The Folk-Play in Marlowe's<i>Doctor Faustus</i>

Pettitt, Thomas

doi:10.1080/0015587x.1980.9716157

Folklore

1980

DOI: 10.1080/0015587x.1980.9716157

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The Folk-Play in Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus

Thomas Pettitt¹

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Cited by 4 publications

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“…As cultural achievements emerging from an Elizabethan theatre precariously poised between literature and popular culture (Lunney, 2002), the plays of Christopher Marlowe have responded positively to approaches deploying the methods and materials of folklore. These include not merely, and rather obviously, identifying folk elements in the plays (Pettitt, 1980), but more fundamentally, discerning the presence and understanding the function of dramatic formulas analogous to the verbal formulas of ballads and oral epics, or diagnosing symptoms of oral transmission in the surviving text of The Massacre at Paris and the A-text of Doctor Faustus (Pettitt, 1988(Pettitt, , 2003. 1 The present study continues this line of research, but more immediately was both inspired and provoked by the report of a paper given by Patrick Ryan to the 1996 meeting of the Marlowe Society of America, on the Christian imagery behind Edward II, since published under the title 'Marlowe's Edward II and the Medieval Passion Play' (Ryan, 1997(Ryan, , 1998.…”

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'Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt': vernacular topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

Pettitt

2005

Orbis Litterarum

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Matching the literary and rhetorical topoi of medieval Latin and neoclassical literature, early European traditional culture deployed narrative, iconographic and dramatic formulas which effectively functioned as ‘vernacular’ topoi. Through repeated occurrence each acquired distinctive resonances which then did not need to be expressed more elaborately in a given work, so leaving modern scholarship the task of reconstructing them. At least three such vernacular topoi – mock shaving, consignment to a cesspit, and impaling on a spit – occur in the sufferings Marlowe associates with the death of the King in Edward II, either by adapting his historical sources, or by choosing between alternatives. Exploration of their occurrences in medieval and folkloristic sources reveals that these topoi invoke liminality by subjecting ambivalent creatures (fools, pigs, babewyns) to transgressive experience (cooking, ‘washing’ in filth) in interstitial environments (carnival, sewers, manuscript margins). Their presence reinforces, even as it is triggered by, Edward's own liminality in relation to a number of categories, and is compatible with recent suggestions linking Marlowe's play to the sufferings of Christ developed in Baroque religiosity.

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'Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt': vernacular topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

Pettitt

2005

Orbis Litterarum

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“…I am grateful to Dr. Pettitt for letting me see both the original paper and the revised article in manuscript. See alsoPettitt 1980 and…”

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The Taming of a Shrew: Composition as Induction to Authorship

Eriksen¹

2005

NJES

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, has a shorter precursor with an approximately identical title has until fairly recently hindered serious consideration of A Shrew in its own right. 1 When editors and critics of Shakespeare have compared it to The Shrew, the majority has-not surprisingly-found it to be inferior in most respects. 2 If we add to the deemed inferiority that A Shrew is shorter than many Elizabethan plays, it was early relegated to the slippery category of 'bad quartos.' 3 The problem is however that the comedy is remarkably 'good' in terms of plot structure, the quality of the dialogue, and-I would argue-even in terms of some aspects of style. 4 In A Shrew there are no blatant loose ends or obvious gaps, whereas in The Shrew the metadramatic Sly material does not survive the Induction. In view of its relative shortness, A Shrew may have been cut for provincial acting during the plague of 1592-94, but then the cuts were arguably executed with discernment. Still, the play's Italianate integration of plots is advanced even for the year of its publication while its style of speech construction, I propose, strongly suggests that it antedates 1590 and is by a playwright intimate with the compositional techniques of Marlowe.

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“…Such shortcomings in the quality of the evidence could not be compensated for by what E. R. Leach dismissed as the "massive futility" of its quantity; indeed on close examination of Frazer's sources Joseph Fontenrose could find no certain instance in the Old World, ancient or modern, of an annual or periodic sacrifice of a "divine king" to promote the fertility of his people and land. 34 As the anthropologist William Bascome repeatedly sought to impress on 32 Studies of folk drama influence on early drama (as opposed to the origins of early drama in folk drama) include: Friedenreich 1974;Hewitt 1949;Montgomerie 1979;Pettitt 1980;Ridden 1998;Thorne 1965;Wincor 1950. 33 Woodbridge and Berry 1992;Woodbridge 1987.…”

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When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian

Pettitt

2005

NJES

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Collecting traditional tales in Lincolnshire towards the end of the nineteenth century, the folklorist M.C. Balfour had the good fortune to encounter "an old man from Lindsey," who alongside a rich fund of legends could also offer a historical account of the picturesque local lore and custom they reflected. For in earlier times, his grandfather had told him, people were much concerned about the forces in nature which could affect their well-being, and to control or placate the "bogles", the vaguely conceived supernatural beings in which these forces were invested, they practised many ritual observances which were hardly in conformity with the doctrines and ceremonies of established religion: the folk had ideas of their own, and ways of their own, as they'd kept up years and years and hundreds of years, since the time when there weren't no church, leastwise no church of that sort. ... So there were, so to say, two churches; the one with priests and candles, and all that; the other just a lot of old ways, kept up all unbeknown and hidden-like, midst the folk themselves.

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The Folk-Play in Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

'Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt': vernacular topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

'Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt': vernacular topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

The Taming of a Shrew: Composition as Induction to Authorship

When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian

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