DEMON AS FORM OF SATIRICAL STATEMENT IN DRAMA THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

This study focuses on a word or line that is identified as satire in a drama entitled The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The data was taken in the form of dialogues from the characters. Demon as a satirical expression means that the words or line identified as satire was built by several elements that are attached with demon characteristics (demonic). Demon is a creature who has clear characteristics as a bad set. The bad character of the demon is representative of satire. The character demon is a representation of ugliness or evil of the object criticized in the drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Researchers used the descriptive analysis method by Ratna (2004) in conducting this research. Descriptive analysis is a method used to analyze data and facts in the text and then interpret them. The researcher used two theories in seeing the story. Inter-relationship principle and semiotic. The results of this research found three important elements in accordance with the topic of this research. The first is the antagonist character Mephistophilis, the demon. The second is the allusion to Franciscan Friar. Third, the phrase holy shape becomes the devil best is satire. Thus, the combination of elements leads to a demon as a form of satirical expression.

Performance as Transformation: The Laughing Songs of “Death in Venice” in Literature, Film, and Opera

This paper takes as its starting point a scene from the fifth chapter of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912). While Venice is threatened by an outbreak of cholera, a group of Neapolitan street musicians plays in front of Aschenbach, Tadzio, and the other hotel guests. The leader of the band—a buffonesque guitarist-singer with red hair and a wrinkled, emaciated face—is an ominous figure whose facetious, sexually charged performance eventually turns into blatant mockery of the audience, whom he infects with his contagious laughter. Using the concept of “performance as transformation” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) as a lens through which to investigate the filmic and operatic adaptations of the scene in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1970) and Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera (1973), I focus on the various renditions of the laughing song to trace the particular transformative power it unfolds across media. Both adaptations use music to ironically comment on Aschenbach’s infatuation. Yet, their approach to the scene at large is distinct from one another: While the opera turns the performance into an interiorized space of moral interrogation, the film evokes the sound of the past through the insertion of pre-existent popular songs from the time, including Berardo Cantalamessa’s Neapolitan laughing song “’A risa.” As I argue, the latter served as a model for the uproarious comical number described by Mann which thus constitutes a “phono-graphic” adaptation itself. Finally, I discuss the recurrences of demonic laughter throughout the film as part of Visconti’s intertextual strategy to create motivic relationships between Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus (1947).

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is generally treated as a soteriological riddle: is Faustus damned, and if so, when, and why? This essay argues that such approaches miss the overwhelming emphasis (in both surviving versions of the play) on Faustus’s reprobation. Faustus, instead of presenting a puzzle waiting to be solved, is better appreciated as an incomparable portrait of the experience of reprobate living. Even more, via its textual and performance history, Faustus sheds light on the collective and collaborative practices of real Renaissance actors and theatregoers coming to terms with the post-Reformation religious trauma they shared with the lonely doctor.

Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

“Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” argues that demonic beings and their temporal experiences serve as useful ways to conceptualize human beings existing in multiple timelines in Marlowe’s play. Plotting Satan’s histories in the Bible, demonology, and the ars moriendi tradition, the essay trace how early modern authors attempted to outline precisely how demonic temporality differed from humanity’s own constricted timescapes. Marlowe’s play, however, undercuts any confidence that early modern readers might have gained from these traditions, and I show how Mephistopheles furthers Faustus’s flawed conception of time as strictly earthly. Mephistopheles, too, is bound by certain temporal demands, particularly when he is forced to arrive upon the clowns Robin and Rafe’s ludic conjurations. Ultimately, Mephistopheles manipulates Faustus’s sense of temporality altogether, and the magus only learns at the very end of the play the true import of “everlasting” and Mephistopheles’s role, his experiences, within that sense of infinitude. In staging an aborted death scene that echoes the first half of ars moriendi texts, Marlowe’s disengagement from the genre rests on differences in understanding demonic temporality.