Doctor Faustus – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Commentaries on Plays by Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. (New Mermaids/Methuen Drama, 2018.)

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

Chorus 1. “The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad”: the story will center on the life and spiritual struggle of one man, Doctor John Faustus.

Chorus 1 tells us that their story will not be about great military exploits or about some grand narrative concerning love. It will be about “The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad” (8). The tale will center on the life of one man. But not just any man—Faustus had been a legendary figure since the early sixteenth century in Germany and abroad. The biographical material I have most recently read about Faustus—for a volume of the play published in 1925—traces the development of the Faustus legend from his presumed existence as a real person, a wandering scholar and self-aggrandizing magician, to someone who had extraordinary experiences like the ones Marlowe includes in his play.

In Marlowe’s tragedy, we are told that Faustus was born “of parents base of stock / In Germany, within a town called Rhodes” (11-12). He studied at Wittenberg, and showed great promise in divinity, earning a doctor’s degree in that exalted field. The text at once indicts him for pride, or “self-conceit” (19), using a figure drawn from the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea when he ignored the advice of his father Daedalus. Faustus pins his hopes for a meaningful, pleasureable future on the dubious practice of magic, or “necromancy” (24).

What is the aim of the career that Faustus determines to pursue? Well, he has long been a prodigy, an intellectual version, we might say, of someone like Mozart. He does not believe that the university’s way of handling knowledge will suit him: the university treats learning as cumulative or aggregative, to be built up slowly over long periods of time. Faustus apparently feels that he has outgrown that model and is ready for something new. He doesn’t want to spend his whole life as a dutiful priest or a patient professor.

For most people, a career lends structure and meaning to life—they bury themselves in their work, plodding along from day to day and thinking little beyond that regimen. Their job swallows them up. But Faustus rejects this model. He rejects the idea of his identity being wrapped up in or subsumed by his ordinary profession, and he turns to necromancy as a vehicle for learning new and exciting things.

As the New Mermaids note to line 25 points out, in the scheme of knowledge, the magic that fascinates Doctor Faustus fits into an unstable space between the dark arts of the occult and more legitimate fields such as natural science, law, medicine, divinity, and so forth. There is something liminal, something not right, about this learning space called “magic.” Still, necromancy is what Faustus will turn to to shape his life and unfold his identity, and in the first flush of this great decision, he has high hopes for its outcome.

Notice the language of pridefulness, “swollen,” “surfeits,” and so forth, along with the reference to Icarus as mentioned just above: a youth who ignored his father and followed his own heady desires to his destruction. For Faustus, the pursuit of knowledge isn’t a patient slog, it is suffused with something bordering on erotic desire. It’s a kind of sweetness, a rush he’s after. Christopher Marlowe spent a good deal of his short life as a university student, so this concentration on how knowledge impacts a person emotionally, how it shapes a life, would naturally be of interest to him.

More generally still, in the background for audience members and even for the atheist Marlowe is a lifetime of realizing that there’s something prideful or hubristic about the pursuit of knowledge, which in the book of Genesis is fenced round by the dictates of a watchful God who doesn’t want humans to reach for the Tree of Eternal Life after they have snatched the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Lord of Hosts will not have mortal rivals.

Scene 1. “A Sound Magician is a Demigod”: Faustus decides to pursue necromancy rather than divinity, law, or medicine.

In Scene 1, Faustus dashes through his arguments about the various fields he is poised to reject. He could obtain a position in divinity, even if only as a cover for scientific inquiry that inculcates doubt. He could pursue logic as a career, or law, or medicine. But with him, all of this amounts to “been there, done that.” Besides, these are very definite fields—they are closed systems of knowledge that have lost their appeal for the polymath Doctor Faustus.

No, what Faustus wants isn’t preeminence in such finite fields but rather transcendence, a dream of mastery in the grander region beyond ordinary learning. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning will one day write in “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” The same goes for the pursuit of law, and divinity or religious studies. Faustus deterministically sees this latter pursuit as reducing to nothing more than the proposition, “we must sin / And so consequently die” (41-42). If that’s the case—if it’s just humanity’s fate to commit sins and be sent to hell for them, what’s the use of laboring over moral philosophy?

Ah, but the learned Doctor is a bad reader of Christian scripture. He picks up on the parts that emphasize humanity’s sinfulness, but not the parts that offer grace. For example, we could point to Saint Paul’s Romans 3.23-24: “ 23… all have sinned, and are deprived of the glory of God, / 24And are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus …” (Geneva Bible). There are many similarly resonant passages in the Gospels and in the Pauline epistles.

But to Faustus, all there is to say is, “we sin, and consequently die.” In truth, Faustus, for all his academic achievements, is taken down not only by Mephistopheles and Lucifer but by his own continual, stubborn misunderstandings.

