The "Hell" of the Theatre: Collapsing Cosmology in the A-Text of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Abstract

This article reconsiders the spatial logic of the A-text of Doctor Faustus (c. 1604), arguing that Marlowe's play displaces the vertical cosmology that traditionally structures representations of heaven and hell. Rather than staging infernal ascent from below or divine descent from above, the play constructs a world in which hell is ambient, immanent, and coextensive with the space of performance itself. Through close attention to stage directions, dramaturgy, and early modern theatrical architecture, this study demonstrates how devils enter laterally, often without sonic or visual markers of supernatural rupture, while heaven remains theatrically absent. Situating these findings alongside medieval iconography, Reformation iconoclasm, and antitheatrical polemic, the article argues that Faustus aligns uncannily with its critics' suspicion that theatre makes vice present rather than merely representing it. In doing so, the play transforms the playhouse into a site of infernal proximity, where spectators, like Faustus, become residents within a world from which transcendence has receded.