'It Is No Small Presumption to Dismember the Image of God': Early Modern Leg Amputation on the Barber-Surgeon's Table and the Dramatist's Page

摘要

The final image of William Mountford's 1697 The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus Made into a Farce is of the conjurer's limbs—which the scholars had just discovered in his room—reanimating and "comfing] together" to delight the audience with a final song and dance. The sight of Faustus's mangled body parts, which Christopher Marlowe, author of the original Faustus, had used as a dramatic device and Mountford reinterpreted under a farcical light, would not have shocked an early modern spectator, who would have been used to considering quartering both as a fitting capital punishment and as entertainment. Due to this firsthand understanding of the fragility of human bodies, the spectacle at the end of Mountford's play would, however, have created a sense of deep unease in the audience, and tapped into a preoccupation with fragmentation and disunity that is typical of the early modern period.