Anyway, Faustus will focus his dreams on necromancy, on the pursuit of “black magic.” This, he thinks, will bring him “honour and omnipotence,” and awaiting him will be “a world of profit and delight” (50-51). We may accuse him of pride, and in the Christian framework that the doubter Marlowe uses for the purpose of informing his play with moral and intellectual structure, that accusation makes sense. But it also seems fair to suggest that we are not dealing simply with one precocious late-medieval man, but rather with an attitude that is a feature of humankind, not a bug. Whatever the case, Faustus believes that “A sound magician is a demigod” (58).

The appearance of the Good Angel and the Bad Angel is appropriated from medieval representations of the workings of conscience. Marlowe is using this medieval device to bring to us something of Faustus’s consciousness, his interiority, but the device also works as a Brechtian alienation effect: we don’t see things from Faustus’s perspective in a life-like, integral way—something that’s required, of course, if we want to claim a genuinely tragic hero-consciousness for Faustus. So Marlowe is serving up a late-medieval Christian moral comedy, ironic as that is since he himself was not a believer.

With regard to interiority or depth of character, then, while Faustus is no Macbeth or Hamlet, this very old device of the Good and Bad Angel at one’s shoulder seems to work well for the play’s objectives. The Good Angel’s action of warding-off, of admonition and pious hopes, appeals to Faustus, but it doesn’t suffice against the Bad Angel’s call upon the Doctor’s alternating grandiosity and despair.

Stanley Fish writes of Milton in Paradise Lost that one of that deeply Christian author’s main devices is to demonstrate to his readers that they are constantly being “surprised by sin,” by their propensity to sin and even to forget that that is the case. It’s a powerful thesis, but it’s applicability to Faustus may require a bit of adjustment. Faustus most often seems contemptuous of the fact of sin and the constraints on conduct that managing it requires. He seems annoyed that a superior man like himself could be limited by it.

Well, perhaps what surprises Faustus isn’t so directly his propensity to sin in general, but rather his capacity to become bored with everything so quickly. Ennui creeps up on a body! It may also surprise Faustus how beholden he is to his own appetites and flights of fancy—the danger of this tendency was pounded into people by the era’s religion and philosophy. In a disordered psyche, the appetites pervert the will and drag people thus afflicted away from the right use of their capacity to reason, or their “rational capacity.” Sir Philip Sidney is alluding to this when in his Apology for Poetry (or Defence of Poesy) he writes of humankind’s “erected wit” being shadowed by its “infected will.” The Fall didn’t diminish humanity’s intellect, but it corrupted the will.

As for pursuing one’s appetites, Faustus mentions in Scene 1 that one of the things he would find intensely pleasurable is the perpetual availability of “fruits and princely delicates” (81). One of my professors at UC Irvine quipped many years ago that today, that sort of thing is available to all of us at our local supermarkets and even at “mom-and-pop” grocery stores, so the illustrious Doctor has basically traded his soul for what today would be a trip to Albertsons or Sprouts. It’s no doubt a tribute to Marlowe’s artistry that this kind of change in circumstances in no way reduces the overall dramatic impact of his play for modern audiences.

In any case, Faustus dreams of things even beyond enjoying deliciouis fruits in all seasons. With regard to statecraft, he would sweep aside the particularities, the frustrating and even infuriating hindrances involved in politics at the national and international level, and simply arrange things as he sees fit. He would, for example, save Protestants from the clutches of Catholics: he means to “chase the Prince of Parma from our land / And reign sole king of all the provinces” (89-90). Fundamentally, though, Faustus seems disinclined to put in the attention and work that such an accomplishment would require.

One thing we might ask is, if others—men such as Valdes and Cornelius—can summon the kind of magic that has so enraptured Faustus, what would be so special about his own invocation of it? The answer seems to be that he is a man of great intelligence, of great “wit” (110), which would result in his using necromancy to greater and more glorious effect. Valdes says, “Faustus, these books, thy wit, and our experience / Shall make all nations to canonize us” (110-11). We shall see how that supposition plays out, but it sounds like a bit of hucksterism, doesn’t it? To seek knowledge for fame is to profane the temple of learning, just as Albert Einstein suggested many visitors do.

Scene 2. “I fear me nothing will reclaim him now:” the First Scholar fears that Faustus will be imperiled by the influence of Cornelius and Valdes.

In Scene 2, a pair of scholars come to visit Faustus at his home, and Wagner puts them off with silly bantering. But he delivers enough information to make the scholars anxious: he tells them that Faustus is dining with Valdes and Cornelius. These men, says the First Scholar, are “infamous through the world” (28). Both scholars fear that there is nothing they can do to help Faustus, but they plan to try anyhow.

We may extrapolate from this information that what Dr. Faustus is doing is hardly new. Engaging in necromancy is more of a fashion than we might have thought. As Yogi Berra is supposed to have said about some club or restaurant, “That place isn’t popular anymore—everybody goes there.” It seems that Marlowe is at pains to point out that Faustus is not quite the trailblazer in necromancy or “black magic” as he was in other, more respectable pursuits like divinity, law, and medicine. The first of the two scholars is especially alarmed, saying, “I fear me nothing will reclaim him now” (32).

