15 Mary Thomas Crane also usefully considers the struggle to define what professional players did on the early modern stage. She explores the ambiguity of the terms “perform or performance” and reminds us that the OED cites Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the first entry of the terms used to convey the sense of acting or playing out a command. It is not until the early eighteenth century that the words contain the meaning of “performing a play.” (171). 16 Yet she also notes that to perform is etymologically linked to ritual or ceremonial practice as in “[t]o do, carry out, or execute formally or solemnly (a public function, ceremony, rite, etc.)” (OED 4a). In other words, perform in a theatrical sense meant to enact a ritual or ceremony. The connotation of perform as a ritual act calls attention to the performativity of the stage, and the residual spiritual power of stage space that Post-Reformation audiences found both frightening and tantalizing. Discussing the act of conjuring, Sofer argues that stage conjuring models the “ontological ambiguity of performance itself.” There is always the performative potential that a stage                                                               14 Worthen, W. B. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance. PMLA 113.5 (1998): 1093- 1107. 15 Riggs. David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 2004. 237. 16 Crane, Mary Thomas. “What was performance?” Criticism. 43.2 (2001): 169-187. 11  performance might blur the tenuous boundaries between “representing (mimesis) and doing (kinesis).” 17 The early modern player’s craft encouraged the confusion between mimesis and kinesis. The early modern stage’s two most charismatic players Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage are reported to have possessed protean qualities when they performed a role on stage. As Joseph Roach explains these players had the capacity “for “Ovidian alterations of bodily state.” 18 The players embodied the character through their passions by possibly manipulating their humours that Roach argues could be a dangerous practice. In Passions of the Mind, Thomas Wright explains “that the humors . . . aid the heart in executing the functions of the passions,” and when an object is presented to the imagination “presently the purer spirites flocke from the brayne, by certayne secret channels to the heart.” 19 Roach outlines an acting theory in which these protean players could control the active spirits and were believed to physically shape shift. The playwright, Thomas Heywood, referred to Alleyn as a “Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tonge / So could he speak, so vary” (qtd. in Roach 42). I argue that the stage properties, specifically the hellmouth and cauldron are also invested with protean qualities. These props potentially collapsed mimesis and kinesis. My primary focus is to explore the multiple material relations encoded in and the performative possibilities of these props as well as their performative possibilities as instruments of damnation and                                                               17 Sofer. “How to Do things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus.” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 2. 18 Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1993. 42, 46-47. 19 Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. London: Valentine Simms for Walter Burre, 1604. Early English Books Online. 45. 12  divine retribution, which trouble, and complicate, the competition to control the knowledge produced by the public stage. The first chapter considers the development of the early iconography of the hellmouth and cauldron. The Monastic reforms of the tenth century encouraged religious art as devotional tools, and early artistic renditions of the portal to hell as the devouring jaws of a great beast seems to be a distinctly English artistic expression. Though classical texts offer Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the gate to Hades, English artists, particularly of the Winchester school, appropriated dangerous and violent images from its own pagan and Christian past. Thus the artists turned to fierce dragons from pagan myths and biblical beasts such as the Leviathan for the early artistic representations of the hellmouth. The spectacle of the hellmouth includes devils cooking souls in a cauldron to feed the insatiable mouth of hell. These sacred representations of hell feeding on the damned served as models for the stage property of the hellmouth used in cycle plays that I argue trouble religious codes of behavior and notions of power while establishing a secular communal identity. For example, the Chester cycle’s The Last Judgment depicts the damnation of a dishonest alewife who laments her fate then marries the devil—an assertive demonstration of female agency that playfully challenges religious authority’s terms of damnation. The second chapter considers the ways in which Christopher Marlowe uses both the hellmouth and cauldron as stage props in Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta, respectively. These stage props invite a critique of the early modern stage as the physical space of the spiritual location of damnation. The ravenous jaws of hell and the simmering cauldron sit beneath the public stage, a theatrical space encoded as hell, waiting to rise 13  through the trap door to cook and feed. The cauldron and hellmouth are the Christian God’s mechanisms of torture that cook and gorge on damned souls as punishment in accordance to his divine will. I argue that in Marlowe’s plays these stage props fuse the sacred and profane, creating an iconic image of frightening power that exposes the early modern culture’s fear and fascination with the public stage. In Dr. Faustus, Marlowe explores the Christian notions of divine retribution as an action of feeding the hellmouth. He gestures to the dramatic finale of the hellmouth feeding on Faustus’s body and soul throughout this play by calling attention to Faustus’s body that Faustus both bleeds and fragments. His practice of magic returns again and again to the disruption and provision of feeding that directs our focus to his body and soul as food for the mouth of Helen and hell. In The Jew of Malta, the rebellious Barabas zealously works to undermine the dominant Christian culture that strips him of his home and wealth. Barabas’s revenge uses the gift of food to poison the nuns and his daughter who claimed his domestic space as their Christian residence. Barabas continues to envision his vengeance through the actions of cooking and feeding by using the cauldron as a weapon against his enemies. Yet, in a move reminiscent of the medieval drama Play of the Sacrament, the Christian militia of Malta successfully re-appropriates this sacred and domestic tool in service to the Christian understanding of divine retribution. Thus Barabas falls into the cauldron in which his body and soul are boiled and cooked in preparation for his descent into the hellmouth. The first two chapters establish the rich iconography of hell on stage. The third chapter considers the witch’s cauldron in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a fragment of the Christian hellmouth. As such, the witch’s cauldron weakens demonic 14  representations of female labor and empties these images of some of its negative power. In Macbeth, the witches interrogate and punish those who abuse their authority and power; the play begins with the contested site of the witch’s body, a material body from a supernatural dimension that claims the space on and beneath the early modern stage—a venue that all too often incurs the wrath of the godly within the early modern community for its many suspected indiscretions that includes collusion with the demonic. Though some scholars argue that the interpolation of Hecate in Act 3.5 of Macbeth is an unnecessary addition to the play, this interpolation is a strategic disruption of the performance and Macbeth’s narrative. The play is now the witches’s narrative. Hecate, a Greek goddess, a crossroads deity, leads us to the witch’s cavern where the cauldron serves as the spatial location of witch space, a space between worlds. This play shows us how female knowledge of cookery and brews can manipulate male authority as we witness the witches’s charms appease Macbeth’s fears and lead him to his destruction. Then, even before the apparitions have completed their prophecies, the witch’s cauldron sinks through the trap door of the early modern stage. Yet the cauldron reappears in Chapter Four in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. The citational process of theatrical performances points us to the performativity of the witch’s cauldron and its ability to traverse the boundaries of seemingly fixed texts and performances. In The Witch, the preparation of the witches’s brew blends the culinary arts with magical charms. Hecate’s musings move from the bubbling contents of the witches’s cauldron and the callous evil of baby-killing to waxing poetic upon the rich possibilities of her witches’s mixture that directs our focus onto the theatrical space in which the impossible is imagined. The appropriation of the witch’s cauldron for theatrical 15  purposes invites a critique of the religious, social and political laws that censor and restrict creative possibilities both on the stage and within the commercial venues in which women sold their labor. This study concludes with an Epilogue that discusses Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair’s meta-theatrical play with Christian damnation and the early modern stage. While the players feast on pig and beer, the audience members not only consume the play’s production but also feed on the food distributed by stage vendors. Jonson’s play pushes the boundaries of diabolic potency of the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron. In the other plays studied, both props are contained behind or below the stage. Jonson opens the diabolic space to include the supposedly safe area where the audience eats, drinks, and feasts on his play. Many consumers of the early modern stage believed in witchcraft. Thus appropriating and relocating this fearsome power onto the stage through the iconic image of witch and cauldron positions the early modern theater under the sign of witch. The spectacle of the witch’s cauldron on stage might have participated in the witching of women. That is to say this prop recognizes a female power whose labor cooks up products for consumption. The early modern stage consumes this feminized power to empower the institution of the stage and its theatrical productions the stage offers up for public consumption. 16  Chapter 1: The Medieval Hellmouth Figure 1.1 The Mouth of Hell. Anonymous 1476 courtesy of ARTstor “Ugly hell, gape not!” cries Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus at the sight of his imminent damnation (5.2.115). 20 Marlowe’s vocabulary for divine retribution calls forth the image of the medieval hellmouth as depicted in the above woodcut. The hellmouth was expected to be a physical and sensual explosion that stares at the damned even as it feels, tastes, and eats its soul whilst it howls in perpetual torment. Religious psalters created under monastic reforms, wall frescoes painted above the chancel arch, reliefs and dooms guarding church doors were sites from which the spectacle of the hellmouth was a daily experience in pre-reformation England. This ubiquitous hellmouth depicted divine                                                               20 All quotations from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus are taken form the Norton Critical Edition of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. All quotes are from the A-Text unless noted as from the B Text. 17  retribution as actions of cooking and feeding, a fact that simultaneously suggests its presence in the most quotidian of spaces and activities, and its threat in turning familiar activities into the reminder of damnation. As the woodcut entitled The Mouth of Hell shows us, every day kitchen utensils mark the demonic space. Meat or flesh hooks are used by one devil to grab a soul and throw it into the bubbling cauldron where another devil cooks the sinful souls, presumably, to the culinary tastes of the rapacious mouth to hell. Paintings, carvings, and stage props depicting a demonic kitchen space serving the hellmouth was a constant presence in communities throughout England prior to the iconoclastic destruction of popish iconography. Though many of these iconic artifacts were destroyed or white-washed in the name of reform, notions of hell did not undergo the same rigorous reform and reduction of sacred power as other Catholic beliefs of the “last things” such as the idea of purgatory and limbo. 21 Hell and its luridly insatiable mouth continued to hold power over the early modern imagination in post-reformation England. Faustus’s verbal reaction to the visual encounter of damnation suggests precisely this: that the early modern imagination continued to recognize the medieval hellmouth as the instrument of divine retribution. This chapter will first examine the early artistic representations of the hellmouth in private psalters, with a primary focus on The Winchester Psalter produced at the Winchester School of Art whose illuminations of sacred scripture were instrumental in establishing the iconography of the English hellmouth. Next, I will look at the visual                                                               21 For futher discussions on “the last things” see Bynum, Caroline Walker and Paul Freedman eds. Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 18  formula used to establish this iconography in public frescoes, reliefs, and dooms painted and sculpted on the inside and outside of parish churches—some that have been recovered in English churches, and others from the Continent that offer evidence of how this iconography would have been distributed and located in and on English churches until the 1540s iconoclastic movement. The visual formula of this iconography includes gaping beastly jaws, devils dancing, beating, and often cooking the damned with a variety of kitchen tools in a cauldron to serve the hellmouth. This chapter will then move to an exploration of the hellmouth as a stage property in both the Wakefield and Chester medieval cycle play the Harrowing of Hell. The secular appropriation of the clerical privilege of spiritual interpretation invites an exploration of the tenuous power dynamics between secular and religious authorities in these major urban areas. In the final section of this chapter, I will look at how this tension directs us to powerful moments of female resistance to male authority in this play. In other words, the hellmouth as a stage prop destabilizes received notions of damnation and the authority of both the secular and religious communities even as it performs the Christian ideals of divine retribution. The English Hellmouth In The Iconography of the Mouth to Hell, Gary D. Schmidt thoughtfully unravels the history of the hellmouth, and its creation as a product of Christian reform. Further, Pamela Sheingorn argues that an early image of hell was as a pit filled with “chthonic creatures.” 22 But Anglo-Saxon England’s visual of hell as devouring jaws, which embraces this chthonic power, became the dominant image of the portal to hell for                                                               22 Schmidt, Gary D. The Iconography of the Mouth to Hell: Eight-Century Britain to the Fifteenth Century. London: Associated UP, 1995. 7, 19-24. 19  Western Christianity. Sheingorn explains that Gergory VII’s Moralia drew on biblical texts that shaped Satan and his abode as a monstrous beast that informed early English artists’ visions of hell. 23 Gregory, known as the reforming pope, supported and encouraged Cluniac reforms. Schmidt takes us through the journey of establishing Cluniac monastic reforms in England during the tenth century when Anglo-Saxon control over the country was fragmented and continually threatened by Viking raiders. The Viking invasions also disrupted the monastic movement in England as raiders destroyed buildings that included libraries and monasteries further destabilizing the already tenuous network between English religious houses. Across the channel, however, in the early part of the tenth century, William, Duke of Aquitaine used the Catholic mechanism of purchasing indulgences to shorten his time in purgatory by establishing a religious house at Cluny. The Duke’s act of reparation for his sins founded a site from which the second Abbot of Cluny, Odo of Dole, zealously enforced the Benedictine Rule, and Cluny soon became the model for monastic communities throughout Western Europe. Cluniac reforms emphasized the life of prayer; thus liturgical prayers and responses were extended, and members were required to embrace a life of humility and contrition structured through divine service that embraced the spirituality of the arts. Schmidt explains that Cluny reformers fixated on the line from Benedict’s Rule that argues “[c]raftsmen present in the monastery should practice their crafts with humility, as permitted by the abbot.” 24 The reformers’s interpretation of this rule understood the                                                               23 Sheingorn, Pamela. “The Iconography of Hell Mouth.” The Iconography of Hell. Eds. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications; Western Michigan U, 1992: 7. 24 qtd. in Schmidt 21. 20  artisanal and artistic production of text and image in manuscripts, frescoes, or statuary as a spiritual endeavor, a devotional process, and part of divine service. These monastic reforms appeared in England through the work of Dunstan, a Cluniac monk trained as a musician, metalworker, and painter. He and an English monk named Athelwold slowly built monastic communities in England that seemed to culminate in the construction of Winchester Cathedral. Dunstan and Athelwold, along with various other Cluniac monks, added their artistic expertise to the building of this great cathedral. The monastery at Winchester founded a school of art that became known for its distinctive artistic style of illuminated manuscripts. This artistic style soon became the most influential form of Anglo-Saxon art. 25 It is here in the Winchester school that the English hellmouth seems to have originated. This powerful spectacle of the point of entry into damnation as devouring jaws feeding on a fallen soul is the key image of the hellmouth, and the Winchester psalter depicts the crucial details: devils cooking the damned in a boiling cauldron that became the dominant artistic vision of Western Europe’s idea of the Christian God’s divine retribution—a spectacle of demonic cooking and feeding on the sinful. 26 Winchester Psalter c. 1150-60, Cotton MS Nero C IV The Winchester Psalter, henceforth Nero C IV, is famously known for its elaborately grotesque illumination of the hellmouth in miniature on folio 39. This hellmouth completes a series of illuminated miniatures of The Last Judgment, folios 31-                                                               25 Schmidt 24. 26 For further information regarding the Winchester School of Art and Cluniac Reforms see Schmidt (13-84). 21  39. Scholars claim there is some difficulty in ascertaining who exactly commissioned Nero C IV, but the artistic style of the miniatures and evidence from the calendar, litany, and a prayer identifies Nero C IV as definitely from the Winchester school. 27 Francis Wormald, among others, explains that Henry de Blois, bishop of Winchester and King Stephen’s brother, probably first owned the psalter. Peter Kidd argues that Nero C IV might have been intended for a woman. He explains that other extant psalters of the period that contain extensive miniatures such as the Albani and Shaftesbury psalters, were most likely gifted to women. 28 Kidd’s observation points to interesting assumptions on gender that feminizes this religious art. Nero C IV did indeed find its way to a group of women in a nunnery, Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, in the middle of the thirteenth century. Scholars have noted this location due to an additional calendar that includes Saint’s Days and other holy days that were of particular import to Shaftesbury Abbey. These changes were possibly inserted at the request of the Abbess Juliana Bauceyn. Like her predecessors, Abbess Bauceyn held the title of baroness due to the extensive land held by Shaftesbury Abbey for the king. Thus she was obligated, as were her secular counterparts, to supply the king with knights when required such as in 1227 when the Abbess Bauceyn was summoned to Chester to play her part in an expedition against Llewellyn ap Griffth. 29 The Abbess Bauceyn, and her predecessors, would have been powerful allies for both religious and secular authorities. The gifting of a psalter such as                                                               27 Wormald, Francis. The Winchester Psalter. London: Harvey Miller & Medcalf Ltd., 1973. 28 Kidd, Peter. “The Ghost of Abbot Vere and the Winchester Psalter.” Notes and Queries, 51.1: 19-20. Kidd also suggests that there is some evidence that the Abbot Vere and not Henry de Blois originally owned this psalter. 29 Eckenstein, Lina. Women under Monasticism. Cambridge: UP Campbridge, 1896 (365). 22  Nero C IV, created to circulate at the highest levels of religious and monarchal authority, would seem an appropriate tribute for such an alliance, especially during the civil war between King Stephen and Matilda when this psalter was commissioned. A psalter is an interesting genre that involves a network of intimate relationships both spiritual and secular. The gifting of Nero C IV may have had political intent, and certainly calls attention to female authority in a patriarchal system. However, it is important to note that Nero C IV participates in the circulation of the English highly stylistic vision of the hellmouth. It is equally vital to recognize the spiritual potency of the psalter genre, particularly Nero C IV. The visual formula used to represent the portal to hell is the creation of devout meditations on scripture that directly or indirectly calls the reader’s attention to the moment of damnation as an act of cooking and feeding. The last known residence for this spiritual work was a nunnery that suggests this psalter served as a liturgical tool for a community of women for at least the last few years it circulated through public networks. Nero C IV, in the tradition of the genre, invites its audience to sensually explore the divine service. The psalms were sung or recited, and the miniatures were intended for devout contemplation on the Christian narrative of salvation. This meditation concludes with folios 38 and 39, which graphically depict divine retribution as cooking the sinful to feed the insatiable jaws of hell. The artistic expressions of faith in the psalters and on the churches I examine in this study are from varying locations in England and the Continent, but all reveal the final act of damnation as a two-part process. For the first part, these artists are careful to construct a kitchen as a demonic space in a register near but separate from the 23  hellmouth—the final act in the process. The use of common domestic utensils found in most households mark this space for prepping and cooking as a demonic kitchen. Figure 1.2 The Tortures of the Damned from Wormald (41). © The British Library Board Mss Nero C IV folio 38 The act of divine retribution then inverts the domestic space as diabolic. Is this a simple inversion to signify demon space? Wall’s study on the violence perpetrated by women in their domestic space complicates the female labor of cooking as simply a nurturing process. Instead, she points out the processes of butchering, cutting, and skinning animals for human consumption that bloodies up the household kitchen space. 30 In depictions of the hellmouth, the violence of kitchen space is exploited to graphically illustrate the physical torment of damnation. In Folio 38, entitled “The Tortures of the Damned,” the                                                               30 Wall 3. 24  folio is divided into two registers with both horizontal and vertical action. First, the sinful soul is caught with meat hooks and pulled into a kitchen-like space. Next, devils busily cut, chop, and cook it into a tasty meal for the hellmouth. The figures in folio 38 push and bend the boundaries between registers. The artist’s flowing lines follows the English Romanesque style. 31 The lines flow and twist into other characters, or background décor. The resistance to substantiate boundaries allows some of the characters to lean into other frames and participate in that action while maintaining a role in the character’s register of origin. The bendable boundaries and flowing characters give the miniature a sense of movement as the devils in the upper and lower registers interact in moving their sinful captives from one level to the next with as much pain to their prey as possible. The energy in this visual narrative moves across the frame left to right to left suggesting a horizontal action, but this is countered with a tension that pulls down or a vertical action that presses into the lower register whose devils look up with anticipation. The demons in the upper register invert the key of salvation into twisted manacles that binds one sinful soul into the traditional position of riding the devil’s back into hell. The devil stares menacingly at his captive while the devil’s body twists in opposition moving to the edge of the frame with birdlike faces extending out of the devil’s ankles above his claws, pulling him towards the middle of the frame. The devil’s body appears to move at once in several directions while the captive soul bounded to the devil sits forlornly. He watches a fellow soul being eaten by a serpent-like creature with wings and a tail that has curled itself along the damned soul’s body. The flesh hooks the devils wield direct our                                                               31 Wormald 77-78. 25  attention to the violent demonic power that pulls its meaty soul into the lower register or the kitchen space of hell. In the lower frame, some of the devils peer up at the activities above them while performing their sacred duty of torturing the damn by chopping up the broken souls then plunging them into the cauldron stationed bottom right. Though Wormald refers to this object in the lower register as “a pit,” the artifact has a circular construction, like a cauldron, that is built on top of a stand with a two frame grate, and the soft suggestion of smoke emitting from the fires of hell. 32 The demons’s weapons are culinary utensils, flesh hooks and a butcher knife, that further suggests a kitchen space with a cauldron boiling on the hearth of hell. The two devils on the left are assigned the task of cutting and chopping the ingredients for the cauldron. These devils stand on either side of one poor damned soul chained to a butcher block. The devil behind him forces his knee into the soul’s back, so that he collapses into the butcher block where his left hand lays open. The devil then severs the soul’s left hand. The right hand already lies on the floor near the chain that binds this soul’s body to the prep table. This devil whose body occupies the middle of the register seems to have another devil growing from his side who is busy sniffing or perhaps licking the soul of a sinner, and the limbs of another soul falls into the lower frame behind the two-headed beast. The action moves to the right side of the frame, or the cauldron space brimming with a king as well as a monk or two as a demon uses a flesh hook to pull another lost soul into the cauldron, whilst another devil, peering into the upper register pokes and stabs the souls simmering in his cauldron. The lost soul chained to the prep table gazes directly out at the viewer piercing through the                                                               32 Wormald 28. 26  conventionally constructed boundaries between the viewer and viewed. The vertical movement of the folio draws our attention down to his feet that drift out of the lower frame as if trying to escape from his kitchen prison in hell. Figure 1.3 “An Angel locks the door of Hell.” Winchester Psalter. © The British Library Board. Mss. Nero C IV, Folio 39. Folio 39, however, nullifies any suggestive moments of escape, and solidifies the tenuous boundaries formed in folio 38. As mentioned earlier Nero C IV is best known for folio 39, entitled An Angel locks the door of Hell. The hellmouth depicted is a hybridity of pagan and Christian influences—the Anglo-Saxon image of a furious and violent supernatural power, the dragon, is blended into a Christian lion-like form with the beastly shape of the biblical Leviathan. The key of salvation twisted into a mechanism of bondage in the upper register of folio 38 reappears in folio 39. In this folio, the key is 27  firmly held and locked by a divine angel. The gate frame provides a ring for him to grasp and a pedestal to stand on suggesting that this angel is permanently assigned to maintaining the security of this hellgate that houses the rapacious hellmouth. 33 Wormald explains that Nero C IV folio 39 is often compared to an earlier manuscript. Stowe Ms. 944. This miniature uses similar themes of keys, doors, angels, and devils carefully delineated on the sides of salvation and damnation. In this earlier folio, the artist uses three registers to horizontally depict The Last Judgment. The key of salvation is notably kept in the hands of God’s angels in all three registers. The upper register shows us the righteous in heaven with an angel, who Wormald identifies as Peter, holding the key of salvation in his left hand while waving to the souls of the faithful to enter the open door to everlasting bliss. This scene of salvation is followed by the middle register’s farcical rendition of the struggle between good and evil for the human soul. One good angel floats to the right of the frame holding a large book, presumably the divinely authorized version of the saved.                                                               33 Joyce Galpern also investigates and concludes the imagery of open jaws for the hellmouth is a synthesis of Christian and Anglo Saxon pagan ideology. The Shape of Hell in Anglo-Saxon England, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (U of California, Berkeley, 1977): 142. 28  Figure 1.4. The Last Judgment. from Wormald 56. © The British Library Board. Stowe Ms. 94, folio 7. As the action moves to the middle of the frame, Peter argues with a devil over the right to the soul they both physically claim. The devil holds up his own authorized book of the damned while Peter smacks the devil with the key of salvation. To the right another angel flies off with a couple of souls. The lower register reveals the final act of damnation where souls fall into the gaping mouth of hell. As in Nero C IV folio 39, an angel locks the gate to the hellmouth, swinging keys in both hands. His body turns towards the gate but his feet turn left suggesting a movement out of the frame. In Stowe 944 folio 7, the angels are the dominant figures who successfully separate the righteous from the damned and securely lock up the sinful in the hellmouth. With the job 29  completed, the angel walks away. The story of damnation is subjugated to the salvation narrative. Contrastingly, Nero CIV folio 38 & 39 are meditations on divine retribution. The flowing lines with their vertical and horizontal movements in folio 38 continue to flow and intertwine in folio 39, forming and reforming multiple hellmouths that create a static silence of pain. The viewer is positioned on the side of salvation with the stationary angel that perpetually locks the hellmouth. The multiple dragon devils work in consort with the angel. The dragon motif and gaping mouths are strewn about this hellmouth. Dragon forms are used for ears on both heads, and the dragons multiply and intensify as we near the edge and entrance to this hellmouth. Three dragons are posted on each side of the keyhole. The two nearest the opening have secured the locked mouth by each inserting one of their long and sharp fangs into the leather loops used to reinforce the closure. The multiplication of mouths and eyes confounds the senses and forces one to seek a means of escape. Free from the terrible horror on the other side of the door, the viewer witnesses the devils within the mouth to hell beat and whip a mix of gender and social classes to prepare their souls as food for the hellmouth. Though the hellmouth continually multiplies, suggesting movement, and the devils actively torture the damned souls, the souls themselves seem static and there is a terrible stillness in the stifling containment. This forced immobility is contrasted with the beauty of the gold illumination. Further, decorative borders of this psalter offer a sense of fluidity that enhances the silent cries and screams of this spectacle of pain and torment. Inside this hellmouth, the bound souls twist and turn upside down as the hellmouth feeds on their immortal souls. Looking at this mechanism of horrific pain from within the hellmouth, one sees that the monstrous 30  hybrid mouth divides itself while it chews on the souls of the damned. The scaly upper mouth with greenish hues has a serpentine quality similar to the biblical Leviathan while its counterpart beneath is colored in shades of brown and gold reminiscent of its dragonish characteristics. Dragons, as demonstrated in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, burrow themselves into the treasures of the earth, and seem to be especially fond of gold. Both beastly mouths gape open, baring their sharp fangs where the mouths meet, conjoin, and form another smaller but equally grotesque mouth with a devil peeping out from it who seems to be laughing at the swirling and tortured bodies of the damned contained within these conjoined mouths of hell. Figure 1.5 from Schmidt 114. 