Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance

1. How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus

16 1 How to Do Things with Demons Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus ’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me. —Faustus in Doctor Faustus (1.1.112) I can’t fix the roof by saying “I fix the roof” and I can’t fry an egg by saying “I fry an egg,” but I can promise to come and see you just by saying “I promise to come and see you” and I can order you to leave the room just by saying “I order you to leave the room.” Now why the one and not the other? —John R. Searle What did it mean for an Elizabethan actor to perform black magic on the early modern stage? When Edward Alleyn stepped onstage as Faustus, dressed in a white surplice and cross and carrying his magical book, the air was charged with dangerous electricity.1 True, Alleyn was clearly an actor , reciting lines that had been set down for him in a play whose comic scenes made light of the blasphemous act of conjuring demons. Noted one skeptical witness at the Fortune, “A man may behold shagge-hayr’d Devills runne roaring over the Stage with Squibs in their mouthes, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house, and twelve-penny Hirelings make artificiall Lightning in their Heavens.”2 But once the magical formula escaped Alleyn’s lips, anything could happen—and apparently did. Stories of “one devil too many” appearing onstage at performances of Faustus became legendary.3 Decades later the antitheatricalist William Prynne relished How to Do Things with Demons • 17 the visible apparition of the Devill on the stage at the Belsavage Playhouse , in Queene Elizabeths dayes, (to the great amazement both of the Actors and Spectators) whiles they were there prophanely playing the History of Faustus (the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it).4 As David Bevington comments, “The hope of such an event was possibly one fascination that drew audiences to the play, in somewhat the same fashion as spectators flock to the circus wondering if the high-wire artist will fall and be killed.”5 If the infernal realm constitutes the dark matter of Renaissance conjuring plays, much of the fascination conjuring held for Elizabethan audiences can be traced to its unnerving performative potential. More precisely, in plays such as Doctor Faustus, conjuring models a performative speech act that threatens to blur the distinction between theater and magic. Mirroring the ontological ambiguity of performance itself, conjuring is poised on the knife-edge between representing (mimesis) and doing (kinesis). How could spectators have been so convinced of the efficacy of Faustus’s conjuring that they “really” saw dark matter—a case of involuntary spectral reading?6 My answer is that the play’s power in performance relies on keeping the ontological stakes of black magic deliberately uncertain . Far from dismissing black magic as mere charlatanism, Doctor Faustus equates conjuring with the dangerous verbal magic of performativity itself. Faustus’s spells enact theater’s potential to escape from the character’s (and actor’s) control and unwittingly bring into being that which it names. Faustus traffics in performative magic not in the service of skepticism, as some critics have argued, but to appropriate speech’s performative power on behalf of a glamorous commercial enterprise, the Elizabethan theater itself. It was precisely the potential for inadvertent magic on the part of the players—the belief that Faustus’s spells might operate independent of actor and character—that thrilled and alarmed Elizabethan audiences, causing them to see devils that were not literally there.7 Doctor Faustus, especially in its A-text version, at once enacts and critiques performative speech (much as Hamlet both enacts and critiques revenge tragedy). While my principal interest is in the phenomenology of Elizabethan stage conjuring, my interpretation of magical speech acts revisits the theoretical debate over the difference between performance and performativity. Faustus continually challenges J. L. Austin’s distinction be- 18 • Dark Matter tween “efficacious” (successful) performatives and “hollow” (unsuccessful) theatrical quotations of them. Austin’s distinction breaks down whenever a speech act in the world of the play makes a material difference in the world of the playhouse. But what constitutes a “material difference”? As my epigraph from John Searle suggests, performativity’s transformative magic lies less in measurable changes in objective states of affairs (an actor cannot build a bridge...