Scene 3. “Why this is hell nor am I out of it”: Mephistopheles levels with Faustus, but the doctor is too intoxicated with grandiose expectations to heed him.

In Scene 3, Faustus summons up Mephistopheles with great dollops of Latin, but as it turns out, with regard to the form that this infernal spirit takes, Faustus can’t handle the truth: “I charge thee return and change thy shape. / Thou art too ugly to attend on me. / Go and return an old Franciscan friar, / That holy shape becomes a devil best” (23-26).

That is a nice dig against Franciscan Friars, but it doesn’t hide Faustus’s terror from us. The man wants access to evil, but he doesn’t want it to look like what it really is. At least, not too directly. We may be reminded of John Milton’s Paradise Lost Book 1.792-798, in which the narrator describes the bad angels meeting for the first time in a hellish conclave: “… But far within / And in thir own dimensions like themselves / The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim / In close recess and secret conclave sat” (1.792-795). If, as St. Augustine says, evil is not grounded in authentic being (meaning God), it stands to reason that it would not have a permanent form. Milton’s “devils to adore for deities,” then, are shape-shifters and inveterate soul-grifters.

In a conversation with Faustus, Mephistopheles calls the soul of a human being “glorious” (46). This should remind us of the important place that humankind occupied in the much-celebrated Great Chain of Being. A person, according to that well-developed concept, occupies a place between the material and spiritual dimensions of the universe, with all the capacities of the animals and angels.

To destroy even a single human soul, suggests Mephistopheles, would be almost like repeating the original Fall. How can he not be excited at the prospect of suborning the clever, superior mortal Faustus? (As an aside, two modern authors who address the Great Chain of Being are Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being and E. M. W. Tillyard in The Elizabethan World Picture.)

It’s good to know that although Mephistopheles will later exult in how devious he has been with Faustus, for the most part he tells him the truth when asked a direct question. For example, Faustus asks him about Lucifer, and Mephistopheles frankly admits that this great angel was cast down to perdition because of his “expiring pride and insolence” (65). Not a good look, that.

When Faustus tries to pin Mephistopheles down with regard to what he is doing ranging freely on the earth, Mephistopheles again answers honestly: “Why this is hell nor am I out of it” (73). Later, Milton would endow his pseudo-heroic Satan with the brilliant lines, “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; / And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide …” (Paradise Lost 4.75-77). Milton may have learned a thing or two from Marlowe, and it leads him to the idea that a devil like Lucifer would be rifled by inner doubts, tormented by an infinite regress of his guilty consciousness.

There is apparently some room for honesty, then, in Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, just as there is in Milton’s Satan. More than one critic has noted that at times, Faustus the intellectual and Mephistopheles the wizened servant of Lucifer are almost like brothers—they have this robust but limited capacity to reflect on themselves in common.

Mephistopheles even asks Faustus to leave behind this new and dangerous pursuit of his, necromancy. But that is not to be. Why, incidentally, does Faustus ask for 24 years, and not some much longer stretch of time? Perhaps he asks for this amount because it was about half of an ordinary lifespan in Marlowe’s time. It’s hard to say, really. Faustus may know full well that he will not get a promise of immortality, for that would be beyond even Lucifer to grant. So at base, he is asking that the second half of his life be a great deal more extraordinary than the first half.

Intoxicated with excitement, Faustus immediately claims that he will accomplish stupendous geopolitical feats: “I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore / And make that country continent to Spain / And both contributary to my crown” (104-106). Although he does later accomplish a few things along political lines, Faustus will fall far short of this delusional glory that he describes. As mentioned earlier, he really doesn’t have the stamina for such exploits.

Scene 4. “I will presently raise up two devils to carry thee away.” Wagner parodies both Mephistopheles and Faustus.

Scene 4 is instructive about the function of the comical interludes in this play. Wagner repeats with Robin a power move that resembles Mephistopheles’s successful attempt to compromise and enthrall Faustus’s soul. For Wagner, the attempt to buy Robin’s service is not an unqualified success. Robin agrees to serve Wagner, but not before subjecting him to considerable mockery for his desire to assert power.

Wagner, seeming to address us and not Robin, muses that the poor fellow is practically starving and so would “give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it / were blood raw” (8-9). Robin, also possibly speaking to us only, responds with, “Not so neither. I had need to have it well-roasted and good / sauce to it if I pay so dear, I can tell you” (10-11). And so it goes. This of course makes Faustus look ridiculous.

We might even say that as the famous observation of Karl Marx goes, “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.” (Marx didn’t say this as quoted, but the quotation summarizes his assertions in his 1852 essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”

Scene 5. “The God thou servest is thine own appetite”: Faustus settles his fears and goes through with his contract with Mephistopheles.

