'Why, this is hell’. Satana, i demoni e l’inferno secondo Marlowe e Milton

The culture of the Reformation and the new religious liturgy introduced by Edward VI shed light on the central role of the devil and on the ‘revision’ of hell that take place in England in the last decades of the sixteenth century. This essay analyses the infernal world presented by Christopher Marlowe in The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus by drawing a parallel with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Close to the «old Phylosophers» he admires, Faustus rejects the existence of an afterlife and the idea of eternal damnation and questions the conception of hell as a physical place. The tragedy indirectly arouses numerous crucial theological debates and, by displaying a world that is actually predetermined – by the devils, not by God –, reverses the dogma of predestination: in this inverted vision of the world, «Sweet Mephostophilis» will become in the end Faustus’s only (and beloved) partner. If the Marlovian demons replace God and Faustus can be obliquely identified with the very Marlowe, Milton’s Satan has a Christological essence and is curiously presented as a projection of the poet: possibly these are the reasons why in both works the only infinite, unlimited, and therefore free, dimension is the infernal one.