Introduction

Sara Munson Deats

University of South Florida

The Guide

Critical consensus identifies Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, probably written and

performed around 1588, as the first great tragedy in the English language, a powerful drama that

ushered in thirty years of unparalleled dramatic creativity on the English stage. For over 400

years, Marlowe’s most often read and most frequently performed play has been surrounded by

conjecture; indeed, few works of literature have evoked such violent critical controversy as

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Almost every aspect of the play has been questioned: the text has

been contested; the authorship has been challenged; the date has been disputed; and the meaning

has been debated. This volume seeks to guide the teacher and student of Marlowe—and, of

course, all successful teachers are also students—through the labyrinth of critical controversy

associated with Marlowe’s most popular play, and to aid all students of Marlowe in gaining a

fuller appreciation of the originality and profundity of this work.

This volume contains an Introduction and eight chapters designed to approach the play

from multiple perspectives. The Introduction outlines the scope and goals of the volume,

examining Marlowe’s changing status in the canon of English literature, whereby during the past

few decades Marlowe has become accepted as one of the most influential of early modern

dramatists, second only to Shakespeare. This chapter also explores the various influences—the

magus legend, the morality play tradition, and the German and English Faustbooks—that

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combined to produce this fascinating fusion of native and classical dramatic conventions. Finally,

this chapter briefly analyzes the characteristics that make this play one of the triumphs of the

English Renaissance and a powerful influence on the development of the English drama.

In the first chapter of this volume, ‘The Critical Backstory,’ Bruce T. Brandt traces the

rich and varied critical history of Doctor Faustus, encompassing the enthusiastic responses of

early modern audiences, the disregard of the play in the seventeenth century, its rediscovery in

the eighteenth century, its resurrection by critics and poets in the nineteenth century, and the

passionate engagement that the play has aroused in twentieth-century critics. This chapter also

surveys the lively debates provoked by the play; these focus on the two very different extant

versions, the A- and B- texts; the dating of the play; the authorship of the comic sections of the

drama; and, most important of all, the theological ideology dominating the tragedy. This chapter

not only summarizes traditional arguments concerning the meaning of the drama, but also

examines the new perspectives offered by psychoanalytical, feminist, and new historicist

commentators on the play.

Although undoubtedly the most frequently performed of Marlowe’s plays, Doctor

Faustus, like so many of the dramas by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, has experienced both

overwhelming success and virtual neglect. In the second chapter of this volume, David

Bevington reviews the diversity in the performance history of the play, ranging from its

immediate popularity after its premier performance, probably in 1588, although this is much

debated, to its degeneration into farcical adaptations in the eighteenth century, to its complete

disappearance from the stage in the nineteenth century, to its resurrection by William Poole in

1896, to its plethora of revivals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter focuses

not only on highly touted productions by companies like the Royal Shakespeare Company and

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the Old Vic but also on the myriad of exciting experimental adaptations performed by repertory

companies and college groups in Britain, Canada, and the United States, as well as radio and

cinematic versions of the play.

The third chapter of this collection, ‘The State of the Art: Current Critical Research,’

written by Robert A. Logan, provides readers with a broad overview of recent critical research on

Doctor Faustus, demonstrating how during the past few decades interest in Marlowe has virtually

exploded. Before examining the present state of the art in the scholarship and criticism of Doctor

Faustus, Logan distinguishes between these two terms, using ‘scholarship’ to describe work that

deals primarily with matters of text and print culture and ‘criticism’ as commentary on issues of

interpretation. This chapter then focuses on three central topics: first, the tendencies reflected in

twenty-first century scholarship and criticism of the play; second, recurrent patterns

characterizing this scholarship and criticism; and, third, areas of critical neglect and possibilities

for new and rewarding inquiry. This chapter also includes a detailed listing of all editions,

collections, and individual essays and chapters on the play published in the new millennium.

The following four chapters, under the rubric ‘New Directions,’ employ innovative

analyses of this widely studied text. These include the discovery of a new ethos for the tragedy, a

postcolonial reading of the play, a first-hand account of the problems facing a director attempting

to produce the drama for a contemporary audience, and the examination of the play’s relationship

to print culture.

What exactly is the magic that Faustus practices, and how does it relate to both his

ambition and his fall? These questions have been asked many times before but have generally

been approached by equating Marlowe’s protagonist with notable Renaissance occultists such as

Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee. In ‘Doctor Faustus and Renaissance Hermeticism,’ Andrew

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Duxfield posits a very different ethos for the play, discovering striking parallels between

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and key passages from the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the

pseudo-historical mystic whose ideas strongly influenced Renaissance occult thought. Duxfield

argues that these parallels offer a new perspective on Faustus’s aspirations and also a potential

synthesis between reading the play as a celebration of an ambitious yet admirable human being

and interpreting it as a moral tale about the punishment of a foolish and faithless sinner.

Characterizing Doctor Faustus as an anamorphic drama, in ‘Imperialism as Devilry: A

Postcolonial Reading of Doctor Faustus,’ Toni Francis assumes an untraditional perspective from

which to view the tragedy. From this unconventional stance, Francis discovers a drama in which

Marlowe adapts his morality play format to contemporary issues, establishing a direct

relationship between Faustus’s surrender of his soul to Lucifer and England’s pursuit of

imperialist power through the mechanism of colonialism. According to Francis, the play’s

multiple allusions to exploitation and colonialism suggest a subtle critique of the discourse of

imperialism emerging in the early modern period. In her reading, therefore, necromancy is

equated with imperialism and Faustus with the colonizer who sells his soul for the power and

control intrinsic to the imperialist enterprise.

In the third chapter in this section, ‘“What means this show?” Staging Faustus on

Campus,’ Andrew James Hartley describes the decisions that he faced in directing this

problematic play at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in April 2007. First, of course,

any director must select from the two very different extant texts. Hartley chose the A-text as

more compatible with his own vision of the production, which stressed Faustus’s agency and

responsibility for his contract. In an effort to make the play relevant to a contemporary audience,

Hartley adopted modern dress and minimized Faustus’s aspirations for power and forbidden

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knowledge while highlighting his yearning for celebrity, in this case, celebrity as both a magician

and a rock star. Finally, Hartley cast a female actor in the role of Mephistopheles, emphasizing

the inner conflict of this most undemonic of devils, who is obligated to tempt and damn a man

for whom she feels pity.

According to Georgia Brown in the final chapter in this section, ‘The Other Black Arts:

Doctor Faustus and the Inky Worlds of Printing and Writing,’ Marlowe’s play is obsessed with

the relationship between writing, print, and performance, and the ways that textuality and

corporeality might overlap. Brown argues that for all the excitement generated by its angels,

devils, magic, and hell fire, Doctor Faustus is particularly concerned with the opportunities and

dangers of writing. First performed during the period when drama became a print form, the play

coincides with the tentative beginnings of a writerly drama, and Brown adapts the techniques of

cultural materialism to interrogate the way in which Marlowe’s play probes the nature of script

and of print, and interrogates the relationship of writing to performance and to bodies.

Not only does Doctor Faustus continue to be Marlowe’s most often performed and

critically debated play, but it also remains a perennial favorite in anthologies and textbooks and

thus appears more frequently than any other work by Marlowe on university and college syllabi.

The final chapter in this volume, ‘A Survey of Resources,’ is thus designed to assist the teacher

in presenting Doctor Faustus in the university and college classroom and proposes educational

approaches that might effectively be adopted in teaching this play. In this chapter, Sarah K. Scott

offers a comprehensive selection of resources that include editions of the play, critical studies,

pedagogical essays, and media-based materials to suggest critical approaches, teaching

strategies, and interpretive perspectives to aid both scholars in their individual research and

instructors in their teaching of this play.

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 As noted above, Marlowe’s reputation as a dramatist has suffered multiple vicissitudes,

ranging from the stunning success of his plays in the 1580s and 1590s to their loss of favor in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to their reinstatement in the canon in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. Due in part to the fervent advocacy of the Marlowe Society of America,

founded in 1974, after centuries of neglect, the late twentieth century rediscovered this enigmatic

figure, an infant terrible in his own time. Throughout the past three decades, two or three

scholarly books on Marlowe have appeared in print every year, in addition to a constant flow of

critical essays, all passionately debating the political affiliations, religious attitudes, and sexual

preferences affirmed in both Marlowe’s life and his work. Moreover, the life of this dashing yet

mysterious figure has also inspired numerous biographical studies, historical novels, and original

dramas. Clearly, in the new millennium, Christopher Marlowe has become an increasingly hot

property and Doctor Faustus has remained his most frequently anthologized and most often

performed play.

The Sources

The roots of Doctor Faustus lie deep in the fertile loam of medieval legend. Many of the

stories told about Faust appear in the accounts of earlier charismatic conjurers such as Simon

Magus, St. Cyprian, and Theophilus, all of whom have been cited as possible forerunners of

Faust.1 The stories surrounding these magicians were typical magus legends, tales centering

around a much-acclaimed conjurer whose magical feats were recounted with great zest and

wonder. Simon Magus, the hubristic magician first mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, sought

to purchase from St. Peter the power of the Holy Spirit and instead ‘gained undying notoriety by

lending his name to one of the great vices of the Church—simony.’2 St. Cyprian, whose

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provenance derives not from Scripture but from Church tradition, was consecrated by his parents

to the devil at the age of seven, performed many miraculous deeds, and was eventually

converted, martyred, and canonized. However, the most popular magus legend was the story of

Theophilus, dating from 650 A.D., which introduced into the tradition the diabolical blood pact.

Theophilus, initially a godly man, angered at his unfair treatment by the Church, denied Christ

and made a pact with the devil, signed in his own blood. Later, however, after a career of

dazzling supernatural exploits, he repented and was redeemed through the intercession of the

Virgin Mary.

If the magus legend provided one radical source for the Faust fable, the medieval

morality play furnished another root of this literary mandrake. Morality plays flourished

primarily in the fifteenth century using allegory to teach a moral lesson. These plays are peopled

with abstractions like Mercy and Justice or Virtue and Vice, and the protagonist usually bears the

name Mankind or Everyman to signify that he represents the entire human race. The typical plot

of these plays focuses on the allegorical conflict for the spiritual allegiance of this Mankind

figure. Mankind’s chief tempter, commonly called the Vice, attempts to lure the Everyman hero

from the straight and narrow road of virtue onto the primrose path of dalliance and sin, while the

virtue figures, often called Good Council or Mercy, urge the hero to follow the dictates of God or

the Church. The entire drama thus occurs within the human psyche, which becomes a

battleground on which good and evil contend for ascendancy. The morality play Vice descends

from the Satan of the mystery play and like his infernal progenitor is a conniving, comic

hypocrite who delights in chicanery for its own sake and speaks directly to the audience inviting

their complicity in his schemes to corrupt the Mankind figure. As a comedian par excellence, the

Vice often usurps center stage from Everyman, and even from God, to become the real star of the

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show. Although humorous, the Vice, representing the Devil, is also horrific, and the levity of his

antics in no way diminishes the terror that he inspires, since a majority of the people in the

medieval and early modern periods believed in the Devil as a real presence—ubiquitous,

malevolent, wily, lurking behind every wheat field, awaiting the chance to lure the unwary to

their doom.3

Doctor Faustus both adopts and alters the schema of the morality play to its tragic format.

Like the morality play, Marlowe’s drama enacts the psychomachia between good and evil for the

allegiance of the protagonist; however, as in classical tragedy, Marlowe’s tormented hero is not

an Everyman figure but an exceptional individual. Moreover, Marlowe imports a number of

emblematic characters from the morality play: the Good and Bad Angels probably derive from

the fifteenth-century morality The Castle of Perseverance; the Old Man assumes the customary

role of Good Council or Mercy contesting with the Vice Mephistopheles for the soul of the

protagonist. However, in his Mephistopheles, Marlowe creates a tempter unlike any Vice that had

ever trod the medieval or early modern stage, a potentially tragic devil capable of both

compassion and suffering. In addition, despite the emblematic quality of the morality play

figures and the comic characters, Marlowe brackets his tragedy with two of the most eloquent

and internalized soliloquies in the early modern drama, soliloquies more appropriate to classical

tragedy than to the morality play. Finally, whereas the majority of the morality plays conclude

with the redemption of the often-erring hero, Marlowe’s drama, as relentless as classical tragedy,

ends in a harrowing denouement.

Critics suggest that the religious controversies of the period between Catholic/

Anglican/Lutheran free will and Calvinist predestination modify the play’s morality

psychomachia. David Bevington and Eric Rassmussen posit that Marlowe’s tragedy departs

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markedly from early Catholic moralities like Everyman and more closely resembles the Calvinist

morality plays of the 1560s and 1570s, which dramatize issues of election and reprobation.4 Lily

Bess Campbell offers another possible homiletic source for the play, Nathaniel Woodes’s The

Conflict of Conscience, a Calvinist work based on the spiritual biography of Francesco Spiera.5

Lastly, Susan Snyder interprets the play as an inversion of the saint’s legend, staging Faustus’s

conversion to evil, his embrace of the sacraments of devil worship, his bogus miracles, his

multiple repentances to Lucifer, his mystical vision of Helen, and his final damnation. Moreover,

Faustus’s consistent inversion of Scripture supports Snyder’s reading of the play as an ironic

hagiography.6

Having briefly canvassed the literary sources of the Faust legend, I shall undertake a

search for the historical Faust. Like the majority of humanity’s myths, the Faust legend appears

to have had some basis in fact. Records show that a Georgius of Helmstadt matriculated at the

University of Wittenberg in 1483 and later became known as Johann Faustus. Bevington and

Rassmussen suggest that ‘Faustus,’ meaning ‘auspicious,’ may have been a Latin cognomen

granted the magician in recognition of his magical exploits.7 Between 1507 and 1540, many

references to a wonder worker bearing the name Johann or Johannes Faustus appeared in

contemporaneous letters and diaries. These documents limn the portrait of a widely-traveled,

well-educated, rather shady miracle worker, who was also a braggart, a vagabond, and something

of a mountebank. After his death, this Faustus became a lodestone about which gathered a mass

of superstition, the deposit of centuries, including tales associated not only with Simon Magus,

St. Cyprian, and Theophilus, but also with Empedocles, Virgil, and Roger Bacon.8 This slightly

disreputable figure has had an indelible impact on the literary imagination of the Western world,

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through the alchemy of myth transformed into an archetypical symbol of humanity’s aspirations,

follies, and impossible dreams.

Throughout the latter decades of the sixteenth century, oral and occasional written

accounts of Faustus’s magical feats circulated around Europe. It was not long before an

enterprising publisher saw the commercial possibilities of the legend and in the year 1587 a

German press produced the first coherent biography of The Historie of the Damnable Life and

Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, compiled by a man named Johann Spies. The German

Faustbook, as this work was popularly called, narrates the story of the insatiable speculator who

taking to himself the wings of an eagle desires to fly over the whole world and to know the

secrets of heaven and earth. In his obsession for forbidden knowledge and worldly pleasure,

Faustus studies necromancy, conjures the Devil, and makes a blood pact with Mephistopheles,

promising his soul to Lucifer in return for twenty-four years of hedonistic delight and intellectual

satisfaction. The center section of the book details the puerile practical jokes on which Faustus

squanders his dearly purchased power and the final chapters conclude on a solemn, cautionary

note, graphically recounting the ‘deserved death’ of the ‘damnable’ necromancer. The German

Faustbook blends soaring aspiration and groveling lust, rollicking humor and tragic despair, all

combined in the hybrid figure of its hero. In 1592, or perhaps even earlier, The German

Faustbook was adapted into English by a man known only to posterity as P. F. Gent (Gentleman),

and critical consensus accepts this version as the source for Marlowe’s great tragedy. P. F., in his

free-wheeling, sometimes grossly inaccurate, but always sprightly rending into English of

Spies’s biography, expanded, condensed, diverged, and interpolated at will, and some of these

modifications help to identify The English Faustbook rather than the German version as

Marlowe’s source. The English Faustbook retains the oxymoronic quality of the German

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original, both its mixed form—part tragedy, part jestbook—and its hybrid hero—part titan, part

buffoon—and Marlowe adopts both the crossbred genre and the hybrid hero to his tragedy.9

The Play

In The Tudor Play of Mind, Joel Altman situates the problematic dramas of the early

modern period within the theatrical tradition of arguing on both sides of the question. According

to Altman, the interrogative plays so popular at this period are constructed from a series of

statements and counterstatements, both equally valid, thereby imitating the form of a sophistical

debate in which thesis provokes antithesis, yet without resolving synthesis. Thus, these plays ask

questions rather than provide answers and deliberately evoke mixed reactions from their

audiences.10 Although all of Marlowe’s plays have traditionally incited multiple responses, none

has provoked the heated controversy generated by Doctor Faustus. Establishing the polarities of

these responses are Una Ellis-Fermor and George Santayana at one extreme, who identify Doctor

Faustus as the ‘most nearly Satanic tragedy that can be found’ and Faustus as a ‘martyr to

everything that the Renaissance prized—power, curious knowledge, enterprise, wealth, and

beauty,’ and Leo Kirschbaum, at the other, who insists that ‘there is no more Christian document

in all Elizabethan drama.’11 Although the majority of commentators assume less hyperbolic

stances, Faustus still arouses widely disparate reactions in audiences and critics alike, ranging

from breathless admiration for the magician’s aspiring mind and eloquent verse to utter contempt

for his inane tricks. These widely divergent responses suggest that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe

has penned an interrogative drama that brilliantly argues on both sides of the question.

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 If we focus only the action of the play, the Christian apologists have the stronger case.

Critics advancing this position cite the many changes that Marlowe makes in his source, The

English Faustbook, that tend to deflate Faustus and his heroic aspirations.

First, the shift in emphasis from a longing for forbidden knowledge (the trespass of

Prometheus) to a desire for power (the sin of Lucifer) radically alters the nature of the magician’s

transgressions. Both Faustbooks offer two primary motivations for Faustus’s fatal contract: an

itch for sensual pleasure and a voracious curiosity. In his dramatic adaptation, Marlowe surpasses

his source in deeply probing his hero’s motivation, during the first two acts of the play allowing

Faustus continuously to rhapsodize on his dreams. The majority of these passages center not on

sensual pleasure (although he does refer to this on more than one occasion) nor on forbidden

knowledge (although he does make casual reference to the ‘resolution of ambiguities’ and the

‘secrets of foreign kings’). Rather, Marlowe’s magician revels in visions of power, glory, and

wealth, like Tamburlaine, another of Marlowe’s titanic overreachers, elevating the sweet fruition

of an earthly crown above knowledge infinite and the puissance of a god above both. Therefore,

so the argument goes, despite Faustus’s frequent intellectual debates with Mephistopheles, the

language of the play minimizes the lure of forbidden knowledge and such curiosity as Marlowe’s

Faustus does exhibit is strongly vitiated by the yearning for power, fame, and wealth. Moreover,

by magnifying his hero’s aspirations (the necromancers of the Faustbooks never presume to be

‘great emperor of the world’ or strive ‘to gain a Deity’) and sharply curtailing his realization

(Marlowe’s Faustus gains few, if any, of his grandiose dreams), Marlowe stresses the hiatus

between Faustus’s overreach and grasp and thus arguably renders his hero more truly tragic.12

Marlowe’s exclusion of extraneous elements from his source further clarifies Faustus’s

downward trajectory as he falls under the spell of magic. According to G. K. Hunter’s schema,

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the play traces the magician’s descent through activities, associates, and adversaries.13 The play

initially presents Faustus as a type of polymath, an adept in the four doctoral-granting disciplines

of the early modern period: Philosophy, Medicine, Law, and Divinity. Having rejected these four

disciplines and embarked on his perilous journey into necromancy, Faustus first requests

information about astronomy as his reward, thus partially vindicating himself as a knowledge

seeker. However, Faustus soon discovers that Mephistopheles, unable to discuss first causes, can

provide only the rudimentary knowledge already available to Faustus, and even to Wagner.

Frustrated in his attempt to discover astronomical truth, Faustus moves from heaven to earth,

devoting himself to cosmography, or what we would today call geography, enjoying something

equivalent to the Grand Tour as he visits the capitals of Europe. In Rome, Faustus progresses

downward from cosmology into politics, since his activities in the papal court, although

primarily involving slap-stick antics, relate tangentially to politics, at least in the B-text.14 In the

Emperor’s court, he further descends from Pope-maker to court entertainer, conjuring simulacra

of Alexander and his Paramour for the pleasure of Emperor Charles; the man who earlier exulted,

‘The emperor shall not live but by my leave,’ now serves the Emperor. Faustus’s status is further

reduced in the Court of Vanholt, where he performs the function of an errand boy, a type of

‘green grocer,’ sending Mephistopheles around the world to fetch grapes out of season for the

pregnant Duchess. Ultimately, he degenerates into comic shenanigans with horse coursers and

carters. At the same time that his field of activity deteriorates, Faustus suffers a social demotion,

as he moves from the court of the Pope to that of the Emperor to that of the Duke, and the status

of his adversaries diminishes from Pope, to jesting knight, to horse coursers and carters.

Although Faustus’s professional and social decline is more carefully delineated in the B-text than

in the A, the elements of descent pervade both versions and this consistent demotion stresses the

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degenerative effects of the contract.15 Finally, both texts of the play include a farcical subplot that

parodies and deflates the necromancer’s achievements, thus further diminishing his heroic stature

by associating him with clowns like Robin and Rafe in the A-text and Robin and Dick in the B.16

According to the Christian exegetes, Marlowe not only adapts The English Faustbook to

reflect the early modern obsession with power, but he further alters his source to accentuate

Faustus’s responsibility for the pact, presenting his hero as agent of his own damnation as he

doggedly seeks to finalize the contract with the devil. In his opening soliloquy, a masterly

exemplum of reason pandering will, the discontented divine rejects all learning as trivial and

embraces damnation as unavoidable, thus providing a rationale for his infernal contract. Later, in

order to make his contract appear less threatening, he convinces himself that hell is only a fable

and confounds it in Elysium. When confronted with undeniable evidence to the contrary—

Mephistopheles come from hell to seize his ‘glorious soul’—Faustus employs fallacious

reasoning to convince himself that the demon cannot really be in hell. Finally, Faustus ignores

Mephistopheles’s passionate warning ‘to leave these frivolous demands / Which strike a terror in

my fainting soul’ (1.3.83-84).17 Here, in one of the most stunning changes in his source, Marlowe

reverses the roles of tempter and tempted. The tempter of both Faustbooks, like the morality Vice

and like any savvy salesman, minimizes the liabilities and maximizes the advantages of his

product until he has his victim’s name on the dotted line, while the vacillating conjurer of the

Faustbooks seeks the best bargain possible. Conversely, in Marlowe’s tragedy, Mephistopheles

even urges his ‘customer’ to abstain from purchasing his product at such an exorbitant price, and

Marlowe’s Faustus himself plays the devil’s advocate.18

In addition, Christian advocates point out that the introduction of emblematic characters

from the morality play further reinforces the centrality of human choice, stressing Faustus as an

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agent of his own fate rather than the victim of a malevolent deity. These morality play figures

include the Good and Bad Angels as well as the Old Man. Christian expositors would insist that

the two debating angels, as well as the Old Man, would be theologically and dramatically

gratuitous were Faustus predestined to damnation as many heroic interpreters insist.

In summation, Christian interpreters assert that despite the allegedly heterodox opinions

of its author, Doctor Faustus is paradoxically the most orthodox of Marlowe’s dramas. They

further insist that the containment and ironic undercutting of Faustus’s radical subversion of

Christian authority constitute a reaffirmation of that authority.

Challenging this impressive array of evidence, exponents of a heroic reading assert that

both verbal statement and visual imagery create an irony that undermines the ostensible

orthodoxy of the tragedy. Heroic advocates find support in two quotations from the play that

arguably problematize the drama’s affirmation of free will and personal responsibility. The first

of these occurs in the Prologue’s description of Faustus’s Icarian flight and his disastrous fall:

‘Til, swoll’n with cunning of a self conceit. / His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And

melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (Prologue 20-22; emphasis mine). The second

quotation is Mephistopheles’s boast to Faustus in act 5, in which the fiend accepts responsibility

for inspiring Faustus’s fatal fallacious syllogism in scene 1:

‘Twas I that, when you wert i’the way to heaven,

Damned up thy passage. When thou took’st the book

To view the Scriptures, then I turned the leaves

And led thine eye. (B-text; 5.2.98-101)

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The first of these quotations certainly seems to imply the presence of a malignant deity

conspiring against Faustus and perhaps predestining him to damnation; the second, although

contradicting Mephistopheles’s fervent warming to Faustus to ‘Leave these frivolous demands,’

definitely interrogates Faustus’s free will. Heroic commentators further cite the threatening

figures of the infernal trinity—Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles—hovering over

Faustus’s initial conjuring (1.3) and over his final desperate soliloquy (5.2) to suggest a world

presided over by malevolent forces. They also stress the appearance of Lucifer instead of Christ

in answer to Faustus’s desperate plea, ‘Ah, Christ, my Saviour, / Seek to save distressed Faustus’

soul!’ (A.2.3.82-83; cf. B. 2.3.84, which reads, ‘Help to save distressed Faustus’ soul!’), as an

emblem of the absence of God or Christ and the presence of evil as the controlling force of the

play. Lastly, heroic expositors adduce the didactic speeches of the two angels at the play’s

denouement, which confirm Faustus’s inexorable damnation, pointing out that these diatribes call

into question the omnipresent possibility of repentance asserted by the Christian exponents and

thus their affirmation of a benevolent providence presiding over the play. Moreover, Kristen

Poole asserts that rather than unequivocally affirming human agency, the two dueling angels

represent the two different theologies—Catholic/Anglican free will and Calvinist predestination

—informing the play. Critics of this persuasion insist, therefore, that the contrary signals

embedded within the play create an ideological disjunction that implicitly subverts the orthodoxy

explicitly endorsed in the drama.19 However, since the sinister imagery of the infernal trinity

presiding over the initial and final scenes, Mephistopheles’s boast concerning the fallacious

syllogism, and the final tirades of the two angels are all absent from the A-text, advocates of a

Christian reading might rebut that this ostensible ambiguity results primarily from textual

corruption rather than ideological contrariety.20

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 Ultimately, the heroic interpreters must rely primarily on something much less tangible

than visual tableau or explicit statement, offering instead the sense of identification and

sympathy with which readers and audiences alike have traditionally responded to Faustus, the

fallible human being desperately seeking to transcend human limitation. Two recent books

present new readings to support this audience identification with Faustus. Patrick Cheney gives a

novel twist to the heroic reading of the play, interpreting the tragedy not only as a deconstruction

of Calvinist theology but also as an affirmation of artistic freedom in the face of restrictive

religious orthodoxy. By merging Faustus the magician with Marlowe the playwright, Cheney

interprets the play as the ‘author’s affirmation of his own artistic power to be free from the

orthodox Christian forces dangerously afoot in the universe.’21 Conversely, adapting a feminist

approach to the play, Alison Findlay suggests that female audience members would have

particularly identified with Faustus who, like them, is bullied by a patriarchal authority figure

and denied desired knowledge.22 Although I find both of these interpretations intriguing, I locate

the source of audience empathy elsewhere, in both Faustus’s complexity and in his eloquence.

For in Doctor Faustus, Marlowe has created not only a morality play but a lacerating tragedy, as

revealed in the two soliloquies with which Faustus opens and concludes the play. In his opening

soliloquy, Faustus rationalizes his reasons for rejecting traditional learning and fatally choosing

magic over divinity; in his final soliloquy, he struggles between desire for repentance and

despair. In both speeches, Faustus portrays an interiority that anticipates Hamlet’s famous

internal conflicts, and this psychological inwardness evokes from the audience both pity and

terror. Moreover, I expect that the empathy, pity, and terror that audiences frequently feel when

confronting the tragedy derive to a large extent from Faustus’s glorious language. For Faustus,

like so many Marlovian protagonists, pits the magnificent word against the ignoble or, in this

17
case, the inane deed. Those listening with a sensitized ear to Faustus’s sonorous rhetoric while

turning a blind eye to his foolish escapades will adopt a heroic reading. Conversely, those turning

a deaf ear to some of the most soaring poetry in the early modern theater and seeing only the

trivial action on the stage will judge Faustus fatally flawed. Spectators able both to hear and to

see simultaneously, and thus to perceive both the swan and the crow of Marlowe’s perspective

painting,23 will probably achieve the fullest experience of Marlowe’s tragedy.24

With its interiorized protagonist and its double perspective, Doctor Faustus occupies a

pivotal position in the development of the English drama. Scholars have long credited Marlowe

with introducing into the drama a flexible and dynamic verse through which emotion could be

communicated and character created. I further assert that in the person of his tormented hero

Marlowe creates the first fully internalized character on the early modern stage. Finally, I

speculate that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe may be the first English playwright to script dialogical

dramas that inscribe the multiplicity and indecidability of human experience, thereby

anticipating, and perhaps even precipitating, the greater achievements of Elizabethan and

Jacobean tragedy. On many levels, I suggest, reading or viewing Doctor Faustus allows us to

participate in the creation of the English drama.

18
 Notes

1. For a full account of the forerunners of Faust, see the excellent study by Philip Mason

Palmer and Robert Patterson More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition (1936; repr., New York:

Octagon Books, 1966), 9-77, to which this brief summary is deeply indebted.

2. Palmer and More, Sources, 10.

3. For two definitive discussions of the distinctive characteristics of the morality play, see

David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) and

Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press,

1958).

4. David Bevington and Eric Rassmussen, introduction to Doctor Faustus: A and B Texts

(1604, 1610), ed. Bevington and Rassmussen. (1993; repr., Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1995), 10.

5. Lily Bess Campbell, ‘Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience,’ PMLA 67 (1952): 219-39.

6. Susan Snyder, ‘Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as an Inverted Saint’s Life,’ SP 63 (1966):

565-77.

7. Bevington and Rassmussen, introduction to Doctor Faustus, 4.

8. Palmer and More, Sources, 81-126, evaluate the historical evidence for a magician named

Johannes or Johann Faustus in considerable detail. My brief summary draws freely from this

valuable study. See also useful discussions by William Rose in his introduction to The Historie of

the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (Notre Dame: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1963), 3-22, and by Bevington and Rassmussen, Introduction to Doctor

Faustus, 4.
19
9. See the discussion by E. M. Butler, of the German and English Faustbooks, The Fortunes

of Faust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 3-41. See also William Rose,

introduction to Historie, 23-45. For the definitive examination of the sources and background of

Marlowe’s tragedy, see Bevington and Rassmussen, introduction to Doctor Faustus, 3-15. For a

detailed comparison of The English Faustbook to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, see Sara Munson

Deats, ‘Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy,’ Studies in Literature 3 (1976): 3-16.

10. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

11. For the heroic interpretation of the play, see Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 143, and Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius,

Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910), 147. For the Christian reading,

see Kirshbaum, ‘Marlowe’s Faustus: A Reconsideration,’ Review of English Studies 19 (1943):

229.

12. For a more detailed analysis of Marlowe’s changes in his source, see Douglas Cole,

Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1962; repr., New York: Gordian Press,

1972), 191-231, and Deats, ‘Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy,’ 3-16.

13. G. K. Hunter, ‘Five Act Structure in Doctor Faustus,’ Tulane Drama Review 8, no. 4

(1964), 84-99.

14. In the papal court, the A-text Faustus limits himself to high jinks and practical jokes

without political implications and thus Hunter’s schema works much better in the B than in the

A-text.

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15. Although Hunter offers the most detailed analysis of Faustus’s descent down the ladder of

early modern professions, the term ‘green grocer’ derives from Helen Gardner’s ‘Milton’s Satan

and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy,’ English Studies (1948): 48.

16. The most comprehensive treatment of the deflative comic subplot in both texts can be

found in Robert Ornstein, ‘The Comic Synthesis in Doctor Faustus,’ ELH 22 (1955): 165-72.

17. See Deats, ‘Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy,’ 7-9.

18. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the play are taken from the A-text in the

edition by Bevington and Rassmussen; citations will be included within the text.

19. For an insightful defense of the anti-Christian reading, particularly the contrariety

produced by the sinister supernatural figures, see Max Bluestone, ‘Libido Speculandi: Doctrine

and Dramaturgy in Contemporary Representations of Doctor Faustus,’ in Reinterpretations of

Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 33-88.

Poole further supports the interrogative nature of the play, ‘Dr. Faustus and Renaissance

Theology,’ in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.,

Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96-107.

20. Leah Marcus in ‘Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor

Faustus,’ Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 1-29, argues that the differences in the two texts are so

significant that we cannot legitimately discuss the single play Doctor Faustus but should treat the

two texts as two separate dramas.

21. Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 190-220.

21
22. Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Backwell Publishers,

1999), 11-25.

23. The allusion is to the ‘couzening picture, which one way / Shows like a crow, another like

a swan,’ from George Chapman, All’s Fools, 1.4.47, quoted in Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious

Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1987), 36.

24. For a fuller discussion of the interrogative tone of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, see my

essay, ‘Marlowe’s Interrogative Drama: Dido, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II,’ in

Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A.

Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 117-20.

22
 Works Cited

Altman, J. (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of

Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bevington, D. (1962). From Mankind to Marlowe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bevington, D. and Rassmussen, E. (1993), ‘Introduction’, in D. Bevington and E. Rassmussen

(eds), Doctor Faustus: A and B Texts (1604, 1616) (reprinted 1995). Manchester:

Manchester University Press, pp. 1-102..

Bluestone, M. (1969). ‘Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and dramaturgy in contemporary

representations of Doctor Faustus’, in N. Rabkin (ed), Reinterpretations of Elizabethan

Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 33-88.

Butler, E. M. (1952), The Fortunes of Faust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Campbell, L. B. (1952), ‘Doctor Faustus: A case of conscience’, PMLA, 67, 219-39.

Cheney, P. (1997), “Un-script(ur)ing Christian Tragedy: Ovidian Love, magic, and Glory in

Doctor Faustus.” Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser Counter-Nationhood.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 190-220.

Cole, D. (1962), Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (reprinted 1972). New

York: Gordian Press.

Deats, S. M. (1976), ‘Doctor Faustus: From chapbook to tragedy’, Essays in Literature, 3, 3-16.

———. (2002), ‘Marlowe’s interrogative drama: Dido, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and

Edward II’, in S. M. Deats and R. A. Logan (eds), Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His

Critical Contexts. Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 107-30.

23
Ellis-Fermor, U. (1946), The Frontiers of Drama. New York: Oxford University Press.

Findlay, A. (1999), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell

Publishers, pp. 11-25.

Gardner, H. (1948), ‘Milton’s Satan and the theme of damnation in Elizabethan tragedy’, English

Studies, 46-66.

Gilman, E. B. (1978), The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth

Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hunter, G. K. (1964), ‘Five act structure in Doctor Faustus’, Tulane Drama Review, 8, (4), 84-

99.

Kirshbaum, L. (1943), ‘Marlowe’s Faustus: A reconsideration’, Review of English Studies, 19,

225-41.

Marcus, L. (1989), ‘Textual indeterminacy and ideological difference: The case of Doctor

Faustus’, Renaissance Drama, 20, 1-29.

Marlowe, C. (1995), Doctor Faustus: A and B Texts (1604 and 1616) (reprinted), D. Bevington

and E. Rassmussen (eds), Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ornstein, R. (1955), ‘The comic synthesis in Doctor Faustus’, ELH, 22, 165-72.

Palmer, P. M. and More, R. P. (1936), The Sources of the Faust Tradition (reprinted 1966). New

York: Octagon Books.

Poole, K. (2006), ‘Dr. Faustus and renaissance theology’, in G. A. Sullivan, Jr., P. Cheney, and A.

Hadfield (eds), in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, pp. 96-107.

24
Rose, W. (1963), ‘Introduction’, in W. Rose (ed), The Historie of the Damnable Life and

Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, by P. F. Gent. Notre Dame: University of Notre

Dame Press.

Santayana, G. (1910), Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.

Snyder, S. (1966), ‘Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as an inverted saint’s life’, Studies in Philology,

63, 565-77.

Spivack, B. (1958), Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil. New York: Columbia University

Press.

25