This chapter investigates the relations between ideas about demonic possession and ideas about selfhood. As I shall argue, the discourse of demonic possession provided part of the terms in which early modern English culture discussed the idea of self-identity, and especially the perceived threats to this identity. The plays and prose texts discussed in this chapter are concerned with selfhood as a precarious reality, in danger of disintegration. In these texts, demonic possession figures as an image of a self overpowered and transformed by forces beyond its control.

These forces manifest themselves in a number of ways. First, the plays and prose texts discussed in this chapter represent the body and its impulses as a demonic presence within the human subject. Demonic possession provided an appropriate idiom for expressing such bodily anxieties, since it implied the existence of a separate force within the self. In this way, possession gave a local habitation and a name to the dangerous energies of which the human body was perceived to be the source. It provided a culturally recognised vocabulary in which these energies could be construed as a palpable, meaningful reality. Second, the demonising of the body was connected to an anxiety over masculine self-identity, and to a male concern with female sexuality. If the body was identified as a dangerous energy within the human subject, female sexuality was similarly seen as a potentially disruptive, physical force within the male self.