Week 07, Christopher Marlowe

Notes on Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

As I learned when studying medieval and Renaissance literature years ago, the old morality plays represented “mind” as a group of abstract qualities, with “will” being a central character or agent because that is the faculty responsible for making moral choices. As drama developed, complex character began to reabsorb such abstractions. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus shows a transition from the morality scheme to something more modern: the good and bad angels aren’t central to the play, and Faustus is a complex character. Still, the play shares the ethical concerns of morality plays. What follows is adapted from what I learned years ago from lectures by Professor Edgar Schell at UC Irvine.

A question for modern readers of Marlowe’s masterpiece might be whether Faustus is a sympathetic and even heroic figure, almost a Renaissance Prometheus who dares to know things that are forbidden to ordinary mortals. That kind of reading certainly makes sense if we are talking about Goethe’s later version of the same legend. If that were so, we might arrive at a reading in which Faustus’ downfall is ironic, i.e. in which it is caused not by sinfulness but instead by intellectual and imaginative superiority defying the natural limits of a universe inadequate to such deeply human gifts. But that may not be the best way to read Marlowe’s working of the Faustus legend.

His play begins with Faustus already an amazing learned man now seeking necromantic, godlike power. At 1.1.61, we hear that “a sound magician is a demigod.” Does the furtherance of civilization, or the pursuit of excellence on the part of an individual, require sacrilege and suffering? As an old professor of mine points out, we may not see what the big deal is—after all, we have what Faustus wants: a multiplicity of goods and wondrous information technology. We take it for granted that we can communicate with somebody on the other side of the world without delay; we travel by air and look down at the earth from 40,000 feet and think little of it. So does he sell his soul for the modern world? Does he have to violate the limits of medieval Christian culture in order to achieve his ends?

Marlowe himself, as a pre-Romantic author, probably saw the play not as high tragedy but rather as moral comedy. The personifications (“the good angel,” “Lucifer” etc.) that define the quality of Faustus’ actions in morality-play fashion have a Brechtian alienation-effect, formally distancing the audience from the protagonist. Doctor Faustus isn’t so much a hero as an object of moral reflection. The text tells us how to interpret Faustus’ actions: it condemns him as an Icharus who violates Nature’s laws and ends up looking foolish, not heroic. The “form of Faustus’ fortunes,” then, is comic or satiric. It may well be asked why a radical like Christopher Marlowe would follow such a conventional scheme. That’s hard to say, other than that he was a working playwright who wanted to make money, not political statements. Then, too, as Professor Edgar Schell points out, the text we are reading is hardly definitive: Philip Henslowe records payment of 4 £ to Ralegh and Bird for substantial revisions, so we don’t have the play as Marlowe wrote it in 1592. (Subsequent editions appeared in 1604 and 1616.)

Structure:

1) Scenes I-VI. Faustus makes his pact. Neatly delineated and analytical, time moves slowly. Breakdown: i—decision; ii—comic; iii—pact; iv—comic; v—Mephostophilis returns and Faustus reconsiders.

2) Scenes VII-XI. Faustus enjoys his powers abroad and at Wittenberg . 24 years go by rapidly. Elizabethan lyric structure involves an opening proposition, an arbitrary middle since imagination fills out proposition until we return to prove it.

3) Scenes XII-XIII. Consequences. We return to a slow time frame—one hour takes much space now.

Examine the relationship between scenes 3, 4, 5. First Faustus makes his bargain, then we have a comic scene with Robin the Clown, and then Mephistopheles reinforces the bargain.

Serious and comic scenes alternate throughout the play, though two serious scenes from v-vi suggest that something may be missing.

In scene 4, Robin is proud of turning a bad bargain into a supposedly good one. His “good” bargain, however, has only been sauced up. One can expect a big smile from either Robin or the audience, the same broad smile with which Mephistopheles must have greeted Faustus’ terror at the success of his Latin conjurations.

