The Devil Is an Ass leaves a fair number of traces in the history of English stage performance before 1945, but very few of them involve a production of Jonson's original play. According to the title-page of the first edition (F2), it was first performed by the King’s Men in 1616, presumably at Blackfriars in the latter months of that year, and perhaps at court during the same winter season, where it would have appealed to the King's interest in exposing fake necromancy but may also have given the offence to one of his courtiers that prompted James I to ask for cuts to the text (see Informations, 319-23). There is no clear evidence that the play held the stage thereafter: ten years later Jonson makes a character in The Staple of News (1.Int., 32-3) allude to a performance of it, but in the shape of a wistful (and undated) memory, which may be simply the dramatist's artful way of recalling his last venture on the public stage. In 1669 Devil was included in a list of plays ‘formerly acted at Blackfriars and now allowed to the King's Company’ (van Lennep, The London Stage, I.151), and in John Downes’s 1708 catalogue of twenty-one old plays ‘Acted but now and then’ at Drury Lane after the Restoration, but no reference to a specific production has survived. The play lingered however in the consciousness of Jonson's theatrical successors, as a cluster of adaptations, echoes, and parodies makes plain.
The earliest sign of such influence appears in the satire on projectors and corrupt officials in The Court Beggar by Jonson's protégé Richard Brome, which was probably first staged in 1640. Schemes like the ‘monopoly / Of making all the perrukes male and female, / Through court and kingdom’, described in detail in the opening scene, continue Jonson’s sardonic exposé of fashionable scams, and if he had lived to see it Brome’s mentor might have chuckled at the project
For building a new theatre or play-house
Upon the Thames on barges or flat-boats
To help the watermen out of the loss
They’ve suffered by sedans . . .
In the fractious world of Caroline theatre, however, the court playwrights elsewhere slighted by Brome also thought it worthwhile to recall lines from Devil. In his unfinished tragedy The Sad One (1640), Sir John Suckling included a lyric based on Wittipol’s song in 2.6, one that begins by evoking ‘the down in the air’ but replaces the sensitive courtship of the original with bitter denunciation of a supposedly faithless wife:
Hast thou marked the crocodiles weeping, or the foxes sleeping?
Or hast viewed the peacock in his pride, or the dove by his bride,
When he courts for his lechery?
Oh so fickle, oh so vain, oh so false, so false is she! (4.3)
Parody of Jonson’s song was sometimes taken to bizarre extremes, as in the somewhat garbled text and musical setting preserved in a set of part-books dating from the 1630s:
Have you seene the blacke little Ma[gott]
Yt Creepes upon a dead dogge
Or an alld woeman with a Fagoott
A Smooth eringe of a hedge hogge
Have you seene Cawes bobbie tosted
Or a sheepe skinne rosted...
O so blacke o so foule o so ruffe
O so sowxe (?) is she.
(MS C6967m4, Clark Library (UCLA): I owe this reference to Stacey Jocoy. On the variant versions of this parody, and the many other rewritings of Jonson’s lyric, see Colin Burrow’s note to The Underwood, 2.4, and John Cunningham’s discussion in the Music Edition.)
This pungent ditty, with its distinct Scots inflection (evident in the original spelling), is unlikely to have served a theatrical purpose, but Jonson’s play was not immune to being linked with onstage burlesque and transgression, given its generic relationship to popular dramas featuring devils that were probably always subject to modification and byplay in performance, eventually producing staple entertainments like the eighteenth-century ‘Harlequin Dr Faustus’. Just as Marlowe’s play acquired the legend of unscripted appearances by real devils in various contemporary productions, so it was reported that at the Fortune theatre ‘they once performed Ben Jonson’s comedy of “The Devil is an Ass,” and . . . his satanic majesty not liking the liberties taken with his dignity, put in an appearance and set fire to the theatre’ (The Examiner, 15 October 1870; see also Rankin, 1870). It seems unlikely that Jonson’s play was the one involved in this putative event (‘too learned a suggestion’, as one respondent to Rankin’s article put it), but the story indicates one of the ways in which it was kept alive not just as a literary achievement but also as part of a volatile and colourful tradition of performance.