In Scene 5, Faustus still seems intoxicated with his choice and just as energized as when we last encountered him. He admits to wavering, but quickly argues himself out of that wavering: “The God thou servest is thine own appetite / Wherein is fixed the love of Belzebub. / To him I’ll build an altar and a church / And offer lukewarm blood of newborn babes” (10-13). By his own admission, then, his career as a great magician and commander of ill spirits is not due to any exalted motive or impulse. Rather, the choice owes much to a common failing—the perversion of the will and intellect or rational faculty by unregulated appetites.

Faustus soon learns that he must ratify his contract with Mephistopheles by “a deed of gift with thine own blood, / For that security craves Lucifer” (35-36). And what will Mephistopheles do for him once he signs on the blood-streaked dotted line? Mephistopheles says he will “give thee more than thou hast wit to ask” (46). This constitutes for Faustus a promise to expand his horizons beyond what he has ever known.

A pattern strikes up at this point when Faustus, whose blasphemous utterance “Consummatum est” is followed by expressions of fear and doubt. (The New Mermaids note points out that the reference is to Christ’s final words on the cross, in John 19:30.) For a moment, Faustus regrets signing the contract, and Mephistopheles finds it convenient to distract him from his doubts and fears. This bad servant says, “I’ll fetch him somewhat to delight his mind” (80). He sends in some devils who offer Faustus “crowns and rich apparel.” They perform a dance and leave. The distracting spectacle works, and Faustus hands over his damnable scroll to Mephistopheles.

Once Faustus signs the deed of gift, what is his first question for his infernal servant? He wants to know all about hell, his future digs when the twenty-four years are up. As usual, Mephistopheles answers honestly enough, saying, “Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed / in one self-place, but where we are is hell / And where hell is there must we ever be…” (118-122).

Faustus offers the specious assertion that “hell’s a fable” (126). But he must know already that that is not true since he has been conversing with and summoning devils. He seems delusional in this regard, and the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes readily to mind in describing his psychological state.

Mephistopheles wards off this ridiculous ploy, and does the same with the doctor’s demand for a wife. A woman devil is sent his way, and this visitation, along with Mephistopheles’s contemptuous remarks about marriage as “a ceremonial toy” (145), is enough to put all thought of marriage out of Faustus’s mind. It had better be since, as Mephistopheles well knows, marriage would require participation in a sacrament. That’s a no-go zone for a man who has willingly sold his soul to the Devil! And of course Mephistopheles can have nothing to do with it. He next offers Faustus the best possible diversion: a book of magic spells to delight him. Who doesn’t like a book of magic spells?

Scene 6. “Do but speak what thou’lt have me to do”: Robin has got hold of Faustus’s conjuring book and can read it.

In Scene 6, the comic interlude is given to Robin and a character named Dick. Robin is busy trying to learn the spells in a conjuring book he has pilfered from Faustus. The trouble is, he’s not much of a reader. Both men head for the Tavern. Once again, Robin’s motive is not so different from that of Faustus. Both pursue their pleasures. It’s worth noting that Robin’s line “Do but speak what thou’lt have me to do” is almost a direct quotation from the words of Saul (later St. Paul) in Acts 9:6, after he has been struck temporarily blind on his way to Damascus: “Lord, what wilt thou that I do?” (Geneva Bible from BibleGateway.com)

Scene 7. “Thanks, mighty Lucifer!” Faustus’s thoughts turn towards repentance, but he fails and Lucifer visits with a delightful procession of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In Scene 7, a considerable amount of time seems to have passed since the previous scene ended. Faustus again turns toward thoughts of repentance, but the Bad Angel convinces him that he will not go through with it. And Faustus agrees, saying, “My heart is hardened. I cannot repent” (18). As usual, Faustus turns to frenetic activities to cover up his spiritual sloth, or acedia. He recounts past triumphs: “Have not I made blind Homer sing to me / Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death?” (24-25) The nymph Oenone, by the way, was the wife of Prince Paris of Trojan fame, who was also called “Alexander”—a marriage that ended badly after Paris left her for Helen (that is, “Alexander’s love”).

This distraction, and much more. Faustus poses time-wasting questions about astrology, and Mephistopheles is happy to satisfy his wish. But Faustus doesn’t stay satisfied for long—not with mere explication of “the double motion of the planets” (49). When the doctor asks who created the world, Mephistopheles becomes upset, telling him, “Thou art damned. Think thou of hell” (70). Mephistopheles apparently brings in Lucifer and Belzebub, who both wax legalistic, telling Faustus that he must not call upon Christ because he made a promise not to do so. Besides, we know that the Bad Angel has already told Faustus that if he should repent, he will be torn to bits by devils (78).

But what is needed above all is not so much threats or legal footwork but blissful distraction. That’s why Faustus and we are treated to an intimate pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, and Lechery. All of them are entertaining in their own way. Gluttony, for example, boasts that it has “a small pension, and that buys me thirty meals a day and ten beavers, a small trifle to suffice nature” (131-132). Gluttony proceeds to set forth a very strange ancestry including bacon and a large amount of claret wine, among other things.

