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D
Damn Yankees
This 1955 Broadway musical drama by George
Abbott has become a classic. In 1958 it was
adapted into a film. A remake of Abbott’s play
appeared again on Broadway in 1994, starring
Jerry Lewis as Mr. Applegate. The story is about a
sports fan, Joe, who is so desperate to see his team
to win the season that he is willing to sell his soul,
if need be, to have them win. At the moment Joe
utters his wish, a man dressed in contemporary
clothes appears before him in a cloud of smoke.
He introduces himself as one Mr. Applegate, who
asserts that he is able to grant Joe his wish. The
horrors of hell and damnation are never dealt with
overtly, though they are alluded to in song and
dance. There is also a happy ending: The devoted
love of his wife is enough to protect him from the
fate of being condemned to hell.
Dante Alighieri
Devils and angels are included in Dante’s great
epic, the Divine Comedy: Satan at the core of the
earth and apex of hell, and multitudes of the good
angels in his paradise. The Italian poet, philosopher
and theologian Dante Alighieri (Florence
1265–Ravenna 1321) was born of a Guelf middleclass
family. He played an important role in
Florentine civic and political life. After writing his
first work, the Vita Nuova, about his youthful
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idealistic love for Beatrice Portinari, he took an
active part in the administration of the commune
and was on the imperial side in the struggle
between Guelfs and Ghibellines, respectively the
partisans of the pope and the emperor, who were
fighting for the jurisdiction in Italy. However,
when the rival party splintered into two factions,
he decided to support the antipapal policy of the
White Guelfs. After the Blacks took over the city in
1301, under the wing of Charles de Valois, Dante
was exiled and his life of wandering from court to
court of medieval Italy began.
During his exile, he wrote the Convivio, his
chief work in Italian prose inspired by the reading
of Cicero and Boethius; the Latin De vulgari
eloquentia, a treatise about the preeminence of the
Italian vernacular and the definition of the highest
form of Italian lyrical poetry, the canzone; the De
Monarchia, an eloquent defense of the imperial
principle that contains Dante’s most original
contribution to philosophical thought.
The actual life of his own times, interpreted by
the story of his own inner anguishes, represents
Dante’s primary source of inspiration for the
Divina Commedia, an allegory of the human
condition and destiny in the form of a vision of
the state of the souls after death. Dante himself is
the pilgrim of the visionary journey through hell
and purgatory, to heaven, during a week at Easter
in the year 1300 when, at the age of thirty-five, he