31  The hellmouth as gaping jaws that feed on the damned captured the imagination of both the religious and secular communities. By the twelfth century, this image moved into the public sphere as it was used to adorn churches in reliefs and wall paintings across England and Europe. 34 The relief above from Lincoln Cathedral follows the familiar formula in representations of the hellmouth. The relief is etched into the west front portal of the church, and depicts the last judgment of a person who is dying or had just died. Angels surround the body while a devil pokes and prods at the souls of sinners stuffed into a wide-open hellmouth that gapes up at the body from beneath the bed in the hopes of eating the newly released soul. In another relief crafted onto the west portal of Ferrara Cathedral, the visual formula includes devils who heave and shove souls into the hellmouth. This relief shows us the incorporation of the cauldron into this formula of the mouth to hell that intensifies this hellmouth’s energy with its focus on the cooking and boiling up of souls for the jaws of hell. A gleeful devil stirs the cauldron filled with souls Figure 1.6 from Schmidt 126.                                                               34 Schmidt 84-164 32  of the damned whose heads peak out over the boiling pot staring at the viewer with the eyes of wretched spirits. The central image of this relief is a brawny devil who has grabbed one of the tenderized souls out of the cauldron and lifts its broken and fearful body up to feed the hellmouth while the devilish cook looks on laughing. The devils’s laughing at the consumption of the human soul intensifies the wretched act. Yet, as John D. Cox reminds us, devils are part of sacred culture. 35 In pre and post reformation ideology, the hellmouth and its devils carry out the Christian God’s divine justice against the damned. The devils merriment in cooking and feeding the hungry mouth to hell is their divine duty. The cauldron again appears in the hellmouth formula in the wall painting from the Stratford-on-Avon, Chapel of the Holy Cross. In this wall painting, the viewer witnesses an explosion of visual terror and pain as the hellmouth feeds incessantly on the damned souls. This wall painting adds gleeful devils on both the inside and outside of the hellmouth. On the outside of the hellmouth, the devils beat, herd, and chain up the recently dead and drag the souls to the gaping jaws where they are swallowed into differing levels of torment. On the bottom level, devils surround a large chimney-like cauldron stuffed with souls that the devils poke as if to test the tenderness of the soul at this stage of the cooking process. Other devils push together another group of souls waiting to be cast into the cauldron and boiled while a smaller devil armed with a bellows keeps the fire roaring hot. As some scholars have argued, this wall painting may depict a performance of a medieval cycle play, specifically The Last Judgment, since it constructs the hellmouth as                                                               35 Cox, John D. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 1-3. 33  a scaffold similar to what scholars argue might have been used for some of the cycle plays performed throughout England. Importantly, this wall painting shows us how its audience envisioned the spatial map of the after-life or sacred space. The demarcation of sacred space is cycled through the religious and popular artistic and dramatic renditions of scripture. Figure 1.7 from Schmidt 170. 34  The Harrowing of Hell Pageant These images of the hellmouth, which I have discovered and compiled, help to illuminate the genealogy of this image in England; the English hellmouth moves from England to the continent and back to England as a vision of hell. Its special arrangement into layers or sections offers a narrative, a story, on the process of damnation. Indeed, these images are without doubt dramatic, and thus, perhaps not surprisingly, they served arguably as inspiration for actual dramatic performances on issues of hell. Cycle plays performed during the feast of Corpus Christi are some of the oldest and richest drama of the early English theater. The cycle, pageant, or mystery plays depict the sacred history of Christianity from God’s Creation of the World to The Last Judgment. These plays were annually performed as both a religious and secular ritual that celebrate faith and community in major cities such as York or Chester throughout England from the late fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries the (Bevington 227). 36 The craft guilds of the community took on the production of the plays, and these artisanal productions highlighted the mystery or trade’s expertise. Thus, as Jonathan Gil Harris explains, “in Chester, Wakefield, and York, guilds of Tanners and Barkers—who were notorious for the diabolically sulphurous odors generated by their treatment of leather and bark—presented the Fall of the Angles in Hell,” and he argues this gave the various guilds an opportunity to simultaneously perform a cycle or mystery play as well as                                                               36 Bevington, David. ed. “The Corpus Christi Cycle.” Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957. 227. 35  demonstrating their own craft or “mystery’. 37 Harris’s important argument examines the use of stage properties as “product placement” or effective advertisements for the craft guilds in both the medieval cycle plays as well as early modern stage productions such as Thomas Decker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday. He discusses the economic value of these stage props for the craft guilds whose audiences recognize the theatrical props as products for consumption or displays of the guild’s skill. Harris argues that the differing craft guilds’s productions of cycle plays were more concerned with advertising their skill and products then the performance of sacred history. There certainly is a focus on the trade’s expertise in most of the extant versions of the mystery plays. However, a consideration of the spirituality of the plays and communal celebration of faith is as vital to illuminate the cultural work of the stage properties, particularly the hellmouth, used in artisanal drama. The stage property of the hellmouth is central to both The Last Judgment and The Harrowing of Hell. The mystery plays, like the sacred art of this period, fearlessly explores the spiritual worlds of the soul. A. C. Cawley argues “the medieval theatre readily invites the imagination to see it as a symbol of the universe in miniature. It embraces Heaven, Hell and Middle Earth, and the dramatic action moves freely between them” 38 Medieval life was surrounded by and concerned with the spiritual locations of the soul. As discussed earlier in this chapter, sacred art depicting these spiritual worlds was ubiquitous in medieval communities. There was also the popular genre of visionary                                                               37 Harris, “Product placement in artisanal drama,” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002: 43-44. 38 Cawley, A. C. “The Staging of Medieval Drama. “ Medieval Drama. Ed. Lois Potter. Revels History of Drama in English, 1. London: Methuen. 1983. 6. 36  literature such as The Visions of Tondal ca. 1149 that recorded visitations to heaven, purgatory, and hell. The medieval cycle plays participated in the confirmation of these spiritual worlds that were both beyond, yet a part of the earthly world. The medieval worldview imagined these worlds as part of the schematic model of earthly existence. The materiality of the hellmouth as a stage prop affirmed this worldview instead of disrupting the belief. Giving material substance to these immaterial, spiritual locations offered their audience a glimpse into heaven and hell. The staging of The Last Judgment in most, if not all versions of the play, followed the vertical scaffolding developed in the artistic visions of this sacred scene. For example, a record of the indenture for The Doomsday Pageant of The York Mercers, 1433 includes a list of stage properties and costumes that suggest the use of these props in the pageant and how they were later stored. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell explain that the legal document testifies to the economic and cultural value of the Mercer’s inventory for this pageant. 39 Among the mechanical properties carefully stored after The Corpus Christi celebrations is a pageant wagon along with “[a] heauen of Iren with a naffe of tre” and a hellmouth. Jonston and Dorrell surmise that the pageant was vertically scaffolded with heaven built atop the wagon while the hellmouth, listed separately, most likely sat next to the pageant wagon at ground level. A swing is also listed among the stage props that were only used by God “when he sall fly uppe to heuen.” 40 In the Doomsday Pageant, Jesus descends from heaven atop the pageant wagon to earth. He concludes his visitation on earth by calling to his apostles to                                                               39 Johnston, Alexandra F. and Margaret Dorrell. “The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433.” Leeds Studies in English, 5. (1971): 29-34. 40 qtd. in Jonston and Dorrell 30-31. 37  “Come forth! I shall sit you between / And all fulfill that I have hight” (2.215-16). He then sits in “the judgment seat” or the swing and flies back up to heaven with the apostles, angels, and the good souls following him up to the top of the pageant wagon. After the play concludes and the wagon with its righteous souls moves to its next station, the damned are left to be dragged into the hellmouth that remains lying on the ground waiting for souls to eat. Johnston and Dorrell point out that this staging of the hellmouth left behind with the sinners unambiguously separates the saved from the damned. 41 In this play, the audience witnesses Jesus moving between the spiritual world of heaven to their physical space on earth. They watch him fly and return to the heavenly space with the godly. The audience, however, is left with the hellmouth or demon space, as they watch the sinful scramble away while devils pull them into the hellmouth. This distinct separation of the saved and the damned could potentially be used to isolate someone in the community who has upset limitations or boundaries imposed by the male dominant culture. A couple of devils could easily pull an unsuspecting audience member into the hellmouth as an act of communal damnation. The hellmouth is an important but secondary playing area in The Judgment plays. It is, however, the central location of the action in The Harrowing of Hell drama. The Harrowing of Hell is not a canonical biblical story, yet it was one of the most popular of the cycle plays. The narrative is shaped from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus that Bevington explains is based on Psalm 24. : “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye left up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in” 42 This biblical source                                                               41 Johnston and Dorrell 30. 42 Bevington 594. 38  material for this cycle play personifies gates and doors as heads, multiple heads that are commanded to raise and open for “the King of Glory.” The theme of broken gates and doors suggests a resistance by the lifted heads that references Job 41.5 where it is asked: Who shall open the dores of his face? his teeth are feareful round about . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of his muth go lmapes, and sparkes of fiyre leape out Out of his nostrelles cometh out smoke as out a boyling pot or caldron. (41.5) 43 The resistant heads and the closed face of the biblical Leviathan suggest the hellmouth whose locked face is secured by fearful teeth that imprison the sinful. It breaths sparks of fire and smoke like a boiling cauldron. This passage of sacred scripture marks this portal to hell as God’s greatness. In other words, God controls divine and demonic space. Both passages of scripture prophesy Christ’s descent and destruction of the doors to Leviathan’s face or the harrowing of hell. While The Harrowing of Hell’s lack of biblical authority becomes a major dispute regarding hell in post-reformation England, in the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this play with its spectacle of the hellmouth performed meaningful cultural and spiritual work. Its audience witnessed their God’s power and control over demonic space while the craft guild that produced this play used the opportunity to show off their skills or products for what Harris’s “product placement” as noted above. Some guilds such as York’s Sadlers, Glaciers, and Fuystours highlight their skills and products, but do so in service to the sacred narrative whereas The                                                               43 all quotations from the bible are taken from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition. Ed. Lloyd E. Barry, Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 1969 39  Chester’s Cooks and Innkeepers use their control over demonic space to separate the saved from the damned as we saw in the Mercer’s Doomsday Pageant. For the Chester Cooks and Innkeepers Guild the damned includes a dishonest alewife, or a woman infringing on the guild’s monopoly of the food and drink trade. Framed between The Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Harrowing of Hell disrupts its audience’s emotional journey from the suffering Christ to the resurrected Son of God. This play takes the audience to the moment in-between the dying and risen Christ when Jesus releases the Old Testament patriarchs and Eve from Limbo, a spiritual location secured by the gates of hell. Jesus, in battle mode, marches on hell in what Peter Marshall calls a “commando raid” (279). 44 Indeed, the audience witnesses their God as a warrior who overpowers Satan and releases his people. Alan D. Justice explains that the military theme in this play may come from the etymology of the word harrow that the OED cites as derived from an Old Germanic form of the term that means “to make predatory raids or incursions” (55). 45 46 The York version of The Harrowing of Hell, produced by the Sadlers, Glaziers, and Fuystours, presents Christ’s descent to hell as a military mission in which he invades hell space and conquers Satan. Justice suggests that the Sadlers and Fuystours craft of saddle making, vital equipment during a battle, highlights Christ’s mission as a military expedition.                                                               44 Marshall, Peter. “The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560-1640.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, (2010): 279. 45 Justice, Alan D. Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle. Theatre Journal 31.1 (1979): 55. 46 OED s.v. “harry” 40  In the York Harrowing of Hell, 47 Jesus opens the play with a direct address to the audience: Man on earth, attend to me And keep thy maker in thy mind And think how I endured for thee With peerless anguish to be pained The covenant of my Father free Have I fulfilled, as folk may find. (1-6) Jesus’s command is a performative move that draws the audience’s experience of the previous play of The Crucifixion into this play. He creates what Bruce R. Smith explains is the “auditory field” (274). Discussing the cycle plays, Smith reminds us that the cycle begins with God creating and ends with God destroying. God’s speech acts, according to Smith, creates “himself acoustically” thus creates the world as well as the world of the play. 48 Thus the audience becomes part of the world of the play. He suffered and died for them. He fulfilled his Father’s covenant for their salvation. Their passive, suffering Christ is now bringing them with him to hell on a rescue mission to save the biblical characters from the Old Testament with a particular focus on Adam and Eve whose fall from grace required redemption through Christ’s blood. Jesus proclaims that: Those redeemed I shall unbind. The fiend beguiled them then, Through fruit of earthly food;                                                               47 all quotations are taken from Anon. “The Harrowing of Hell. The York Pageant of The Saddler’s Play. <http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/yorkplays/York37.html>, November 2011. 48 Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1999. 274. 41  I have them got again Through buying, with my blood. (8-12) The fall from grace, the eating of the forbidden fruit, is redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh and blood. According to the Catholic ideology of transubstantiation, Christ continues to feed the godly with his flesh and blood, providing sacred nourishment for their souls. Jesus’s claims of his body and blood as sustenance for the righteous starkly underscores the hellmouth’s demonic feeding on the sinful as Jesus breaks into the portal to hell and delivers the faithful from the jaws of damnation. The idea of Jesus as nurturer Figure 1.8 Christ in the Wine Press, first quarter of 15th century courtesy of Artstor 42  or a nurturing divine substance seems to have developed from the active piety of women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Caroline Walker Bynum explains that medieval spirituality of this time was greatly influenced by women mystics as well as their secular counterparts whose devotion centered on Christ’s humanity and the Eucharist. It was women united in their devotion to the body of Christ who petitioned for and achieved the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi. 49 Literal depictions of Jesus as bread or wine as in Figure1.8 reminds its audience of Christ’s body and blood as the food of salvation. In this woodcut, Jesus is placed inside the wooden wine press as if on the cross. The weight of the top timber pushes down on him to squeeze the sacred blood out of his body. The viewer is brought into Jesus’s sacrifice in process. We witness Jesus’s body crumble and his legs waver under the immense pressure from the wood press down on him and forcing him into a cross-like pose. In “Christ in the Woodpress” The wooden press crushes Jesus body to squeeze out his sacred blood that is so sparing and precious there is only enough of the divine substance to fill a small chalice placed near Jesus’s feet. This crushing of Christ’s broken body painfully stresses Jesus’s humanity. In the opening lines, of the York Harrowing of Hell, Jesus embraces his humanity then demonstrates his divinity. He tells the audience that “. . . some sign I shall send before /[. . .] A light now they shall have / To show them that I shall come soon (19, 22- 23). The divine light shines in hell as Adam exclaims “Now I see a sign of solace clear, / A glorious gleam to make us glad” (41-42). The Glaziers, craftsmen of stained glass,                                                               49 Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkley: U of California P. 1982. 18, 110-11. 43  could have produced a spectacular special effect with colored glass and candles. 50 Philip Butterworth considers other ways of achieving this special effect and suggests a torch or candle might be used with a polished bowl of metal that would gather the light. He quotes Sebasatinao Serlio (1611) who explains how to achieve the technique: “if you need a great light to show more then the rest, then set a torch behind, and behind the torch a bright Bason; the brightnes whereof will shew like the beames of the sunne.” 51 Dazzling light invades hell space, and the patriarchs each rehearse their role in the salvation narrative. It is important to note that Eve is given voice in this play that she does not receive in the Chester version. She is the only female presence in this version, and she initiates the witnessing of divine power. She tells Adam that “[w]e both saw such a light / In Paradise, openly” (47-48). In the darkness of hell, she speaks of their pre-lapsarian experience in open space with sunlight. Thus she claims a position in the salvation narrative, and prompts the patriarchs to rehearse their roles in sacred history that shaped the story of salvation. But the primary focus of the York pageant is on Jesus’s battle against Satan that revises the temptation story of the New Testament. In the gospels of Mathew, Mark, and Luke, the temptation narrative shows us a Satan who is potentially more powerful than Jesus. For forty days and nights, Satan tempts Jesus with power. He moves him from the wilderness to the top of a city then to a mountaintop both demonstrating and offering terrific power, but Jesus resists temptation and keeps faith with his God. The Harrowing                                                               50 Justice 55 51 Butterworth, Philip. “Hellfire: Flame as Special Effect.” The Iconography of Hell. ed. Clifford Davison and Thomas H. Seiler. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U. 1992 : 73-74. 44  of Hell narrative shows us the transformative power of this faith. Though technically still dead, Jesus now has the divine power to harrow Satan’s hell and pull the godly up to heaven. As we have seen, the early visual culture of the Harrowing of Hell and The Last Judgment vertically divides sacred space into different registers. Following the visual codes from this spiritual artwork, this play was most likely performed with Limbo gated off from the audience on a different scaffold then Satan’s realm. Another scaffold linked by ladders and parapets served as hell space with the hellmouth at street level. This staging offered the devils a structure to perform diabolic chaos. The devils run up and down the ladders and across the parapets, screaming for other devils to come help stop Jesus. As Jesus storms the gates, the devils no doubt fled to the hellmouth where they could continue to run in and out of while, perhaps, pulling a few of the audiences members into the mouth of hell. The devil Ribald raises the alarm, crying, “Help, Beelzebub, to bind these boys! / such uproar never was heard in Hell” ” (97-98). Eve and the patriarchs’s prayers and songs of joy disrupts the frantic horror the devils work so hard to maintain, so the devils convene to discuss their next course of action. Ribald explains to Satan that the perpetrator at the hellish gates “. . . is the Jew that Judas sold / To death, only the other day” (146-47). Satan claims knowledge of Jesus and his “trantes” (161), or tricks and attempts to calm his devils, and sends them off to thwart Jesus’s purpose. They, of course, fail, and with Jesus’s command “This place shall stand no longer stuck. / Open up, and let my people pass! (190-91), hell’s gates are destroyed. The play now assumes the narrative of Christ’s temptation when Jesus claims “[m]y Father ordained” that now 45  was the time to release the patriarchs from their hellish prison. Satan mocks Jesus’s humanity and claims to divinity. He tells Christ that his father Joseph and mother Mary are “. . . all that there is to all your kin” (238). The play shows us an angry Jesus who proclaims his divinity stating, “you wicked devil! Let be your kin; / My Father lives in Heaven on height” (239-40), and Satan changes tactics. He debates with Jesus on the legality of this harrowing that he argues goes against scripture. Jesus, finally out of patience, he commands “Michael, my angel, make him bound; / Tie down that fiend; he shall not flit” (345-46). Jesus has called in his army with the militant archangel Michael leading the troops. Michael throws Satan, into the hellmouth as Satan cries, “Alas, for dole and care! / I sink into Hell’s pit!” (353-54). A swing similar to the one used in the Mercer’s Doomsday Pageant might have served as the means to move Satan from the scaffold to the hellmouth. Jesus’s conquering of Satan is followed by the release of the patriarchs and Eve who celebrate their salvation with praises to Christ’s divine power. The York Harrowing of Hell is a faithful rendition of the apocryphal story. The play ends with the functioning hellmouth whose jaws move up and down with billows of smoke and flames emitting from its gaping jaws while devils run in and out of the hellmouth and up and down the scaffold, exploding smelly squibs along the way. This spectacle and the humor derived from the chaos created by the devils running up and down the scaffold and in and out of the hellmouth certainly intended to entertain a medieval audience. Nonetheless, the play is an act of devotion that is heightened with the stage property of the hellmouth, itself derived from devotional art. Schmidt argues that the hellmouth as a stage property lost its devotional efficacy. 52 Yet the theatricality of the                                                               52 Schmidt 165-66. 46  hellmouth as a stage prop invites an active participation with this spiritual site of damnation. The imagination is aroused by the sensual appeal of this stage property that can create a rich religious experience that lives in the imagination and continues long after the play has concluded. As a stage property, however, the hellmouth also calls attention to itself as a site of religious and political contestation—and in this sense, we see its orthodox rendering of the apocryphal story deployed to a more unorthodox use. The popular cycle plays competed with the religious feast of Corpus Christi that celebrated the body of Christ by carrying the host through the streets of the religious liberties. 53 This pageant and the cycle plays were a form of beating the bounds—marking religious and secular territory. The religious themes of the cycle dramas appropriated the priestly prerogative of transmission and interpretation of Biblical texts. In York, religious authorities successfully petitioned to have the cycle plays performed the day after their pageant. These street performances became a site of contestation between the secular and religious communities. The hellmouth can be read as a focal point for this communal tension. Rolling through the streets of the community, the hellmouth and stage devils, a spectacle that assaulted the senses, unifies the community under a common faith, and divides allegiances to communal authority. The stage property of the hellmouth troubles religious codes of behavior and notions of power while establishing a secular communal identity. The use of the hellmouth as a social critique of community members can best be experienced in the Chester Harrowing of Hell. The Chester version of this cycle play was                                                               53 Higgins, Anne. “Streets and Markets.” A New History of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 77-92. 47  produced and performed by the Cooks and Innkeepers Guild, and instead of a scaffold it is believed the Chester cycles used pageant wagons. 54 Thus the hellmouth would be pulled through the streets of Chester with smoke rising out from its jaws and devils grabbing neighbors along the way to join them in hell. Though similar to the York version, the Chester Harrowing of Hell opens with Adam waxing poetic about the divine light entering hell. The patriarchs again run through their roles in the Jesus narrative. Eve is notably silent. The Chester version gives her no voice. Instead, the Chester version adds a female character, a dishonest alewife, to the drama to publically damn her to hell. In this version, Satan knows and fears Jesus’s power, and Jesus blasts through the gates with little resistance. Jesus hurls Satan from his throne, and Satan laments his defeat and the loss of “[m]y prisoners and all my prey” (206). Jesus empties hell of all the Old Testament patriarchs, greeting each one, and even calling on the Archangel Michael to lead Adam out of hell. The thief who was crucified beside Jesus is also set free. At the end of the play, the only soul left in hell is a woman, an alewife. She tells us that: Sometime I was a taverner, A gentle gossip and a tapster, Of wine and ale a trusty brewer, Which woe hath me wrought. Of cans I kept no true measure: My cups I sold at my pleasure, Deceiving many a creature,                                                               54  all quotations are taken from Anon. “The Harrowing of Hell.” The Chester Pageant of the Cooks and Innkeepers. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. ed. A.C. Cawley. London: J. M. Dent, 1974. 48  Though my ale were naught (269-76) Though she first claims to be a “trusty brewer,” she quickly confesses her crime of over charging and watering down her ale and wine. The cacaphonous noise of pots and pans clanging together possibly celebrated the alewife’s damnation. Richard Rastall explains that the directions for “material noise” as Jesus attacks hell in the Chester Harrowing of a Hell was likely produced by using some of the Cooks’s and Inkeepers’s instruments of their trade—pots and pans. 55 It is a fair assumption that this guild again used the instruments of their trade to celebrate the damnation of this woman who presumed to participate in the drink trade. The dishonest alewife was a common motif as Judith Bennett explains: “[t]he hellish fate of brewsters and tapsters was a potent and unusually popular.” Bennett turns our attention to an early representation of the dishonest alewife in the Holkham Bible Picture Book. In the image for The Last Judgment, devils carry a baker, cleric, and alewife to throw them into the fiery cauldron while the alewife waves a jug over her head. Bennett suggests the alewife’s use of the jug signifies her sin of cheating her customers. 56 However, we can also read this move as gesture of resistance to a religious and cultural system that damns her for infiltrating the male dominated drink and food trade. This move, I suggest, is similar to the alewife left to dwell in hell with Satan and his minions. Though the alewife’s role is to serve as a warning to other dishonest tapsters and brewers when she states, “Taverners, tapsters of this city / Shall be promoted here by me / for breaking statutes of this city (285-87), her words belong to the                                                               55 Rastall, Richard. “The Sounds of Hell.” The Iconography of Hell. eds. Clifford Davison and Thomas H. Seiler. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U. 1992: 102-31. 56 Bennett 125. 49  male cooks and innkeepers of the guild that produced this play. This guild counsels its fellow townspeople that there is a special place in hell for those that would cheat their neighbors, and an especially hellish place for women who dare to participate in the drink trade. Thus the alewife stands for a number of unruly women, challenging male authority. But the alewife’s role is also special—it speaks to this culture’s concern and anxiety of female labor that brews or cooks for public consumption. These women labor in the most intimate spaces, producing the food and drink that the culture consumes. They are at once necessary and suspicious. Hence the vitriol leveled at them in cultural condemnations of alewives, so carefully chronicled by Bennett. In response to the vitriolic attacks on her profession, the alewife eventually embraces her condition by turning to Satan and stating, “Thus I betake you, more and less, / To my sweet master, sir Satanas (305-06). The play concludes with a wedding in hell when Demon 2 tells the alewife, “[w]elcome, dear lady, I shall thee wed!” (313). The alewife marries a devil. Though Marlowe’s Mephistopheles will later refer to marriage as a “ceremonial toy” (2.1.147), this play offers the alewife a marital contract that can be read as empowering this woman. Though this play both silences and damns women who have transgressed beyond religious and social codes of this culture, the alewife seems to have found a kind of power in her damnation. Instead of food for the hellmouth, the alewife’s pact with the devil witches her, so she can continue to trouble the religious and social values of this culture. Female Labor We have travelled, then, from manuscripts depicting the hellmouth which were 50  housed in nunneries and perhaps offered to powerful women as compensation, to plays condemning errant women to the hellmouth itself. In this trajectory, I have attempted to illuminate the ways in which the hellmouth iconography relies, in both manuscripts and dramatic versions, on the every day kitchen stuff of housewives. The hellmouth as a cauldron and the cutting up of souls as akin to cooking helps establish the hellmouth as particularly familiar while the cauldron is arguably a female image of labor. Women participated in the labor market during this period in various ways. As Marjorie Keniston McIntosh explains, women impacted the general economy not only as consumers but also as producers of products for consumption. 57 Women from both the urban and rural areas marketed a variety of domestic skills for public consumption such as sewing and brewing. Ironically, there was less opportunity for women as public cooks. McIntosh’s meticulous account of a variety of records throughout medieval and early modern England shows us how men dominated the food trade of public cooking. Though women might have participated in this food trade as cooks, they did so almost certainly under the supervision of male authority—be it husband, father, or master. Concern for the quality of the products cooked for public consumption, according to McIntosh, most likely contributed to this suspicion of female cooks. Though some women did work as public cooks, the popular culture of the time demonized this female labor. 58 Similar to the negative representations of brewsters that Judith Bennett examined in her important study                                                               57 McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston. Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 3-5, 198-201. 58 Keniston 201. 51  of female labor, women cooking for public consumption were also vilified. 