Sunday, March 16, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
The English Reformation caused a rift between England and the Catholic nations of Europe, and also between a newly Protestant English people and their Catholic past. This traditional Catholic past did not disappear overnight, and the English theatre, emerging as a mass medium in the 1580s, reflected and resurrected its legacy. This resurrection of England’s Catholic past creates an opportunity for comparison with another country that maintained its Catholic identity, Spain. This paper explores English Renaissance drama’s formation of a new identity based on doubt through a concern with the self, contrasting it with Spanish Golden Age drama’s visual, hierarchical focus. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Mira de Amescua’s El Esclavo del Demonio demonstrate this cultural difference through their portrayals of religion and salvation. Both plays share plotlines that involve the temptation and damnation of the protagonist but reach very different conclusions: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus presents us with a uniquely English religious doubt that can only be solved through an inner struggle while Mira de Amescua uses divine intervention to reinforce a religious tradition. Inner and outer worlds clash in these plays as do the worldviews of England and Spain.