The play was briefly recalled in the prologue to John Wilson’s The Cheats (March 1663), with a reference to ‘no little Pug, nor Devil’; but its next significant reincarnation, as far as we know, was in Nahum Tate’s Cuckold’s-Haven: Or, An Alderman No Conjurer (1685), which the author describes as ‘Scenes drawn from the stores of that great master Ben’. Tate's plot draws most of its characters from Eastward Ho!, but deploys them into two episodes directly modelled on Devil. First, Clogg the servant is charged with watching Security’s wife, Winifred, and protests to her that ‘I am your little parakeet, your sparrow, your shock, your Pug, your squirrel’. She nonetheless sees through him:
My jealous husband put him on this practice. Where are you, sir?—for
I know you hear me; come from your peeping corner; spare yourself a little
from your watch to applaud your groom here, that so well follows your
instructions (B3).
Later in the play, Security, usurer and bawd, is under arrest on the orders of Alderman Touchstone, but Quicksilver, the latter’s ‘debauched servant’, proposes a subterfuge: ‘Master Touchstone has always had great belief in witchcraft . . . I will counterfeit being bewitched, and you shall lay it to his charge: he’ll do any thing to get quit of us.’ Security assents:
I can enact any manner of thing . . . Why, ’tis but rolling my eyes and
foaming at mouth, (a little castle-soap rubbed upon my lips will do it)
and then a nutshell with tow and touchwood in it, makes me spit fire
like any dragon (F4).
When this scenario is duly enacted, with various echoes of Jonson’s scene, it’s left to Golding (the ‘sober servant’) to condemn the proceeding (‘mere juggling’) and Mrs Touchstone to declare ‘How the Devil can act!’ (G1v). The conspirators overreach themselves with an attempt to frame Touchstone with a forged letter from ‘Dorothy Jerk’ (‘This is the third time I am with child by you’, G2), and the cheat is exposed. Tate admits in an epilogue that ‘Poets banking th’old roads of the stage, / Bring farce to tickle up th’enervate age (G3v), but insists that his reworking of Jonson serves a constructive purpose, to affirm the integrity of authority in the face of subversive elements, in this case the recent Popish Plot:
Oh! Were this frantic nation’s woes too few,
But we must have both dam and devil too?
First with the old serpent plagued of associations,
And since, with viler spawn of declarations:
Whose poison such distraction could create,
That scythe-men lifted to mow down the state.
But now the monster has her final rout,
The very dregs of treason’s tap are out . . . (A4)
A generation later, in 1709, Devil seems to have provided the model for at least one scene in Susannah Centlivre’s The Busybody: this at any rate was the view of the Pall Mall Gazette for 22 February 1881, when it reported on a Victorian revival of this hardy perennial of the English stage. ‘When Sir George Airy pays a hundred guineas to Sir Francis Gripe for permission to speak to Miranda in the presence of her guardian, but out of his hearing, the whole idea and execution of the scene, down to such details as the strict silence of the lady and her lover’s plan of answering for her, is taken’ from Jonson's play (p.10). In fact, the Centlivre scene owes nothing to Jonson verbally, and is quite different in tone and dramatic emphasis – as is apparent from a review of a slightly later performance: ‘the proof that The Busybody contained amusing elements is seen in the fact that . . . Miss Kate Vaughan thinks the character of the heroine sufficiently mirth-provoking to please her patrons at a Gaiety matinee. We must cordially congratulate her upon the success with which she acted as Miranda, an artful young lady, who, finding herself in the clutches of an avaricious and amorous guardian, leads him a pretty dance, until she is out of his power.’ Unlike Frances in Jonson's play, ‘Miranda chooses silence as a deliberate strategy to play her suitor and her guardian against each other’ (The Era, 28 June 1884). Some thought that ‘Mrs Centlivre improved what she borrowed’, but The Busybody was not universally admired, and the paper’s correspondent felt obliged to recall that Robert Wilks, the actor-manager in charge of Drury Lane when the play was first produced, ‘threw down his part at rehearsal, and swore that no audience would endure such stuff’ (The Era, 26 February 1881).
When Tate and Centlivre lost their hold on the stage, not even mild travesty was available to keep Jonson’s play in theatrical view. But the appearance of Gifford’s edition of Jonson's Works in 1816 probably helped the teenaged Tennyson to embark on his verse-drama The Devil and the Lady (c.1823), which Christopher Ricks describes as ‘an exuberant pastiche’ of Renaissance comedy that ‘draws on plays like Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, in its assurance that a woman is a match for the Devil, its delight in learned jargon and canting Latin, its hyperbolical oddness in simile and metaphor’ (New York Review of Books, 11 June 1964). The play, which Tennyson never published, may also have been following Jonson's example in its brief satirical glances at Regency high society. Nonetheless, the revival of interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the nineteenth century did not produce any known stagings of The Devil Is an Ass. People were reading Jonson's less regarded plays, but scarcely had a chance to see them performed, at least until the early years of the twentieth century when directors like Harley Granville-Barker and Barry Jackson, and university groups on both sides of the Atlantic, began to take an interest in this repertory.
It seems to have been the work of these directors that sparked the interest of Edward Elgar in writing an opera based on Devil. Elgar admired Granville-Barker, and knew of Barry Jackson's revivals of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Jackson also directed the first Malvern Summer Festival in 1929, where Elgar delivered a speech and subsequently asked Jackson to provide him with a libretto. The project occupied the two men for some years, but eventually foundered in 1933, when Elgar became discouraged by the news that Richard Strauss was at work on an opera based on Epicene (Die schweigsame Frau, 1935) and Jackson’s Birmingham company fell into financial difficulties. A complete libretto was found in Elgar's papers, but only a series of sketches for the music. What attracted the composer to the play? Percy M. Young suggests that he was drawn to Jonson’s satire on ‘ostentatious living and corruption in high places’, and more specifically concurred with ‘Jonson’s attitude to the existence of devils’. The demons in The Dream of Gerontius ‘are as real as Elgar could show them’, and Young argues that the composer found in Jonson’s play a Catholic response to contemporary evils. Be that as it may, Young insists that Elgar ‘was obsessed by the subject, musically illustrating diabolic influences through fugal textures, and it is a fugal incipit that marks the motto theme for Meercraft in The Spanish Lady’ (Elgar, 1991, xi- xii).
When it came to modifying the plot, however, Elgar and Jackson showed themselves to be subject to conventional pressures similar to those that operated on adapters of Jacobean drama in earlier centuries. Most notably, they simplified the play’s ending by changing Frances from a wife to a ward: as Jackson put it, ‘we both felt that the relationship of guardian and ward, with the young lover anxious to snatch his prey from the amorous Pantaloon, was at once more pleasing and more plausible, while it made the plot much easier to unravel at the end’ (Elgar, x). This emollient treatment of Jonson’s material was very apparent to Edward Greenfield when he reviewed a performance of the opera’s fragments at the City University’s Department of Music in 1986: some 40 minutes of music ‘not so much operatic in flavour as echoing Elgar’s incidental music’. Greenfield wondered how with so ‘sharp a source’, Elgar could ‘so completely avoid any hint of irony in his idiom, which remains wholesome and untroubled throughout’ (Guardian, 17 May 1986). Nonetheless, The Spanish Lady has had other advocates: Percy Young brought together all the existing sketches ‘to create a complete, colourful, dramatic work’ and enable its first recording in 1995 (liner notes to BBC Music CD33D, 1995), and it was presumably this version that was performed by the Cambridge University Opera Society in November 1994.
In 1945, Ivor Brown, writing in The Observer on 18 November, was moved to ask: ‘Who nowadays has seen enacted Jonson’s “The Devil Is An Ass”? Few indeed, but many have quivered at the beauty of its song ending, “Oh, so white . . . ” ’. Brown was reminded of the lyric by the recent publication of Frederick Boas’s Songs and Lyrics from the English Playbooks (1945). As it happened, though, the play was about to be staged, and a week later the same newspaper reported that the Little Theatre at Highbury, Sutton Coldfield, ‘has just produced it with success’. This was probably the first performance of the play in nearly three centuries, and one wonders how it was received in the socially transformative but economically straitened conditions of post-war Britain.
The Highbury Players saw themselves as part of a theatre movement in Britain that burgeoned in the 1914-18 war and the years after, one in which several amateur organisations sought to provide permanent theatre homes for themselves. The Little Theatre was built between 1937 and 1942, and after an ambitious first season in 1942-3, when six productions were mounted, it planned each of its next four seasons around four plays, one of which was required to be an ‘English classic’. But this was no safe option designed to support the more experimental and unfamiliar productions to which the company was committed (‘a special function of our type of theatre is to encourage new writers’): they put on Devil in 1945 and Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure in 1946 after satisfying themselves that neither had been staged since its original performance in the early seventeenth century. A history of the company’s early years, Theatre Arts Centre: The Highbury Little Theatre, compiled by Mollie Randle and John English (Sutton Coldfield, 1946-7), contains a half-dozen production shots illustrating the ‘Jacobean stage’ that was specially constructed for the show, with a central curtained recess flanked by two arched openings that appear to have had both solid doors and curtains to close them. A central gallery on the upper level was flanked by two further openings that represented the ‘two windows’ Jonson calls for in the scene (2.6) where Wittipol woos Frances, though in this production Frances stood in the central gallery and Wittipol was in one of the adjacent wings, thus presumably facilitating Jonson’s marginal direction at 2.6.70 (see also notes to lines 2-3 and 33). Also illustrated are three costume designs, for Pug, Merecraft, and Frances, by Peta English. Merecraft was all in black, and Pug in a riotously foppish outfit of red, blue and gold, with all three colours showing in the large roses adorning his shoes (see 1.3.8-9), and an elaborate hairstyle that included two quiffs resembling horns sticking through his hat (appropriate to the trendy ‘Devile’ he becomes in Act 4). No cast list is given, but John English and Noel Sherwood were responsible for the production. A major patron of the company was Sir Barry Jackson, who supplied a foreword to the volume, clearly did much to support the venture (including donating equipment from his Birmingham theatre), and possibly suggested Devil as a likely candidate for production, after his venture with Elgar ran into the sand.
The play was taken up sporadically by university groups in the decades that followed: by the Edinburgh University Dramatic Society at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964, at the University of Illinois in 1977, and by the Bristol University Drama Department in a 1967 production at the Little Theatre in Bristol directed by George Brandt. The latter was seen by the national critics: B. A. Young (Financial Times, 12 July 1967) noted that the show had ‘costumes that span three or four centuries’, and Pug was ‘a giggling, wriggling, fawning little horror’. A highlight seems to have been the Spanish lady scene (4.3), with ‘very funny performances’. But Irving Wardle (Times, 12 July 1967) was less impressed by the production, and thought it a mistake to treat ‘Jonson merely as a prophet of swinging London’.
Wardle's response seemed to find a disjunction between the upbeat cultural mood of the late 1960s and the darker implications of Jonson’s play, and the issue of contemporary relevance (which, as we saw, may also have mattered to Elgar and Tennyson) was to be of some concern to the critics when The Devil Is an Ass finally earned a major professional production in the 1970s. Stuart Burge directed the play at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1973, and subsequently with the Birmingham Repertory Company in 1976, in an adaptation by Peter Barnes that made substantial cuts to the text and simplified the plot, as well as adding a new final scene – one that Barnes explained as resulting from ‘the need to see the resolution of the play’s framing device – Pug’s abortive mission to earth’. In it Satan confirms Pug’s memorable observation about London depravity that ‘Hell is / A grammar school to this’ (4.4.170-1) with a change of diabolical policy:
How can they fear hell? It holds no terrors for them.
’Tis their familiar daily, though they do not heed the fires
Or hear the screams from the icy dark outside. . . .
He gestures lights down to spot on him and Pug and on the globe representing earth spinning slowly above stage centre.
This planet earth, this plague-spot of the Cosmos,
I now declare to be out-of-bounds for all my demons.
Stay clear, else we be infected with the air they breathe
And lose the sense of good and evil
And so deprive ourselves of the knowledge
Of who we are and what we do ’gainst God.
Michael Coveney offered a vivid sketch of this added scenario: Satan and Pug ‘make a final return to survey humanity which they find crouching in attitudes of corruption as if posing for a Breughel; they determine to find new worlds where devils are devils and men still eat apples rather than each other; they will quit Earth “this plague-spot of the cosmos”.’ Coveney noted that the ‘last phrase does not sound Jonsonian’, but thought that ‘the archness of the writing is a price worth paying for the new shapeliness of the action. Jonson lets his devils dwindle and vanish’ (Observer, 5 September 1976). He was not alone in criticising Jonson's ending: in reviewing a later production Greg Walker objected to the play’s ‘asymmetrical conclusion. What feels like the epilogue, in which Pug returns to Hell and Satanic judgement, actually precedes a further series of London scenes, with the result that the play can appear over-extended’ (Cahiers Élisabéthains 49, 1996, 82). Barnes’s alterations produced a lively debate, sparked by Bernard Levin’s strenuous objection to them, which in turn elicited a critique of Levin’s ideas about adaptation by Burge, Charles Marowitz, and Trevor Nunn (Sunday Times, 8 and 15 May 1977).
Some reviewers objected to the added final scene on the grounds that its negative assessment of planet earth departed from Jonson’s more positive resolution: Nicholas de Jongh argued that without the ‘subversive additions . . . the play asserts the triumph of honesty and love without lust ending in reconciling humanism’ (Guardian, 3 May 1977). All were agreed, though, that Jonson portrayed ‘a society hardly redeemed from monetary obsessions’, so the principal charge was that Burge and Barnes had disturbed the balance of the play rather than distorted its message. As Cordelia Oliver put it, in this ‘painstakingly Jacobean’ production, nonetheless ‘the centuries are curiously telescoped. Jonson, so Barnes and Burge seem intent on emphasizing, was recording the very beginnings of our own rotten capitalist society’ (The Guardian, 3 September 1976). It seems that Barnes’s new ending may have evolved in production in response to Pug's role: in his valuable discussion, Peter Happé, who drew on Barnes’s detailed recollections of the production, suggests that the finale ‘arose partly as a recognition of Pug's extraordinary power over the audience who responded warmly and sympathetically towards him. His part on stage turned out to be bigger and more powerful than it may seem in the book’ (Devil, ed. Happé, 25). The old appeal of the Vice figure in drama was apparently rediscovered here, and enriched by the empathy and amusement Pug generates as a hapless victim of modern iniquity; but the decision to provide him with a fresh purpose in life (‘Jupiter's the place for me!’) seems to have distracted the audience from the hints of moral renewal in the compact between Wittipol and Frances and Manly’s concluding sentiments.
Burge’s Birmingham Rep production was taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1976, where the use of a thrust stage in the Assembly Hall, with the audience on three sides, was felt to have been successful in presenting a complex action with clarity and pace. It subsequently travelled to the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre in the summer of 1977. Barnes’s version also formed the basis of the production broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 1987, directed by Ian Cotterell: this used a battery of sound effects at the start to evoke the scene in hell, and added three new personifications of vice, Wrath, Lady Vanity, and Covetousness, who spoke before the appearance of Iniquity.
In 1993, Devil received a student production at Reading University, directed by Brian Woolland, and another at the McMaster Summer Drama Festival (29 July-1 August), notable for a female Satan, ‘in black bodysuit and high heels, the better to crack her whip’, and a female Pug, who was ‘like a jittery gymnast’ (Hamilton Spectator, Ontario, Canada, 28 July 1993). Several other male roles were taken by women. These revivals turned out to be harbingers of a major production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995, directed by Matthew Warchus, which has been analysed in an essay by Peter Happé (1995). As Happé indicates, several reviewers fastened on contemporary parallels to the abuses satirized by Jonson, responding once again to the acuity of his socio-political observation; but they also found much else in the production to interest them. Michael Coveney suggested that ‘Bunny Christie’s design of a glittering miniature townscape propped up on rotting stanchions is a visual metaphor both of [Douglas] Henshall’s outstanding Wittipol in drag, and of the mercantile city and its theatres’, and he noted the combination of ‘Jonsonian city comedy with elements of the less familiar devil play: “Vice” prances as a rubbery pterodactyl, Satan booms in triplicate, and when Fitzdottrel . . . is compelled to put on an amateur show of demonism in the last act, his four-poster levitates, his face froths in foam and he spits fire into the auditorium’ (The Observer, 9 April 1995). The pace of the production was often frenetic, yet it allowed for some daring effects, as in the scene (4.6) where Frances reaffirms her refusal of Wittipol’s advances and, as Michael Beddow describes, the director followed her speech ‘with a silence that trespasses perilously on the zone where less perceptive members of the audience begin to assume that the prompter has nodded off.’ When that silence was broken, Manly’s intervention (‘Forsake not / The brave occasion virtue offers you’ – one that ‘on the printed page [is] distinctly awkward’) was found effective because of Warchus’s casting of Wittipol as ‘a hyperactive and unkempt Lowlander, who begins his first attempt at seduction by addressing Mistress Fitzdottrel as if she were a Glaswegian public meeting’ (TLS, 21 April 1995). By this stage Wittipol and Frances have agreed to be friends, but Manly reacts to the intensity of feeling between them that persists from the earlier scenes of courtship, and which this production appears to have emphasised: as Happé puts it: ‘Both the stage direction at 2.6.71 about sexual contact . . . and the way the love scene was played here increase the sense that what she was seeking was not merely a friend to help her, even though that is how she later came to rationalize the relationship’ (240). At the end Fitzdottrel and his wife were left ‘looking somewhat uncertainly at each other. The marriage was unbroken, she had not been seduced, and Wittipol had secured her financial future; but how would or could the marriage now continue?’ (241). The complexity of portrayal in these scenes led Sarah Hemming to conclude that ‘it is the stealthy force of good that is best handled in the production . . . in the last scene . . . you really feel that some lesson has been learned’ (Financial Times, 30 April 1996).
The RSC production was widely praised, despite some criticism of its eclectic style, and it put the play back on the theatrical map. Since 1995 there have been at least half a dozen productions in Britain and the USA, and in recent years a film version has been in production, directed by Jeremy Riggs for Limestone Pictures, although it has not proved possible to find out whether it was ever completed. At the time of writing a clip remains available on YouTube, entitled ‘Rough cut of a scene from the motion picture The Devil is an Ass ’ (www.youtube.com/watch?v="j-5LUP086ew)" showing a sequence from the second and third scenes of Act 2.
The Connecticut Drama Association planned to put on ‘an hour-long version of its May 10 production’ of the play at the CDA’s annual festival at the end of March, 1996 (New Haven Register, 1 March 1996), but no further information could be gleaned. Devil was next staged in 2000 by Queenswood School, Hatfield, a girls-only independent school, a production which, like the McMaster Festival revival in 1993, must have offered opportunities to experiment with gender roles, particularly in representing the diabolical characters. There was a staged reading of the play at the Globe in London in 2001, and two American productions followed a few years later. In February 2005, the Manhattan Experimental Café mounted a 90-minute ‘dinner theatre’ version, ‘given a 1920's cabaret flair highlighting the intermingling themes of vice and virtue’, with original music by Sam Belich and choreography by Jeff Shade. And in March 2007 the play was performed at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia.