59 For example, in John Heywood’s popular interlude The Play Called The Four PP, the Pardoner tells of Margery Coorson, a public cook who was damned to cook in the kitchen of hell for the devils’s consumption. She proved to be a very bad cook even for devils. Thus both the devils and the damned in hell celebrate her release by clanging their chains and shouting their relief to see her go (30-31). The Pardoner tells us how easily he persuaded Lucifer to release her. He tells us that he: I toke her then fro the spyt for spede But when she sawe thys brought to pas To tell the ioy wherin she was And of all the deuyls for ioy how they Dyd rore at her delyuery And how the cheynes in hell dyd rynge And how all the soules therin dyd synge Although this representation of a woman as a public cook ridicules Margery Coorson’s supposed lack of skill and talent to cook properly even for devils, this representation also suggests that the poor cooking skills Margery Coorson demonstrates in hell’s kitchen was a subversive act that helped to gain her release from eternal damnation. The example of Marjorie Coorson and the alewife in the Chester cycle, then, counsels women towards a kind of salvation from the hellmouth by virtue of their intimacy with the devil. Even if the specter of the alewife left alone in hell might be offered as a cautionary tale, it also indicates that there is indeed ways to avoid mutilation                                                               59 Heywood, John. “The Play Called the Four PP.” Medieval and Tudor Drama. ed. John Gassner. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1987, 232-262. 52  of the jaws of hell—intimacy with Satan. If the Chester cycle might offer a simultaneously frightening and powerful role for women within hell, the audience for the cycle play would well know the position of women within their own communities, particularly those women involved in the food and drink trade. And it is this alignment of the alewife, or the serving woman, with hell, which brings us to the next crucial adaptation of the hellmouth, the witch’s cauldron. Though the stage witch and her cauldron are the subjects of Chapter 3 & 4, it should be noted now that it is not surprising the hellmouth began to take on specifically feminine characteristics, in shifting from a male dominated ravenous consuming mouth into a female controlled boiling cauldron. 53  Chapter 2: Marlowe’s Hellmouth and Cauldron The theatrical properties of the hellmouth and cauldron found their way onto the early modern stage via Christopher Marlowe’s plays. As traditional subversive conduits of eternal damnation, both stage props physically manifest Marlowe’s intense and public study of the English church’s beliefs on redemption and damnation in both The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta. 60 Though all of Marlowe’s protagonists display overt tendencies of rapacious ambition, the protagonists in these plays furiously interrogate the justice of their damnation. Faustus’s and Barabas’s unfettered ambitions are a palpable need and passion to prove the value of their life and soul even while their respective plays fragment the tenuous links between a mortal life and immortal soul. Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, henceforth Faustus, explores the spiritual anguish and struggle of his title character through the medium of theatrical spectacle—a spectacle of feeding and eating that calls forth the mechanism of damnation—the hellmouth. In The Jew of Malta, hereafter Jew, Marlowe’s Barabas plots, bakes, and cooks up counter retribution to the Christian suppression of his wealth as well as his religious and racial identity. At last, however, Barabas, body and soul, falls into the boiling cauldron of Christian divine retribution. As seen in the last chapter, the hellmouth and cauldron as stage properties in medieval cycle plays offered unique and important theatrical possibilities, reminding its audience of the physical spectacle and pain of hell while also offering a sense of its power, even for those isolated and culturally condemned who make the devil their ally. Marlowe cites this early English theatrical tradition,                                                               60 All quotations for Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus are from the Norton Critical Edition ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 2005. I will be using the A text unless marked otherwise. 54  imagining hell and damnation as the action of cooking and feeding the insatiable hellmouth. This feeding machine, modeled after the stage property used in early cycle plays, gave material substance to a spiritual location somewhere just off stage or below the stage boards. While the hellmouth has a disturbing focus on feeding, the cauldron, a component of the hellmouth, has an equally unsettling concentration of cooking the wicked that also opens the theatrical space to the supernatural location of hell. This chapter will look at the spiritual potency invested in the hellmouth and cauldron as stage properties that invite critiques of the early modern stage as the physical space of the spiritual location of damnation. The boiling cauldron and the ravenous jaws of hell wait in the wings or sit beneath the public stage waiting for its cue to cook and feed. In constructing this sensual and material representation of hell, we might consider the ways in which theater is a citational practice. If the last chapter explored manuscript, visual, and theatrical demarcations of spiritual space, in terms of the stages the soul moves through in the process of salvation or damnation, in this chapter, in Marlowe’s play and the newly constructed public stage, I suggest that the early modern stage reiterates this same traditional marking of spiritual space vertically to delineate the three locations the soul travels through—heaven, middle earth, and hell. The main stage space, the playing area, is citationally middle earth, above the stage, heaven, and below the stage, hell—everlasting darkness and damnation. As we have seen, the entrance to this location of perpetual torment in the imagination of early modern peoples is the hellmouth and cauldron. I argue that in Marlowe’s plays these stage props fuse the sacred and profane, creating a unique critical lens to better understand early modern cultural fears and fascination with the public stage. In other words, the performative powers of these 55  portals to hell situate stage space in-between the super and natural worlds. Marlowe uses cues, stage directions, shadowy references, as well as the physical stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron in Faustus and The Jew of Malta, respectively, to examine English Christian concepts on hell and damnation. Most significantly, he also uses these stage props to draw attention to the space below the stage as a literal and physical location of demonic power. At least in Marlowe’s rendering, the early modern stage, in other words, controlled this unstable space where the fierce and meaningful stage properties of hell culture await their cue to emerge out of demon space into the playing area of the stage. This chapter looks at the ways in which Faustus rehearses this collusion between the stage and demonic space through the constant moments of feeding in this play that leads us to the final act of the hellmouth devouring Faustus’s soul. Next, I turn to the Jew of Malta to examine how notions of cooking, feeding, and divine retribution in this play continue Marlowe’s demonic experiment. There is substantial scholarship on Marlowe’s Faustus that informs this study. Many scholars have noted Faustus’s hyper-ambition, and his propensity for self-delusion. David Riggs’s important biography on Marlowe considers the playwright’s blended structure of heroic drama and morality play with the former borrowing heavily from Marlowe’s own scholarly life at Cambridge. 61 The surprising religious orthodoxy of this play has been well documented while other scholars point out the play’s subversive elements. In his significant study, Richard Halpern explores the parallel between the commodification of Faustus’s soul and Marlowe’s play while Cox uses Stuart Clark’s notion of oppositional thinking in his analysis of Dr. Faustus to illuminate notions of the                                                               61 Riggs 232-33. 56  devil as a vestige of sacred culture on the secular stage (60). 62 63 Indeed, the devil as well as the material culture of hell such as the hellmouth and cauldron should be understood as components of sacred culture that are possessed with a powerful spiritual potency. Marlowe’s direct and indirect use of these stage props recognizes the spiritual power charged within these demonic but sacred objects. It is their roles in sacred culture that seems to appeal to Marlowe. Marlowe’s Faustus performs the sensual orality of the hellmouth that we have seen in medieval religious art and drama. In fact, Marlowe gestures to the dramatic finale of the hellmouth feeding on Faustus’s body and soul throughout this play by calling attention to Faustus’s body that he both bleeds and fragments. His practice of magic returns again and again to the disruption and provision of feeding that directs our attention to his body and soul as food for the mouth of Helen and hell. Though some argue the hellmouth was an anachronistic object on the early modern stage, its frightening power and functionality of feeding preyed on the cultural memories of its medieval past that continued to circulate within the early modern social system. For example, the German artist, Lucas Cranach the Younger, used the hellmouth in numerous works such as the woodcut below to promote Martin Luther’s agenda of Christian Reformation. Martin Luther commands the central focus of the image. With his translation of the bible laid out before him, he performs the act of divine judgment by gesturing to the godly placed in the traditional position of salvation to the right of Christ                                                               62 Halpern, Richard. “Marlowe’s Theatre of Night: ‘Doctor Faustus’ and Capital.” ELH 71.2 (2004): 457. 63 Cox 60. 57  while the damned, a collection of the Catholic priestly hierarchy with the pope as the most notable tasty morsel of wickedness, are jammed into the voracious hellmouth with Figure 2.1 Lucas Cranach the Younger, Last Supper of the Protestants and the Pope's Descent into Hell (c.1540) its devils blaring horns while sticking meat hooks into the soft flesh of the Catholic clergy. Both Catholic and Protestant propagandists continued to use the hellmouth as a mechanism of divine retribution that fed on the enemies of God and his one true church. The sacred culture of both versions of Christianity envisioned a painful devouring of those who promoted and believed in the opposite Christian belief system. Early modern playwrights wrote for an audience with these competing Christian ideologies. Marlowe’s emphasis on Protestantism in this play exploits the volatile 58  tensions between Christianities. He is also careful to call attention to the stratified class system of early modern England, and the lack of opportunity for such as Faustus’s parents who the Chorus tells us are “base of stock” (11). It is only through the charity of a relative that Faustus is able to attend and eventually achieve scholarly acclaim at Wurtenburg (A Text) or Wittenberg (B Text). Both German cities were home to Protestant reformers. 64 The Chorus stresses both Faustus’s social class and religious identity as it builds to its conclusion of Faustus’s over-reaching ambition and damnation. Marlowe’s use of the Chorus establishes the many narratives invested in the Faustian legends. The Chorus also turns our attention to Faustus’s damnation when he states, “And melting heavens conspired his overthrow / For, falling to a devilish exercise” (22-23). Though Marlowe uses the classical allusion of Icarus’s fate with “melting heavens,” the Christian idea of damnation is addressed with Faustus’s fall into the knowledge of magic and sorcery. These lines point us to the mechanism of his damnation, the hellmouth simmering under the stage boards or just off stage awaiting its cue. The Chorus guides the audience into Marlowe’s play. A play concerned and even anxious about the Christian ideology of hell that reflects on but constantly defers the acts of repentance and damnation. When we first meet Marlowe’s Faustus, he is tossing aside volumes of received knowledge. Books are Faustus’s tools. As the Chorus, the magicians Valdez and Cornelius, and Faustus himself inform us, Faustus is the master of books. He has just “commenced” or graduated from years of intense and long study on each of the subjects he examines. The particular texts he chooses to read from are the seminal works for a                                                               64 Kastan ft. 13. 59  humanist study of philosophy, medicine, law, and theology. Having just attained his degree that marks him as a master on these subjects, Faustus considers his choices of careers. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to dismiss Faustus’s self-assessment of his intellectual mastery over each subject as arrogant and unrealistic account of his intellectual prowess. However, Marlowe’s play celebrates Faustus’s intellectual virtuosity. The Chorus, magicians, and scholars in the play’s world honor Faustus’s intellect and scholarship. Riggs points out that Marlowe used much of his own tenure as a scholar for his characterization of the infamous Dr. Faustus. Marlowe’s Faustus has just completed his degree thus he is still immersed in the academic world of study and disputation. Faustus is a scholar, and thinks, acts, and reacts like a scholar. He studies, learns, questions, and can debate the veracity of an argument from every position. As First Scholar muses, “I wonder what’s become of Faustus, that was wont to make our schools ring with ‘sic probo’” (1.12.1-2). Though First Scholar’s remark is tinged with sarcasm, he highlights Faustus’s enjoyment of disputation. Riggs explains that this required intellectual debate most likely sparked ideas of skepticism in more than a few scholars. 65 A scholar might be required to argue against notions of hell and damnation, or the Christian God’s compassion and redemption. Faustus grapples with these spiritual concerns. Throughout the play, he vacillates between Christian and skeptical belief systems, and he has a difficult time elucidating his own personal beliefs. We are immediately introduced to Faustus’s almost frenetic confusion as he interrogates each of the disciplines his degree signifies he has mastered. Addressing himself in the third person, he begins to debate with himself and states that “[h]aving commenced, be a                                                               65 Riggs 232-249. 60  divine in show, / Yet level at the end of every art” (1.1.3-4). Faustus weighs the purpose for the knowledge garnered from each subject, and finds each lacking in economic, intellectual, and artistic advancement. For Faustus, a career in philosophy, medicine, law, or theology does not offer the wealth and fame he craves. More significantly, he burns to use his intellectual powers to acquire these worldly riches, and to gain a sense of control over his life and soul. He pointedly explores “the end” of each subject whose study pursues specific ends such as “to dispute well” (1.1.8), which Faustus continuously revels in; “the body’s health,” which Faustus would rather know how to “raise [. . .] to life again” (1.1.25); Justinian’s laws that “fits a mercenary drudge” (1.1.34), and finally Jerome’s Bible. Faustus seizes on Jerome’s Bible, and tells himself to “view it well” (1.1.18). This self-command demonstrates his respect for and trepidation with sacred scripture. Trained in philosophy and theology, Faustus chooses two passages of scriptures that Riggs explains were supposedly known as the Devil’s Syllogism. These specific passages reflect Calvin’s dogma. Faustus privileges the first line of this passage according to Calvinist interpretations. Calvin’s theology and English homilies preached justification by faith and argued only God’s elect will find salvation—not all who repent and confess their sins will find redemption. 66 Marlowe’s early modern audience would have understood Faustus’s interpretation of this well-known biblical passage. As Marlowe moves his scholar from traditional sources of knowledge to forbidden knowledge, he forces his protagonist and the audience to question sacred scripture. Faustus’s evaluation of scripture concludes with “[a]y, we must die an everlasting death.” (1.1.46). He then asks                                                               66 Riggs 241. 61  in the A text “Why doctrine call you this?” (1.1.47), and in the B text “What doctrine call you this?” (1.1.46). The A text asks the purpose of such a teaching while the B text refuses to recognize the teaching as Christian doctrine. Both queries suggest a subversive and heretical questioning of Protestant interpretive control of the scriptures. Yet Faustus’s questioning of the purpose and value of Calvinist doctrine is ambiguous since he returns again and again to this same religious debate sincerely trying to find his personal relationship with the Christian God. Once Faustus initiates the descent into his damnation by sending for the magicians, Valdes and Cornelius, Protestant notions of repentance and salvation are voiced through the Good Angel who pleads with Faustus “lay that damned book aside” (1.1.70), and cautions him to “[r]ead, read the Scriptures. That is blasphemy” (1.1.73) while the Evil Angel calls this same blasphemous text “. . . that famous art / Wherein all Nature’s treasury is contained” (1.1.74-75). Though the Good Angel’s influence is, at best, momentary, it is important to note that the character’s prostelyzing Protestant ideals of sin and damnation do impact Faustus. There is a tension and nervous edginess to Marlowe’s Faustus demonstrated in the character’s consistent self-reference in the third person. Faustus persistently talks to himself and about himself. This repetitive reference of the self in third person textually fashions and re-fashions Faustus between Protestant reprobate and “conjurer laureate” – a fashioning of the self forbidden in Christian culture. Yet, as Keith Thomas explains, the act of conjuring was popular in both secular and religious communities. Every village had at least one cunning man or woman, if not several who competed for their custumers’s patronage. Emily Bartels discusses the bifurcated idea of the Renaissance magician as either white or black. This bifurcation 62  acknowledged some legitimate magical practices. Internationally renowned magicians “such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Cornelius Agrippa prompted occult philosophy” that searched for divine transcendence. 67 The philosophy delineated a hierarchy of spirits that were a network of occult “influences and sympathies.” 68 John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, famously conversed with angels on spiritual matters that earned him the forbidden identity of conjurer. Yet, as Deborah Harkness explains, Dee participated with a trans continental group of scholars such as Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Leicester, Peter Ramus, and Tycho Brahe. 69 Bruno Giardono was also a natural philosopher and a proponent of natural magic. In the B text version of Marlowe’s play, Faustus rescues Bruno from the pope. Marlowe questions the agenda of the Good Angel who must speak truth because of his character. Yet he doesn’t seem to speak the whole truth. Books of magic are marked as blasphemous, yet important and scholarly men in England and on the Continent have found wisdom and power in these texts. The Good Angel pushes the Protestant schematic model against temptation—reading the scriptures. The blasphemous books of magic take the gaze off the sanctioned reading of God’s word, and, as Faustus admits, he is “glutted with conceit of this!” (1.1.76). Faustus is fascinated with the “[l]ines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters” (1.1.51) in these forbidden books. It is not                                                               67 Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P. (118). In this important study, Bartels argues that Marlowe’s use of “alien types” for his protagonists exposes the dominant culture’s overt demonizing of the other to reassert its authority and identity xv, 118. 68 Thomas 223. 69 Harkness, Deborah E. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 12-13. 63  just the text or words that captivate Faustus’s imagination but the sensual shapes and fashioning of the book with “scenes, letters, and characters” (1.1.51). The materiality of the book seems to consume Faustus’s imagination. The glutted feeling of feeding on these books is reflected in his fantasy of magical power in which he would have spirits “search all corners of the new-found world / For pleasant fruits and princely delicates” (1.1.84-85). His fantasy moves from the intellectual pursuit of ridding himself of all “ambiguities” (1.1.80), to a mercenary move of acquiring gold and pearl. Finally, he seeks nourishment for his soul and spirit—unknown delectable fruits. This feeding on foods from the New World empowers him to imagine himself as a Protestant warrior who can protect Wurttemberg and fight off Parma. He then becomes a benevolent emperor who properly clothes and respects poor scholars. In this short soliloquy, Faustus greedily swallows and eats up the power and mystery this art promises. He positions the books of magic as food for his mind and soul, yet this forbidden knowledge demands Faustus repay this nourishment with his own body and soul according to Christian ideology. Though Faustus attempts to extract himself physically and spiritually from these Christian edicts, his contract with the devil binds him to this Christian system. Conjuring on The Early Modern Stage The play offers three highly varied conjuring scenes. First, there is Faustus’s dark and serious conjuring in a “lusty grove.” Next, we witness Wagner parodying his master’s skill while tormenting poor Robyn. Finally, Robyn steals one of Faustus’s magic books. Though he garbles the magic words, he successfully conjures the great Mephistopheles. As Andrew Sofer argues in “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus,” the early modern audience had a particular 64  fascination with the act of conjuring on stage. Sofer attributes this attraction to the action of conjuring’s “unnerving performative potential.” 70 In plays such as Faustus, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, and Thomas Dekker’s The Devil Is In It, conjuring on stage “models a performative speech act that threatens to blur the distinction between theater and magic.” Sofer rehearses the debate about performance versus performativity, but he clearly delineates the performativity of the stage that leads to his important assertion that to conjure on the early modern stage “was a Janus-faced endeavor whose ontological stakes were uncertain.” The indeterminate metaphysical risks expose the early modern stage as a potentially volatile space in which devils might emerge or the hellmouth rise to bite a sinner or two. Sofer focuses on the performative potential of conjuring as a speech act. Therefore, he distinguishes early modern consumers of stage productions as an audience who comes to hear the play as opposed to spectators with the focus on the visual. However, the act of conjuring on stage cannot be separated from the stage properties that are requisite for a successful performance. 71 The performative impulse that Sofer finds in the act of conjuring further explores the fluidity of theatrical space and its resonances with occult forces. As discussed earlier, to perform contains the idea of a ritual act, or the performance of a ceremony as required in occult or supernatural encounters. Marlowe uses the verb with this idea of theatrical ritual when the Chorus in Faustus informs the audience, “[. . .] we must perform / the form of Faustus’s fortunes, good or bad” (1.1.7-8). Marlowe’s muse positions theatrical space as ritual space demanding the performance or ritual execution of “the form” or material shape of                                                               70 Sofer “How to do things with Demons.” 9-10. 71 for Sofer’s analysis on stage properties see The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 65  Faustus’s fate “good or bad” (1.1.8). The ritual aspect of the Chorus’s line gestures to both Classical and Christian traditions and speaks to the lingering spiritual efficacy of stage space. The early modern stage space charged with spiritual or supernatural energy contributes to the protean qualities of the actors on this stage. For example, Thomas Heywood, celebrated Alleyn’s acting prowess as a “Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tonge / So could he speak, so vary (qt. in Roach 42). Heywood’s account argues for Alleyn’s ability to embody the character. Thus, as Faustus, there was a real danger that he could actually summon occult forces to the stage. A note regarding an early performance of Faustus records this palpable fear that Alleyn might conjure a real devil to the stage. The often-qtd. anecdote reads: “ ‘as a certain nomber of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them.’ When the audience was informed of the actors’s fears, every man hastened to be first out of dores.” 72 Though this might have been a smart marketing ploy, the record points to the early modern peoples’s interest in the occult or the forbidden dark spiritual forces. The performativity of the stage, as Sofer suggests, and the occult like powers that some of the stage players seemed to possess, as Roach outlines, implies an affinity between the early modern stage and magic. Marlowe’s play forcefully claims this intersection between the stage and magic or the occult and demonic forces housed beneath the stage or waiting in                                                               72 qtd. in Kastan 181. 66  the wings. In discussing the role of magic in late medieval and early modern England, Richard Kieckhefer points out that magic was a “crossroads” in which the popular, the religious, and the scientific intersected (1). Yet, as Marlowe shows us, the early modern stage inserts itself into this threshold of intersection that disrupts and reflects on received notions of these varying schools of knowledge. When we first witness Faustus’s powerful moment of conjuring the devil on stage, he first must conjure up the “lusty grove” wherein he devises the ritual ceremony. Figure 2.2 1616 Title Page to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus 67  He summons forth a dark night as he charts the constellations: “Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth. / Longing to view the Orion’s drizzling look / [. . .] dims the welkin with her pitchy breath” (1.3.1-4). Marlowe plays with the sensuality of darkness or a “pitchy breath” that consumes all light from the slight reflection of the constellation Orion whose astrological position promises a cold and wet night. These opening lines are in stark contrast to the scene depicted on the title page to the 1616 edition of Dr. Faustus. Instead of a lusty grove, the title page places Faustus in his room during the conjuring scene. Yet Alleyn’s protean powers could easily call forth the dark, cold, and rainy night the lines construct. Leo Kirshchbaum argues that this title page is drawn from an early performance of the play. Therefore, it offers evidence of the staging of this important scene. Indeed, using a rendition of this popular scene from one of Edward Allyen’s acclaimed performances for the title page of the quarto is a smart marketing move that would attract the potential buyer’s gaze. The title page shows us Faustus standing in his magic circle wearing his scholar’s robes with a book of magic in his left hand, and a stick or wand to complete the drawing of the circle. A variety of symbols are etched into the circle that must be the inscription of the sacred names, forward and backwards. The title page captures the moment when Faustus recites the ritual language that concludes with “surgat nobis dicatus Mephistopheles!” (21-22). Faustus’s imperative surgat—to rise—is a stage direction for the devil, or the dragon’s head to rise up through the trap door. The title page illustrates this action, and moment of stage history. This theatrical moment calls attention to the demonic space below the stage that begins to emerge from the trapdoor. The dragon’s head positionally located between stage spaces calls forth the stage property of the hellmouth waiting in the wings to feed on Faustus’s 68  soul. The title page should be read as part of the visual culture of the hellmouth for it shows us the spiritual efficacy of this stage property. Faustus and the audience only witness the dragon’s head when Faustus initially conjures the devil. A dragon’s head reiterates sacred culture’s mechanism of damnation the hellmouth –the gaping jaws of a great beast such as a dragon. In the play, Faustus is terrified of the dragon’s head he has conjured on stage, and he tells it “I charge thee to return and change they shape; / Thou art too ugly to attend on me” (1.3.23-24). He commands the devil to change shapes before it fully emerges from beneath the demonic space below the stage. Thus the dragon’s head or the hellmouth is again contained beneath the stage, and the feeding on Faustus’s soul is deferred. The devil that reappears has taken on a human shape draped in friar’s robes. Like other stage conjurers, Faustus is an expert theologian and a learned scholar. In Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil is in it, Friar Bacon and Peter Fable understand and respect the terrible power they conjure; both learn to control the devil they trick into service and repent of their over-reaching powers in time to save their souls. Though Valdez and Cornelius properly instruct Faustus on how to conjure the devil, they seem to have forgotten to explain the importance of capturing and controlling the devil once raised. While the devil retreats to change shape, Faustus exclaims “How pliant is this Mephistopheles, / Full of obedience and humility!” (1.3.28-29). In the garb of “an old Franciscan friar” (1.3.25), the devil is seemingly subjugated, and Faustus unaware of the horrific power he has unleashed on himself. Mephistopheles drains Faustus of his own power when he claims to have appeared on his own accord, and Faustus’s conjuring 69  merely “per accidens” (1.3.45). Faustus fails to interrogate this devil. Instead, he capitulates to Mephistoples’s terms of service for his soul. Yet in Act 3, scene 2, Robin infuriates Mephistopheles who is forced to appear before the clownish conjurer. Mephistopheles’s pride in his demonic rank in demon hierarchy is wounded by this misuse of conjuring power. He refers to himself as “Monarch of Hell” to whom kings and potentates kneel before (3.236). The Father of Lies turns poor Rafe and Robin into an ape and a dog, but this action of injured demonic pride exposes the orchestrated deception Mephistopheles perpetrates on Faustus. In his teleological survey of humanist subjects, Faustus chose the only one with a definitive end—damnation; the feeding on his soul for perpetuity begins with Faustus signing the devil’s contract with his blood. The contract scene follows a battle for Faustus’s soul between the Good and Bad Angel with Faustus vacillating between remorse for his ambition and desire to achieve that same ambition. The angels leave Faustus as he works himself into an almost delirious state of desire for Mephistopheles’s return. “Veni, Veni, Mephistopheles! (2.1.29), he cries as the devil enters the scene. Yet Mephistopheles’ demand that he must “write a deed of gift with thine own blood” (2.1.35) turns Faustus’s attention to concern for his soul. His inquiry focuses on the value of his soul to hell. The devil tells him that hell yearns to expand, misery loves company, and there are unimaginable tortures for the damned. Yet he agrees. Why? Mephistopheles seduces him with the promise of power and the inference of protection. He tells Faustus that “[. . .] I will be thy slave, and wait on thee, / And give thee more than thou has wit to ask” (2.1.46-47). Though I have argued that Faustus should be considered an eminent scholar, neither he nor any human can outwit the devil—a supernatural power controlled only by the Christian God. Yes 70  Mephistopheles does offer Faustus a moment of honesty when he tells Faustus of the horrors of hell and begs him to “Leave these frivolous demand, / Which strike a terror to my fainting soul” (1.3.82-83). To which, Faustus scorns the devil’s moment of truth and tells him to “[l]earn thou of Faustus manly fortitude” (10.3.85). Mephistopheles positions himself as a slave who waits and gives to his master Faustus. It is a fair assumption that Faustus would be lulled into a sense of security with this seemingly pliant and self subjugated demon. When Faustus’s acquiesces to the deal, Mephistopheles preys on Faustus’s masculinity and tells him to “Then stab thine arm courageously / And bind thy soul” (2.1.49-50). To which Faustus replies “for love of thee / I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood” (2.1.54). Many scholars have pointed out the homoerotic relationship between Faustus and the devil that this scene demonstrates. Faustus cuts his arm for the devil and enjoys the sensual pleasure of the blood “that trickles from mine arm” (2.1.57), but Faustus’s body disrupts his erotic moment. The blood refuses to flow. His body’s repulsion of the selling of its soul forces Faustus to question the sign, but he fails to read the portent properly. Instead, Faustus’s concern is for his autonomy and agency. “Is not thy soul thine own?” he asks. As Majorie Garber explains Mephistopheles’s fire that burns Faustus’s skin and forces the blood to flow again performs Faustus’s damnation. Faustus’s arm is cooked and his blood warmed as food for the hellmouth waiting off stage. 73                                                               73 Garber, Marjorie. “Writing and Unwriting in Doctor Faustus.” Doctor Faustus: Norton Critical Edition of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. 