In scene 3, Mephistopheles is so ugly that Faustus cannot stomach his appearance. Like Robin, Faustus cannot accept his bargain raw. Robin, then, acts as a parodist of his master and clarifies the tone appropriate to the latter’s conjurations and to his fear at their success. Like King Lear with his Fool, Faustus is never alone at the height of his folly; there is no room for self-pity or our pity. This “shadowing” technique is similar to that of commedia dell’arte, in which il dottore’s pretentious claims are shown wrong, and he’s followed by a servant-clown who mocks his actions and dress. Parody and repetition clarify the true nature of Faustus’ bargain.

Faustus’ defects show in other ways, too. Near the beginning, Marlowe makes the doctor demonstrate the quality of his mind through this syllogism: the wages of sin is death (Romans vi.23); all men sin (John viii); therefore, all men die. On this basis, Faustus concludes that the study of divinity is a waste of time. But how can one fail to notice that his premises are false? He misreads the texts and suppresses the qualifying clauses that offer grace to sinners. Therefore, Faustus is not “learned” at all—he has committed a vulgar intellectual error, and despairs of God’s grace because he cannot imagine that it has been offered. (Some scholars claim Calvinism is at the root of this common problem, but let’s leave that aside.) Robin parodies this chop-logic just as he mocked Faustus’ terror. All in all, then, Marlowe’s play seems more like self-deception than a real tragedy. This initial self-deception is repeated throughout the play.

When Faustus goes to sign his contract and finds that his signature-blood has congealed, Mephistopheles distracts him with illusions. Faustus believes neither in hell nor in the devil’s confessions about his own crimes. Moreover, when he asks for a wife, Mephistopheles, realizing that providing one would involve a sacrament, furnishes him with other things—books and paramours.

When Faustus becomes dangerously disillusioned, Lucifer and Beëlzebub appear with a circus act starring the Seven Deadly Sins. Why do the devils appear? Faustus is not really praying; rather, he is arguing with Mephistopheles, so he is fair game for another diversion. One can see how far Marlowe’s “hero” has fallen by the fact that Lucifer’s display of banal, everyday sins delights his soul. Faustus, who once dreamed of infinite power, is now contented with trivial sensuality.

Note that all of Marlowe’s frames for and representations of Faustus show the steady degradation of his soul. By the second half of Doctor Faustus, the protagonist himself is putting on the banal shows. He has made no substantial gains. He has seen only illusions, and we do not see any of the text’s alleged visual splendors. We see only Faustus’ vulgar jokes and showmanship. Perhaps really seeing Homer sing would have been worth one’s Renaissance soul, but the point is that Faustus sees only illusions.

The last distraction for Faustus is one that he has explicitly asked for as a distraction: Helen of Troy. The play’s comic force comes from its demonstration of Augustine’s doctrine that evil does not exist. The old man has offered Faustus one last chance to repent, but the latter instead asks Mephistopheles to torment the man. Then he asks for Helen explicitly as a distraction. As she is now, however, Helen is nothing but a destroyer of civilizations and souls. Note that when Faustus uses the familiar Elizabethan figure concerning the exchange of souls during kissing, it plays against him—he really is going to lose his soul.

What does Helen look like to the audience? Aristotle says that tragedy deals with events inspiring pity and fear and that to inspire such emotions, the protagonist, described as “one like ourselves,” must suffer an undeservedly harsh misfortune. Macbeth follows this prescription in that the emphasis is not on the murder of Duncan but on its psychological consequences for Macbeth. Macbeth, even if we cannot agree with his act, is “like ourselves” because we see things through his eyes. But is Faustus like us? Do we see Helen as he does? We look at Faustus as he misperceives everything that happens in the play. When he sees Helen, he asks, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” What should we make of this ambiguous phrase? This calls for reflection. Does the play seek to reproduce only the surfaces of things, or does it seek rather to reveal their underlying moral reality? What does Helen look like?

By the play’s end, Faustus simply cannot repent—he has no soul to save and wants only to avoid this fact. How could Marlowe write such a play? Well, conventional form has great force. He illustrates the conventional Christian idea that “Sin, by custom, grows into nature.” That is why the old man’s entreaties at the play’s end fail. In sum, although Aristotle says that in tragedy one need not share the protagonist’s values but must simply see things from his point of view, it seems clear that we do not see things from Faustus’ point of view, so the play would be better described as a moral comedy than as a tragedy.