Harlequin, the Whigs, and William Mountfort’s Doctor Faustus

The author argues that the slapstick comic routines for which commedia dell’arte was well-known were not innocuous. In his The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1697), produced in 1688, William Mountfort addresses circumspectly the heated controversy over religion and the crown in the months just prior to the Glorious Revolution. Building on contemporary broadsides, ballads, and pamphlet literature that satirized Titus Oates and linked him with the Whigs, the devil, and the Dutch, Mountfort demonstrates concern about the stability of the state.