361. 71  The feeding on Faustus’s damned soul is also playfully foreshadowed in Act 1, scene 4, when Wagner coerces Robin to become his apprentice. Where Faustus reduces the soul to “vain trifles” (1.3.61), Robyn recognizes the value of his soul. He counters Wagner’s accusation that he would sell it “to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood raw” (1.4.8-9), and tells him that “if I pay so dear” (1.4.13) he would expect the meat roasted with a nice sauce. The impoverished clown demands a tasty meal for his soul, and the poor scholar sells his soul for a mere twenty-four years of demonic service. Marlowe’s parody of Faustus’s conjuring scene suggests the unequal distribution of wealth in early modern England and a notion of deprivation among the social classes. The value of an immortal soul varies according to one’s social and economic rank in the cultural system. Faustus’s deprivation of economic advancement and fame as well as his longing to know what is forbidden leads him to an unimaginative and even mundane negotiation for his soul. Robin’s poverty, on the other hand, deprives him of regular meals. Thus he demands a culinary delight in exchange for his soul. The value of the soul is thus marked as temporal spectacle and a good meal. Robin’s longing for food in exchange for his soul suggests the process of damnation in which the soul becomes food for the hellmouth. This rehearsal of Faustus’s damnation is further explored with Robin and Wagner when the later threatens to “turn all the lice about thee into familiars, and they shall tear thee in pieces” (1.4.26-27), and Robin reveals “they are as bold with my flesh as if they had paid for my meat and drink” (1.1.29-30). Wagner and Robin imagine the vermin that infest Robin’s body as devils who bite and tear at his flesh as if carving and chopping him up to feed the jaws of hell. 72  Hell Faustus, however, tells Mephistopheles that “[t]his word “damnation” terrifies not him, / For he confounds hell in Elysium. His ghost be with the old philosophers” (1.3.58- 60). Faustus rejects Christian notions of damnation in favor of Classical interpretations of the afterlife where he envisions himself taking up his place among the ancient philosophers. Faustus attempts to set up a competing option for the afterlife of the soul no matter the Christian assessment of that soul’s rightful place with its schematic location of spiritual space. There is some justification for Faustus’s futile but progressive move to offer choices in interpretations of a spiritual space of everlasting eternity. The “word damnation” is a thirteenth century construct from the Latin damnare, “to adjudge guilt, condemn, convict,” used in religious works to evoke the terms of the Christian God’s retribution for the sinful. 74 Faustus seems to consider the term a Christian medieval idea thus tainted with popery. Therefore, his Protestant scholarship has trained him to read this as the error and corruption of the Catholic Church, like the notion of purgatory. Marlowe pressures the Protestant move to read Catholic doctrine as false ideology, while it continues to advocate popish notions of damnation. Marlowe also appropriates Calvin’s metaphorical notions of hell without relinquishing threat of physical torment. The public stage became a space in which the competing discourses of high and low, religious and secular culture thrash out their differences on ideas of faith such as everlasting damnation in hell. This play participates in the discursive community debating the concept of hell and damnation. However, early modern Protestant debates on hell centered on the apocryphal story of The Harrowing of Hell or Christ’s Descent into                                                               74 OED def. 1a & 2a. 73  Hell. The first chapter explored the spiritual and cultural significance of this apocryphal text to Christian belief systems across social classes. Reformation ideology struggled with this pseudo biblical text. According to Deborah Shuger, Calvin translated the Hebraic schoel to mean dead not hell, so the Christ descended to an indeterminate place of the dead and not Satan’s kingdom to release the patriarchs of the old testament. 75 Yet there seems to have been little disputation on hell as a physical site of horrific torment. Peter Marshall explains that Catholic notions of hell and its insatiable mouth easily transferred to Protestant doctrine. Both Catholic and Protestant homilies threatened their congregations with the promise of eternal damnation that was both poena damni or deprived of the sight of God, and poena sensus or perpetual torment (283). Calvin and other reformers considered the concept of hell a metaphor but were careful not to refute its existence or regulate it to the same category of popish fictions as purgatory. In fact, Bishop Thomas Bilson warned all those who believed hell a metaphor that “they that go thither shall find it no metaphore” (The Effect of Certain Sermons, London 1599). 76 Marshall explains there were disputes as to the nature of hellfire and hell’s physical location, but few theologians of the time argued against the real threat of damnation in a physical location of everlasting pain. 77 Yet some radical reformers such as Henry Jacob described the fire and brimstone “in Hell [as] what a toyish fable” (81). An assertion that echoes Faustus’s claim that “hell’s a fable” (2.1.123-25). Ironically, it is the devil cites Bilson’s warning. Mephistopheles counters Faustus’s dismissal of hell with “[a]y, think                                                               75 Shuger, Deborah. The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus: Disputing What Hell Is.” UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance. Sawyer Series. May 15, 2008. 76 qtd. in Patrides 223. 77 Marshall 81, 284. 74  so still, till experience change thy mind” (2.1.124). Faustus’s response is disturbing: “Why, think’st thou that Faustus shall be damned?” (2.1.125). At the beginning of this scene, Faustus contemplates the necessity of his damnation that summoned forth the Good and Evil Angel. The Good Angel implores Faustus to repent and pray, but the Evil Angel captures his imagination with “think of honor and wealth” (2.1.21. This discursive practice is repeated throughout the play. Whenever Faustus fears his damnation the angels show up to offer their advice and either the Evil Angel or Mephistopheles distracts Faustus with the promise of power. Faustus ignores the signs of salvation offered to him in the play because salvation is predicated upon giving up his magical demonic power. Though a divine spiritual power warns Faustus of the danger he is buy writing on his body “Homo Fuge!” (2.1.76), Mephistopheles easily counters the divine sign with a theatrical spectacle “to delight his mind” (2.1.81) . He succeeds in turning Faustus’s mind away from the Christian God and on diabolical delights. Mephistopheles continually uses theatrics to keep Faustus entertained and feeling empowered. Both he and Lucifer are like demonic playwrights who conjure up theatrics and entertainments to captivate Faustus while keeping him captive. They even present him with an early modern version of the pageant of The Seven Deadly Sins. Marlowe uses theatrical spectacle to demonstrate demonic power. In so doing, Marlowe shows us how the early modern stage controls and manifests this unstable power resting below the trap door into which one or several deadly sins traversed through into stage space then back to its space beneath the stage. As discussed earlier, the stage has performative potential, particularly the early modern English stage that emerged out of both Catholic and Protestant ideologies. In the late 1580s and early 75  1590s when Marlowe was writing, the institution of the theater was a novel enterprise. Marlowe’s Faustus explores the performative potential of the stage with the conjuring scene as well as Faustus’s other demonstrations of magic. Though often trivial, these acts of magic have political and spiritual significance. His practice of magic returns again and again to the disruption and provision of feeding that directs our focus to his body and soul as food for the mouth of hell. Faustus does not demonstrate his magical powers on stage until Act 3, scene 1. The scene begins with Faustus narrating his international travels and experiences with Mephistopheles. Marlowe defers Faustus’s performance of magic on stage for his trip to Rome and the papacy. Faustus’s disruption of the papal feast rehearses his earlier impulse of a Protestant nationalism that compels him to build a wall of brass around Germany and force the “swift Rhine [to] circle fair Wurttemberg” (1.1.88-89) so as to protect Protestantism from Catholic invasion. He would even battle the “Prince of Parma” (1.1.93) from the land. About to invade the Pope’s private rooms, Faustus asks Mephistopheles to turn him “invisible, to do what I please / Unseen of any whilst I stay in Rome? (3.1.55-56). This move adds to the anti-Catholic humor that quickly turns violent. The Pope’s banquet and the conspicuous display of ostentatious consumption seems to enrage Faustus who declares “Fall to, and the devil choke you an your spare!” (3.1.61). Though the line does not directly cue a physical attack, it certainly implies that Faustus has imposed himself on the person of the pope. The words themselves seem to slap against the pope who vocally declares his trepidation of this invisible presence, but he immediately turns his attention to the food he has procured from those seeking favors from the papacy. He gestures to the Cardinal of Lorrain to view “ a dainty dish was sent 76  [him] from the Bishop of Milan” (3.1.65-66) and another dish from the Cardinal of Florence. In this scene, Marlowe presents the priestly hierarchy and its network of power in this distribution of food. The pope distributing food among his faithful congregation parodies the Catholic mass and the ideology of transubstantiation. During the liturgical service of the Catholic mass, the Eucharistic host changes its substance from bread to the body of Christ, and the wine into his blood. Faustus mocks this ideology by robbing the pope of his specially prepared dishes and wine. Instead of the humble meal prepared for Christ’s last supper, this pope replicates the aristocracy and its trend of banqueting and banqueting stuff. Kim F. Hall explains that an early modern banquet not only had the connotation of a feast but was also a particular moment of the feast in which confectionary and sweetmeats were elaborately displayed on a separate table while the feasting table was cleared or voided. The culinary art of banqueting symbolized wealth and status, and established a niche industry. Separate rooms instead of mere tables were constructed to house the entertainment of the banquet. 78 The pleasure of such banqueting reached all classes. By the early sixteenth century, cookbooks such as Hugh Platt’s Delightes for Ladies (1602) offered women outside the circle of the aristocracy recipes from the rich and famous. Sumptuary laws that proved difficult to enforce no longer prohibited this kind of conspicuous consumption by the middling classes. The religious class, however, in both Catholic and Protestant ideologies were expected to resist this temptation. The elite of the Catholic                                                               78 Hall, Kim F. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century. “ Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. ed. Valerie Traub et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 168-190. 77  priestly hierarchy, as Marlowe shows us, demonstrates their power in displays of elaborate consumption. Faustus engages this elite display of consumption according to its own rules—a violent destruction of the gaudy presentation of the sugary delights. As Hall explains, this part of the meal was intended as entertainment and to exhibit wealth. The dishes themselves were often made of the marzipan or almond paste used to make the dishes for the banquet. An assortment of animals and even a castle were sometimes part of the display. At the time of the banquet, the guests would break, crack, and destroy the sugary substances before nibbling on a tasty bit. Hall tells us of one record where the tables were overthrown and the banqueting room looked as if a brawl had taken place instead of an elite ritual culinary custom. Hall connects the English penchant for banqueting stuff with the slave trade. She traces the raw sugar’s route from Barbados where it is exported as a valuable product into England where its value is at first as a spice and medicine then used by ladies of the upper classes to devise these sugary treats into elaborate constructions as the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy. 79 The pope’s banqueting stuffs mimic the culinary rituals of the affluent, and Faustus plays his part. He steals the rich food sent to the pope by the elite in the priestly class. Though there are no stage directions stating that Faustus destroyed these dishes, the dishes themselves could have been made of the almond paste or machepane as stage props for this scene. The pope with his exhibition of worldly trade participates in the slave trade that produced his sugary delights with their blood and bodies. We also have a moment on stage when the products produced by female labor are used to orchestrate a theatrical spectacle. Faustus’s anti-Catholic rage that dismisses the power of this church as simple objects of                                                               79 Hall 172-179. 78  “[b]ell, book, and candle” (84) with no spiritual substance mirror his destruction of the Pope’s banquet in which there is no nurturing substance but simply the sugary sweetness procured through forced labor. Faustus meditations on salvation are brief, yet plunge him into moments of despair and helplessness. In the role of the repentant reprobate, Faustus finds judgment and condemnation instead of the forgiveness and compassion that is also promised. Marlowe offers a conventional Calvinist Christianity that this play celebrates to a certain extent. The Good Angel and the Old Man offer Faustus a path to repentance and redemption. God’s spirit marks his body with signs of salvation, but Christian condemnation seems to frighten Faustus more than the devil’s damnation. Faustus interprets these two concepts as categorically different. He is terrified of the Christian God, so he turns to the devil for protection and power. Unfortunately for Faustus, the devil, in all his manifestations, works for the Christian God. With Faustus’s crisis of faith, Marlowe explores the collision of humanist study and Protestant ideology. Faustus’s humanist education encourages individualism and ambitious goals. Scholars were trained to think, explore, and question. English Protestantism, however, preached the doctrine of the elect and predestination that depended on the language of sin, judgment, and retribution. The Fall of Lucifer and Adam and Eve were particularly important biblical works for this Protestant ideology. In this play about a fallen soul, Marlowe considers the struggle of faith for an ambitious man who feels oppressed by a religious and cultural system that condemns him for wanting to learn that which the dominant secular and religious cultures forbid. 79  The fall of man is rehearsed in the scene with the Duchess of Vanholt, the only female character in the play. Faustus asks the “great-bellied” (4.2.4) Duchess if she craves “some dainties” (4.2.11) that he can procure for her, and the Duchess admits she has longed for “a dish of ripe grapes” (4.2.11). When Mephistopheles returns with the out of season grapes, the Duke and Duchess are amazed with Faustus’s power, and the Duchess claims “they be the best grapes that e’er I tasted in my life before” (4.2.26-27). Just as Eve ate the succulent but forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, the Duchess eats fruit forbidden to grow in her country by the laws of nature. She eats the tasty fruit that the devil has retrieved for her. Thus the temptation scene is repeated, and expanded. The devil’s fruit could affect the baby, and calls attention to male authority’s anxiety of cuckoldry. Is it the Duchess or the baby that craves the fruit? Would the Duke’s child crave the forbidden? The Duchess promises Faustus that she will remain “Rest beholding for this courtesy” (4.2.33). Acknowledging that she will be forever in his debt for this prohibited gift, she aligns herself with Faustus’s magic and the devil that produces it. Both the fear and demonizing of the female body is reflected in Robin’s discussion of devil lore. He explains he knew the devil’s gender by horns that mark a he- devil as a cuckold, and the cloven feet of a she-devil references her genitalia (1.4.55-56). The sexualizing of these devils foreshadows Faustus’s sexual encounters with the she- devil Helen of Troy. In a moment of resignation, Faustus rehearses his final damnation with a kiss from Helen of Troy. After which, he cries, “[h]er lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies” (5.1.94-95). Helen is now the hellmouth, or the hellmouth as a metaphor for the vagina dentata—a misogynist fear of female power that envisions hell as an extremely large uncontrolled vagina with teeth. Solimar Otero explains that the vagina 80  dentata motif is a cross-cultural phenomenon found in most folklore including Western tales of the “voracious vagina.” 80 Shakespeare uses this motif of the vagina as the hellmouth in King Lear. Peter L. Rudnytsky discusses the repetition of this image in Shakespeare’s play. “Do you smell a fault,” (1.1.16), asks Gloucester when he introduces his bastard son Edmund to Kent. Rudnytsky argues that Gloucester puns on the word “fault” to mark the vagina as spoiled and unstable while also alluding to a female odor that Lear later condemns as a “burning, scalding, stench” (4.6.126-34). 81 In Act 4, scene 6, Lear unleashes his fear of and hatred for female sexuality. Speaking to Gloucester, Lear denounces women claiming that: Downe from the waste they are Centaures, though Women all above. But to the Girdle do the gods inherit; beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkeness, There’s the sulphury pit , burning, scalding, Stench, consummation. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! (8-23) 82 Lear seems to spit his final words out in revulsion of female genitalia that for him is hell and darkness or the hellmouth. Greenblatt claims that Shakespeare often used the noun “hell” as a euphemism for women’s genitalia. 83 No doubt, Marlowe also understood the use of the term as a derogatory image of female sexuality. Indeed, Marlowe seems to                                                               80 Otero, Solimar. “’Fearing Our Mothers: An Overview of the Psychoanalytic theories Concerning The Vagina Dentata Motif.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis: Sept. 1996 : 56.3. 262, 282. 81 Rudnytsky, Peter L. “The Darke and Vicious Place” : The Dread of the Vagina in ‘King Lear.’” Modern Philology. 96.3 (1999): 291-311. 82 quotations for King Lear are from Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 83 ft. 3 King Lear. Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 81  revel in immersing his audience in irony and contradictions. Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships” (5.1.90), who Faustus and his scholars recognize as the most beautiful of women, sucks Faustus’s soul out of his body with her mouth. Ironically, Faustus calls on Helen to “come, give me my soul again. / Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips” (5.1.94-95). Faustus knows this is not Helen of Troy, but a spirit and most likely a demonic one who has used diabolic glamour to cover her cloven feet and appear as the most beautiful female hostage from the classical world. She now takes Faustus’s soul hostage. As one of Mephistopheles’s crew, she cannot give the soul back, so with each kiss she sucks Faustus’s soul further into the dangerous and unstable hellmouth that is this she-devil’s mouth. Before Faustus’s final damnation, Marlowe gives Faustus a few last moments of inspired remorse for his ambitious display of demonic power. He witnesses Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament and recognizes the sign of salvation. He stretches to touch the sacred sign of forgiveness and redemption, but he feels pulled down much as the souls in the early iconography of the hellmouth attempted to stretch into the upper registers only to be pulled into the lower register of hell’s kitchen. As Faustus’s twenty- four years comes to an end, in both the A-text and B-text, Faustus cries “ugly hell, gape not” (5.1). He sees the destruction of his soul, the gaping jaws of hell. Marlowe’s consistent bleeding and fragmenting of Faustus’s body and his performance of magic centralized on the production of food beckons the luridly insatiable mouth of hell to materialize on stage. Philip Henslowe’s record of the Lord Admiral’s Men inventory of stage properties provides evidence the stage property of the hellmouth did tread the boards of 82  the early modern stage. What did it look like and how was it staged? The B text version of the play cues the entrance of the hellmouth. Yet the stage directions and verbal cues from both the versions of this play offer clues to the visual appearance of the hellmouth on the early modern stage. As the final scene builds to the climax of divine retribution, the stage directions call for sounds that portend Faustus’s impending damnation. While he pleads with the heavens to free him, the clock strikes three times to signal Faustus’s final moments. The final sound of the clock is followed by thunder and lightning. In the B text The Good Angel, in Act 5 scene 2, bids Faustus farewell with “The Jaws of hell are open to receive thee” (5.2.113). This line is followed by the stage directions Hell is discovered. As the Good Angel leaves, the Bad Angel reveals the hellmouth. This stage direction from the B text offers insight into the entrance of the hellmouth that could have been used in both versions. This stage property was most likely constructed after the medieval model as depicted in the Stratford Upon Avon wall painting. The hellmouth is built horizontally, so its jaws can open and close whilst smoke and fire billows out from the open jaws. The opened jaws must also be large enough to fit several adult size devils and souls. Shaggy haired devils could pull the prop out from the discovery space onto the playing area covering the trapdoor where Faustus is pulled into damnation. Discussing the staging of an earlier scene when Faustus cries “Who buzzeth in my ears I am a spirit?” (2.3.14), Allen Dessen explains, “the evil angel probably would exit though the trap or hellmouth.” 84 He further contends that the sense of buzzing “or muttering suggests an intimate physical relationship” between Faustus and the Good and Bad Angel who                                                               84 Dessen Alan C. Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1977. 139. 83  signify Faustus’s “internal conflict.” Dessen’s argument is important to understand how the play builds to Faustus’s final damnation as an intimate physical experience of torment as he feeds the hellmouth with his soul. The sensual explosion of the hellmouth as it enters the play overwhelms Faustus and the audience. In the B text, the Bad Angel describes the visual he or she has just revealed sitting in the discovery space. The evil angel lingers on the torments Faustus will enjoy by pointing to the sensuality of the hellmouth describing it as: [. . .] that vast perpetual torture house There are the Furies tossing damned souls On burning forks. Their bodies boil in lead there are live quarters broiling on the coals, That ne’er can die. (5.2.116-21) As illustrated in the early iconography of the hellmouth discussed in the previous chapter, souls are tossed onto meat hooks, boiled, and broiled to perpetually feed the luridly voracious mouth to hell. The evil angel continues to elaborate on the culinary feasts planned with Faustus’s soul as the main course. Though the A text has no stage directions calling for the hellmouth to emerge, Faustus’s “Ugly hell, gape not!” is a verbal cue that calls for the terrible sight of a gaping, smoking, and smelly hellmouth. As the devils swarm the stage with the entrance of the hellmouth, they most likely threw squibs on the stage floor that would spark and smell. Squibs were made with a bit of dynamite and animal excrement, so the stage itself becomes hell space. 85 Faustus’s final words “Ah                                                               85 For an interesting analysis of the use of squibs and smells in Macbeth see Jonathan Gil Harris’s “The Smell of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 58.4 (Winter 2007): 465-86. 84  Mephistopheles” (5.1.115) returns us to the homoerotic impulse explored earlier in the play with Lucifer’s beauty. The ambiguity of this final scene of recognition compounds the uncertainty of Faustus’s damnation. The historical Faustus was condemned and damned according to Christian ideology. This same ideology damns Marlowe’s Faustus. Yet Marlowe shows us a flawed and conflicted human being searching for salvation, but yearning to exercise his own agency and autonomy. Does Faustus deserve damnation? Does he embrace the devil as an act of agency, and in doing so creates an autonomous self? Marlowe leaves us with deliberate ambiguity as the hellmouth is pulled off the stage to rest in its demonic space until another tasty soul demands damnation. In Marlowe’s Faustus and in the early cycle plays, the deployment of the hellmouth creates a hyper-intense theatrical moment of spectacle that plays on a multiplicity of cultural networks. Just as Sofer argues for the performative potential of theatrical conjuring, this stage prop also blurs the lines between the mimetic and kinetic. It both represents and acts as the portal to hell. The grotesque mash up of the sacred and profane with its unnerving appetite for human souls pushes against the seemingly fixed boundaries between the natural and supernatural worlds, insisting on its spiritual space. Stephen Gosson, however, in his invectives against the stage would most likely consider this theatrical prop just one more “terrible monster made of broune paper.” 86 For Gosson, as Korda and Harris contend, stage objects “obstruct dramatic meaning due to their very visibility.” 87 Yet Gosson, a former playwright, recognizes the sensual appeal of the early modern stage as power—a power he reads as demonic. Nevertheless, Gosson invests the                                                               86 Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in Five Actions, Prouing That They Are not To Be Suffred in a Chrisitan Wommon Weale. London, 1582. EEBO. 27. 87 Harris and Korda 5-6. 85  stage with this terrible unstable diabolic force, and claims that “[p]layes are the invention of the devil” (62). Gosson’s view of the stage as demonic is echoed by Philip Stubbes, in Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, who condemns the theater as “Satan’s synagogue”. 88 These anti-theatrical tracts then read the early modern stage as demonic space. Thomas Heywood fiercely argues against the demonization of the institution of the theatre, and carefully laid out the importance of the stage to promote religious and political compliance. 89 Marlowe, however, embraces the idea of a diabolic stage space and uses the stage props of the hellmouth and cauldron to create and maintain demon space around the periphery of the stage. Yet the fantastic hellmouth as an early modern stage prop, to my knowledge, never seems to have been deployed in any other play than Marlowe’s Faustus, and it is not certain if this stage prop found itself in both versions of the play, or if it was just “discovered” in the B text. When Faustus was not performed, the hellmouth was stored somewhere behind or below the stage. Henslowe certainly considered it a valuable asset listing the hellmouth among the important properties for his son-in-law’s theater company. This stage property, however, represents the entrance to hell as an organic animal mouth with an unsettling inner drive to feed on sinners. The citational process of the stage invests a level of performativity in this stage property that interacts with stage space, most particularly with the space below the stage where the trapdoor becomes the portal from whence hell’s occupants and instruments emerge into the playing area. In                                                               88 Stubbes, Phillip. Anatomie of Abuses. 1583. Medieval & Renaissance Tests & Studies Vol. 245. Renaissance English Text Society. Ser. 7 Vol. 27. Ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie. Tempe : Renaissance English Text Society, 2002. 89 Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. 1612. EEBO 86  other words, the trapdoor becomes a kind of hellmouth. The trapdoor literally traps the demonic below the stage until the play cues a devil or an instrument of divine retribution such as a hellmouth or a cauldron to appear. For The Jew of Malta, Marlowe chose the cauldron instead of the larger stage property of the hellmouth as the mechanism of divine retribution at the conclusion of the play. The cauldron is a nexus of power derived from sacred culture as well as the culture of labor—a culture that reads the cauldron as a an important tool for male cooks who cook for public consumption, a demonic vessel for women who cook for public consumption, or a cooking vessel in domestic space thus not recognized as labor. As an object of sacred culture, the cauldron is an important component to the idea of damnation as an act of cooking and feeding. The cauldron’s intense focus on cooking has the same unsettling promise as the hellmouth with its fierce concentration on eating. The portability of the cauldron also offers even greater performative potential. Where the hellmouth is limited to the discovery space for its entrance and exit, the cauldron can enter or exit anywhere but, most significantly, it can rise up from and sink into the trapdoor or the sacred and theatrical locations of hell. The stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron as objects of sacred culture offer glimpses into the spiritual world. The hellmouth as the point of entry into damnation organically emerges from that spiritual space. Thus it is of that supernatural world. The cauldron, however, moves between the physical and spiritual worlds. In both locations, the cauldron is a culinary tool for the act of cooking in hell, at home, or for public consumption. 87  Henslowe included “j cauderm for the Jewe” in his March 10 th 1598 inventory that also includes “j Hell mought.” 90 There is, however, another intriguing record of a cauldron in Henslowe’s pawn accounts. On February 8, 1594, Henslowe records “lent vpon a greate cavderne of goody diers for . . . . . . . . . . . Xs.” (25). Since this is the only mention of Goody Diers in the pawn accounts, it seems unlikely that she was among the female agents such as Goody Watson or Anne Nockes who Henslowe employed for his pawnbroker industry. Goody Diers, it would seem, needed money, and sold one of her most precious objects—her great cauldron—for five schillings. Sarah Pennell makes clear the buying and selling of domestic goods such as pots and pans “enabled a circulation of goods throughout a vibrant commercial system,” such as Henslowe’s pawnbroker industry. Pennell argues that [f] emale control and ‘fiixng’ of utensils of the hearth, and to a lesser extent of the table, assisted in ‘fixing’ the parameters of the kitchen which had the potential to be spatially and relationally so fluid” (213). Pennell explains that the cooking vessels were among the objects that were “legally allowed as limited property” for married women. These hearth goods circulated in the social systems as women’s bequests to their daughters and other female relatives. 91 For example, a widow named Sarah Boult bequeathed to her daughter, Sarah Clements: my largest and smallest brass kettles . . . my largest brass skellet one dozen of my pewter playes. . my iron jack . . . my screen . . . my largest pair of iron dogs my bell                                                               90 Henslowe 319. 91 Pennell, Sara. ‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England. Journal of Design History 113. (1998): 211-213. 88  metal pott. . . my limbeck my chest of drawers and my Bible. 92 (Along with her Bible, Boult’s most valuable possessions are her cooking pots and pans. These pots, pans, and “bell metal pott” or cauldron had most likely been repaired several times, and it is this family history of cooking and domestic maintenance that Boult wants Figure 2.3 from Pennell 213. Cast Cooking vessel handles with mottoes. to recycle within her female family community. 93 Pennell points us to the female agency exercised in the circulation of cooking vessels. As demand grew for these metal pots in the sixteenth century, foreign tradesmen with expertise in cast iron products were encouraged to come to England and share their knowledge in fashioning pots and pans for English consumption. Yet English metalworkers, the bell-founders, continued to use bronze and bell metal to produce cooking vessels. Bell metal cauldrons are noticeably                                                               92 qtd. in Pennell 211. 93 Pennell discusses the how the frugal housewife mended and reused her pots and pans (211). 89  distinct with their saggy bottom shape. These early metalworkers personalized the pots and pans with the owner’s initials or date of construction. The pots and pans were also engraved with short homilies such as “Pittie the Pore” or, as illustrated above, the line of scripture that concerned Marlowe’s Faustus: “Ye Wages of Sin is Death,” also decorated a cooking vessel. 