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

179 Pages·2012·47.683 MB·English

by  M. Barbara Mello

FROM THE HELLMOUTH TO THE WITCH’S CAULDRON:
COOKING AND FEEDING EVIL ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE

by

M. Barbara Mello

_____________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 M. Barbara Mello
UMI Number: 3542290
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i i


I dedicate this dissertation to
Mary Vicencia Mello and Manuel David Mello.
Both have inspired me throughout my life
with their love, kindness, tenacity, and
insightful wisdom.
I am proud and grateful to call them Mom and Dad.
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Table of Contents

List of Figures iv

Abstract vi

Introduction Stage Properties, Divine Retribution, and Damnation 1

Chapter 1 The Medieval Hellmouth 16
The English Hellmouth 18
The Winchester Psalter 20
The Harrowing of Hell Pageant 34
Female Labor 49

Chapter 2 Marlowe’s Hellmouth and Cauldron 53
Conjuring on The Early Modern Stage 63
The Jew of Malta 89

Chapter 3 Macbeth: Hellmouth & The Witch’s Cauldron 104
Newes From Scotland 108
Visual Culture of The Witch 113
Macbeth 118
Macbeth’s Hellmouth 128
Hecate: Goddess and Queen of the Witches 132

Chapter 4 Hecate’s Return or Middleton’s The Witch 136

Epilogue Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and The Witch’s Cauldron 157

Bibliography 162
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List of Figures

1.1 Anon. The Mouth of Hell. 1476 16

1.2 Anon. “The Tortures of the Damned.” Winchester Psalter.
British Museum, Nero C IV Folio 38. 23

1.3 Anon. “An Angel locks the door of Hell.” Winchester Psalter.
British Museum, Nero C VI Folio 39. 26

1.4 Anon. The Last Judgment. British Museum, Stowe Ms. 944 7r 28

1.5 Anon. Lincoln Cathedral, West Portal. ca. 1145. from Schmidt, Gary D.
The Iconography to the Mouth of Hell. 30

1.6 Anon. Ferrara Cathedral, west portal ca. 1300. from Schmidt, Gary D.
The Iconography to the Mouth of Hell. 31

1.7 Anon. Stratford-on-Avon, Chapel of the Holy Cross. ca. 1550s fresco. 33
from Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic
Mysteries from Schmidt, Gary D. The Iconography to the
Mouth of Hell.

1.8 Anon. Christ in the Wine Press, ca. 1400s 41

2.1 Lucas, Cranach the Younger. Last Supper of the Protestants
and the Pope’s Descent into Hell. (ca. 1540). 57

2.2 Anon. 1616 title page to (1616) Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus 66

2.3 Cast Cooking vessel handles with mottoes 88

3.1 Grien, Hans Baldung. The Witches’ Sabbatt 1510 104

3.3 Anon. “Two Witches Cooking up a Storm.” 114

3.4 Anon. “Rooster and Serpent.” (1490) 114

3.5 Grien, Hans Baldung. Three Witches (1514). 116
v 

3.6 The Gunpowder Plot 129

3.7 Imaginia de I Dei (Hecate) 132
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Abstract
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. It enthralls its audience, first with
horrific acts of boiling up the ungodly in a blazing cauldron to feed the sinful souls to the
hellmouth, and then in scenes of damnation as those sinners fall into the gaping jaws of
the mouth to hell. These stage props of the hellmouth and cauldron are powerfully
charged with the Catholic iconography that devised the image, the Reformation ideology
that embraced it, and the Post-Reformation theology and practices in which the image
produced ridicule, fear and fascination.
Specifically, the stage property of the hellmouth gives us a fresh understanding of
the ways in which early modern peoples imagined hell and damnation as a spectacle of
cooking and feeding. In sacred art, the hellmouth opens up into a process of damnation
that is often artistically depicted as kitchen space. Everyday kitchen utensils such as meat
hooks, knives, and butcher blocks are instruments with which to torture the damned. The
centrality of the cauldron in the visual formula of the hellmouth marks a disturbing
relationship between hell’s kitchen and the domestic kitchen space in a household. The
religious artists that created the iconography of the hellmouth appropriated kitchen space
into their renditions of damnation to use that female violence in the butchering and
bleeding of the human soul as food for the hellmouth. This sacred art of divine retribution
and damnation uses cultural fears of the female labor of cooking, and exploits social and
moral notions of eating. The plays I examine in this study depict these ideas of nurturance
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and pollution, and focus on the body as a site of constant tension that wavers between
deficiency and excess. In these plays, the cooking and eating of food are meditations on
the divine retribution and damnation of the protagonist. In each play, a hellmouth
emerges to snack on the sinful or a cauldron rises from the trapdoor to boil the ungodly.
Thus, this study concentrates on works that theatrically deploy a spectacular hellmouth or
the witch’s blazing cauldron.
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.
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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.
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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