THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS
Introduction
Born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as William
Shakespeare, Christopher
Marlowe was an
actor, poet, and playwright during the reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I (ruled
1558–1603). Marlowe attended Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University and received degrees in 1584 and
1587. Traditionally, the education that he received would have prepared him to
become a clergyman, but Marlowe chose not to join the ministry. For a time, Cambridge even wanted to withhold his
degree, apparently suspecting him of having converted to Catholicism, a
forbidden faith in late-sixteenth-century England, where Protestantism was the
state-supported religion. Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council intervened on his
behalf, saying that Marlowe had “done her majesty good service” in “matters
touching the benefit of the country.” This odd sequence of events has led some
to theorize that Marlowe worked as a spy for the crown, possibly by
infiltrating Catholic communities in France.
After leaving Cambridge, Marlowe moved to London, where he became a playwright and
led a turbulent, scandal-plagued life. He produced seven plays, all of which were
immensely popular. Among the most well known of his plays are Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus. In his writing, he pioneered the
use of blank verse—non-rhyming lines of iambic pentameter—which many of his
contemporaries, including William Shakespeare, later adopted. In 1593, however, Marlowe’s career was cut short. After
being accused of heresy (maintaining beliefs contrary to those of an approved
religion), he was arrested and put on a sort of probation. On May 30, 1593, shortly after being released, Marlowe became
involved in a tavern brawl and was killed when one of the combatants stabbed
him in the head. After his death, rumors were spread accusing him of treason,
atheism, and homosexuality, and some people speculated that the tavern brawl
might have been the work of government agents. Little evidence to support these
allegations has come to light, however.
Critical Summary
The opening chorus gives a brief
biography of Doctor Faustus. He was born of poor parents in Rhodes, Germany. Later he lived in Wertenberg. By
university study, he earned the title of doctor and excelled in the heavenly
discipline of theology. Then, however, he became enamored of magic and turned
to cursed necromancy.
Doctor Faustus was sitting in his
study. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He had once enjoyed Aristotle's logic,
but now he was dissatisfied. All it did was enable a person to dispute
effectively. Doctor Faustus was already skilled at disputation, so he did not
have to study logic any more. He used to enjoy Galen, but he had already made
his mark in the field of medicine. He felt that the legal precepts of Justinian
were paltry, and he did not take pleasure in the field of theology.
He finally settled on necromancy
as a worthy subject on which he could exercise his brains. He commanded his
servant Wagner to fetch German Valdez and Cornelius, who were
proficient in this field.
At this point, the good angel and
the bad angel make the first of their many appearances. The good angel tried to
dissuade him from involving himself with necromancy; the evil angel encouraged
him.
Doctor Faustus contemplated all
the knowledge, riches, and power that he thought necromancy could bring him.
With the help of German Valdez and Cornelius, he became
proficient in the magical arts. As he was intoning a special spell, the devil
Mephistopheles appeared before him.
Doctor Faustus thought that
Mephistopheles was too ugly to attend him. He commanded the spirit to assume
the form of a Franciscan monk.
Doctor Faustus wanted
Mephistopheles to do whatever he commanded from that day forth. Mephistopheles
replied that he would first have to secure the consent of Lucifer, his boss. In
the ensuing discussion, Mephistopheles explained that he had come of his own
accord. Lucifer had not sent him. Nor did the incantations of Doctor Faustus
force him to appear. He came because his incantations included a renunciation
of the Holy Scriptures and the Savior, so he had come in the hope of securing
for himself the glorious soul of Doctor Faustus.
In answer to further questions on
the part of Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles explained that Lucifer was once an
angel. Because of his pride, he and his followers were cast out of heaven and
now suffer in hell. Even though Mephistopheles was in Faust's study, he was
still suffering the pangs of hell. Wherever he went, hell followed him.
Faust agreed to surrender his soul
if Mephistopheles would serve him for twenty-four years. Mephistopheles carried
this message to Lucifer.
At this point the story is
interrupted by comic relief provided by the servant Wagner and a clown. When
the main story resumes, the good angel and the evil angel appear again and pull
Faustus in different directions. The evil angel wins the battle.
Mephistopheles secured the consent
of Lucifer. However, Doctor Faustus had to write a document bequeathing his
soul to Lucifer. He had to write the document with his own blood.
Dr. Faustus stabbed himself in the
arm and began to write. However, he encountered a problem. His blood became
congealed, and Mephistopheles had to warm it up with hot coals before he could
complete the document.
After completing the document,
Doctor Faustus thought that he saw some ominous Latin writing on his arm. To
distract his mind, Mephistopheles summoned some dancing devils who gave Doctor
Faustus some crowns and gorgeous apparel.