94 Did Goodie Dier’s great cauldron have a similar homily? Was her cauldron used for The Jew of Malta? These queries will, no doubt, remain a mystery. However, the materiality of the cauldron on the early modern stage calls for a consideration of the gendering of this cooking vessel and the power both secular and spiritual that it possesses. The Jew of Malta In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe exploits the “cauderm for the Jewe” for its secular and spiritual power. 95 As in Faustus, Marlowe defers the protagonist’s damnation for the climatic conclusion of the final act. He also again draws from English Medieval drama to engage the early modern audience in the English tradition of Jewishness as displayed in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Scholars such as James R. Siemon have noted Marlowe’s appropriation of Jonathas’s catalogue of jewels in his speech in which he thanks his God Mahomet for his great wealth. Barabas, on the other hand, begins the play in mid thought while he counts his money and expresses his discontent with “paltry silverlings” (1.1.6). Yet he waxes poetic while lusting for Eastern treasure of “[b]ags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, / Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds” (1.1.25-                                                               94 Field, Rachael. “Boiling” Irons in the Fire. Ramsbury: The Crowood Press, 1984: 70-103 95 all quotations from Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta,” are from New Mermaids. ed. James R. Siemon. London: A&C Black 2006. 90  26). Edward Allyen probably played Barabas’s disgust with “groat” (1.1.12) to the audience of groundlings hugging the stage who were a composite of social classes and genders, yet would no doubt appreciate an extra groat in their pocket. Barabas’s mocking of simple wealth invests the character with the deadly sin of greed that English ideas of Jewishness expected. I suggest, however, that Marlowe not only appropriates Jonathas’s list of gemstones to establish Barabas’s Jewish thus vice-like character, but he also uses the notion of conversion and the stage property of the cauldron used in The Play of the Sacrament to force the Jews into Christian compliance. Marlowe deploys this stage prop in role of the hellmouth in The Jew of Malta to cook up divine retribution. In The Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1500s), Jonathas offers Aristorius, a Christian, one hundred pounds to steal a Eucharistic host for him. Jonathas and his brethren set out to prove the host is nothing but a “cake” (495), and that Christianity is based on a hoax. 96 In the play, Jonathas and his brethren gather in a small room with a kitchen to test, tear, and torture the host. First, they each pull out their knives and stab incessantly at the host until it bleeds. Next, they fill a cauldron with boiling oil to destroy the sacred host. Jonathas grabs the bleeding host off the table and tosses it into the cauldron filled with bubbling oil, but the host clings to his hand and refuses to let go. Jason and Masphat attempt to nail the host to a post, but the host will not release Jonathas’s hand. The other Jewish men pull and finally rip Jonathas’s hand off his arm, yet still the host grips his severed hand. They throw the bleeding hand and host into the boiling cauldron. The boiling oil turns to boiling blood as it flows out of the cauldron while Jonathan’s hand bubbles and cooks in the boiling blood as his skin melts off the bones, and the joints and                                                               96 Bevington, David. ed. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1957, 54-88. 91  sinews soften so bits of boney fingers float atop the bloody broth. The host, however, remains pristine. The Jews then cast the host into a hot oven that bursts asunder and the spirit of Jesus appears with his five wounds bleeding and asks “Why ar ye to yowr king onkind” (720). All the Jews fall to their knees and convert to Christianity. In trying to drain and destroy the power of the Eucharistic host, the Jews in this play rehearse Christ’s passion that calls his presence forth and produces conversion. The Banns to this play claim the play dramatizes the miracle in the city of Hercules in Spain, ca. 1461. According to David Bevington The Banns also explain that the play was on tour as The Banns read: [a]nd it place yow, this gadering that here is, / At Coxton on Monday it shall be sen[e]” (2.2). The Banns conclude with a pitch to the audience to come see the next performance of this popular conversion play. Marlowe uses The Play of the Sacrament’s idea of conversion but drains it of its spiritual potency. Instead, he offers the notion of conversion as a ploy used for manipulation and revenge. Barabas, by the force of his name, is placed under the sign of the anti-Christian. He fearlessly challenges Christian authority, and resists the suppression of his Jewish identity. Until he is damned by his own design, a cauldron filled with boiling oil used by Christian authority as divine retribution. We enter the play with Barabas counting his wealth. Malta is a trade port, and Barabas a rich merchant who invests heavily in merchant ships that return hefty profits for Barabas’s coffers. In fact, the Jewish community seems to be the only people of Malta with significant economic stability. Though the 1565 Siege of Malta by the Ottoman Empire failed due to bad 92  weather and the timely arrival of Spanish re-enforcements, 97 Marlowe presents us with a troop of defeated Knights led by Governor Fereneze. Ferneze is a capable but unimaginative politician who pays tribute to the “Suleiman the Magnificent” (1.2.13) to maintain the little power he continues to wield. The Malta we enter with the Jewish leaders is in a crisis of authority. Calymath, the son of Suleiman, has arrived to collect “[t]he ten years’s tribute that remains unpaid” (1.2.7). Ferneze begs for more time, and Calymath agrees that “’tis more kingly to obtain by peace / than to enforce conditions by constraint” (1.2.25-26). Ironically, in Marlowe’s play, a Knight of Malta who G. K. Hunter explains historically were the “celebrated Knights Hospitaler of St. John of Jerusalem” (229), not only negotiates with the Turkish force but also accepts their authority over this Christian community. 98 In Honor, Military and Civil Contained in Foure Bookes (1602), William Segar explains that: Every Knight of this order was sworne to fight for the Christian faith, do Justice, defend the oppressed, relieve the poore, persecute the Mahomedans, use vertue and protect Widowes and Orphanes. 99 When Del Bosco arrives with his cargo of slaves to sell at the Malta market, the Vice Admiral of Spain reminds Fernese of his Christian duties as Segar outlines. Del Bosco asks “Will Knights of Malta be in league with Turks, / And buy it basely too for sums of                                                               97 Bonavita, Helen Vella. “Key to Christendom: The 1565 Siege of Malta. Its Histories, and Their Use in Reformation Polemic.” The Sixteenth Century Journal. 33.4(202): 1021-1043 98 Hunter, G. K. The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 27 (1964). 229. 99 Segar, William. Honor military, and ciuill contained in foure bookes. Viz. 1. Iustice, and jurisdiction military. 2. Knighthood in generall, and particular. 3. Combats for life, and triumph. 4. Precedencie of great estates, and others. 1602. Bk. 2, Ch. 20. EEBO 93  gold? (2.3.28-29). For Del Bosco, the Knights of Malta’s profession and policy, terms Barabas and Ferneze debate regarding Christianity, are to “persecute the Mahomedans” or the Turks. Del Bosco takes particular issue with the exchange of gold between the Christians and the Turks. He reads the exchange as defiling Christian edicts, yet his business is selling peoples from Middle Eastern or African territory. Del Bosco’s Christianity argues that one does not give gold to the racial other but one should receive gold for that racial other. Ferneze and Del Bosco’s exchange gestures to the Machiavellian overtones throughout this play. Ferneze extortion of Jewish wealth begins the play’s discussion on Christian Machiavallism. Barabas inquires if the Jews would be asked to contribute “equally” (1.2.62) To which, Fereneze exclaims, “No, Jew, like infidels. / for our sufferance of your hateful lives “ (1.2.62-63). Ferneze justifies the Christian extortion of Jewish wealth by appealing to the Christian ideology that reads Jewishness as “accursed in the sight of heaven” (1.2.63-64). To further undermine the authority of the Jewish leaders, Ferneze adds a codicil to his newly devised decree of taxation. The Officer reads the terms to the Jews stating that “the tribute money of the Turks shall be levied amongst the Jews” and each will give half of their wealth. Next, if any Jew refuses to pay he “shall straight become a Christian” (1.2.73-74). Finally, if a Jew refuses to pay, he will lose all his wealth (1.2.76-77). After the reading of the last requirement, three of the Jewish leaders relent and agree to give half. This yielding to Christian misuse of the law infuriates Barabas who first scorns his own people as “earth-metalled villians, and no Hebrews born!” (1.2.79). Shakespeare picks up this challenge to Christian law in trade ports in his 94  interrogation of Christian/Jew relations with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice who is forced to convert as part of his humiliation by the dominate Christian culture. “I will be no convertite” (1.2.83), Barabas growls at Ferneze’s query. Marlowe’s Barabas holds the traditional belief of conversion as a transformation. In conversion plays, such as The Play of the Sacrament, conversion is a gift from the Christian God. Religious figures from St. Paul to Martin Luther speak of their conversion narratives as igniting their passionate devotion to Jesus and his church. In The Jew, Ferneze uses conversion as a threat for material gain. Thus he effectively empties the sacred act of spiritual force. Instead, conversion is made another form of oppression against the Christian other. As Barabas asks, “[i]s theft the ground of your religion?” (1.2.96). Marlowe presents his audience, however briefly, with a sympathetic Jewish man whose questioning of Christian practices in view of the extortion of his wealth and property seems not only valid but heroic. Since Barabas witnesses the Christian authority of Malta using this act of faith as a tool of coercion, he borrows the strategy to retrieve his stolen wealth. First, Barabas demonstrates his gift for improvisation and dissembling as he wails against his Jewish brethren whom he reads as betraying him. He scoffs as they leave for “the simplicity of these base slaves” (1.2.216) and claims for himself an identity “framed of finer mould than common men” (1.2.221). Before the confrontation with Fereneze, Barabas learns that his wealth has increased with the arrival of several ships in Malta, and he muses upon the Jewish situation that is tightly controlled by Christian authority. He concludes that he “[r]ather had I a Jew be hated thus, / Than pitied in a Christian poverty” (1.1.113- 14). Throughout the play, Barabas claims his role of “the other “ against the normed 95  Christian. Thus he sustains a bi-furcated worldview of Christian/Jew, yet Marlowe inverts this traditional binary model that privileges Christianity. Barabas reads the world through a Jew/Christian perspective. He reads Jewish wealth and material gains as trumping the Christian ideas of power sustained through military force and royal lineage. For Barabas, his faith gives him “the blessings promised to the Jews” (1.1.104) that he interprets as material gain in this life, and not a Christian afterlife. As he considers kingly successions, he claims that he has “one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear/ As Agamemnon did his Iphigenia” (1.1.136-37). In this passage, Barabas delineates ideal Jewish male authority through the Old Testament patriarchs, yet he borrows a character from a Greek tragedy to define his father/daughter relationship. Some scholars such as Michelle Ephram offer insightful readings on this father/daughter relationship as alluding to the biblical narrative of Jephthath in Judges 11.30-42. In this story, Jephthath vows to God “If though shalt deliuer the children of Ammon in to mine hands” (11.431-32) he would sacrifice to God the first thing that came out of his house the day he returned home. Jephthath won the war and when he returned home his daughter was the first that “came out to mete him with timbrels and dances” (35-37). 100 Jephthath’s daughter was given two months with her ladies to mourn her virginity. At her return, Jephthath kept his vow and sacrificed her to God. Ephrim astutely remarks how this biblical passage illuminates Abigail’s role as “an innocent victim who signifies the replacement of Old by New.” She further explains the Agamemnon allusion “as a crude attempt to control the sexual dispensation of his daughter.” Ephraim argues that                                                               100 Judges 11.30-42. 1560 Geneva Bible. ed. Lloyd Berry. 96  Marlowe’s play undermines Christian interpretations of scripture. 101 Indeed, Barabas consistently pressures Christian notions of sacred scripture such as his reduction of Job’s labors in comparison to his own loss. But Barabas is more Agamemnon than Jephthath. The biblical character did not know he had condemned his daughter with his vow, and he lamented the act though he carried it out. Agamemnon, like Barabas, demands ownership over his daughter’s body and agency. Both male authorities believe in their absolute rule over the female body and mind. In this play, the father/daughter relationship is premised upon Abigail’s unconditional and unwavering devotion to Barabas as the sole authority over her. Barabas reads Abigail as his possession—a valuable possession like a diamond. Barabas controls the circulation of Abigail, as his object, in the trade market of this social system. Marlowe’s Abigail who is “scare fourteen years of age” (1.2.375) enters the scene swearing to “run to the senate-house, / And in the senate reprehend them all” (1.2.234- 35). She actively demonstrates her absolute devotion to her father and poignantly declares: Father, whate’er it be to injure them That have no manifestly wronged us What will not Abigail attempt? (1.2.274-76). Barabas ends her line with “Why so (1.2.76). He claims his daughter or, as he offers Lodowick his “diamond” (2.3.57), as his property—a material object whose only subject position is as his daughter. In the following two scenes, Abigail does indeed prove herself                                                               101 Ephraim, Michelle. “Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage.” Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. 114. 97  to be her father’s daughter. When Barabas asks if she will “[b]e ruled by me” (1.2.272), Abigail responds: Father, whate’er it be to injure them That have so manifestly wronged us, What will not Abigail attempt? (1.2.274-60) Though Barabas forces a subject/object relational position on his daughter, Abigail demonstrates her own agency and autonomy in her paternal allegiance. She is willing to fight for “us,” a plural pronoun she interprets as kinship, her trusted family. The close relationship between this father and daughter is demonstrated in the multiple lines they share in Act 1, scenes 2 and 3. Having entrusted her father with her life, Barabas borrows Ferneze’s abuse of Christian conversion and councils his daughter to “[e]ntreat the abbess” (1.2.280), and pretend conversion. Father and daughter stage a very public and dramatic conversion with Barabas shouting and lamenting while also whispering and gesturing instructions to Abigail who plays the penitent Jewess seeking solace from her Christian audience so that, in the name of Christianity, she can enter her father’s home. In scene 3, Marlowe poignantly develops this Jewish family’s separation from the dominant Christian culture that has stolen their home and turned it into a nunnery. Throughout this scene, we gaze on the father waiting anxiously outside his house while we watch Abigail creep into her own room like a stranger and search for her father’s wealth. The play again enforces the ideas of a tainted and corrupt Christianity oppressing the Jewish minority. The Christians in this play, however, are Catholic, and thus Marlowe critiques Christian corruption based on Catholic practices. Turning Barabas’s house into a nunnery not only 98  plays into English ideas of nunneries as locations of female sexual deviance, it also directly insults Barabas’s Jewish identity. As Barabas paces in the street filling his imagination with fearful images of ruin and despair, Abigail enters the scene from above saying “Now have I happily espied a time / To search the plank my father did appoint” (2.1.19-20). The repetition of Now by both characters charges the scene with an acute immediacy. The incessant Nows pressure this significant stage moment of experiencing the complex connection between this father and daughter who are in separate stage spaces thus unaware of each other but seen simultaneously by the audience. Marlowe’s deft staging of this scene, forces an intense focus on the dutiful and courageous daughter trying to fulfill the patriarchal to find her father’s treasure. The third now leads us to Abigail’s discovery: “And here behold, unseen, where I have found / The gold, the pearls, and jewels which he hid” (1.2.22-23). Barabas shifts from despair to bliss repeating, “Oh girl, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my bliss” (2.2.55), and the stage directions reads Hugs his bags. Is his girl also his beauty and bliss, or is it the gold? Since we next meet Barabas negotiating with Lodowick for his “diamond” (2.3.49) while walking to the slave market, it would seem that the girl is his gold. Barabas and Lodowick use the diamond metaphor covertly to negotiate Abigail’s monetary value. At the slave market, we are told by the Officer that “Every one’s price is written on his back” (2.3.3). Each slave’s monetary value was printed on his back, so the individual man did not know his market value. The negotiations were between the seller and the buyer. This trade in human bodies, racially and economically structured is replicated in Barabas and Lodowick’s negotiations for Abigail. Barabas, of course, has no 99  intention of selling Abigail to any Christian. A he states he will, “sacrifice her on a pile of wood” (2.3.54) before he would allow her to marry a Christian. He uses Abigail as an erotic object to tempt Lodowick into further marriage negotiations, so he can gain his trust, and incites him to fight Mathias—the object of Abigail’s desire who threatens Barabas’s authority over her. Thus Barabas is able to exact revenge on Ferneze and maintain control of his daughter with the death of Ferneze’s son, and Abigail’s love. Ironically, Marlowe stages Abigail exacting her own revenge. Marlowe’s Barabas begins the play as a stage Jew who is greedy and spouts anti-Christian propaganda. The he becomes a sympathetic character oppressed by a tyrannical dominant culture. We even see him as loving father, at least for a few moments. Barabas’s protean identities conform to the needs of the situation. No matter the persona or character he takes on, Barabas is always the stage Jew—greedy and anti-Christian. Abigail, however, undergoes transformation. She refuses to be his Iphgenia. When Ithamore praises her father’s ingenuity in devising the duel in which Mathias was killed, Abigail swears: Hard-hearted father, unkind Barabas, Was this the pursuit of they policy? To make me show them favour severally, That by my favour they should both be slain? (3.3.38-41) Abigail again converts to Christianity, but this time it is through her own agency and autonomy. She effectively divorces herself from her Jewish. I argue Abigail’s conversion in this play is not just to promote Christianity though the staging has the possible effect. Abigail’s conversion disengages Barabas’s rights to her body and soul, and gives her a space in which to discover and exert her own sense of self beyond the constrictions of 100  male authority. Similar to Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Abigail finds power in this female community. Upon discovering his daughter had taken the veil and was now out of his reach living in the nunnery, Barabas declares: “Ithamore, entreat not for her, I am moved, /And she is hateful to my soul and me” (35-36). He dismisses Abigail from his life, and incorporates Ithamore into his schemes against Christianity. Hunter argues that the character of Barabas sustains the identity of the definitive other, or anti-Christian, as his name demands (216), but Abigail believed in her father’s humanity until he betrayed her. Without Abigail, Barabas loses what Hunter refers to as the “ironic counter-currents” in the play that present him as a victim of Christian oppression. As Stephen Greenblatt claims Marlowe’s “is not the exception to but rather the true representative of his society (203). Marlowe’s Malta is a Machiavellian state whose dominant Christian culture uses this belief system to maintain their wealth and power. However, Barabas’s execution of his daughter and the nuns removes him from the category of “representative of his society.” Instead, he becomes the demonic Jew of English myth and legend. Barabas abuses the long and valued tradition of the gifting of food. Felicity Heal explains that in the tradition of gift exchange, “[f]ood is the most basic form of offering, set apart from other because of its roles in commensality, hospitality and the relief of need.” 102 The gifting of food creates bonds between individuals and social classes. The food as gift helped to orchestrate the power structures of the ruling class insofar as food gifts were offered to procure favors and promotion. As we saw in Marlowe’s Faustus, the pope had received gifts of food from prelates to secure the pope’s good will and support.                                                               102 Heal, Felicity. “Food Gifts, The Household and the Politcs of exchange in Early Modern England.” Past and Present. 199 (2008). 44. 101  Barabas perverts the tradition of gifting food by spoiling and poisoning the wholesome food product. Ithamore recognizes this abuse when he returns with the dish or porridge saying to Barabas, “the proverb says, he that eats with the devil had need of a long spoon, I have brought you a ladle” (3.458-59). Ithamore’s proverb may have been imprinted on the ladle he offers Barabas. Barabas ignores the comment who, and then pours the poison over the porridge. He adds to his demonic misuse of food telling Ithamore “Stay, let me spice it first” (3.4.85). In this parody of food preparation, Barabas devolves into his anti- Christian model. He has taken on the role of the stage Jew stripped of signs of humanity. Barabas’s violence against his daughter with adulterated food is juxtaposed against his dying daughter’s last words, which do condemn her father, yet still expresses her heartfelt love for him. Without Abigail mitigating his role as the stage Jew, Barabas poisons and strangles nearly half the characters named in the play’s Dramatis Personae, including himself, albeit temporarily. He not only remains wealthy, but he also claims Fereneze’s authority when he colludes with the Turks. Yet he remains unsatisfied. He cannot accumulate enough wealth, power, or revenge. Though he may not exhibit all seven deadly sins, Barabas certainly demonstrates several such as greed, wrath, and lust for revenge. In the final act, Marlowe again gestures to The Play of The Sacrament, but the cauldron full of boiling oil is not intended to convert, but to inflict divine retribution against the Christian other. Ironically, Barabas elaborately constructs his own mechanism of retribution. Act 5, scene 5, opens with Barabas and some carpenters busily finishing the construction on his trap. Barabas invites the carpenters to enjoy his large assortment of wines in his cellar. After they exit, he retorts, “[a]nd if you like them, drink your fill 102  and die: / For so I live, perish may all the world” (5.5.9-10). With these lines, Marlowe deconstructs English ideals of Jewishness as exemplified in the stage Jew. The stage Jew cannot be sustained. He must convert or die because the model demands that he compulsively murders Christians and anyone he reads as his enemy. Barabas will never convert. He killed his own daughter for converting to the religious faith that despises their Jewish identity. The climax of the final scene is Barabas on stage divine retribution. Ferneze betrays Barabas, and the stage directions read: [a] charge [sounded], the cable cut, a cauldron discovered. Barabas falls into his own trap, and begs for help calling “Oh help me, Selim, help me Christians” (5.5.69), but no aid is forthcoming. The ever-tenacious Barabas uses his last moment on earth gloating over the pain and violence he wrought against this Christian community. He curses “[d]amned Christian dogs, and Turkish infidels”(5.5.85), while his body marinates in the boiling oil of divine retribution. Hunter, among other scholars, has discussed the allusion to the hellmouth in Barabas’s fall into the blazing cauldron. 103 However, this performance of divine retribution differs from Faustus’s experience. Barabas is not carried off by devils into the hellmouth. Instead, we witness the first act of the process of damnation on stage. Ferneze takes on the role of the devil cook when he cuts the robe forcing Barabas to fall into the bubbling cauldron. The audience witnesses Barabas’s body cooking on stage even as he shouts: But now begins the extremity of heat To pinch me with intolerable pangs:                                                               103 Hunter 233-35; Ide, Arata. “The Jew of Malta and the Diabolic Power of theatrics in the 1580s.” SEL 46.2 (2006) : 257-79); Tkacz, Catherine Brown. “The Jew of Malta and the Pit.” South Atlantic Review. 53.2 (1988): 47-57. 103  Die, life; fly, soul; tongue, curse thy fill and die!” (5.5.86-88) The violent heat boils about his body as it cooks and tenderizes the muscles and fat. Just as the flesh on Jonathas’s hand melted off the bone, Barabas skin is boiled off the flesh to leave only bones, teeth, and bits of hair floating in the bloody alchemical stew that is Barabas. The “cauderm for the Jew” serves as the vessel of retribution that boils Barabas body into a bloody soup to feed the hellmouth. Perhaps, this great cauldron on stage bore the homily The wages of sin are death as a final humiliation of the stage Jew by Christian authority. 104  Chapter 3: Macbeth and The Witch’s Cauldron Figure 3.1 Hans Baldung Grien The Witches’s Sabbatt 1510 courtesy of Artstor “Your Vessels, and your Spells provide, / Your Charmes, and every thing beside” (12-13) instructs Hecate to her sisters in Act 3, scene 5 of Macbeth. When Hecate joins the play at the end of Act 3, she takes charge of staging the final witchcraft scene in Macbeth, Act 4, scene1, or the cauldron scene. Hecate’s scenes, however, have traditionally disturbed both literary and theater scholars. These two witch scenes disrupt notions of authenticity be it authorial, theatrical, or supernatural— i.e. witchcraft. There seems to be a palpable scholarly and theatrical distaste for the witchcraft spectacle at the end of Act 3 and the beginning of Act 4. In fact, scholars at a recent conference session devoted to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, encouraged the idea of Macbeth without the witches. Fortunately, current productions of Macbeth include the witches. Yet the witches’s 105  presence has been successfully minimized since Act 3, scene 5 is usually cut from productions of this play. The witches, so the assumption goes, are inferior distractions to Shakespeare’s eloquent poetry and prose, and the subtlety and deftness of his staging against his complex characterizations of humanity. Others, such as Diane Purkiss’s feminist assessment, argues that Shakespeare’s witches are inferior representations of witchcraft constructed to serve male fears and anxieties of this female power. Purkiss explains that the “all-singing, all-dancing” witches in Macbeth “are a low-budget, frankly exploitative collage of randomly chosen bits of witch-lore, selected not for thematic significance but for its sensation value.” She argues the play ignores and even suppresses female discourses on witchcraft. 104 This play does, indeed, suppress the female characters thus their discourse. Yet Shakespeare’s play highlights the performative potential of the witches in Macbeth. Macbeth’s witches assume the roles of the devil cooks in the iconography of the hellmouth. Shakespeare borrows heavily from low and high culture to construct the stage witch. In Macbeth, however, the witches do not simply replicate Reginald Scott’s or James VI and I’s constructions of witches—both depending upon folklore and popular theology with heavy doses of patriarchal hostility towards women. Macbeth’s witches do                                                               104 Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century. Representations. London: Routledge Press. 1996. 207. Purkiss’s important study critiques received ideas about the witch, and points out what she argues are false assumptions by both history and literary analyses of the witch in the early modern period. Purkiss offers incisive analysis of female discourse on witchcraft that she constructs from witch trial transcripts. Women’s narratives on witchcraft express fears and anxieties of housewifery. The witch threatens the housewife’s control and authority of the domestic space by disrupting her domestic labor. For Purkiss’s engagement with female discourses on the witch see Part II “Early modern women’s stories of witchcraft”; for Shakespeare’s Macbeth see Part III “witches on stage:, Ch 8 “The all-singing, all-dancing plays of the Jacobean witch- vogue: The Masque of Queens, Macbeth, The Witch” (199-230) 106  not conform to either high or low cultural notions of the witch. These types of narratives usually succeed in containing this dangerous and notably female power. Instead, Shakespeare imagines the power of witchcraft on stage constructed through the identity of a stage witch that could perform the multiple identities fused under the sign of the socially, politically and religiously constructed witch. In other words, Macbeth’s witches, most importantly in the cauldron scene, demonstrate the power of witchcraft that their audiences imagined witches’s possessed. Macbeth’s audiences believed in a witchcraft that fused and confused social and ideological registers. The witch scenes are intended to disturb its audience as they enforce and challenge entrenched belief systems regarding power, gender, and faith. Though Continental witch beliefs such as flying or the witches’s Sabbatt were not part of the English witch belief system, Keith Wrightson explains that these witchy powers seeped into the early modern imagination. 105 Indeed, plays such as Macbeth contributed to the cultural assimilation of these popular Continental notions of witchcraft. Yet this female power is not staged to be contained and destroyed in Shakespeare’s play as it is in the popular early modern witchcraft pamphlets such as The Newes From Scotland. At the end of 4.1, the witches and their cauldron exit the play, sinking through the trapdoor into the chthonic liminal space beneath the stage. Shakespeare, like Marlowe, pressures the citational process of early modern staging. The stage property of the cauldron with its witchy power marks the stage below as witch space—an unstable and particularly female                                                               105  Wrightson, Keith. HIST 251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, Society Under the Tudors and Stuarts. (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (March 31, 2012). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 107  power tenuously controlled by the early modern stage. This chapter will explore how Shakespeare deploys the cauldron as a citational process reitering its sacred and theatrical functions as discussed in Chapter 2 with the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Shakespeare, however, deviates from these models by moving the act of divine retribution from the conclusion to Act 4, scene 1. The cauldron scene marks the commencement of Macbeth’s Christian retribution, and the climatic conclusion of the witches’s narrative in this play. When we consider the cauldron as an object of sacred culture that serves as a significant component to the iconography of the hellmouth, the witches should be read as playing the same roles as the devilish cooks who feed the hellmouth. The witches, like the devil cooks, boil up divine retribution for the damnable act of treason against an anointed king—the exemplary sign of patriarchal authority. First, I will rehearse King James VI & I’s views on witchcraft since this kingly interest possibly influenced the playwright’s subject matter. Next, I will consider visual records of the witch to take up the question: What does a witch look like? How can she be staged so an early modern audience recognizes the character as under the sign of witch? Next, I will look at the interesting ways in which the witches direct the play for the audience, and, by doing so, turn our attention to the disruption of conspicuous consumption in this play. This disruption of visual feasting whose preparation assumes maximum labor production should turn our attention to the female labor. The witches’s cauldron scene demands attention be paid to the female labor needed to prepare the conspicuous displays of consumption in Macbeth. It is my contention that the witch and her cauldron brings us back to the alewife and Marjorie Coorson discussed in Chapter 1 108  who are both damned for brewing and cooking for public consumption, but find a kind of power in their demonic alliance. The witch and cauldron is an iconic reference to the demonizing of this female labor. I argue that the witch’s cauldron on the early modern stage fuses the domestic, the public, and the sacred, creating an iconic image of great power that exposes post-Reformation England’s fear, anxiety and fascination with the public theater, the witch figure, and female labor. This chapter considers the ways in which the stage property used as the witch’s cauldron in Shakespeare’s Macbeth blends the culinary arts with the preparation of magical charms and draws our attention to these stage witches as cooks. I suggest the spectacle of witch and cauldron in Macbeth demonstrates an affinity for women cooking for public consumption who, like the early modern stage, were viewed as unsavory, witchy, and possibly demonic by both the godly and male authority. 