The gambit works — Faustus is delighted with this vain show, saying, “Thanks, mighty Lucifer!” The doctor decides to call upon Mephistopheles to remain behind as Lucifer and Belzebub take their leave. Evidently, Mephistopheles has hit upon the best method for keeping Faustus in line—fill his time with pleasures and entertainments.

Chorus 2. “He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars”: Faustus ascends to the primum mobile on a cosmographical field-trip.

In Chorus 2, we find that adventure counts as pleasurable. We are told that “To find the secrets of astronomy / Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament…,” Faustus went straight up to Olympus in a chariot powered by dragons: “he views the clouds, the planets, and the stars,” and many other great things in the heavens (1-25 inclusive). The voyage lasts for eight days, an extraordinary cosmography field trip. The doctor seems to have the energy to keep up such a schedule, and it makes for a wonderful description for the audience of the play. But at the same time, travel in the real world of Marlowe’s day was a nightmare and no doubt apt to make a person weary to the bone even contemplating it. Would the audience be thinking of that fact of life as well?

Scene 8. “In this show let me an actor be”: Faustus disguises himself as a Catholic cardinal and meddles in a papal political struggle.

In Scene 8, Faustus dedicates himself henceforward to the pleasure principle, saying “Whilst I am here on earth let me be cloyed / With all things that delight the heart of man” (58-59). After his trip to the heavens, what will Faustus do next? There is a hint that the big trip did not entirely satisfy him in what he says to Mephistopheles: “Then in this show let me an actor be, / That this proud Pope may Faustus’ cunning see” (75-76). This time, he wants to play an active role in his pleasurable experience.

It is hard to untangle Marlowe’s historical timeframe with regard to the papacy since he may be talking about either Pope Adrian IV or Adrian VI, the latter being temporally more plausible. In any case, Faustus sides with Bruno, a German churchman who has also been elected Pope but is now in the clutches of Pope Adrian. After the death of Adrian IV, the papacy was rocked by a number of Pope-Antipope schisms. Faustus is having fun helping the Church tear itself apart and deepening the dangerous connections between church and state that have for so long troubled Christianity going all the way back to the time of the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the fourth century AD.

As for Pope Adrian, he comes across as a megalomaniac, saying at one point, “he and thou and all the world shall stoop, / Or be assured of our dreadful curse / To light as heavy as the pains of hell” (158-160). Faustus enters the picture disguised as a Cardinal. In this disguise, Faustus accepts Adrian’s commission to bear the “triple crown” to the church’s treasury and take care that Bruno should not escape. All of this, from Faustus’s perspective, is done to tee up Adrian for the humiliation that awaits him.

Scene 9. “Now, Faustus, come prepare thyself for mirth”: Faustus plays tricks on Pope Adrian and helps Bruno escape.

In Scene 9, Faustus makes sure that Bruno escapes the clutches of his nemesis Pope Adrian and makes his way to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In large part, the Doctor is just having fun. He says that he will “by their folly make some merriment” (10). Adrian thinks Bruno is already condemned to execution and the Emperor denounced as an heretic, but now he finds that this is not the case. The real Cardinals tell him as much since, of course, it was not they who made the promise that Adrian heard—that promise was made by Dr. Faustus.

Next, Faustus (rendered invisible by Mephistopheles) keeps stealing Adrian’s dinner and wine, which of course enrages the already raging narcissist. The Archbishop of Reims suggests that this must be “a ghost crept out of purgatory” who must be tamped down with ceremony (79-80). When the Pope makes the sign of the cross before taking a bite of his dinner, Faustus smacks him in the face. Several friars arrive after the Pope leaves and curse the supposed ghost with a series of maledicat Dominus repetitions. It’s impossible to miss the irony of these priests damning Dr. Faustus, who is already damned by his own efforts.

Scene 10. “We scorn to steal your cups”: Dick and Robin get in trouble with a vintner and Mephistopheles.

In Scene 10, Dick and Robin have stolen a wine cup and are soon confronted by the vintner himself. The connection to Faustus’s escapades is that we get a premonitory look at the point where things start to get consequential for the malefactors. Dick and Robin’s silly tricks are beginning to catch up with them.

Dick tries to lie his way out of the predicament, brazenly telling the vintner “I fear not your searching. We scorn to steal your cups…” (19-20). Dick recites a spell from Faustus’s book, and summons up some demons thereby. Mephistopheles is deeply annoyed to be disturbed by these magic-spell-wielding buffoons. He must feel as if he’s being plagued by telemarketers. He asks management upstairs—or rather downstairs—“How am I vexed by these villains’ charms?” (33). He turns Dick into an ape, and Robin into a dog. Oddly, both men seem to believe they have been granted a gift.

Scene 11. “Wonder of men, renowned magician”: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Welcomes Faustus.

