In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious
drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own
reputation for anti-Christian irreverence. The Aesthetics of
Antichrist explores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long
before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled
in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical
opponents paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy. By embracing this
tradition, Marlowe's work would at once demonstrate the
theatricality inhering in Christian worship and, unexpectedly,
resacralize the commercial theater.
The Antichrist myth in particular tells of an impostor turned
prophet: performing Christ's life, he reduces the godhead to a
special effect yet in so doing foretells the real second coming.
Medieval audiences, as well as Marlowe's, could evidently enjoy the
constant confusion between true Christianity and its empty
look-alikes for that very reason: mimetic degradation anticipated
some final, as yet deferred revelation. Mere theater was a
necessary prelude to redemption. The versions of the myth we find
in Marlowe and earlier drama actually approximate, John Parker
argues, a premodern theory of the redemptive effect of dramatic
representation itself. Crossing the divide between medieval and
Renaissance theater while drawing heavily on New Testament
scholarship, Patristics, and research into the apocrypha, The
Aesthetics of Antichrist proposes a wholesale rereading of
pre-Shakespearean drama."
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