106 Newes From Scotland While James VI of Scotland sojourned in Denmark for six month awaiting propitious weather to sail back to Scotland with his new bride Anne, James enjoyed the intellectual discourses of Continental scholars. He took a particular interest in the latest scholarship on witchcraft that included a pact with the devil, night-flying, and a witches’s Sabbatt. In Scotland, James intervened in several witchcraft trials using his new-found knowledge to judge those accused of witchcraft—an act he now believed to be a diabolic and treasonous act. James’s strong interest in the North Berwick trials speaks to his anxiety of and interest in witchcraft. The women accused of witchcraft in these trials presumably had plotted to kill the King and Queen while the royal couple sailed home to                                                               109  Scotland. Christina Larner, in her significant study Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief, explains that Peter Munk, admiral of the Danish fleet on this voyage supposedly started the rumors of witchcraft because he “wanted to blame the storms on the wife of a Copehhagen Baillie whom he had insulted.” Naval disasters and witch trials were common in Denmark. In the North Berwick trials, the one hundred suspects were accused of participating in a witch narrative that included another two hundred witches both in Scotland and Denmark who gathered at various times and places to raise storms while the King and Queen crossed the North Sea to Scotland. In 1590, a pamphlet entitled Newes From Scotland was published in and circulated throughout England. The pamphlet claims to record the true account of the trials based on an original Scottish document. Larner points out, however, that a Scottish original has yet to be discovered. Larner explains that the pamphlet seems to have been constructed solely for its English audience, and was part of James’s campaign for the English throne. 107 The pamphlet records the vicious tortures inflicted on the accused until they confessed. Gilles Duncan was the first to be accused of witchcraft by her master. Duncan was a healer. When she had time off from her duties as a young maidservant, she visited those who required her skill. Yet her master and other men of the village believed her powers to be demonic thus they tested or tortured her into confession. The pamphlet explains that under coercion and torture that involved the breaking of each of her fingers with a “[p]illiwinkes,” and her neck wrenched with a cord, she confessed and named other witches.                                                               107 Larner, Christina. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. ed. Alan MacFarlane. Oxford : Basil Blackwell Ltd 1984. 11-16. Larner’s primary focus is on Scottish witchcraft, Yet she offers incisive insights regarding English witch beliefs and particularly those James subscribed to. Larner also carefully notes that James’s initial enthusiasm for witchcraft was much subdued and he assumed a more skeptical position when he moved to England. 110  At these trials, James positioned himself in the role of royal skeptic. Agnes Simpson, the oldest of Duncan’s witches, was brought before the King and jurists, but she maintained her innocence and refused to confess. She was returned to prison “to receive such torture as hath been lately proudide for witches in that country.” 108 Among other torments, she was left hanging for about an hour while all her hair was shaved off her body, so her body could be inspected for the witches’s mark. When the devil’s mark was found on her privy parts, she confessed. Frances E. Dolan explains the process of searching for the witch’s teat that proved the devil had witched this female body. 109 Local women were asked to serve as “ ‘juries of matrons’s ” to search the body of the accused woman. Dolan argues these women tended to de-familiarize the accused witch’s body when, for example, a matron would discover hemorrhoids on the woman’s body. The matron, no doubt, knew of this common affliction, but did not read this as a deformity on her own body. Dolan’s incisive analysis illuminates the complexity of this process. Women sometimes volunteered for this job, but women were also chosen to take charge of this important evidentiary procedure. If an abnormality was to be found on the female body it was usually located on or near her privy parts. Though the matron might even suffer with this infirmity, the piles found on the witch’ body were not of the same substance. The witched body had to differ from the matron’s normed female body. Christine Larner’s careful perceptive study of trial records for witchcraft prosecutions shows us how religious and political authorities fixed the witch to the diabolic via the devil’s pact versus the popular culture’s concern for the malfiecum of local women who                                                               108 Anonymous. Newes From Scotland. 1592. 12. 109 Dolan, Frances E. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700. Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1994.171-236. 111  were communally identified or self-identified as a witch (74-75). Thus the “juries of matrons” carefully regulated the normed female body (their own) against the polluted witched body of the accused. When another woman accused by Duncan, Agnes Tompson came before the King for questioning, she told the King the stories he expected to hear such as the witches’s sabbatt and night-flying. She also confirmed for the King that the devil hated him because he was his worst enemy. As Purkiss remarks James was fascinated by the spectacle of witchcraft that Anne’s stories told of, and he sent for Gilles Duncan when he heard of her witch dance. Yet the pamphlet insists that the King remained skeptical until Anne Thompson spoke to King James privately and revealed something only he and his Queen would know. Thus Thompson offered the King the evidence he needed to convict her of witchcraft and treason. Rebecca Lemmon’s crucial work on early modern treason illuminates the extreme rarity of treason as understood as the act of king-killing. She explains that the Henrican 1534 law with its “innovative claim” of treason by words was expanded by Elizabeth I in 1571 to include specific acts such as “writing, printing, preaching, speech.” 110 Tompson convinced the King of Scotland that she was a witch who participated in the international diabolic agenda of king-killing because she told him the right story. Unfortunately, the story remains a mystery. But the pamphlet served King James VI and I as affective propaganda. He is not just an anointed king, scholar, and jurist, but he is also the devil’s worst enemy. Thus, as king, James could protect his English subjects from the devil himself.                                                               110 Lemon, Rebecca. Treason By Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. 10. 112  Ben Jonson plays with this idea of James as divine protector against the assaults of the demonic in his anti-masque preceding the Masque of Queens, commissioned by Queen Ann. 111 Jonson explains that the Queen chose the theme of “honourable and true fame, bred out of virtue,” and she also asked that a dance or “false masque” precede the main event. Jonson writes that he divised a “spectacle of strangeness” with eleven “hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposite to good Fame.” Jonson opened this spectacle of strangeness with an “ugly hell,” from which emitted flames and smoke, and writes that Inigo Jones devised the scenic machine and the witches attire: some had rats on their head, others on their shoulders, while others carried pots, spindles, timbrels, rattles, “or other venefical instruments, making a confused noise with strange gestures.” Jonson added stage props such as vipers, snakes, bones, herbs, roots, “and other signs of magic” that he found in books on magic. As the spectacle of strangeness begins, one witch notices their leader has yet to arrive. At her cue, Dame enters “naked-armed, barefooted, her frock tucked, her hair knotted and gilded with vipers, in her hand a torch made of a dead man’s arm, lighted; girded with a snake.” This Medusa-like witch rallies her troop of hags into a frenzy, but they are immediately caught and bound by the Queens of good fame. Jonson’s anti-masque suggests a Witches’s Sabbatt such as one of the many that James believed convened to cause his death. This spectacle of strangeness, however, is bound in performance for the King that refers us back to James’s interest in the witchcraft as entertainment in the Berkshire Trials. As in those trials, the monarchy, though amused, contained the threat of these                                                               111 Jonson, Ben.” The Masque of Queens.” Masques of Difference: Four Court Masques. ed. Kristen McDermott. Manchester : Manchester UP. 2007: 107-110. 113  unruly women. In Jonson’s masque, it is women, the Queens, who assume the role of binding, containing, and eradicating these rebellious, disorderly, and demonic women. As mentioned earlier Diane Purkiss posits that the early modern theater’s tendency to stage witchcraft as spectacle is a reductive act that places women’s shared stories of female knowledge and practices in servitude to the male narrative (200). Purkiss also claims that “[c]auldrons [are] now linked to witches, thanks to the memorability of this very scene.” 112 Purkiss is, of course, referring to Act 4, scene 1, and the spectacle known as the cauldron scene. Yet Shakespeare’s Macbeth borrowed from the substantial visual culture of the witch to stage this memorable scene. Visual Culture of the Witch Early modern visual culture imagined the witch in various ways, but the visual codes for the witch or witchcraft, as Charles Zika explains, requires at least one woman, usually three, cooking around a cauldron. Other objects that are also often included to signify witchcraft are cooking sticks, food, and drink. The depiction of witches with wild hair also added to the visual code of witchcraft. Some of the most significant visual fashionings of the witch are the six woodcuts that illustrate twenty editions of Ulrich Molitor’s On Female Witches and Seers 1490-1510. Molitor’s text, crafted as a dialogue between three respondents, was commissioned by the Archduke Sigismund of Austria as a response against Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum. The text refutes the power of witches as demonic illusion. 113 Zika, however, points out that the woodcuts add “a fourth voice” to this discourse that ignores the influence of the diabolic that the text                                                               112 Purkiss 212. 113 Zika, Charles. The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth- Century Europe. London: Routledge. 2007. 114  stresses. Instead, the autonomy and agency of the women are the focus of these woodcuts. These six woodcuts dramatically demonstrate the witch’s power in and on the natural world. The woodcuts show us the power of a witch to lame a man, fly on her cooking stick or the mare, and kissing the devil. The woodcut most significant to Macbeth is entitled Two Witches Cooking up a Storm (figures 3.2 & 3.3). Figure 3.2 Two witches Cooking up a Storm, Figure 3.3 Rooster and Serpent Thrown. titlepage woodcut, in Ulrich Molitor, Anonymous Artist, 1490 De laniis et phitoniicis mulieribus, Colgone: courtesy of Artstor Cornelius von Ziericksee, ca. 1496-1500 courtesy of Artstor There are several versions of this popular woodcut, but all versions illustrate two women in peasant clothes cooking or brewing over a cauldron outdoors in public space. In each version, one witch gazes at the viewer while she points to the cauldron. Zika argues that since the sixth century the cauldron has been an object in the visual code of 115  witchcraft. 114 I suggest the act of cooking or brewing in public space forces these women under the sign of witch. As Zika discusses, the performance of weather magic potentially disrupts and harms the community as opposed to an individual act of maleficium. Since their craft and labor are a public concern, these witches are that more powerful and dangerous. Women cooking or brewing for public consumption without male authority controlling their labor are depicted with witchy overtones. This depiction is intended to constrain this female labor, but it potentially recognizes some cultural power for these female public cooks and brewsters. The witchcraft pamphlets also participated in the witching of female public cooks and brewsters. In ‘How the Witch served a Fellow in an Alehouse’ (1606), the pamphleteer deviates from the trial transcripts and adds a prose narrative. A drunk insults the woman serving him crying “”Doe you heare Witch, looke tother waies, I cannot abide a nose of that fashion” and he continues to outline her repulsive appearance. After serving him another beer, she finally replies “Does thou heare good friends (quoth she) that thou throwst in they drink apace, but shall not find it so easie coming out.” Shortly after, the drunk cried for help and yelled “the Witch, the Witch, I am a man spoyld.” He was finally released from the spell and relieved himself, but the witch and her daughter in this fictional account were executed on the drunk’s testimony. 115 This odd narrative of misogynistic humor is attached to a pamphlet that records the murder trial of Annis and George Dell who were convicted of the grisly murder of their three year old son, and the mutilation of their daughter. The parents were                                                               114 For information on sixth century allusions to witches and cauldrons see The Laws of the Salian Franks, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew. Pennsylvania: U of Pennsylvania P. 1991, 125, 199. 115 Gibson, Marion. ed. Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. London: Routledge. 2000. (151-156) 116  accused of tearing out her tongue and leaving her in a tree to die. She somehow recovers her speech after four years of living as a beggar, and testifies against her parents. Figure 3.4 Hans Baldung Grien Three Witches 1514 courtesy of Artstor The Dells were supposedly aided by the witchcraft produced by Johane Harrison and her daughter. This short fictional narrative attempts to drain the witches of power, but instead highlights the power of what is often read as a female craft. The narrative gazes on the witch’s body gendered female. The drunk lingers on her fleshy nose, and fears “her lips once looke into the lid” would spoil his drink. He also feels “her breath so would not wash it out again” (156). The drunk imagines the witch’s breath clinging to his drink and body. The drunk physically feels the woman’s speech. Her open mouth breathing out on him and breathing in his scent suggests the hellmouth sniffing out a sinner to eat. 117  Hans Baldung Grien, who was significantly influenced by Molitor’s woodcuts, dramatically illustrates the power of the witched female body in the practice of witchcraft (Figure 3.4). Zika incisively reads Baldung Grien’s rendering of witchcraft that reveals the witch’s body as directly linked to the cauldron. In Baldung Grien’s Three Witches, the cauldron is an extension of the witches who are highly sexualized with their interlocking bodies and wild flowing hair. They hold a ritualized pose that provocatively exposes their genitals to the viewer. The woodcut captures the witches in a ritual dance that is both posed and static while also flowing with energy upwards through the witches’s bodies to the blazing caldron that the witch on the left extends above their bodies while she leans into the older witch and rests her right leg on the other witch’s back. The older witch straddles the witch who kneels on the floor. This witch raises her buttocks while gazing at the viewer through her spread legs. The witch looks at the world upside down. Stuart Clark, referring to this woodcut, argues that this inversion is the language of witchcraft. Clark claims the witches act in opposition to the natural world. Clark’s argument understands the witches through the ideology of the demonic. Zika, however, insightfully points out that there are no signs of the demonic in either Molitor’s or Baldung Grien’s woodcuts. Instead, these woodcuts show us women using their culinary skills and an aggressive sexuality to conjure supernatural power into the natural world. Zika’s formula for the visual code of witchcraft and his insightful analysis of the Baldung Grien woodcut are a useful critical lens to examine Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth Shakespeare’s play begins with the contested site of the witch’s body that claims the space on and beneath the early modern stage. The stage directions for Macbeth’s 118  opening act promise a supernatural spectacle: Thunder and Lightening. Enter Three Witches. 116 The clang of thunder, flashes of lightening, and the explosion of smelly squibs announces the moment of supernatural happenings. 117 Baldung Grien’s Three Witches (Figure 3.4) offers a powerful illustration of the theatrical potential of this opening scene. Three female figures take to the stage amidst the chaotic noise of thunder, flashes of lightening, and the stench of a smokey squib. Most likely the witches emerge out of the trapdoor thus reiterating the subversive chthonic power imagined beneath the stage. As Banquo tells us, the witches appear “wild in their attire.” This effect of an untamed wildness about the witches speaks to Zika’s visual code of witch with witches hair flying wildly around their female bodies as we see in the Baldung Grien woodcut. There is a significant autonomy claimed by each witch in Baldung Grien’s woodcut. The woodcut is emptied of any coercion from outside forces operating on the women performing witchcraft. The witches interlocked bodies produce the power exhibited in this image. The power flows through the witches’s bodies with notable flare-ups surrounding the witch pose that travels upward to the fiery cauldron extended above the witched bodies. Though grouped, as are the witches in Macbeth, each witch exerts her own agency. The witches in Macbeth also assert individual agency though we tend to read them as a collective. Assigning Macbeth’s witch roles to each witch in the Baldung Grien’s woodcut can illuminate the autonomy of Macbeth’s witches. First Witch is the witch in the woodcut who stands and holds the cauldron. She is the leader. She asks the                                                               116 Thompson, Leslie. “The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations.” Early Theatre (1999) 1-24. 117 For a study on “smell” in Macbeth see Harris’s “The Smell of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 2007 Winter; 58 (4): 465-86. 119  questions. Second Witch, the older witch but powerfully built witch in the woodcut, thoughtfully responds with her prophecy. Third Witch peers between her legs gazing at the audience as she replies “Macbeth.” As the sister’s closing chant promises “fair is foul,” or they read the possible upside down. The witch language adopted is a strict tetrameter rhythm. First Witch questions while Second and Third Witch respond as if they are reading the signs of the earth and air, and then they vanish. This moment of vanishing puts pressure on the materiality of the witch’s body. A material body that feeds her familiar, and a body that Banquo reads as looking “not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, / And yet are on’t?” (1.3.42-43). Banquo’s question is important. Both elite and folk discourses identified a witch as having a mortal corporeal body, usually female. Some women at this time self-identified as a witch. Many people in the lower classes as well as some in the upper echelons of this society knew something of witchcraft. Thus the seemingly incorporeality of the witch’s body on stage demonstrates the incredible power the early modern imagination invested in the identity of witch as experienced in the Molitor’s or Baldung Grien’s woodcuts. The witch’s body is a permeable, bound and unbound mortal, female body that calls attention to itself as an uncontrollable body that “hovers through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.12). Whether the actors playing these roles were raised up, as the verb “hover” suggests, or crept down through the trapdoor, the performativity of this theatrical spectacle releases an irrational sensuality into the space of the play. The witches open the play, plan when next to appear, then vanish into a supernatural realm that is above, beyond or beneath what is suppose to be the natural and rational world that in Macbeth is a male dominated system of war and treason. 120  Though Macbeth’s witches embody a supernatural, ethereal and possibly chaotic power as illustrated in the Baldung Grien woodcuts, these witches also assume the form of peasant women as depicted in Molitor’s woodcut. The play’s overwhelming supernatural effects are grounded in practical detail. The witches not only plan when next they shall meet, but they also let the audience know when, where and with whom the witches will next appear in the play. The response to their soothsaying tells us that we shall meet the witches again after the battle, on a heath where they will meet someone named Macbeth. The witches disappear, and the audience is thrust into the “hurley burley” somewhere on the sidelines. At the sound of an alarm, a rush of bodies take to the stage. King Duncan enters anxious for news of the battle over his kingdom. He calls out to a severely wounded soldier as he nears their camp: What bloody man is that? He can report, As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt The Newest State. (1.2.1-3) Malcolm finishes his father’s line telling him that “This is the Sergeant” (1.2.4) who rescued him when he was taken captive, and assures his father of the man’s honesty and courage. Scene 2 brings us into the chaos of battle caused by a crisis of authority. The King, the exemplum of male authority in a patriarchal system, is unsure of his status. King Duncan feels vulnerable, and seems passively disengaged. Malcolm assures his father of the Captain’s loyalty and courage, but Malcolm also highlights a certain weakness. He had to be rescued. Both father and son, king and prince, seem to be inordinately dependant on their subjects, particularly their warriors and thanes, for the security of their privileged roles. 121  The Captain’s narration of the fight against the rebellion counters Duncan’s static and disconnected male authority with Macbeth’s hyper-masculinity demonstrated with the extremity of the violence he commits against the enemy. The bloody Captain, in Act 1, scene 2, reports how Macbeth’s sword “smoked with bloody execution” (1.2.18), and “like valor’s minion carved out his passage” (1.2.19), until he faced Macdonwald and “unseamed him from the knave to th’ chops, / And fixed his head upon our battlements” (1.2.22-23). Duncan and his men celebrate this narrative of Macbeth’s gruesome and vicious butchering as heroic masculinity. When the Captian finally faints from his wounds, Ross enters to finish the tale of the battle. The butchering and dismembering of the male body on the battlefield underscores the devaluation of the body in this play. Bodies are stabbed, wounded, bled, and fragmented. The female body is pressured to strip itself of its female parts, or she is killed. The witches, however, are a profound female force that defies prescriptive codes surrounding the female body. When the Weird Sisters return to the performance in Act 1.3, they have shape- shifted into the witches depicted in the Molitor woodcut. They are now outdoors on a heath, waiting for Macbeth. Their informal conversations presume peasant women chatting about the everyday domestic chores of their witchy activities that focus on the public disruption of food. Second Witch was killing swine that disrupted the food supply of at least one family, and First Witch complains about a sailor’s wife who refuses to share her chestnuts with her then dismisses her with “Aroint thee, witch!” First Witch fixates on how the sailor’s wife feeds on those chestnuts stating that she “munched, and munched, and munched” (1.3.5). The repetition of “munched” stresses the onomatopoeic effect of the word as a noisy, mindless type of eating. It is the action of eating without 122  thought or concern for the food as well as this woman’s lack of Christian charity that seems to concern First Witch. The sailor’s wife’s curse repels back on her when the sisters punish the sailor for his wife’s lack of charity by whipping up “a tempest-tossed,” weather magic, a particularly female magic as depicted in Molitier’s woodcut. Macbeth’s witches whip up the storm sans snake, rooster, and cauldron, but First Witch does have a “pilot’s thumb” (1.3.29), a supposedly severed thumb from a navigator who at least the witch thought had some power of direction. At the sound of drums, the witches move into their supernatural roles and their discourse morphs into the rhythm of a magic charm. The three witches greet Macbeth with prophecies of future power that feeds his inordinate ambitions, but it is Banquo who engages the witches. Macbeth, as he is wont to do, speaks in monosyllables or commands. Banquo’s fascination with the witches’s bodies draws the audience’s attention again to the permeability of these female bodies on stage. Banquo muses if “[t]he earth hath bubbles, as water has” (1.3.77), while Macbeth wonders if they had gone “[i]nto the air, and what seemed corporal / melted as breath into the wind” (1.3.79-80). The idea of the witches’s bodies sinking into a bubbling earth or melting into the air speaks to the uncontrollability of the witch’s body that Macbeth and Banquo should recognize as dangerous. Instead, both warriors fixate on the witches’s discourse, and their promises of kingship. It is important to note that these witches display a familiarity with this community. They have knowledge of the peasantry, tradesmen, and sailors as well as the nobility in this play. In fact, we are introduced to these three characters as working women who we meet in media res. First Witch asks of the other two when, where, and who they shall next meet. The chant-like rhythm of the lines produce the required 123  information as Second Witch and Third Witch seem to envision their next scene together. Though the stage directions to this play state these characters are three witches, only First Witch uses the term in 1.3.6 when she complains about the sailor’s wife dismissing her with “Aroint thee, witch!” It is only in the stage directions and tag lines that textually and silently impose the sign of witch onto these characters. The witches refer to each other as sister and claim the title of the Weird Sisters or the classical fates. Indeed, Banquo and Macbeth also think of them as the Weird Sisters, along with black and midnight hags, but the play carefully omits the naming of these sisters as witch except for line 1.3.6. This suggests the confusion in establishing a witch identity. What does a witch look like? How does one recognize a witch? According to records of witch trials, the only physical determining factor of a witch is the witch’s teat—a mark or growth that can only be found by thoroughly searching the witch’s body. This invasive prodding of the female body was conducted by other women under orders from the male authority of the court system. These woodcuts, and I argue Macbeth’s witches, invite a consideration of a woman socially forced under the sign of witch as a working woman, a female cook, and even an active members of the community. In the early modern imagination, a witch could be a neighbor, the old cunning woman down the road, the woman who cooks for public consumption in some unsavory locale, or even the kitchen staff in the houses of the great. Though a witch’s power prompts fear and fascination, the early modern belief systems showed real concern and anxiety for the ordinariness of the witch’s body. A recent film production of Macbeth considers the ordinariness of the witch and places the 124  witches in differing roles, but the most interesting was as Macbeth’s kitchen staff. 118 If we consider Macbeth’s witches as the devil cooks from the iconography of the hellmouth then we would expect to find them in Lady Macbeth’s kitchen. Cutting, chopping, butchering and cooking for the Macbeths as they prepare their feasts and Macbeth for the divine retribution the witches have been entrusted to deliver according to the Christian God’s justice. Borrowing from Mary Ellen Lamb’s particularly insightful study on Macbeth that positions this play within the discourse of women’s stories told to children, I suggest that the witches as kitchen staff model the old wives whose tales Lady Macbeth scorns. Lamb directs our attention to the tense but definitive relationship between Lady Macbeth and the witches or an aristocratic lady and her household staff: the village women who worked as cooks, nurses, midwives, and maids. Lamb argues that Lady Macbeth’s scorn for these lower class women is evident in her constant questioning of Macbeth’s masculinity. 119 Scorning Macbeth’s public display of fear and anger at what he believes to be Banquo’s ghost, Lady Macbeth states: “O, these flaws and starts, / Impostors to true fear, would well become / A woman’s story at a winter’s fire” (3.4.62- 65). Lady Macbeth’s resistance to female narratives told by poor, uneducated women points to her lack of power in the male dominated world of the aristocracy. She denies the value of these women’s knowledge and power because it is acquired through everyday domestic chores—female labor that holds little value in this play or early modern culture. To participate in this male-centered warrior culture, Lady Macbeth calls upon the                                                               118 At least two recent film versions of Macbeth have staged the witches as members of the community or kitchen staff. Sam Worthington’s Macbeth (2007), and Michael Bogdanov’s Macbeth (1998) 119 Lamb, Mary Ellen. Old wives’ tales, George Peele, and narrative abjection.” Critical Survey. 14.1 Berghahn Books, Inc., January 1, 2002. 1-10. 125  “supernatural spirits” to “unsex” her—to rid her of her femaleness. She conjures up the black spirits to remake her into the masculinity she craves. Her female parts, however, will not be denied. Robert Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, explains that the humour gall is “so adust and hot [that it] degenerates [one] into madness” (402). Thus Lady Macbeth’s request of the spirits “to take my milk for gall” (1.5.40-48) is a recipe for her degeneration into madness. Lady Macbeth, trapped in the natural and rational world of the play, obeys the social codes of this male system. She prides herself as the most formidable hostess of this culture’s rituals and customs. When the messenger delivers the news that Duncan would be her guest that night, Lady Macbeth response seems inordinately strong. She scolds the messenger saying “[t]hou’rt mad to say it ” (1.5.29), and argues that her husband would have warned her to prepare. This is an interesting moment. Though contemplating Duncan’s death, Lady Macbeth’s concern at this moment is her duties as hostess. King Duncan enforces the importance of this female role when he greets Lady Macbeth with “our honored hostess” (1.6.10). Duncan never refers to Lady Macbeth by her name. She is simply Macbeth’s wife, or Duncan’s hostess. Duncan and his hostess exchange the civilities about the privilege of hosting the royal monarch in their humble castle, and the King completes this ritual of hospitality by asking Lady Macbeth to take his hand and lead him into her house, as he says “By your leave, hostess” (1.1.30). This short scene is significant for the manners of hospitality it demonstrates. The King and his hostess play their roles with the King thanking her for the troubles of hosting royalty, and his hostess wishing they could do even more than their ample supple of food, drink, and entertainment can supply to honor such a worthy guest. Even as the king and Banquo ride towards Inverness, the play encourages the feeling of 126  hospitality and wholesomeness. Duncan notices the pleasant environment and sweet air. Banquo then ruminates on the “temple-haunting martlet” whose nest he spies, and concludes these birds only nest where “[t]he air is delicate” (1.6.10). Banquo speak of the martlet’s nests but not the bird. When speaking of a bird, it is odd not to mention the bird’s particular song. Unless, there were no birds, but empty nests because the air from Inverness is beginning to pollute the areas. Neither Duncan nor Banquo are capable of properly reading the signs or portents in their environment. In Act 1.7, Lady Macbeth plays the role of hostess to her royal guest and calls for a suitable feast to be prepared for the king. The stage directions call for: Enter a sewer and divers servants with dishes and service over the stage. Then enter Macbeth. Servants, possibly the witches in their guise as kitchen help, carry Lady Macbeth’s feast for the King across the stage. Yet the King’s feast that walks across the early modern stage lacks substance. It fails as a ritual feast. The servants carry dishes of gold and silver to simulate a feast, but there is no tasty and nurturing food present. Duncan is placed on the periphery of the action offstage to consume his meal. The ritual of feasting a king is hollow and emptied of power because it lacks the conspicuous display of consumption and power. Macbeth’s move away from the off stage feast to his on stage moment of vacillating between honor and power further gestures to the corruption of this ritual feast that anticipates Duncan’s murder. Both the King’s host and hostess leave him to dine alone off stage while they quarrel over his murder on stage. Lady Macbeth scolds Macbeth for leaving and tells him “[h]e has almost supped” (1.7.28). The Macbeth’s argument exposes the power struggle between this couple. Though Macbeth craves the crown as much as his wife, he would 127  rather settle for the honors he has already achieved. Lady Macbeth, however, is not satisfied, and she questions his masculinity just as she highlights her own femaleness. She ties his manhood to his promise, and compares the integrity of her own promise with a grisly description of motherhood. She first speaks to the joys of being a young mother and she: would while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this” (2.1.56-59) This passage highlights Lady Macbeth’s crisis of gender in which she pushes against the boundaries of limited gender codes. When we first meet the Lady Macbeth in Act 1, scene 5, she is reading Macbeth’s letter. First, it is important that we see a woman on stage reading and interpreting her husband’s letter. This shows Macbeth’s love and respect for his wife. It also shows some dependence on her for direction. When he enters the scene, she controls the dialogue and him. She seductively turn him to her way of thinking about how easy it would be to murder an anointed king. Now in Act 2, scene 7, Lady Macbeth uses a different strategy on her husband. She mocks his masculinity, and uses her femininity to prove her bond and fortitude stronger than his. He finally claims, “I am settled” 2.1.79). Duncan has enjoyed his last supper. Duncan is murdered off stage; Lady Macbeth again has to assume the role of Macbeth’s caretaker. As he jumps at every noise, and mourns his lost gift of sleep, she tries to calm him down while directing him to change clothes, and claims, “a little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.70). Unfortunately for the Macbeths, the smell of blood 128  cannot be cleared away, and for the warrior Macbeth the smell only drives him onto more murder and more blood. Macbeth’s Hellmouth Many scholars such as Glynne Wickham and John Harcourt have analyzed the significance of the porter scene with The Harrowing of Hell and Last Judgment cycle plays. 