ABSTRACT
This chapter gives short readings of plays by seven of Shakespeare’s major contemporaries—Marlowe, Cary, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford, and the prolific Anonymous—that treat legal material in significant ways. Doctor Faustus was written by Christopher Marlowe within a few years on either side of 1590, around the time Shakespeare’s career began. It concerns a renowned scholar who sells his soul to Satan in exchange for having the devil Mephistophilis made available to do his bidding for 24 years. Calvinism, in Britain as elsewhere, was one of the dominant strains of Christian theology in the 16th and 17th centuries. Danielle Clarke argues that Mariam's unjust execution “sanctions active, rather than passive resistance to tyranny, both domestic and political”.