After questioning Mephistopheles
about hell and expressing his own doubts about the existence of such a place,
Doctor Faustus asked Mephistopheles to give him a wife. However, when
Mephistopheles brought him a devil that has assumed the form of a woman, Doctor
Faustus was displeased.
Mephistopheles expressed contempt
for marriage. He gave Doctor Faustus a book which could provide him with
whatever he wanted. By repeating the correct lines, he could get gold, warriors
in armor, a whirlwind, or a tempest.
When Doctor Faustus asked for
incantations that could raise up spirits, Mephistopheles told him that they
were in the book. The book would also enable him to see all the planets of the
heavens and understand their motions. It would also show him all the plants
that grow on the earth.
When Faust beheld the heavens, he
expressed a desire to repent. The good angel came to encourage him, but the
evil angel discouraged repentance. In the ensuing discussion, Mephistopheles
feared that he was losing Doctor Faustus; so he went to hell to fetch Lucifer
and Beelzebub.
While Mephistopheles was gone, the
good angel and the evil angel came once more. The evil angel told Doctor
Faustus that they would tear him into pieces if he repented.
When Lucifer, Beelzebub, and
Mephistopheles arrived, Lucifer secured the allegiance of Doctor Faustus once
more. For his entertainment, Lucifer then showed him the seven deadly sins:
pride, covetousness, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, and lechery. He conversed
briefly with each of the seven.
The chorus informs us that Doctor
Faustus has already learned all the secrets of astronomy. He now will delve
into cosmography. The chorus guesses that he will first stop at Rome to see the pope.
In actual fact, Doctor Faustus
visited several places before he came to Rome. He visited Trier, Paris, Naples, Padua, Venice, etc.
Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles
visited the pope when he was about to have a feast. Doctor Faustus asked
Mephistopheles to make him invisible so that he could do whatever he wanted.
During the feast, Doctor Faustus kept taking for himself whatever the pope was
about to eat or drink.
The pope kept crossing himself.
This irritated Doctor Faustus, so he struck the pope on the ear.
The pope and his company left the
room. Then all the friars returned and started chanting a dirge in which they
cursed whoever stole the pope's food and hit him in the face. Doctor Faustus
and Mephistopheles raised some havoc with the friars and left.
The chorus makes another brief
appearance. It tells of the doctor's return to Wertenberg and the fame he
subsequently acquired through his magical arts.
After a comic interlude, the next
scene occurs in the palace of Emperor Charles V. Doctor
Faustus is feasting with the emperor. A knight and others
are also present.
The emperor admired Doctor Faustus
and wanted him to exercise some of his powers. In contrast, the knight thought
that Doctor Faustus was a charlatan.
The emperor asked Doctor Faustus
to make Alexander the Great and his paramour appear before his eyes. Doctor
Faustus acknowledged that he could not do so, since their bodies had
disintegrated to dust. However, he could make spirits appear before the emperor
with the exact shape of Alexander and his paramour.
The knight scoffed, saying:
"That's as true as Diana turned me into a stag." Faust replied that
Actaeon had bequeathed his horns to the knight when he died. When Doctor
Faustus ordered Mephistopheles to fulfill the emperor's wish, the knight left
in disgust.
Spirits appeared, and the emperor
was satisfied that they possessed the authentic forms of Alexander the Great
and his paramour.
After the spirits had left, Doctor
Faustus asked the emperor to summon the knight. The scoffer entered with a pair
of horns on his head. The emperor teasingly called his attention to the
phenomenon. The knight complained loudly. At the emperor's request, Doctor
Faustus removed the horns. However, he admonished the knight not to scoff at
magic. (Biologically, a stag has antlers, not horns.)
The emperor rewarded Doctor
Faustus handsomely before he left.
After a comical scene in which
Doctor Faustus used magic in a somewhat whimsical manner, the duke of Vanholt
and his duchess visited Doctor Faustus. The duchess was pregnant and desired a
dish of fresh grapes. It was January, but Mephistopheles quickly went to the
southern hemisphere and returned with some grapes.
The day of Doctor Faustus' death
was approaching, but he still caroused with his students. At their request, he
commanded the spirits to assume the form of Helen of Troy.
After the students left, an old man
visited Doctor Faustus. He wanted to guide the doctor's steps in the way of
life. He directed Doctor Faustus to the Savior, "whose blood alone must
wash away thy guilt."
Doctor Faustus was moved by these
words. After the old man left, Mephistopheles called him a traitor. The doctor
apologized and told Mephistopheles to torment the old man. He also asked
Mephistopheles to give Helen of Troy to him as a mistress.
