Calvinist Theology and “Country Divinity” in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

This essay examines the devils of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a play that explores the disputed theological boundary between diabolic temptation and human sin. John Calvin made a significant break even with Protestant predecessors by positing a ubiquitous tempter-devil whose autonomy was wholly circumscribed by providence. In Elizabethan popular culture, by contrast, independent diabolic agency was often blamed for bodily disease, destructive weather, and other apparently malign interventions in the material world. I argue that Faustus’s interactions with Mephistopheles and the low-comedy subplot that parallels his damnation evoke, and yet refuse to resolve, these divergent views of the devil’s power.