revision pack year 13 faustus

Revision pack for year 13 Theatre studies 2010-

Some notes on Faustus: Use these to enhance your ideas for your production notes and choices. These notes come from Spark notes and the Open University if you quote them.

Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe



Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Sin, Redemption, and Damnation
Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or both.
Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
The Conflict Between Medieval and Renaissance Values
Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology, quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
Power as a Corrupting Influence
Early in the play, before he agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They lend a grandeur to Faustus’s schemes and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies.
Once Faustus actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped. Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustus’s behavior after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather, gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty celebrity.
In the Christian framework of the play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what to do with it.
The Divided Nature of Man
Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Magic and the Supernatural
The supernatural pervades Doctor Faustus, appearing everywhere in the story. Angels and devils flit about, magic spells are cast, dragons pull chariots (albeit offstage), and even fools like the two ostlers, Robin and Rafe, can learn enough magic to summon demons. Still, it is worth noting that nothing terribly significant is accomplished through magic. Faustus plays tricks on people, conjures up grapes, and explores the cosmos on a dragon, but he does not fundamentally reshape the world. The magic power that Mephastophilis grants him is more like a toy than an awesome, earth-shaking ability. Furthermore, the real drama of the play, despite all the supernatural frills and pyrotechnics, takes place within Faustus’s vacillating mind and soul, as he first sells his soul to Lucifer and then considers repenting. In this sense, the magic is almost incidental to the real story of Faustus’s struggle with himself, which Marlowe intended not as a fantastical battle but rather as a realistic portrait of a human being with a will divided between good and evil.
Practical Jokes
Once he gains his awesome powers, Faustus does not use them to do great deeds. Instead, he delights in playing tricks on people: he makes horns sprout from the knight’s head and sells the horse-courser an enchanted horse. Such magical practical jokes seem to be Faustus’s chief amusement, and Marlowe uses them to illustrate Faustus’s decline from a great, prideful scholar into a bored, mediocre magician with no higher ambition than to have a laugh at the expense of a collection of simpletons.


Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Blood
Blood plays multiple symbolic roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he signs in blood, symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact. His blood congeals on the page, however, symbolizing, perhaps, his own body’s revolt against what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Christ’s blood, which Faustus says he sees running across the sky during his terrible last night, symbolizes the sacrifice that Jesus, according to Christian belief, made on the cross; this sacrifice opened the way for humankind to repent its sins and be saved. Faustus, of course, in his proud folly, fails to take this path to salvation.
Faustus’s Rejection of the Ancient Authorities
In scene 1, Faustus goes through a list of the major fields of human knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and theology—and cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and Jerome’s Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of these figures in favor of magic. This rejection symbolizes Faustus’s break with the medieval world, which prized authority above all else, in favor of a more modern spirit of free inquiry, in which experimentation and innovation trump the assertions of Greek philosophers and the Bible.
The Good Angel and the Evil Angel
The angels appear at Faustus’s shoulder early on in the play—the good angel urging him to repent and serve God, the evil angel urging him to follow his lust for power and serve Lucifer. The two symbolize his divided will, part of which wants to do good and part of which is sunk in sin.
Faustus as a Tragic Hero
There are different views of Dr. Faustus.
There may be different or varying ways of looking at certain characters and revealing them as a certain type of character. In Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, the main character, Doctor Faustus, could be described and revealed as a tragic hero, similarly to other tragic characters, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet may also be described as such. There are different features and characteristics, which would make these characters be considered as tragic heroes rather than another type of character.

One of the features that characterize a tragic hero is that this type of character “will mistakenly bring his own downfall”, (McManus) which is referred to as “hamartia”. In Marlowe’s play, the main character, Faustus, brings his own downfall by the end of the story. In his opening speech, in Act 1 Scene 1, Faustus tells and explains the audience and the readers that he has skilled himself in law, medicine and divinity, but he wants to know more than what he knows and also know more about other things. This aspect of Faustus, his curiosity to learn and know more, may be thought of as part of the human condition and human nature and isn’t something that is seen as wrong in our society.