Mephistopheles easily fulfilled
the latter wish of Doctor Faustus, but he could not accomplish very much when
he attacked the old man. Mephistopheles was able to buffet his body, but the
faith of the old man prevented the demon from touching his soul.
On the final day of his life,
Doctor Faustus told three scholars about the pact that he had made with the
devil. Faust warned them not to stay in the room with him when the devils came
to fetch him. They decided to stay in the next room and pray.
Doctor Faustus awaited the
appointed hour with despair. His final words were expressions of horror as the devils
came to carry him off to hell.
Themes
Sin, Redemption, and
Damnation
Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals
with the themes at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world.
First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to
the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a
sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and
even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance
to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be
forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who,
according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus,
however terrible Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of
redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is
ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus
considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the
old man in scene 12—both of whom can be seen
either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or both.
Each time, Faustus decides to
remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this
turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the
end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he
cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In
creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being
redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize
the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for
the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different
universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot
be forgiven.
The Conflict Between Medieval and Renaissance Values
Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously
remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who
had to pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this
quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash
between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The
medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and
the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon
spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on
classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In
the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance,
though, secular matters took center stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician
rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century),
explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship,
beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology,
quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine,
the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval
model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this
soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He
resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or
authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the
clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems
hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his
tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the
price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it
is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern
world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on
humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his
successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times.
On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact
with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks,
might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the
new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a
Faustian dead end.
Power as a Corrupting Influence
Early in the play, before he
agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the
power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to
plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely
admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They
lend a grandeur to Faustus’s schemes and make his quest for personal power seem
almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early
soliloquies.
Once Faustus actually gains the
practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to
narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped.
Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself
with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange
delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not
that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustus’s behavior
after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather,
gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by
transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty
celebrity.
In the Christian framework of the
play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s
blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is
condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what
to do with it.
The Divided Nature of Man
Faustus is constantly undecided
about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact
with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him
of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it
seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and
the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him
in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be
intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent
Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but
also to question this commitment continually.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures,
contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s
major themes.
Magic and the Supernatural
The supernatural pervades Doctor
Faustus, appearing everywhere in the story. Angels and devils flit about,
magic spells are cast, dragons pull chariots (albeit offstage), and even fools
like the two ostlers, Robin and Rafe, can learn enough magic to summon demons.
Still, it is worth noting that nothing terribly significant is accomplished
through magic. Faustus plays tricks on people, conjures up grapes, and explores
the cosmos on a dragon, but he does not fundamentally reshape the world. The
magic power that Mephastophilis grants him is more like a toy than an awesome,
earth-shaking ability. Furthermore, the real drama of the play, despite all the
supernatural frills and pyrotechnics, takes place within Faustus’s vacillating
mind and soul, as he first sells his soul to Lucifer and then considers
repenting. In this sense, the magic is almost incidental to the real story of
Faustus’s struggle with himself, which Marlowe intended not as a fantastical
battle but rather as a realistic portrait of a human being with a will divided
between good and evil.
Practical Jokes
Once he gains his awesome powers,
Faustus does not use them to do great deeds. Instead, he delights in playing
tricks on people: he makes horns sprout from the knight’s head and sells the
horse-courser an enchanted horse. Such magical practical jokes seem to be
Faustus’s chief amusement, and Marlowe uses them to illustrate Faustus’s
decline from a great, prideful scholar into a bored, mediocre magician with no
higher ambition than to have a laugh at the expense of a collection of
simpletons.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to
represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Blood
Blood plays multiple symbolic
roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he signs in blood,
symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact. His blood
congeals on the page, however, symbolizing, perhaps, his own body’s revolt
against what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Christ’s blood, which Faustus says he
sees running across the sky during his terrible last night, symbolizes the
sacrifice that Jesus, according to Christian belief, made on the cross; this
sacrifice opened the way for humankind to repent its sins and be saved.
Faustus, of course, in his proud folly, fails to take this path to salvation.
Faustus’s Rejection of the Ancient Authorities
In scene 1,
Faustus goes through a list of the major fields of human knowledge—logic,
medicine, law, and theology—and cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle,
Galen, Justinian, and Jerome’s Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of
these figures in favor of magic. This rejection symbolizes Faustus’s break with
the medieval world, which prized authority above all else, in favor of a more
modern spirit of free inquiry, in which experimentation and innovation trump
the assertions of Greek philosophers and the Bible.
The Good Angel and the Evil Angel
The angels appear at Faustus’s
shoulder early on in the play—the good angel urging him to repent and serve
God, the evil angel urging him to follow his lust for power and serve Lucifer.
The two symbolize his divided will, part of which wants to do good and part of
which is sunk in sin.
CHARACTERS
Faustus
Faustus is the protagonist and
tragic hero of Marlowe’s play. He is a contradictory character, capable of
tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange,
almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained
at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on
his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn
out badly (the Chorus’s introduction, if nothing else, prepares us), there is
nonetheless a grandeur to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his
magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners
of the globe, reshaping the map of Europe (both politically and
physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe.
He is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that
we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He
represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval,
God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least
early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.
But Faustus also possesses an
obtuseness that becomes apparent during his bargaining sessions with
Mephastophilis. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the only way to
fulfill his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what such a pact
actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad and that one
needs only “fortitude”; at other times, even while conversing with
Mephastophilis, he remarks to the disbelieving demon that he does not actually
believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about the
prospect of eternal damnation, -Faustus is also beset with doubts from the
beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly
approaches repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he
fails to repent is unclear: -sometimes it seems a matter of pride and
continuing ambition, sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea.
Other times, it seems that Mephastophilis simply bullies him away from
repenting.
Bullying Faustus is less difficult
than it might seem, because Marlowe, after setting his protagonist up as a
grandly tragic figure of sweeping visions and immense ambitions, spends the
middle scenes revealing Faustus’s true, petty nature. Once Faustus gains his
long-desired powers, he does not know what to do with them. Marlowe suggests
that this uncertainty stems, in part, from the fact that desire for knowledge
leads inexorably toward God, whom Faustus has renounced. But, more generally,
absolute power corrupts Faustus: once he can do everything, he no longer wants
to do anything. Instead, he traipses around Europe, playing tricks on yokels and
performing conjuring acts to impress various heads of state. He uses his
incredible gifts for what is essentially trifling entertainment. The fields of
possibility narrow gradually, as he visits ever more minor nobles and performs
ever more unimportant magic tricks, until the Faustus of the first few scenes
is entirely swallowed up in mediocrity. Only in the final scene is Faustus
rescued from mediocrity, as the knowledge of his impending doom restores his
earlier gift of powerful rhetoric, and he regains his sweeping sense of vision.
Now, however, the vision that he sees is of hell looming up to swallow him.
Marlowe uses much of his finest poetry to describe Faustus’s final hours,
during which Faustus’s desire for repentance finally wins out, although too
late. Still, Faustus is restored to his earlier grandeur in his closing speech,
with its hurried rush from idea to idea and its despairing,
Renaissance-renouncing last line, “I’ll burn my books!” He becomes once again a
tragic hero, a great man undone because his ambitions have butted up against
the law of God.
Mephastophilis
The character of Mephastophilis
(spelled Mephistophilis or Mephistopheles by other authors) is one of the first
in a long tradition of sympathetic literary devils, which includes figures like
John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and Johann von Goethe’s Mephistophilis in
the nineteenth-century poem “Faust.” Marlowe’s Mephastophilis is particularly
interesting because he has mixed motives. On the one hand, from his first
appearance he clearly intends to act as an agent of Faustus’s damnation.
Indeed, he openly admits it, telling Faustus that “when we hear one rack the
name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ, / We fly in hope to
get his glorious soul” (3.47–49). It is Mephastophilis who witnesses Faustus’s pact
with Lucifer, and it is he who, throughout the play, steps in whenever Faustus
considers repentance to cajole or threaten him into staying loyal to hell.
Yet there is an odd ambivalence in
Mephastophilis. He seeks to damn Faustus, but he himself is damned and speaks
freely of the horrors of hell. In a famous passage, when Faustus remarks that
the devil seems to be free of hell at a particular moment, Mephastophilis
insists,
[w]hy this is hell, nor am I out of
it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
(3.76–80)
Again, when Faustus blithely—and
absurdly, given that he is speaking to a demon—declares that he does not
believe in hell, Mephastophilis groans and insists that hell is, indeed, real
and terrible, as Faustus comes to know soon enough. Before the pact is sealed,
Mephastophilis actually warns Faustus against making the deal with Lucifer. In
an odd way, one can almost sense that part of Mephastophilis does not want
Faustus to make the same mistakes that he made. But, of course, Faustus does so
anyway, which makes him and Mephastophilis kindred spirits. It is appropriate
that these two figures dominate Marlowe’s play, for they are two overly proud
spirits doomed to hell.
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