In Scene 11, which takes place at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Faustus has promised to display the shade of Alexander the Great and his paramour Roxana. The Emperor is delighted at the prospect of such a vision. He is also pleased that Faustus has helped set Bruno free because this German is the Emperor’s choice for Pope. Faustus is hailed by the Emperor with the effusive description, “Wonder of men, renowned magician” (1).

Why is the Emperor so excited? It was a common thing at the time for moral philosophers and writers to provide readers with examples of perfection. King Cyrus of Persia was one such exemplar of excellence in conduct and wisdom. So the Emperor waits for Faustus to display Alexander and Roxana “In their true shapes and state majestical, / That we may wonder at their excellence” (77-78).

Threaded through this scene is a comic interaction between Faustus and Benvolio, a knight who is signally unimpressed with the Doctor’s illusions. For his criticism, Benvolio is gifted with a pair of horns like those of a stag. We cannot miss the reference to Actaeon, was turned by Diana into a stag and torn apart by her hunting dogs. Marlowe grew up on this kind of classical reference, and it may be that he intends to diminish Faustus by making him reenact these great classical myths in such a farcical, vulgar manner.

In any case, Emperor Charles V seems to offer Faustus real power and influence because he has taken such pleasure in the visions granted him: “Thou shalt command the state of Germany / And live beloved of mighty Carolus” (166-167). But as already mentioned, this sort of thing really isn’t Faustus’s cup of tea.

Scene 12. “He must needs go that the devil drives”: Benvolio plots his revenge and ends up considerably worse off.

In Scene 12, Benvolio, humiliated in the previous scene, now plots his revenge and enlists his friends in an ambush of Doctor Faustus. He actually beheads Faustus, but the doctor at once recovers and gloats that he has been granted immunity from death for the period of twenty-four years. As such, he enjoys a truer version of Macbeth’s belief that “no man of woman born” can harm him. He at once sets Mephistopheles and several of his assistants to hunt down Benvolio and confederates and deal roughly with them. As Benvolio’s associate Frederick runs away, he utters the famous line, “He must needs go that the devil drives (95). Shakespeare would later borrow it in slightly adapted form in All’s Well That Ends Well.

What happens to Benvolio and his friends sounds rather like the fall of the bad angels as Milton will later describe it in Paradise Lost, but whatever the truth of that may be, the point is again that Marlowe has taken a grand scene and turned it towards a farcical repetition. We go from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some soldiers attempt to make good the assassination attempt against Faustus, but the devils drive them off, too.

Scene 13. “We’ll rather die with grief than live with shame”: Benvolio, Martino, and Frederick withdraw to live in seclusion.

In Scene 13, the would-be Arthurian knight Benvolio, thoroughly defeated by the man he dismissed as a mere conjurer a few scenes back, withdraws to a castle with his friends Frederick and Martino, all three of them now symbolically “cuckolded” with a pair of horns courtesy of Faustus. In the end, the joke will be on Faustus, as we’ll see, but for now the only thing for these three losers to do is withdraw. Benvolio sums up their predicament best: in their seclusion, he says, “We’ll rather die with grief than live with shame” (25).

Scene 14. “Christ did call the thief upon the cross”: Faustus again deals with thoughts of repentance.

In Scene 14, we begin with a transaction between Faustus and a Horse-Courser or, in modern English, a horse-trader. The man gets Faustus to sell him a good horse for forty dollars, but the discount comes at a hidden cost. The doctor tells this man that as for the horse, “you may ride him o’er hedge / and ditch and spare him not, but, do you hear, in any case / ride him not into the water” (10-12). So off the man goes, happy with his shrewdly bargained-for horse.

Faustus, however, is in a heavy mood as the time is passing by quickly. “What are thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?” he asks himself, and reflects at last, “Tush, Christ did call the thief upon the cross, / Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit” (19, 23-24). He stills his rising anxiety with this reflection that repentance is possible right up to the point of death. The trouble is, this is pattern-thinking: he has confronted the prospect of repentance before, but he keeps coming round to a state of despair, which is a grave sin in Christian theology.

Well, the Horse-Courser soon steps into the sleeping Faustus’s quarters, and goes over in his mind what has happpened. It’s a breathless tale about a certain forty-dollar horse turning into a bundle of hay. It seems that the man thought Faustus imposed the restrictions he did because he was hiding something. Curiosity, in this case, has nearly killed the Horse-Courser, and he consoles himself with yanking off Faustus’s leg as he sleeps. This is another farcical but premonitory dismemberment, and we know that no Horse-Courser born of woman can harm the Doctor.

Scene 15. He never left eating till he had eat up all my load of hay: Robin, Dick, the Horse-Courser, and a Carter discuss their experiences with Faustus.

In Scene 15, Robin, Dick, the Horse-Courser, and a Carter meet at a tavern to commisserate with one another about their mishaps with Faustus or his devils. The Horse-Courser tells his story again, but the Carter steals the show when he says that Faustus cozened him by asking how much it would cost to buy as much hay as he could eat.

