1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456567603321

Autore

Parker John <1972->

Titolo

The aesthetics of Antichrist [[electronic resource] ] : from Christian drama to Christopher Marlowe / / John Parker

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, c2007

ISBN

0-8014-6354-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (272 p.)

Disciplina

822/.3

Soggetti

English drama - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 - History and criticism

Christian drama, English - History and criticism

Christianity and literature - England - History - 16th century

Antichrist in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Texts and Translations -- Abbreviations -- INTRODUCTION. After Strange Gods: The Making of Christ and His Doubles -- CHAPTER 1. Lying Likenesses: Typology and the Medieval Miracula -- CHAPTER 2. Blood Money: Antichristian Economics and the Drama of the Sacraments -- CHAPTER 3. Vicarious Criminal: Christ as Representative -- CHAPTER 4. The Curious Sovereignty of Art: Marlowe's Sacred Counterfeits -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.