Ebook: From the hellmouth to the witch’s cauldron: Cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage

This dissertation interrogates the early modern stage properties of the hellmouth and its cauldron that terrified and fascinated early modern audiences with their performances of damnation and divine retribution. Hell, that fearsome place from which no one but the devil seems to escape, over the course of the sixteenth century becomes reduced to a stage prop, but this stage property has unique powers.

First, I trace the evolution of the hellmouth during the medieval period when it first appears in English psalters. The English renditions of the hellmouth and cauldron gripped the imagination of early Christianity, moving into the public sphere as reliefs and frescoes on parish churches, and as a stage prop in the medieval cycle plays for the Corpus Christi Pageant. Next, I look at Christopher Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe seems to be one of the first playwrights to deploy both the hellmouth and cauldron onto the early modern stage as instruments of the Christian God's justice against the reprobate. Pride, avarice, gluttony, and ambition festers in his protagonists' souls while each fights against the social system that condemns them. In these plays, Marlowe responds to the theater critics who condemn his plays and the early modern stage itself by using the demonic valences of the hellmouth and cauldron to draw attention to the institution of the theater as diabolic space. The hellmouth hiding in the Discovery Space, and the cauldron simmering beneath the stage boards invests the early modern stage with the power to control the demonic energy burning within these stage properties.

The first half of my project establishes the rich iconography of the hellmouth and its cauldron, and examines the spiritual and theatrical potency of these props in arguably their debut on the public stage. The second half of this study turns to the important cultural and political work the witch's cauldron performs on stage. William Shakespeare's Macbeth and Thomas Middleton's The Witch continue Marlowe's demonic experiment. Shakespeare's and Middleton's plays demonstrate the power of the cauldron to inflict divine justice as a distinctive act of female labor—cooking. In each of these plays, the cauldron rises up from the hellish space beneath the stage to join the action of the play and perform its part in divine retribution. Finally, I move to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, a play that shows us the extent to which the stage properties of the hellmouth and cauldron mark the early modern stage as the physical location of the supernatural realm of hell. He stages the cauldron off stage, but the blazing vessel's presence is a palpable force in the play. His character, Ursula, similar to Shakespeare's and Middleton's witches, embodies the sweating cauldron on stage, and uses this power to manipulate and disrupt the social and political hierarchy.

Scholars have not yet considered the intervention these stage properties make in received ideas about hell, female labor, and the early modern stage, and this study addresses this gap. A study of these stage properties shows us how the early modern theater used the cultural memories of demonic power infused in these objects to assert its authority, however transitory. This study takes as its premise W. B. Worthen's argument for the performativity of the stage—the potential of a performance to transgress its prescribed boundaries. Theatrical performance is a citational process, and the stage props of the hellmouth and the witch's cauldron are invested with this performative potential. Thus these objects of sacred and theatre culture are endowed with a fearsome tension that threatens to transgress the seemingly rigid boundaries of the possible with imaginative and chaotic performances of the impossible.

Many consumers of the early modern stage believed in the diabolic and witchcraft. Thus appropriating and relocating this fearsome power onto the stage through the theatrical properties of the hellmouth and the witch's cauldron positions the early modern theater as housing and containing the terrible power of damnation and retribution. The early modern stage consumes this diabolic, witchy, feminized power to empower the institution of the stage and its theatrical productions the stage offers up for public consumption.