The servant comes in, reads off the formula,
and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits.
He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them
alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed;
he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more
unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue.
There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea
of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense
of humour defying and dominating hell.
One of the best points in the play as performed in this Yorkshire
town was that the servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire,
instead of the German rustic dialect which he talked in the original.
That also smacks of the good air of that epoch. In those old pictures
and poems they always made things living by making them local.
Thus, queerly enough, the one touch that was not in the old mediaeval
version was the most mediaeval touch of all.
That other ancient and Christian jest, that a wife is a holy terror,
occurs in the last scene, where the doctor (who wears a fur
coat throughout, to make him seem more offensively rich and refined)
is attempting to escape from the avenging demons, and meets
his old servant in the street. The servant obligingly points
out a house with a blue door, and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus
to take refuge in it.
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