The Carter quickly arrived at a price of three farthings, and Faustus proceeded to do something that astonished him: “as I am a cursen man he never left / eating till he had eat up all my load of hay” (25-26). Hay, hay, hay! It’s an all you can eat buffet! The Horse-Courser, though, consoles everyone by saying that at least he has pulled Faustus’s leg off. So, there’s that. Or is there?

Scene 16. “I would request no better meat than a dish of ripe grapes”: Faustus charms the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt but strikes Robin and his friends dumb for complaining.

In Scene 16, Faustus, social climber that he apparently is, visits the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt in Germany, and is pleased to ask the Duchess what she would most like at this moment? It occurs to her that she would love to have a bowl of delicious grapes. Ordinarily, that would be a problem since it’s winter and grapes are out of season. But it isn’t a problem for Faustus, who orders up just such a dish of grapes for the Duchess.

Faustus shares this notion of the pleasures of out-of-season food, we know, since he mentioned as early as Scene 1 that he would like to have “fruits and princely delicates” made available to him (81). This all seems trivial to us, who can easily drive to a supermarket and pick up that sort of item. But at the beginning of the Age of Science as presided over by the likes of Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton a bit later, and before the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, enjoying fresh fruit out of season would have seemed like a miracle.

Plenty of sources on the Internet can remind us that there were “ice houses” long ago (along with pickling, salting, and smoking perishable foods), and mechanical refrigeration goes back to the mid-eighteenth century. But the commercially viable electric refrigerator came along only in 1913. The truth is, human beings lived mostly at the mercy of the seasons, the elements, and so forth until the last few hundred years rolled around, when humanity got the upper hand on the natural world—or at least, so we are pleased to believe, truly or otherwise.

All that aside, Scene 16 continues the trend in Marlowe’s play of mixing the comical with the serious even in the same scene. Faustus takes advantage of the presence of Robin, Dick, the Horse-Courser, and the Carter to bring still more entertainment to his gracious hosts the Duke and Duchess. When these lower-class fools crash the Duke’s place and start airing their various complaints, Faustus strikes them mute. He especially enjoys frustrating their expectation that he must have only one leg, thanks to the strong yank given to the “missing” one by the Horse-Courser.

In the end, the Doctor’s visit to these aristocrats is a success, at least for them. The Duchess hails Faustus as a “learnèd man,” while the Duke declares that “his artful sport drives all sad thoughts away” (111-112). They enjoy the distractions that Faustus has brought them, though he, of course, is running up against personal doom.

Scene 17. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” Faustus stirs up for others a vision of the fair Helen of Greece, and then decides he must have her for his paramour.

In Scene 17, Faustus’s scholar-friends have decided that the famous Helen, wife of Menelaus, was indeed the world’s most beautiful woman, so they would love to see her. The Doctor tells them he wouldn’t dream of denying them this great pleasure, and says, “You shall behold that peerless dame of Greece,” and Mephistopheles obligingly makes her take a ghostly catwalk past the gentlemen (18).

The three Scholars don’t see this performance as the demonic spectacle that it is, but Faustus knows the truth. Soon after they depart in their happiness, an Old Man mysteriously appears and tries to talk moral sense into Faustus, pleading earnestly, “O gentle Faustus leave that damnèd art.” But Faustus’s backsliding thoughts of repentance enrage Mephistopheles, who threatens to tear him to pieces. That threat of dismemberment (so resonant thanks to the era’s insistence on correspondences between bodily integrity, statecraft, and moral wholeness) brings Faustus round, and his last serious chance at repentance has effectively come and gone.

Probably to keep himself from wavering so near the end of his metaphysical bargain, Faustus decides that for him, merely viewing the apparition of Helen is not enough—he must have her as his lover. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” runs the famous question, and Faustus’s wish is easily granted with its damnable implications (90).

At this point, Faustus goes beyond Petrarchan longing for an absent, impossible lover—he succeeds in possessing at least her image, saying, “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,” and even invoking that Renaissance commonplace that a kiss draws the soul of one’s lover out from their body and gives it back to them again (see lines 90-109 inclusive). So the Doctor’s final distraction on the eve of his destruction is love, or perhaps more accurately, sexualized infatuation.

Scene 18. “Curst be the parents that engendered me!” Faustus tries in vain to cope with the spiritual and physical disaster that he has brought upon himself.

In Scene 18, the last day of Doctor Faustus is near. His twenty-four years are up, and the devils hover around him as if he were a lab rat. Beelzebub says, “And here we’ll stay, / To mark him how he doth demean himself” (9-10).

Faustus finally comes clean with his three Scholar-friends, who plead with him to repent and call upon God for help. But Faustus despairs; he cannot do it. Mephistopheles is as happy as a demon can be—he set up and managed the long con, and now his “mark” is duly taken. He admits his malice freely: “I do confess it Faustus, and rejoice / Twas I that when thou were’t i’the way to heaven, / Damned up thy passage ….” (80-82).

