The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns

A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World

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2024-07-10 05:30:08

The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty.

Examine some of those Mephistophelean hoof-prints as discovered at a Southwark, London construction site in 1989. The Rose Theatre, where Marlowe’s play premiered in the late sixteenth century, was torn down in 1606 where it would be subsumed beneath layers Jacobean, Interregnum, and Restoration, then Hanoverian, Regency, and Victorian, until Thatcher-era contractors building a soulless corporate office tower uncovered the bottom level of this strata of London history. Workers sifting through dirt found the tell-tale signs of a theater, from the preserved remains of charred hazelnut shells once sold as snacks to the broken clay pots used to collect tickets. The ruins of the theater once again had sunlight upon them. Now the remains of the Rose are within the basement of said soulless office tower looming above the Thames, the rare active archeological site which also invites audiences to enjoy a show atop the detritus of the theater where plays were first performed four centuries ago.