120 The incessant knocking that Macbeth shouts at “Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!” (2.2.74), recalls Jesus’s knocking at hell’s gates in the mystery play (393).). The Porter is often played as a drunken sleepy reprobate who assumes the role of “devil porter[ing]” at a hellgate that allows for some black comedy in this bloody play. However, as we saw in Chapter 1, The Harrowing of Hell is a significant play in the cycle of the Christ narrative, and the source of much theological debate during the early modern period. As we can see in the image above, the hellmouth structured as a castle was part of the visual culture of damnation. Having killed an anointed king, his guest, and relative, Macbeth’s soul is damned. The omens that Lady Macbeth ignores during the murder scene now compel a transformative process in which                                                               120 Wickham, Glynne. “Hell-Castle And Its Door-Keeper.” Shakespeare Survey. 1966 Harcourt, John B. “I Pray You. Remember the Porter” Shakespeare Quarterly 12.4 (1961) 393-402 129  Figure 3.6 The Gunpowder Plot Inverness sinks into the hellmouth. The porter, like the devil Ribauld in the mystery play, inefficiently protects hell’s gates. The porter continually calls for other devils such as Beelzebub who is from the same cast of devils as Ribauld. But the porter also teases the teases the audience with “that other devil’s name,” possibly referring to Macbeth’s lost soul. The porter, famously, refers to the Gunpowder Plot by mentioning treason and equivocation. This event is also marked by the hellmouth in visual culture as we can see in Figure 3.6 from a pamphlet on the Gunpowder Plot. The central focus is Parliament in the middle with the Royal family, and underneath is the hellmouth eating its fill of traitors such as Guy Fawkes. The transformation of Macbeth’s castle into the hellmouth in the Porter scene initiates the process of Macbeth’s damnation and the witches’s demonstration of divine retribution in 4.1. The Porter’s allusion to the Macbeths’s abode as the hellmouth haunts the banquet scene in Act 3.4. 130  After the discovery of Duncan’s murder, his sons, Malcolm and Donaldbain flee for England and Ireland, respectively. They fear to be blamed for the murder of their father or to be murdered themselves. Since they leave the country, they are blamed for the murder, and Macbeth crowned King of Scotland. Lady Macbeth, who now wears the golden crown she craves, prepares a banquet to celebrate their coronation. As his wife takes delight in performing her hostess duties as Queen of Scotland, Macbeth prepares to ensure the stability of his crown by murdering whomever he believes might be a threat. He first begins with Banquo, and pays three murders to hunt down and murder Banquo and his son Fleance since they will father kings while the Macbeths remain barren. While Macbeth speaks to his hirelings and discovers Fleance is still a threat. Lady Macbeth calls on her husband to initiate the ritual process of feasting. She states: My royal lord, You do not give the cheer. The feast is sold That is not often vouched, while ‘tis a-making, ‘Tis given with welcome. To feed were best at home. From thence the sauce to meat is ceremony, Meeting were bare without it (3.4.31-36). Lady Macbeth’s concern for traditional rituals of hospitality at this moment in the play asserts her claim to this display of power. She playfully argues that guests should be properly welcomed to a King’s feast. She stresses the infinitive “to feed” as a bodily function in contrast to the conspicuous consumption of her table, and the mere “ceremony” of “sauce to meat” covertly calls for the recognition of her power through the ritual cheer. Macbeth’s violent reaction to the ghost of Banquo ruptures Lady Macbeth’s tight control over the feast. As she struggles to assure her guests and turn Macbeth’s 131  reason back to their celebratory meal, Lady Macbeth’s Queenly rule crumbles. She becomes, as Lamb argues, the scolding mother 121 . She refutes her refined and delicate understanding of “feeding” as a bodily function to be satisfied in the privacy of one’s home, and orders her guests to “Feed, and regard him not” (3.459). Lady Macbeth’s carefully orchestrated royal feast has devolved into a spectacle that returns our attention to the Macbeths’s castle as the hellmouth, a spectacle of pain, fear, and violence from which her guests, at her insistence, willingly flee. Macbeth, however, turns his attention back to the witches. In Act 3, scene 5, we find the witches turning their thought again onto Macbeth. In this scene, we meet a new witch, Hecate, who claims to be “the mistress of [their] charms” (3.5.6). As mentioned earlier, this scene is usually cut. Most scholars believe this scene is an interpolation by Thomas Middleton. Perhaps he worked with Shakespeare on this scene, but scholars and theatrical professionals tend to cut the scene because it is just not Shakespearean. I disagree with this assessment. Act 3, scene 5 is vital to the witch scenes and the ongoing preparation of Macbeth’s divine retribution. Shakespaere at least alluded to Hecate in Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Hamlet, and Henry IV, Part 1, and he gave her a role in Macbeth.                                                               121 Lamb 10. 132  Hecate: Goddess and Queen of the Witches Figure 3.5 Hecate, Luna, Filippo Ferroverde 1615 With Act 3, scene 5 the play becomes the witches’s narrative of divine retribution. Hecate, a Greek goddess, known as a cross-roads deity, is classically known as the Queen of the witches. She has chthonic power; she is also one of the triple goddesses. In the classical world, Hecate “facilitated communication between the human world and the divine.” 122 She opened boundaries between the worlds to help the release of the soul. In Macbeth, Hecate uses her power to open boundaries between worlds, but not save any mortal souls. Instead, she speaks of Macbeth as a “wayward son / Spiteful and wrathful,                                                               122 Johnston, Sarah Iles. Hekate Soteira. American Classical Studies 21. Atlanta: Scholars Press. 1990. 1. 133  who, as others do, / Loves for his own ends, not for you” (3.5.11-13). In other words, this classical goddess reads Macbeth through a Christian lens and determines to use her skill so that: he shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace and fear And you all know, security Is mortal’s chiefest enenmy” (3.5.30-33) She instructs her crew to retrieve their “vessels” or cauldrons, and outlines her course of action to bring the “wayward son [….] such artificial sprites / As by the strength of the illusion / Shall draw him on to his confusion” (3.6.27-29). The Hecate scene leads us to the witch’s cavern where the cauldron serves as the spatial location of witch space, a space between worlds. The opening of Act 4.1, creates the iconic image of witch and cauldron seething with the fierce power of retribution. The cauldron rises up from beneath the stage through the trap door or hellmouth. 123 The witches have doubled in number, and they dance and chant around the cauldron while adding the devilish ingredients in a rhyme and rhythm that cooks up an alchemical stew of mis-direction for Macbeth. The witches’s recipe lists items found in charms and spells recorded in Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, which were supposedly taken from witch practitioners. But it also calls for body parts from a Jew, a Turk, a Tartar and a “birth strangled babe” (4.1.1-38). This gruesome list of the unsanctified illuminates notions of the body in early modern culture that reads the body within limiting social and religious                                                               123 At 4.1.123, Macbeth asks “Why sinks that cauldron?”, thus it seems probable that the cauldron had risen during the transition from 3.6 to 4.1 before it sinks through the trap door later in this scene. 134  codes. Yet the witches celebrate the power contained in the corporeal body. In fact, the witches’s recipe is no more gruesome than some medicinal recipes found in treatises such as Timothie Bright’s A Treatise, wherein is declared the sufficiency of English medicines, for cure of all diseases, cured with medicines. Whereunto is added a collection of medicines growing (for the most part) within our English climat, approoued and experimented against the aundice, dropsie, stone, falling-sickness, pestilenece (1615). For jaundice, Bright recommends goose and oxe dong mixt together, and for the taste add some nutmeg and cloves; the skin of hen’s stomachs, washed with wine, dryed and poudered placed on toast dipped in wine will cure jaundice. An arthropod steeped in wine will also cure jaundice. 124 The witches’s ingredients are not just grisly, but powerful sources of blood, skin, and bones. With Hecate’s moon vapour added to the blazing cauldron an alchemical stew of retribution is served to Macbeth when arrives. The illusions soothe his fear, and he continues he bloody massacre to hold his throne. As the cauldron sinks back into the hellmouth, the witches disappear from the play, or the witches have completed their witch narrative and compete their final act with a theatrical spectacle of a blazing cauldron, apparitions, singing, chanting, and dancing. Their rituals complete, they leave the play. Malcolm and Macduff then assume the witches’s vacated roles as instruments of retribution. Malcolm orders his men to carry wood from Birnam Wood to help disguise their forces thus fulfilling one prophecy, and Macduff, not born of woman, fulfills the other, and he successfully kills Macbeth, cutting the head off the traitor as he calls to Malcolm, “Hail King of Scotland” (5.8.59). Yet as Lemon argues the traitors in this play have taught Malcolm “the value of deceptive                                                               124 Bright 28-29. 135  rhetoric” (103). Lemon calls attention to the doubling of Cawdor and Macbeth in name and deed that haunts Malcolm’s victory. 125 Malcolm’s crowning seems anti-climatic, even a bit hollow. The conclusion of the play leaves the audience wanting something more. Perhaps, one more scene with the witches saying “Hail Macduff.”                                                               125 Lemon 105. 136  Chapter 4: Hecate’s Return or Middleton’s The Witch When the cauldron rises through the trapdoor in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch we move from the deployment of this stage property from tragedy to comedy. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron execute divine retribution against the protagonists in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s respective tragedies. Faustus feeds the hellmouth with his damned soul. Barabas’s body and soul stews in the cauldron’s bubbling oil of retribution, and the witches send Macbeth to his damnation with their cauldron’s brew. As we have seen, these moments of damnation are highlighted at critical points in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, his The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth with direct and indirect moments of cooking and feeding, the procurement of foodstuffs and the disruption of banquets. As Hillary Nunn surmises, in tragedies, on stage eating tends to be interrupted whereas comedies indulge in the pleasure and pain of culinary delights. 126 The banquet scenes in Faustus and Macbeth are both interrupted by a violent supernatural presence, and Barabas uses the gift of food as a weapon against a female community in The Jew of Malta. Each of these plays fiercely interrogates early modern religious ideas of evil and damnation while embracing the demonic power infused in the stage properties of the hellmouth and witch’s cauldron. In Thomas Middleton’s satiric tragic-comedy The Witch, the witch’s cauldron reiterates the religious, cultural, and theatrical traditions invested in this stage prop. It is, as in the earlier plays described above, a stage property bound to the Christian idea of damnation, the female labor of cooking, and the early modern notions of witchcraft.                                                               126 Nunn, Hillary. “Playing with Appetite in Early Modern Comedy.” Shakespearean Sensations. ed. Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 137  Elizabeth Schafer argues that “Macbeth is in some ways a source for The Witch.” 127 As discussed in Chapter 3, some scholars have dismissed Macbeth’s witch scenes as inferior interpolations. 128 Between 1609-1610, Middleton was hired by the King’s Men to revise Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare may have collaborated on Middleton’s revisions and additions to his play since early modern playwrighting was often a collaborative effort. However, Macbeth’s Act 3, scene 5 or Hecate’s scene is assumed to be Middleton’s work. Schafer posits that Middleton may have begun work on his play The Witch while working on the revisions to Macbeth. Schaffer’s assumptions importantly trace a narrative between Macbeth and The Witch through the character of Hecate. These plays share two songs “Come away, Hecate!” and “Black Spirits,” as well as some dialogue. 129 In other words, it is the spectacle of witchcraft that Middleton unleashes from the seemingly bounded text of Macbeth. The “unnerving potential” 130 of theatrical space releases Hecate from the hellish space beneath the trapdoor or hellmouth into Middleton’s The Witch. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Marlowe and Shakespeare use the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron to mark the early modern stage as the physical location of the supernatural world of hell and damnation, empowering the stage with its                                                               127 Schafer, Elizabeth. “Introduction” Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. ed. Elizabeth Schafer. New Mermaid. London: A&C Black, 1994. ix-xx-x. All quotations from The Witch are from this edition. 128 see Schaffer’s “Introduction” xiv-xv for further discussion on scholarly debates on Middleton’s revision and additions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 129 Schaffer explains that Middleton used two different composers: Robert Johnson wrote the music for The Witch and John Wilson composed Black Spirits” (xiv). 130 Sofer 1. 138  demonic power. Middleton, I argue, uses the genre of comedy to pressure this citational process and create on stage a hellish space of excess and indulgence. Yet this hellish space is ambiguously demonstrated in both the cultures of Ravenna and Hecate’s witch community. The dominant culture of Ravenna condemns Hecate’s witch space, yet this play highlights the hypocrisy of the godly and critiques the male authority that rules over the righteous in Ravenna. Thus the witch and the public stage through highly exaggerated and comedic demonstrations of power expose male authority’s tenuous control of their Christian social system. Middleton’s The Witch wavers between the tragic and moralizing situations and relationships in the dominant culture of Ravenna and the hilarious mischief making conducted in Hecate’s witch community. Staging the tragic against the comedic underscores the hypocrisy and immorality of Ravenna’s patriarchal system while displaying the tremendous power of witchcraft contained and controlled by the theatrical comedic structure. In Macbeth, the witches dwell in the male world of this play, and Middleton sends the goddess Hecate to invade this space in Act 3, scene 5. For The Witch, Middleton takes his audience into the witch’s community. When we first meet Hecate in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Witch, she informs us that she has only three years left on her one hundred and twenty year contract with the devil (68). In Macbeth, Hecate is the mistress; there is no demonic master controlling the witches. Macbeth’s Hecate is an immortal goddess whose powers are beyond the control of the Christian devil. This goddess traverses the boundaries of Macbeth’s world into The Witch’s theatrical structure then shape shifts into a mortal woman’s body made of flesh and blood. Middleton stresses Hecate’s mortality and fleshy body in this play to call attention to Hecate and her 139  witch community as a group of mortal women sans male authority who possess the fearsome power of witchcraft. In other words, this female community on the margins of this social system represents the dominant culture’s fear and anxiety of powerful, sexually aggressive women who have succeeded in creating a cottage industry that gives them economic freedom. Hecate’s contract with the devil lacks the fear and remorse that Marlowe’s Faustus experiences. Instead, she represents women who work on the margins of the food and drink trade such as the dishonest alewife in the Chester’s Harrowing of Hell and Marjorie Coorson in Heywood’s The Play Called The Four PP. Similar to these fictive characters, Hecate finds a powerful ally in the devil, and she sells her occult knowledge and domestic skills to those who desire the forbidden. Thus she serves her diabolic master by luring a few of the godly to the sinful ways of witchcraft while ensuring the economic independence for her community of witchy women. This chapter looks at the ways Middleton recasts Hecate as a flesh and blood woman who practices witchcraft along with her family of witches as a source of income and pleasure. The pleasure derived from their witchy activities focuses on the production of foodstuffs such as brews and ointments. When we first enter Hecate’s witch space in Act 1, scene 2, the blazing cauldron is positioned off stage seething and boiling magical properties into the witches’ alchemical stew, allowing Hecate and her crew to defy the laws of nature and fly. The witches’ flying powers releases these female bodies from the earth and sets free an aggressive female sexuality much like the witches depicted in Baldung Grien’s woodcuts. These uncontrolled female bodies leaking with inordinate sexuality is starkly contrasted to the dominant culture of Ravenna’s constrictive and oppressive control of the female body and sexuality. In Ravenna, the pleasure of eating 140  and drinking is disrupted and perverted to enforce submission of the female body and agency to male authority. In Middleton’s The Witch, the ideas of damnation and divine retribution are rehearsed and emptied of spiritual potency. Instead, these religious acts of condemnation are revealed as policing strategies constructed by male authority. Yet, by the end of the play, damnation and divine retribution perform their sacred duty when Antonio, who has lied, cheated, maimed, and attempted murder, falls through a trapdoor offstage. This offstage damnation of Antonio falling into a trapdoor or the hellmouth is countered in the previous scene in which the cauldron rises. In The Witch, the cauldron is invested and renewed with its valences of female labor, power, and resistance to male authority while still mischievously cooking up Christian retribution. The main plot of Middleton’s The Witch suggests the scandalous Overbury affair—a sordid narrative with traces of witchy activity, and a key scene in which the pleasure of eating is corrupted. 131 In building the important lines of connection of witchcraft and the distribution of food between Middleton’s play and the Overbury murder trial, I will first rehearse a brief synopsis of the trial narrative. Thomas Overbury was poisoned at the command of Lady Frances Howard while he was imprisoned in the Tower. This act of poisoning, however, concludes a narrative of Lady Howard’s notoriety that began with her divorce from Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. The couple married in 1606 when both were still teenagers, so the Earl went on a tour of Europe while Frances Howard served as one of Queen Anne’s ladies in waiting. Howard enjoyed court life. She performed in the court masques with the Queen, and met Robert Carr with                                                               131 This information is culled from New Mermaids edition of The Witch edited by Elizabeth Schafer (xv-xix). 141  whom she fell in love. When the Earl returned Howard sought a divorce. She allegedly requested Anne Turner, a widow of a physician with ties to court culture, 132 to procure magical products that would cause the Earl to become impotent. He eventually agreed to the divorce on the grounds of his failure to perform his conjugal duties, but insisted that it was clearly stipulated his lack of sexual potency was only with Frances Howard. Howard was now free to marry Robert Carr, but Carr’s trusted friend Thomas Overbury strenuously objected to the marriage. King James aided Carr, his favorite courtier, by removing Overbury from the court until after the marriage ceremony was conducted. James offered Overbury an ambassador position in a foreign court with the codicil that the consequences of refusing James’s offer would be imprisonment in the Tower. Overbury chose the Tower, and he unexpectedly died in prison in 1613. It wasn’t until 1615 that authorities discovered that Overbury had been murdered. A young boy who had been paid to poison Overbury’s food confessed, and trial transcripts argue that Howard again turned to Anne Turner for help in managing Overbury’s unwanted male interference. Turner obtained poison and arranged to have that poison drizzled over Overbury’s dinner. Turner and her accomplices were tried and executed. Howard and Carr were also found guilty and served time in the Tower. Eventually, they were released to finish their lives in wedded bliss. The Overbury Affair hardly seems the stuff of comedy, yet there are obvious references to both the divorce case and murder trial in Middleton’s play. Paul Yachnin’s important analysis of The Witch encourages a critique of this play that moves beyond                                                               132 Yachnin refers to Turner as “the court bawd” (219). Turner’s assumption of social mobility through her relationship with Howard seems to have charged her with varied identities that were both innocuous and condemning. 142  simply attempting to establish Middleton’s political agenda in using topical references to this important murder trial. Barbara Howard Traister claims that this trial “is arguably the most scandalous crime of King James’s reign and certainly the one that touched the court most intimately.” 133 Yet as Yachnin explains positioning Middleton “as a fearless political commentator” on the abuse of power by King James’s court obfuscates the production of meaning created by the cultural and theatrical environment from which this play emerged. Yachnin argues that the entertainment value of this play for public consumption provides a profitable critical lens in which to investigate the political elements in this play. He examines how early modern peoples consumed information regarding the Howard scandal through both print culture and the public stage. Print culture, according to Yachnin, tended to report the information of the trial objectively under the fear and pressure of official reprimands that could include some prison time that would disrupt these writers' income. There were some more libelous texts circulating in manuscript that denounced Howard and Carr, but these texts circumvented the scrutiny of authorities who oversaw the printing of materials. In regards to the early modern stage, Yachnin points out that The Witch was written for the King’s Men who “who marched in royal livery at the 1604 coronation.” The King’s Men were economically invested in court culture, and Yachnin argues that the wicked but intriguing display of court culture on the public stage in The Witch commercially appealed to its audience. The early modern audience experiences and participates in court culture in this play as if they were trusted courtiers. Yachnin shows us how Middleton’s play also exploits the burgeoning                                                               133 Traister, Barbara Howard. The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Day of Simon Forman. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001. 181. 143  trade markets of the early modern period with his representation of witchcraft and stagecraft, presenting both as “scandalous trades.” 134 Following Yachnin’s strategic move of situating the play within the cultural and institutional milieu from which this play materializes, I examine the witch culture, most powerfully demonstrated with the witch’s cauldron both off and on stage, and the distribution of food produced by this culture that charges this play with an entertainment value that both excites and terrifies. This commercial appeal is similar to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare’s Macbeth in that the audience witnesses and experiences the desire for as well as the demonstration of the forbidden act of occult practices. Just as Middleton added theatrical spectacle to Macbeth, he entices the audience for The Witch with sensuous displays of pleasure and power, but he intensifies the theatrical spectacle in this play with the ostentatious display of witchcraft through a comedic structure. As mentioned above, the genre of comedy theatrically contains the witchcraft unleashed in this play thus making this terrible power in both Ravenna and Hecate’s witch space less threatening. However, as discussed in previous chapters, the performativity of the stage centralized in the stage property of the witch’s cauldron can potentially blur the tenuous boundaries of stage space and slip from the mimetic to the kinetic. Middleton furthers Marlowe’s demonic experiment in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and even more demonstratively in The Witch by staging the imaginative possibilities of witchcraft wherein the danger of performing occult activity might actually produce the dark forces the magical brews and incantations calls forth onto the public stage.                                                               134 Yachnin, Paul. “Scandalous Trades: Middleton’s ‘The Witch.’ the ‘Populuxe” Market and the Politics of the Theater.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. 12. (1999). 223-227. 144  The centrality of witch culture in the political and social system of early modern England is dramatically staged in the trial of Anne Turner as an accessory in Overbury’s murder. Traister explains that two letters from Howard, now lost, were introduced as evidence against Turner. In one letter, Howard addresses Turner as the recipient, and the other begins with “Sweet Father” (182). Lord Chief Justice Edmund Coke, appointed by King James to investigate and prosecute those responsible for this crime, argued that the second letter referred to Simon Forman, an astrologer and physician who both Turner and Howard had visited presumably for his professional advice. Traister explains that the only records of these letters are in the trial transcripts, and she argues that Coke’s dramatic rendition of the letters implicated Forman as an accomplice. Traister argues that Forman, who had died before the trials began, was not involved in this conspiracy against Overbury, but Coke represented Forman as not only an accessory to the murder but as a diabolic force. 135 Coke referred to Turner as “the daughter of the devil Forman.” 136 Mrs. Forman testified against Turner telling the court that her husband and Turner would spend hours alone behind closed doors, and after the death of Forman, Turner tried to retrieve papers that Mrs. Forman argued possibly implicated both Turner and Howard in the bewitching of the Earl of Essex that caused his impotence, and in Overbury’s murder. Coke’s introduced evidence confiscated from Turner’s residence that included “a black scarf full of white crosses and ‘pictures of a man and woman in copulation, made in lead.’” 137 Also, parchments with Christian symbolism and presumably magical                                                               135 Traister 182. 136 qtd. in Traister 185. 137 qtd. in Traister 184. 145  inscriptions, similar to what Faustus uses in Marlowe’s play, were also presented as evidence, and the record notes how the crowd in the scaffolds reacted in fear and anxiety “as if the devil had been present.” 138 Traister’s important analysis shows us how Cokes successfully demonized Forman, and witched Turner who claimed “had the seven deadly sins: vis. a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon, and a murderer.” 139 Turner was found guilty and executed for murder, and Forman’s reputation ruined. As Traister argues, the patriarchal authority of the court insisted that the young aristocratic woman, Frances Howard, was influenced by the older woman from the lower classes whose sexuality and witchy activities proved her guilt. Expanding on Traister’s claim, I argue that both Howard’s and Turner’s assertion of female agency and sexuality disrupted this patriarchal system and charged the Overbury murder trials of Howard and Turner with an illicit and salacious energy that was further electrified with Howard’s and Turner’s repeated turns to witchcraft to manipulate this patriarchal system to their respective female desires. It is this female subversive power channeled through witch culture that Middleton uses in The Witch to both entertain and seduce the audience with the thrilling encounter of forbidden desires. In Ravenna where court culture is on display , oodstuffs are contaminated and the pleasure of eating disrupted for the purpose of constraining female agency. In the subculture space where women enjoy economic and sexual freedom, cooking and eating are celebrated. Within their spatial location, these marginalized characters regulate the action. In this play, an aggressive and powerfully sensual woman commands this                                                               138 qtd. in Traister 184. 139 qtd. in Traister 185. 146  space—a professional witch in charge of a community of witches. The witch’s cauldron is the vessel of their trade, and they offer their magical products to serve the dominant community of Ravenna. In Ravenna, there is a palpable male fear of female sexuality. The female body in this community is strictly controlled and monitored. This is playfully contrasted with the witches’ unbridled sexuality. Middleton’s The Witch celebrates the sexual and economic freedom of Hecate’s community of witches, a freedom cultivated through an intimate knowledge of occult secrets. This celebration of the witch’s craft recognizes the knowledge procured, developed, and produced by the public stage. The Witch begins with a wedding banquet that is disrupted before it begins. Sebastian opens the play espousing his need to revenge the loss of his fiancé. He claims that Isabella “is my wife by contract before heaven” (1.1.3). They had a verbal contract or “holdfast” that are not legally binding but culturally accepted. Sebastian has just returned from the wars with the Duke, and finds his beloved Isabella marrying Antonio. Sebastian’s discourse of revenge foreshadows the Duchess’s desire to avenge the desecration of her father’s body. At the banquet where a level of violence against the sweet delicacies displayed is expected, the Duke sets the violent tone with his toast to the newlyweds. He produces “a soldier’s cup” and explains it is the skull of his slain enemy—the Duchess’s father. Melissa Walter explains that the drinking from the father’s skull at a wedding feast suggests the Anglican ideology of marriage in which two becoming one flesh with the husband as the head of the wife. 140 This perversion of the                                                               140 Walter, Melissa. “Drinking From Skulls and The Politics of Incorporation In Early Stuart Drama.” At The Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; v. 18. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2007 (93-105). 147  marriage vows reveals a crisis of male authority. The Duke’s need to publically humiliate his new bride, his war prize, exhibits a demonstrative weakness in the Duke’s perception of his authority and masculinity. Ironically, the Duke’s savage move empowers the Duchess to seek out female assistance to avenge herself and her father. This sadistic disruption of the wedding banquet also calls attention to the newly wedded couple whose ritual feast has been violently marked. The overt displays of consumption that could signify fertility and fruitfulness for this couple are instead presented as sterile and impotent. Traditionally, the skull references the memento mori, and forces a contemplation of death. At least for this married couple, the death head of the Duchess’s father not only suggests mortality but also a lack of sexual potency. This violent portent of sterility is countered by Francisca’s illicit fertility. Forced to drink from the skull, she whispers to herself “[t]his’s the worst fright / that could come / To a concealed great belly” (1.1.132-33). In this opening scene, female sexuality has been cursed, condemned, and endangered by male authority. This ghoulish act of passing the Duchess’s father’s skull among the wedding party, however, reiterates the early modern stage practice of the skull as a stage property. As Sofer explains Shakespeare’s Hamlet establishes the stage prop of the skull as an iconic object of stage history. 141 Hans Holbien’s The Ambassadors (1533) arguably initiated the sixteenth century obsession with the anamorphic skull with its disturbing projection of death. Middleton pressures this citational process creating a macabre but comedic moment as each character is forced to interact with the grisly skull. Unlike Hamlet who contemplates mortality while holding Yorick’s skull in a graveyard, the                                                               141 Sofer. The Stage Life of Props. 10. 148  characters in The Witch are rapidly moved from celebrating life in the form of a wedding feast to holding death in their hands. The violent physical reaction of each character mashes up the comical and tragic, creating an uncomfortable and uncanny humor. By the end of this first scene, three of the main characters are so distressed that they announce their intent to seek out the services of the witches to revenge their perceived injustices. Sebastian seeks a means to punish the man who married the woman he believed himself to be contracted to; the Duchess wants revenge on the husband who forces her to drink from her conquered father’s skull both publically and privately; Almachildes simply wants to satisfy his lust. Middleton moves us from the grisly scene with the skull cup to Hecate’s disturbing actions of stuffing herbs into an “unbaptised brat” (1.2.18). Hecate’s witch community is an open secret to the dominant culture of Ravenna. We first meet Hecate in Act 1, scene 2 where she is in the process of picking herbs that she stuffs into the orifices of the dead baby who she carries onto the stage. Hecate’s opening lines are taken from Reginald Scott’s Discovery of Witchcraft in which he argues against the power or the possibility of witches and witchcraft. 142 As in Macbeth, early modern playwrights ironically often turned to his work for their staging of witch and witchcraft. Hecate chants a list of familiars’s names, herbs, and spirits to enchant the herbs she continues to stuff into the baby. In this scene, Hecate and her witches are busily preparing their magical brews and potions. The baby stuffed with fresh herbs, after boiling in the cauldron, will produce the magical ointment that allows these women to defy laws of nature and fly above their community where they each then seek out a young man whom they can                                                               142 Scott, Reginald. The Discovery of Witchcraft. ed. John Rodker (1930). New York: Dover Publications. 1972. Ch 33, 455. 149  sexually ravage. Middleton plays with the performativity of the stage in this scene. The theatrical process defamiliarizes the familiar, thus opening up fractures and cracks that allow critiques of supposedly stable ideologies and institutions. Yet, in this play, Middleton stages the unfamiliar as familiar. In other words, he domesticates Hecate’s witch space. “Where’s Firestone? our son Firestone!” (1.2.64), Hecate calls out as she prepares the “brazen dish” (1.2.66), another magical brew. Firestone enters and the ensuing conversation between mother and son blends the domestic with the chilling and gruesome discussion of incest and demonic rape. Hecate first greets her son by acknowledging him as her heir to this witch space. She tells him, “Thou shalt have all when I die—and that will be / Even just at twelve o’clock at night come three year” (1.2.67-68). As mentioned earlier, Hecate calmly accepts her fate as she uses the forbidden demonic knowledge to busily prepare the ointment for night flying. Mother and son banter back and forth about the devil, and the potions with their grisly ingredients. Though the content of the conversation seems unnatural, this type of scene is repeated in every domestic space. This uncanny domestic scene is further exploited when Firestone begs to ride the Nightmare instead of sleeping with his mother. Hecate at first seems to respond as most mothers would: “You’re a kind son! / But ‘tis the nature of you all, I see that” (1.2.96-97). All children explore their sense of independence from their parents. But this seemingly natural response is followed by Hecate’s lament that her son would rather have sexual intercourse with other women instead of his own mother. To further concentrate this scene beyond the audience’s perception of the natural world, Firestone suggests the Cat sexually satisfy his mother that night instead of him. The discussion of 150  this incestual, beastly, and illicit female sexuality directly comments on the restraining of female sexuality by male authority in the dominant culture of Ravenna as well as addressing the exploitation of Turner’s sexuality in the murder trial. Middleton’s domestic scenes of witchcraft highlight a fearsome power controlled by the early modern stage. These scenes normalize an aggressive female sexuality and indulgent morbid spectacle. Though initially off stage, the witch’s cauldron quickens the normalization impulse. Hecate calls out to Stadlin, who responds “Here, sweating at the vessel” (1.2.8). Stadlin and Hoppo remain offstage with the cauldron as they respond to Hecate’s queries about their witch’s brew. The witches’s discourse brings us into the sensuous process of cooking up spells. Hecate calls out to “Boil it well” (1.2.8), so we feel the intense heat that forces Stadlin to sweat. Hoppo adds further movement to the process by stating “It gallops now” (1.2.8). The Oxford English dictionary cites Middleton’s play as the origin for the use of gallop to mean rapid boiling. 143 As the witches continue to cook up their brew, they further call attention to the sensuality of the process. Hecate asks if the fire is blue enough, and Stadlin replies, “The nips of fairies upon maids’s white hips / Are not more perfect azure “ (1.2.12/13). The juxtaposition of the flaming blue intense heat seething in the cauldron with the physical pinch of a fairy on female flesh embodies the sensual experience of cooking. It is interesting that Stadlin uses fairy lore that claims fairies pinch lazy maids, or young women who do not take their labor seriously whereas this play demonstrates the significance and import of female labor.                                                               143 OED gallop v.2. 151  As the characters from Ravenna descend upon the witches’s space, our attention is again drawn to the link between the witch, cauldron and the early modern stage. As Yachnin argues, it is important to read The Witch “in terms of a nascent entertainment market” and the “scandalous trades” practiced in this play and the institution of the theater. 144 Hecate and her witches are working women. They revel in their witchiness and participate in the community by selling their magical potions and charms to those who fear their turn to evil, but turn nonetheless. The witch’s cauldron is the locus of this community of women whose products are crafted within a domestic space. The witch’s space, however, is also public space since their community is accessible to the dominant culture, similar to the theatrical space of the early modern stage. This play, ironically gestures towards the stage as an economic source for women. Almachildes offers Hecate a “toad in marchpane” as payment for her services (1.2.26). Hecate accepts Almachildes token, but she requires more than a piece of marzipan for her products. She conjures up a feast while her cat plays the fiddle to lull her prey into sexual submission to her desires (1.2.230). The offering of marzipan and the magical feast suggests the female confectioners who supplied the theater with their tasty treats for various productions. Natasha Korda, in Domestic Economies explains that women worked in a diversity of roles such as female basket weavers and confectioners who produced their products for the stage. These products were possibly used as the buck- basket for Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and for “banqueting stuff” in the                                                               144 Yachnin 218. 152  Taming of the Shrew (210). 145 Almachildes’s marzipan was no doubt sourced out to one of these female laborers. Almachildes continues to call attention to this witch space as a female source of income. When the Cat enters playing the fiddle while Hecate’s magical banquet manifests on stage, he cries out “the cat and fiddle? An excellent ordinary” (1.3.229). I suggest Middleton is referring to an alehouse that might have been a locale frequented by the theatrical community and their audience. There were numerous taverns and alehouses called The Cat and Fiddle. Since it was a common name for a food and drink establishment, one can assume that the early modern audience would recognize Hecate’s witch community as an alehouse. In her alehouse, Hecate whips up food by magic, and entertains her customers in a variety of witchy kind of ways. Where the main plot of the play is concerned with controlling female sexuality within the dominant culture, the witch community celebrates female economic freedom while enjoying the power and pleasure of food. This enjoyment of eating as spectacle calls attention to the Christian ideology, which Coveney explains thought “hearty eating could be a mortal sin.” 146 Coveney further contends that “both sex and food have been part of a ‘problem of pleasure’ since antiquity (11). The theatrical spectacle of witches flying in Act 3. scene 3, conflates this anxiety over the pleasure of sex and food. Though the cauldron remains offstage, the food products, a mix of gruesome ingredients similar to what is used in Macbeth in Act 4, scene 1. In both plays, an unbaptised baby is an invaluable ingredient. Since infant morality was extremely high at this time, babies were usually baptized within three days                                                               145 Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. 210. 146 Coveney 11, 46. 153  of their birth, so the child was protected from diabolic forces such as witchcraft. Unbaptized babies were usually bastards born out of wedlock such as Francisca’s child. She gives birth to her child at a location on the margins of her brother’s authority, and Aberzanes, her lover, pays an old woman to deliver the child to a house where he or she will supposedly be raised as part of that household’s family. Neither Franscica nor Aberzanes confirm that the child is safely delivered to a welcoming home. Middleton leaves the fate of the unnamed infant ambiguous. Thus the child produced by illicit sex according to the dominant culture’s codes of female sexuality could possibly end up in the witch’s cauldron, serving as an invaluable ingredient for the witches’s consumption. The witches in Act 3, scene 3 prepare their bodies for flight not only by consuming ghastly and chthonic food, but also by being consumed as food. Stadlin brags that “ a bat hung at my lips three times / As we came through the woods, and drank her fill” (3.3.7-8). As discussed in Chapter 1, the blood of Christ was a scared and powerful source of spiritual food before the Reformation. A post reformation English audience, would most likely read this moment as a corruption of this sacred act, a Catholic ideology that Middleton collapses into witchcraft. The witches’s potion also required eggs from a variety of sources of reptiles. Eggs are traditionally a pagan symbol of fertility that would seem to enhance the aggressive female sexuality the witches exhibit. While Hecate and Stadlin and their familiars anoint their bodies in a feverish anticipation of a night of flying and sexual intercourse, Firestone grumpily comments on the female energy exciting the night air, referring to these women as “foul sluts” (3.3.17), and wishing his mother “would break [her] neck” (3.3.36), so he could claim his inheritance and assert his authority over this female community. Firestone’s commentary 154  provides a comedic lament of the lack of male power in this witch space. Yet Hecate offers her son a moment to demonstrate his power by helping her into the air. She rises and flies to Robert Jonson’s melody “Come Away, Hecate!” This song also accompanies the goddess’s Hecate’s flight in Macbeth in Act 3, scene 5. In Macbeth, Hecate has chastised her witches for their mischief with Macbeth, but also calls them into the cauldron scene. As she exits Act 3, scene 5, her familiar sings Jonson’s tune. The words to the song repeat much of the action of Act 3, scene 3 of The Witch, calling on Stadlin and Hoppo, and singing of the sipping of blood. Yet the haunting melody in Macbeth recognizes the multiple worlds Hecate inhabits. The Baldung Grien woodcuts discussed in the previous chapter imagines the erotic potential of the witches’s female bodies flying through the air. Their long wild hair whirls around their fleshy bodies with their legs straddling a broom, stick, or the nightmare—a demonic creature in the shape of a horse that flies in the night and disturbs the silence and peace of sleepers. Hecate informs us in Act 1, scene 2 when Almachildes visits her that her “blood stirs” (195) when she sees him because she has sexually assaulted him in the guise of an incubus—a demonic shape that rapes men and women while they sleep—on several of her night rides. The lusty ravenous sexuality of the witches body flying freely in the night air is a disturbing fantastical spectacle of both witch and stage craft. Yet, as in Macbeth, it is the cauldron scene in Act 5, scene 2 of The Witch that exudes the power of witchcraft. In Macbeth, Hecate devises the cauldron scene as an act of retribution against Macbeth. In The Witch, Hecate demands the cauldron scene because the Duchess doubted her power. Hecate and her crew gather together “three ounces from 155  the red-haired girl / I killed last midnight” (5.2.55-56), herbs and salves, bat’s blood, lizard’s brains, juice form a toad and adder’s oil (5.3.69-71). Hecate sings as she stirs the pot and repeats the chant we heard her sing when she first appeared in Act 1, scene 2. As in Macbeth, the witches’s chant as the circle the cauldron adding each ingredient in perfect rhythm. The cauldron blazes as they dance and sing “Round, around, around, about, about--/ All ill come running in, all good keep out!” (2.1.75-76). Middleton’s reiteration of Macbeth’s cauldron calls attention to the performative properties of the witch’s cauldron. The cauldron seethes with unwholesome ingredients that produce an alchemical mixture “to the tune of damnation” (5.3.81). As we saw in Macbeth, this scene is charged with female power intent on disrupting the patriarchal system that denies and condemns this exertion of women’s agency demonstrated through the female labor of cooking. This powerful electrifying scene of women publicly defying cultural codes of feminine behavior ends delightfully in “reverence to yond peeping moon” (5.3.83). The witches and the public stage celebrate and honor the symbol of the triple goddess, Hecate, with a song and dance of praise. Like Macbeth, the conclusion of The Witch is ambiguous. Antonio who has intimated, threatened, and physically punished the women he rules over falls into the hellmouth offstage. But the patriarchal system remains unchanged. The Governor is willing to punish his niece, Isabella, and the Duchess despite the lies and savage abuse of their respective husbands, and the Duke seemingly rises from the dead. The willful Duchess is drained of power and submits to the rule of male authority. Isabella and Sebastian reunite, so there is the promise of a marriage, but the promise of female agency in the dominant community, much as in the Overbury trials, is seemingly lost. But the 156  witch’s cauldron seethes beneath the stage boards with its promise of the unsettling potential of female and theatrical spectacle. 157  Epilogue: Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and The Early Modern Stage Ben Jonson’s metatheatrical Bartholomew Faire is stuffed with stage properties. From hobbyhorses to gingerbread, this play offers a plethora of sensual delight for the senses to dine on. The most significant stage prop, however, never trods the stage boards. Instead, Ursla’s great cauldron seethes just off stage with the promise of succulent pork to appease the audience’s appetite. In this play, Jonson demonstrates how the instruments of damnation and divine retribution as stage properties are embedded in stage space. The blazing cauldron hidden from the audience’s gaze takes on an even more ominous presence of retribution. It tantalizingly offers the smell and taste of the forbidden meat, and teases the audience to appease their unruly desires. In Bartholomew Faire, the call of the cauldron’s retribution is manifested in Ursla’s tent, where she serves pig and ale. Ursla’s space becomes the central location of the play. Ursla’s space then suggests the early modern playhouses as sites of consumption where the audience interacts with the staging of the play in which food and drink constantly circulates just as the food and drink stalls inside and on the periphery of the playhouse circulated nuts, apples, oranges, and beer. Jonson’s play satirizes puritan ideology. But Ursla, the pig woman, commands the show at least at the fair. When we first enter the fair, the quality of the food sold by female vendors is immediately interrogated. Leatherhead questions the quality of Joan Trash’s gingerbread. As we saw in earlier representations of women in the food and drink trade, they are often accused of adulterating their products with unwholesome ingredients Yet we soon discover there is some gender equality among the vendors in this fair. Though Jonson marks Joan with the name Trash thus suggesting her food products are 158  indeed unsavory, Joan demands equality. She paid the same price for her space as the peddler, and her products are equal to his. We next meet Ursla whose pork products are consumed by most of the characters in the main plot of the play who represent the dominant male culture. Ursla walks on stage complaining “I am all fire and fat, Nightingale, I shall e’en melt away to the first woman, a rib again. (2.2.48-59). As we experienced with Stadlin in The Witch, Ursla brings us into the cooking process with her intimate description of sweating. She tells us how “I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great garden- pot; you may follow the S’s I make” (50-52). Referring to herself as Eve, “a rib again,” Ursla draws our attention to the biblical narrative of man’s fall into temptation. Her corpulent body leaks and even pours out its bodily fluids, watering the ground and making S’s, a sexual innuendo with a serpent’s hiss. Though the cauldron is kept off stage, Ursla’s space seems like a hellmouth sending out its sweet scent of boiling pork for all sinners to come and taste. In Act 2, scene 5, Ursla takes to the stage armed with a firebrand that suggests the early iconography of the hellmouth with its devils poking souls with meat hooks. Ursla uses kitchen utensils to berate her boy Mooncalf for not tending the fires properly, and promises to roast him “till your eyes drop out” (2.5.65) if he fails to tend the fires again. The constant references to the boiling cauldron of pork meat, and roaring flames strongly suggests a fiery hellish space. In Macbeth, the witches’s bodies are a site of contestation as they are vaporous and physical beings. Ursla’s corpulent physical body also upsets dominant codes of physical presence. Quarlous and Winwife refer to her as “Body o’ the Fair!” (2.5.66), and “An inspired vessel of kitchen stuff” (2.5.72). Busy argues that Ursla 159  bears the marks “of the three enemies of man: the World, as being in the Fair; the Devil, as being in the fire; and the Flesh, as being herself” (3.6.34-35). These male characters condemn Ursla for her economic freedom. The fair is her business space wherein she sells the products of her labor. Male authority reads Ursla as the fair itself; she embodies the fair; she embodies kitchen stuff, and male authority demands her damnation for her cauldron’s fire and her fleshy self. Quarlous even asks if there “may be a fine new cucking stool i’ the Fair” (2.5.106) that overtly marks her as a witch. Yet Jonson’s play celebrates Ursla. In Act 2, scene 5, Ursla enters the scene with a pan of scalding water in order to battle the men who are disrupting her business. She falls and scalds herself. The vendors of the fair come to her assistance, place her in a chair, and carry her to her tent. The comradely and rivalry among the members of this sub-culture suggests the sub-culture of the early modern stage. This marginalized group would not only include the players and playwrights but those who build the sets and props as well as the food stalls in the theater and the alehouses and taverns directly outside the theatrical space. Jonson gestures to this theater community in Act 4, scene 1 when Cokes engages the Costard-Monger while Nightingale trips him, unbeknownst to Cokes. As the Costard-Monger falls, his pears roll out over the stage and possibly into the audience. 147 Nunn and W.J. Lawrence argue there is evidence that theatrical producers timed the staging of their plays when they presumed their audience would need to snack. Thus apples and pears were sold during certain points in the performance, and Lawrence discusses how “the annoyance occasioned not only to the players but to concentrative                                                               147 Nunn suggests the clumsy Cokes might have caused even further confusion with fruit flying everywhere. 160  playgoers by the nut-cracker.” 148 On stage cooking and the sight of foodstuffs must have contributed to early modern playgoers need for a snack. In Ursla’s tent, the godly and the righteous indulge in pig and ale, and the puritan Busy proves the most voracious glutton. When Justice Overdo seeks to condemn Ursla who he calls “O the sow of enormity” (5.6.55), his wife who has drunk too much ale vomits in front of him and the other characters jammed into Ursla’s tent. Ursla’s pig and ale successfully undermines male authority since Overdo drops all charges, and invites everyone at the fair, high and low, to his home to enjoy his hospitality. Jonson’s representation of women cooking for public consumption reiterates the traditional demonizing of this female labor. Jonson’s Ursla demonized and witched by the male authority in this play. Yet Ursla claims this hellish power as her own, and rules over her spaces san male authority. This female move of constructing an alliance with demonic power brings us back to the narratives of the dishonest alewife and Marjorie Coorson with whom I began this study on women in the food and drink trade. These female cooks, brewsters, and witches demonstrate a fierce power that defies the Christian ideology that argues for their damnation. Yet it is in this Christian damnation these women find power. The Christian iconography of damnation embodies this female power as it is imagined as an action of cooking and feeding. The hellmouth itself is delineated with a kitchen space, and every day kitchen utensils are the devil’s weapons against the sinful souls. The witch’s cauldron, a vessel boiling on the hearth in most early modern peoples’s homes, plays a prominent role in the Christian God’s performance of divine retribution.                                                               148 Lawrence, William John. Those nut-cracking Elizabethans. New York: Haskell House Publishers. 1969. 2. 161  Though the stage property of the hellmouth may have had a brief career on the public stage, but its stage presence is so palpable, many scholars such as Allan Dessen and Stanley Wells refer to the trapdoor as the hellmouth as if hell perpetually seethes beneath the stage boards. The witch’s cauldron that enters stage space through the hellmouth or trapdoor reiterates this citational process. Thus the early modern stage positions itself as the force controlling this unstable power, a theatrical space in which the impossible is imagined and given material substance. The stage properties of the hellmouth and the witch’s cauldron are invested with multiple narratives of hell and damnation, Christian ideals of salvation, theatrical spectacle, witchcraft and women cooking. These dramatic stage properties, devised from Catholic iconography, meaningfully critique and revise the networks of cultural and religious relationships divested in these stage props for its Protestant audience.   162  Bibliography Anon. “The Harrowing of Hell.” The Chester Pageant of the Cooks and Innkeepers. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. ed. A.C. Cawley. London: J. M. Dent, 1974. Anon. “The Harrowing of Hell. The York Pageant of The Saddler’s Play. <http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/yorkplays/York37.html>, November 2011. Anon. A Calendare of Dramatic Records in the Livery Companies of London. Eds. Roberson and Gordon. Malone Society by Charles Batey at the University Press, 1954. Anon. Newes From Scotland (1592) ed. G. B. Harrison. San Diego: Book Tree. 2002. Barish, Jonas A. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation interrogates the early modern stage properties of the hellmouth and its cauldron that terrified and fascinated early modern audiences with their performances of damnation and divine retribution. Hell, that fearsome place from which no one but the devil seems to escape, over the course of the sixteenth century becomes reduced to a stage prop, but this stage property has unique powers. It enthralls its audience, first with horrific acts of boiling up the ungodly in a blazing cauldron to feed the sinful souls to the hellmouth, and then in scenes of damnation as those sinners fall into the gaping jaws of the mouth to hell. These stage props of the hellmouth and cauldron are powerfully charged with the Catholic iconography that devised the image, the Reformation ideology that embraced it, and the Post-Reformation theology and practices in which the image produced ridicule, fear and fascination. ❧ Specifically, the stage property of the hellmouth gives us a fresh understanding of the ways in which early modern peoples imagined hell and damnation as a spectacle of cooking and feeding. In sacred art, the hellmouth opens up into a process of damnation that is often artistically depicted as kitchen space. Everyday kitchen utensils such as meat hooks, knives, and butcher blocks are instruments with which to torture the damned. The centrality of the cauldron in the visual formula of the hellmouth marks a disturbing relationship between hell’s kitchen and the domestic kitchen space in a household. The religious artists that created the iconography of the hellmouth appropriated kitchen space into their renditions of damnation to use that female violence in the butchering and bleeding of the human soul as food for the hellmouth. This sacred art of divine retribution and damnation uses cultural fears of the female labor of cooking, and exploits social and moral notions of eating. The plays I examine in this study depict these ideas of nurturance and pollution, and focus on the body as a site of constant tension that wavers between deficiency and excess. In these plays, the cooking and eating of food are meditations on the divine retribution and damnation of the protagonist. In each play, a hellmouth emerges to snack on the sinful or a cauldron rises from the trapdoor to boil the ungodly. Thus, this study concentrates on works that theatrically deploy a spectacular hellmouth or the witch’s blazing cauldron. ❧ First, I trace the evolution of the hellmouth during the medieval period when it first appears in English psalters. The English renditions of the hellmouth and cauldron gripped the imagination of early Christianity, moving into the public sphere as reliefs and frescoes on parish churches, and as a stage prop in the medieval cycle plays for the Corpus Christi Pageant. Next, I look at Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe seems to be one of the first playwrights to deploy both the hellmouth and cauldron onto the early modern stage as instruments of the Christian God’s justice against the reprobate. Pride, avarice, gluttony, and ambition festers in his protagonists’ souls while each fights against the social system that condemns them. In these plays, Marlowe responds to the theater critics who condemn his plays and the early modern stage itself by using the demonic valences of the hellmouth and cauldron to draw attention to the institution of the theater as diabolic space. The hellmouth hiding in the Discovery Space, and the cauldron simmering beneath the stage boards invests the early modern stage with the power to control the demonic energy burning within these stage properties. ❧ The first half of my project establishes the rich iconography of the hellmouth and its cauldron, and examines the spiritual and theatrical potency of these props in arguably their debut on the public stage. The second half of this study turns to the important cultural and political work the witch’s cauldron performs on stage. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch continue Marlowe’s demonic experiment. Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s plays demonstrate the power of the cauldron to inflict divine justice as a distinctive act of female labor—cooking. In each of these plays, the cauldron rises up from the hellish space beneath the stage to join the action of the play and perform its part in divine retribution. Finally, I move to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a play that shows us the extent to which the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron mark the early modern stage as the physical location of the supernatural realm of hell. He stages the cauldron off stage, but the blazing vessel’s presence is a palpable force in the play. His character, Ursula, similar to Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s witches, embodies the sweating cauldron on stage, and uses this power to manipulate and disrupt the social and political hierarchy. ❧ Scholars have not yet considered the intervention these stage properties make in received ideas about hell, female labor, and the early modern stage, and this study addresses this gap. A study of these stage properties shows us how the early modern theater used the cultural memories of demonic power infused in these objects to assert its authority, however transitory. This study takes as its premise W. B. Worthen’s argument for the performativity of the stage—the potential of a performance to transgress its prescribed boundaries. Theatrical performance is a citational process, and the stage props of the hellmouth and the witch’s cauldron are invested with this performative potential. Thus these objects of sacred and theatre culture are endowed with a fearsome tension that threatens to transgress the seemingly rigid boundaries of the possible with imaginative and chaotic performances of the impossible. ❧ Many consumers of the early modern stage believed in the diabolic and witchcraft. Thus appropriating and relocating this fearsome power onto the stage through the theatrical properties of the hellmouth and the witch’s cauldron positions the early modern theater as housing and containing the terrible power of damnation and retribution. The early modern stage consumes this diabolic, witchy, feminized power to empower the institution of the stage and its theatrical productions the stage offers up for public consumption.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Mello, M. Barbara (author)

Core Title From the hellmouth to the witch's cauldron: cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/31/2014

Defense Date 04/26/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cauldron,Cooking,damnation,Devil,eating,female labor,Hell,hellmouth,OAI-PMH Harvest,retribution,witch

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemon, Rebecca (committee chair), Harkness, Deborah (committee member), Rollo, David (committee member), Smith, Bruce R. (committee member)

Creator Email bmello10@hotmail.com,mmello@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-78936

Unique identifier UC11288758

Identifier usctheses-c3-78936 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MelloMBarb-1080.pdf

Dmrecord 78936

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Mello, M. Barbara

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA