Breaking Loose from Hell: Devils, Despair, and Dystopia

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other form, Thomas Nashe’s rhetorical style influenced the shape of Dekker’s prose and pamphlet writing. Yet unlike Dekker, Nashe never managed to locate himself as a writer in the new metropolis. Often his work was inflected by that sense of dislocation: ‘This is the lamentable condition of our times, that men of art must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best be kept under by dunceschrw …’.¹ Much can be understood about the place of metropolitan literature and culture by exploring the subtle differences between these two writers, in particular their nuanced expeditions into the meaning of Hell. This chapter examines the deployment of Hell as a cultural narrative; not simply as a theological concept but as a complex social structure which refracts ideology through urban space and city topography. In tracing the cultural contours of Hell, writers like Dekker and Nashe drew together the seemingly disparate strands of the city — theatre, plague, poverty, and prison — which tied life and literature so closely together.² Telling the story of Hell enabled the writer to find a language through which to indict and criticize the social system within which he had to work. The writer was able to reveal the dark side and effects of metropolitan life, to make them topical, with the kind of verve and wit often denied him elsewhere.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one place; for where we are is Hell,

And where Hell is, there must we ever be.

(Mephistopheles in The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, Scene 5, 121–3)