Shakespeare's Medieval Devils and Joan La Pucelle in 1 Henry VI

All things considered, Shakespeare’s plays avoid the representation of devils. In Shakespearean drama, a devil or a demon is about as welcome as the personified abstraction: although ornamental personifications may crowd spoken discourse, only a few personified characters lumber onto Shakespeare’s stage—Time in The Winter’s Tale or Rumour in 2 Henry IV—and even then in very compromised ways. The same goes for devils, as John D. Cox once pointed out. ¹ Very rare were characterizations of the devil on the Renaissance stage overall; at that, he would usually appear in programmatic incantation scenes of the sort witnessed in Greene’s Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay. Shakespeare, in sum, seemed to have little use for stage fiends.