“Straunge Motion”: Puppetry, Faust, and the Mechanics of Idolatry

Summary

THE history of the Faust legend is one of cultural appropriation and considerable intermeshing of “high” and “low” art forms, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus occupies a central role in this history, both appropriator and appropriated, engaging in metaphysical tragedy and slapstick comedy at once. Critical trends privileging the 1604 A-text over the 1616 B-text, and vice versa, have remained in flux since the play's inception, the former supposedly possessing authorial fidelity and the latter supposedly presenting a more complete and more often performed version. While the A-text, which primarily attends to Faustus as a tragic figure, certainly has its dramatic merits, the B-text with its comic interludes lends itself readily to popular performance. As a result, the B-text gave rise to a rich tradition of mummery and puppet plays that disseminated the legend through country fairs and street shows. No few historians of the puppet theatre have traced these miniature manifestations of Faust as they travelled between Germany and England from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Very little critical attention, however, has been paid to the complex relationship between puppetry and the Faust legend as they grew in popularity during the sixteenth century or what influence they may have had upon one another afterward. A further assessment of the bonds the legend shares with puppetry—not only as a means of cultural dissemination, but also as an apt metaphor for mechanisms of bodily and spiritual control—might provide a better understanding of the legend's historical contexts and add yet another level of depth to one of its central tensions, namely, the question of who is in control of whom.

Though Dr. Faustus remains a complex and emotionally moving piece of drama for modern audiences, in many ways, we simply do not or cannot understand the anxieties that underpin much of its former dramatic force. We no longer concern ourselves with the power that demons, witches, and sorcerers might have to control our actions and do violence to our bodies. In the sixteenth century, however, witchcraft and demonic possession came to be perceived as real threats, threats to individual autonomy and agency, in particular.