However, this aspect also blinds Faustus from a sense of reason and right from wrong. This eventually leads the main character of Doctor Faustus to make an agreement with the devil, which results in Faustus’ downfall. This aspect of Faustus’ character and personality is similar to Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Oedipus’ pride blinds him from seeing truth, reason, as well as the difference from right and wrong, which leads to and results in the character’s downfall and to the main character of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus, stabbing his eyes out.
This feature will lead to the characteristic and fact that, by doing these mistakes or “flaws”, the tragic heroes are doomed from the beginning and the audience and readers know the fate of these characters is sealed. And for the tragic hero be just that, a tragic hero or tragic character, this type of character has to be doomed from the beginning of the play, but doesn’t hold any responsibility for possessing his flaw or fault. This may be seen in Faustus. From the beginning of the play, from the time that he tells the audience and readers that he wants to acquire more knowledge and especially when he signs the, the audience and readers may that Faustus is doomed to have a less than perfect and happy ending. Much like Faustus, Oedipus’ fate is sealed when he refuses to see the truth, even when it’s standing right in front of him. Though these two tragic heroes may feel some sense of guilt about their actions, neither Faustus nor Oedipus seem feel some sense of guilt or responsibility of their flaw.
A third feature or characteristic that the tragic hero should have is that “[t]he protagonist should be renowned and prosperous”. (McManus) The audience and readers may witness and see this characteristic in the main character of Doctor Faustus. Early on in the play, the audience and readers knows that Faustus is well renowned and with some reputation. Over the course of the play, there are several people, mainly three scholars, talk about Faustus, his knowledge, and such aspects of this character. The audience and readers may see some signs of prosperity in Faustus. In Act 1 Scene 1, Faustus calls in his servant and student, which reveal not only that Faustus is prosperous, but also renown. The reason for this is that people at this time wanted to send their children study would to well known people.
It could also be said that Oedipus and Hamlet are also prosperous and renown. Oedipus is king of Thebes, which leads the readers and audience to assume that he is fairly prosperous. The readers and audience may also assume that he is renown, because the citizens of Thebes come to Oedipus, when the city is attacked with plague, in the prologue. Hamlet is a prince, which also may lead us to suggest that he is fairly prosperous and successful.
A fourth feature and aspect involving the tragic hero is that this character must support the plot of the story, which is similar to many other protagonists. This may be easily seen with Faustus, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It is Faustus’ actions, which seem to lead and direct the plot and the entire story of the play. This is the same situation with Oedipus and Hamlet, in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Both Oedipus and Hamlet are tragic heroes, who both lead and guide the story and its plot. This may be also part of and applied to the human life, as most of us make our own decisions and lead and drive our own lives, much like Faustus, Oedipus, and Hamlet guide the plays they are in.
A fifth feature, which is attributed to the tragic hero, is that the main character must be realistic or present some sense of realism. This may help the audience and readers relate to the character. This aspect of the tragic hero is meant for the audience to relate to or feel some form of connection with the characters and the story of the play. Faustus does have a certain sense of realism to him. For one, the main character of the play Doctor Faustus makes mistakes, which is part of the human condition and is something that every human being does. This also adds to a sense of realism to Faustus. This is the same for Oedipus and Hamlet, who also both make mistakes.
There is also the fact that Faustus wants to acquire more knowledge, which adds to the realism of the play. Acquire knowledge is another aspect that is part of the human condition. Learning and understanding more and more subjects and obtaining more knowledge is part of how we can grow and evolve as human beings, as individuals and as a society.
This sense of realism in the tragic hero may introduce pity. This is a crucial aspect to the tragedy genre. If the audience and the readers pity or sympathizes with the main character, this may lead to suggest that the audience and readers feel some form of connection with the hero of the play. In order for this to occur, the character must have some realistic features. This aspect of the tragic hero of Doctor Faustus in relation to the audience and readers may vary. There may be some who do pity Faustus, while other may feel no pity for this character. The same can be said of the characters Oedipus and Hamlet. Several people may feel sympathy for these two characters, while others won’t sympathize with these characters. This aspect and feature is part of the human condition and adds to the realism of the character and of the play. It is impossible to like or sympathize with everyone.
These aspects are a few attributes and features that characterize a tragic hero. Most of these attributes may be applied to Faustus, as well as other tragic heroes, such as Hamlet and Oedipus. But, like every human being and characters that exist, these three tragic heroes aren’t perfect and do make mistakes.