A year earlier saw the first staging of the play at the White Bear in Kennington, a small pub theatre in south London, in a double bill of Devil and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. This was put on by the Left-Handed Theatre Company and directed by Blanche McIntyre in what Lois Potter describes as a ‘surprisingly luxurious’ production given its fringe location and resources. The play was heavily cut (like the Marlowe it ran for about an hour), but for Potter ‘it was surprising to find how effectively the scissors could be applied to Jonson. The director’s adaptation managed to get rid of the excessive complexities (e.g. Gilthead and his son Plutarchus), focusing on Pug’s ineffectual attempts to do enough damage to raise his status in the hierarchy of hell’ and on Jonson's unusual love triangle. ‘Extracted from its excessive verbiage, the play revealed a surprising variety of tone. Wittipol’s courtship address to Mrs. Fitzdottrel and his song were genuinely lyrical moments. The multiple confusions and role-playings of the final scene . . . did full justice to its mixture of humanity and absurdity.’ The pairing of the two plays provided food for thought about modern stagings of the demonic: whereas ‘Marlowe gives some moments of grandeur and pathos to his lost souls . . . Jonson makes them consistently trivial and worthless. Yet, oddly enough, even these Londoners were capable of being frightened by the whiff of sulphur . . . If we are unable to see anything really magical, we inevitably take damnation to be simply a psychological state; on the other hand, making its effects entirely visual may remove most of what intrigues people about the Faustus myth, the question of why anyone should indulge in such obviously self-destructive behaviour’ (Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.1, 2008, 125-6).
Four years later the enterprising White Bear Theatre was host to another production of Devil, this time in a fuller version put on by the Spartan Dogs Company directed by Kate McGregor. The action was set in 1829, as Howard Loxton explains in the online British Theatre Guide, exploiting the play’s parallels with ‘another period when speculation was rife and Newgate Prison, where some of the action is set, was still in operation’. The show ‘takes its cue from the Dickensian setting and rather suggests the whole show is a period piece performed by Vincent Crummles’ travelling troupe from Nicholas Nickleby’, together with ‘a circus element introduced with juggling, and plate spinning between scenes, bags of cash and other props that bounce, some white-face make-ups, some very modest legerdemain for devil Pug, and would-be speculator Fitzdottrel [who] even dons clown suit and red nose when he puts on a pretence of madness’. As in earlier productions, the pace was frenetic and the action at times difficult to follow, though Loxton found that there was ‘more clarity in the second half, when Sean Turner as Frances's admirer Wittipol keeps his female impersonation of a Spanish lady well within bounds and the company give themselves the chance to think as well as speak what they are saying’.
The play was next staged, in what may have been its only outing in the southern hemisphere to date, at the Helen MacPherson Smith Theatre in the Ballarat Arts Academy, Australia, in 2009. The most recent production was in February 2012 at the Drum Theatre, Plymouth, by the Theatre Royal Plymouth People’s Company, directed by Matt Hall, which acted a shortened version of about 70 minutes (Western Morning News, 2 March 2012). Hall commented that ‘There are parallels to the banking crisis, so the story rings true.’ (On this evidently successful and well-attended performance, see http://ourproductionblogs.wordpress.com/category/the-devil-is-an-ass.) The play's dialogue with contemporary intimations of economic and cultural exorbitance is, as we have noted, a recurrent one over the centuries, and it has helped to give the play a wide reach. The Summer Teen Theater Project (Sonny Productions) in West Hills, California, sought unsuccessfully to raise money for a production in the summer of 2012, an enterprising endeavour that we must hope signals fresh interest among theatre groups of all kinds in producing Jonson’s less familiar plays.
Newspaper reviews cited
B. A. Young, Financial Times, 12 July 1967
I. Wardle, The Times, 12 July 1967
M. Coveney, The Observer, 5 September 1976
G. Walker, Cahiers Élisabéthains 49 (1996), 82
The Sunday Times, 8 and 15 May 1977
N. de Jongh, The Guardian, 3 May 1977
C. Oliver, The Guardian, 3 September 1976
The Hamilton Spectator, Ontario, Canada, 28 July 1993
M. Coveney, The Observer, 9 April 1995
S. Hemming, The Financial Times, 30 April 1996
The New Haven Register, 1 March 1996
L. Potter, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.1 (2008), 125-6
The Western Morning News, 2 March 2012