The Good Angel, realizing that its quest to save Faustus is futile, departs, and the Bad Angel stays behind to explain to the Doctor what his condemnation means. Faustus says just seeing the pangs of hell is enough, but the Bad Angel points out that the experience of these torments must by its very nature be tactile as well: “Nay, thou must feel them, taste the smart of all. / He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall” (122-123).

If physical, tactile pleasure is the cause of many a damnation, why then, the damnation itself will be physical and tactile. To some extent, this is probably Marlowe’s way of remembering Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian insistence that the five senses are vital in humanity’s quest for knowledge: humans are profoundly sensory-based creatures, not otherworldly angels.

By the end of the scene, Faustus’s final hour comes and goes. At the end, he runs through some predictable psychological strategies: blaming everyone but himself and then at last himself, lamenting the path that has brought him to this hour, this place, and so forth. “Curst be the parents that engendered me!” he says at one point (169).

Faustus wishes he could hide, avoiding the finality of damnation as indicated, for example, in Revelation 21:8: “But the fearful and unbelieving, and the abominable and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Bible Gateway). Jesus, on his way to crucifixion, says in Luke 23:30, “Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us: and to the hills, Cover us.” These are the sorts of bible passages that Marlowe is likely to have borrowed from in casting his image of Faustus’s last efforts to save himself.

Scene 19. “We’ll give his mangled limbs due burial”: the Three Scholars memorialize Doctor Faustus.

In Scene 19, The three Scholars pay tribute to the Faustus they knew: a great scholar, a learnèd doctor.

Chorus 3. “Regard his hellish fall”: the Chorus delivers an orthodox judgment on Faustus.

Chorus 3 offers a traditional Christian sentiment: it is unwise to pursue knowledge too far when it is forbidden to put it into practice. This prideful sin, of course, lay at the root of what Genesis describes as Eve and Adam’s transgression against God: they pursued knowledge according to their own self-generated scope and timescale, not God’s. As Milton’s Archangel Raphael would later say to Adam at the end of Paradise Lost, Book 6, “let it profit thee to have heard / By terrible Example the reward / Of disobedience; firm they might have stood, / Yet fell; remember, and fear to transgress” (Milton Reading Room).

Final reflections on Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus.

We should return to the split in sensibilities that made our Early Modern predecessors read this play so differently from the way we tend to read it today. From the Romantic Period onward, the tendency is to cast Marlowe’s protagonist as a genuine hero on a quest to transcend the limitations placed on humanity. But Marlowe’s audiences were closer to the Medieval mindset that would respect the limits we want to transcend. So they tended to interpret Faustus’s fall as a moral exemplum of what happens when people fail to respect God’s will.

The 2011-12 Globe Theater production seems to do a good job of presenting both of these viewpoints together or alongside each other, which seems respectful of what we may conjecture to have been Christopher Marlowe’s intentions. At times, we may view the famous “learnèd doctor” with empathy because we see something of ourselves in his proto-romantic dissatisfaction with the constraints humans face. We may identify, too, with his ennui, or all-consuming boredom. But even as we do so, we recognize that much of his effort all too easily, and all too predictably and even comically, gets dragged down into the maw of baser human appetites.

Marlowe sees that the silly or trivial parts of his play Dr. Faustus are part of the “hero’s” tragedy: once again, for the millionth time, we see humanity reaching for the stars and falling grotesquely, yet somehow grandly, into the ditch. The comedy in the play isn’t a superfluous addition to an otherwise serious text; it is integral to its moral and theological framework.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we usually see things more fully through the protagonist’s eyes than we do in Marlowe’s masterpiece, but even so, Shakespeare is resourceful in finding ways to keep us from wholly identifying with his protagonists. Among the most powerful of those ways has to do with his plays’ structure, where we often find comic scenes twinned with heavier or even tragic scenes, or even combined, as happens in several of Marlowe’s structural units. In the end, as Dr. Johnson says, “Shakespeare has no heroes.” In this regard, Marlowe may have been his famous colleague and rival’s best teacher. King Lear has his fool, and Doctor Faustus has himself.

In his sometimes underrated historical drama King Henry VIII, Shakespeare ascribes to the disgraced but once great Cardinal Wolsey a remarkably self-aware sentiment that blends together our feeling for the sublime and the ridiculous in humanity, the light and the heavy, the serious and the absurd: the Cardinal thinks back on his time in power in Henry’s order, and says wistfully, honestly, this:

I have ventur’d,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory;
But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye;
I feel my heart new open’d. O, how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again. (Act 3, Scene 2, Gutenberg e-text)

That kind of passage is the fruit of many playwrights’ struggles to create an adequate level of interiority in their characters, without losing the semblance of coherence that comes with the external structures imposed by religion, society, and politics.

For quotations, I have used the 2018 New Mermaids edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.