One Devil Too Many

The dangers of pretending to conjure on stage

Here’s a question for you:

What’s the difference between speaking the words of a magical ritual as part of a theatrical performance and speaking them for real to conjure demons?

The answer:

As far as the demons are concerned, there might be no difference at all.

This is the fear that lurks behind a wonderful urban legend that grew up around Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1588). The play tells the story of a scholar who sells his soul in return for supernatural powers, and I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that it doesn’t end particularly well for him.  

Alleyn Conjures Devils

The actor who first played the role of Faustus, Edward Alleyn, was known for his powerful performances. He was a great speechmaker, capable of holding the audience in the palm of his hand, of becoming a tragic hero or embittered tyrant—or, indeed, a doomed magician.

There was something so viscerally thrilling about hearing occult invocations spoken aloud by such a stage presence and seeing magic mimicked so convincingly in the flesh that a rumour began to spread about the conjuration scenes of Doctor Faustus.

When the actors playing the devils had taken to the stage, audiences had allegedly counted one devil too many running around the playhouse. One of them, presumably, wasn’t an actor after all, but something that had been listening to the words that the pretend-magician had spoken, had taken them seriously, and was answering his magical summons.     

The Black Book

The idea of real devils manifesting in theatres was perpetuated by another early modern playwright, Thomas Middleton, in his Black Book (1604), a prose text set during a time when a plague had meant the theatres had been ordered to close (imagine that). Here, The Devil himself rises from the trapdoor of The Globe Theatre and heads out into the streets of London to check in on various local villains.

Lucifer describes one ne’er-do-well as having ‘a head of hayre like one of my Divells in Docter Faustus, when the olde Theater crackt and frighted the Audience.’ The thrilling production that had sparked these rumours was still within living memory and Doctor Faustus had been revived and expanded long after Marlowe had died.

Devils Today?

There is still something unsettling about both acting out and watching a conjuration live on stage. Early modern plays about magic, originally performed for audiences who all believed in devils in accordance with their Christian faith, have lost surprisingly little of their power.

Macbeth (1606) is a great example: its blistering curses and vivid scenes of witchcraft have contributed to the superstition that it is unlucky to speak the play’s name in a theatre.

Conjurations in general are perhaps more chilling on stage now that audiences are used to watching depictions of magic from the safe remove of cinema. Theatre alone can put you in the same physical space as the conjurer and involve you intimately in the consequences of transforming a performance space into a site of occult ritual.

Special thanks today go to my first ever paid subscriber, Alexander Eth aka Glitch Bottle who writes about ‘magic, mysticism and the generally misunderstood’ and can be found on Substack, Patreon, and YouTube. Thank you for helping to guarantee the future of this newsletter, it’s amazingly encouraging to have this kind of support so early on and I’ve got lots of exciting benefits for paid subscribers in the works. Watch this space!