The Devil's Charter
The Devil's Charter is an early Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy written by Barnabe Barnes.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 16 October 1607, and published before the end of the year, in a quarto printed by George Eld for the bookseller John Wright.
[2] The play opens with a dumbshow prologue that shows Roderigo making a deal with the devil to become Pope Alexander VI.
Lodowick convinces Charles VIII of France to go to war against Italy on religious grounds.
Gismond and Barbarossa intercept some slander against the pope and are both upset, promising to find and punish the writer.
She ties him up, makes him sign a statement that he slandered her, her father the pope, her brothers Caesar and Candy, and also Sforza, and then stabs him many times.
The Chorus tells us that after this, Charles dies, territory changes hands a couple times, and the rest of the play really only concerns the Pope and Caesar.
The Pope arranges for Astor and his brother Philippo to be drugged to sleep, then places an asp on both their chests and they die.
Caesar discharges his army with good pay and then hires Baglioni to kill Rozzi, an apothecary.
The Pope and Caesar discuss their plans to poison Cardinal Caraffa at a banquet that night.
Two Cardinals find his corpse and order Rome's bells to be run in Thanksgiving for being delivered from this wicked pope.
Since the characters are historical personages (Charles VIII of France, Lodovico Sforza, Cesare Borgia, and Francesco Guicciardini among others), the effect can be odd and striking; at the start of Act I, scene v, Lucrezia Borgia enters carrying a chair, "which she planteth upon the stage.
[4] It is not accidental that this anti-Catholic play was written and produced in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; Protestant propagandists found the story of the Borgia family a useful resource.
[5] The Devil in the play's title is literal rather than metaphorical; Alexander conjures up Astaroth to aid him in his climb to power.
The diabolism of the plot provides opportunities for sensationalism, with multiple ghosts, and stage spectacle, as in the conjuring scene IV, i.
At the start of V, v, Astaroth calls up two fellow devils, Belchar and Varca; they converse and dance.
In the next and concluding scene, Astaroth, wearing the papal robes, surprises Alexander; the pope learns that the devil has planted tricky arithmetic in their written contract, and that his reign is over years sooner than he expected.