Reading Doctor Faustus ( Open University notes)
2.2 Act 2, Scene 1: Faustus and God ( Calvinism)
By the end of Act 1, Faustus appears to have made up his mind to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years in which he will ‘live in all voluptuousness’ (1.3.94). Act 2, Scene 1 opens with another soliloquy.
Activity
Please look now at this soliloquy (page 15, lines 1–14). How would you describe its mood? Jot down any points you think are important about the way the language helps to create this mood.
Faustus appears to be wrestling with his conscience in this soliloquy. He clearly feels the urge to repent, so why doesn't he? It is interesting that although he delivers this speech before he has signed his contract with Lucifer, he tells himself in the first line that he must ‘needs be damned’; in other words, he sees his own damnation as unavoidable. So what's the point, he asks himself, of thinking of God or heaven? The repetition of the word ‘despair’ in lines 4 and 5 emphasises Faustus's hopeless state of mind. If you count the syllables in lines 2 and 10, you will see that each line has only six. This means that in performance the actor would have to pause for a moment because the lines are shorter than normal, and this would have the effect of drawing attention to the sentiments expressed in the two lines, that is, to Faustus's despairing conviction that he cannot be saved and that God does not love him.
Why should Faustus feel so strongly that he is damned, when at this point in the play there seems to be every reason to believe that repentance will secure God's forgiveness? Some critics, most notably Alan Sinfield (1983) and John Stachniewski (1991), have argued that Marlowe is exploring the mental and emotional impact of the form of Protestantism that prevailed in England during the late sixteenth century, based on the doctrines of the French-born Protestant reformer Jean Calvin. Calvinist theology developed and changed over time, but at this historical juncture it stressed the sinfulness and depravity of human nature. In contrast to the traditional view of salvation as something that an individual could earn by living a virtuous Christian life, Calvinism argued that salvation is entirely God's gift rather than the result of any human effort. Moreover, according to the doctrine of predestination, God gives that gift only to a fortunate few whom he has chosen; everyone else faces an eternity of hellfire.
This theology formed the official doctrine of the Elizabethan Church. However bleak it sounds, its effect on believers was often positive; for those persuaded by their own virtuous impulses that they were chosen by God, it proved an enormous source of comfort and well-being, perhaps especially for poorer members of society, for whom the conviction of divine favour could be empowering. But for some, these doctrines provoked a sense of powerlessness and anxious fear about their spiritual destiny. It is possible to argue that Marlowe's Faustus is a depiction of one of these casualties of Calvinist doctrine, and that this helps to explain not only his opening dismissal of Christianity as obsessed with sin and damnation, but his repeated inability to repent. As in the soliloquy that opens Act 2, he cannot bring himself to believe that God favours him and has granted him salvation. The desire for repentance is overwhelmed by a still stronger belief, consistent with Calvinist doctrine in its early modern form, that the chances are that God does not love him at all.
However, it isn't necessary to believe that Doctor Faustus is specifically about Calvinism to feel that its portrait of the Christian God who vindictively ‘conspires’ Faustus's overthrow is not entirely flattering. Numerous critics have been troubled by a particular episode in the play that seems to cast doubt on the presence of divine mercy and benevolence. This is the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 when Faustus makes his most serious attempt at repentance. He quarrels with Mephistopheles, the Good Angel (unusually) gets the last word in the debate with the Evil Angel, and Faustus calls out to Christ ‘to save distressèd Faustus’ soul’ (2.3.85). And what happens? Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles enter. Why does God not intervene to save Faustus? The stony silence that greets his plea for divine assistance seems to call into question the traditional Christian notion of a loving and merciful God.
Other critics have argued that God is silent on this occasion because Faustus's repentance is insincere, and that he consistently fails to repent not because he is suffering from theologically-induced despair, but because he is afraid of the devils and constantly distracted by the frivolous entertainments they stage for him, like the pageant of the seven deadly sins which follows this episode. One could argue as well that the play does represent the Christian God as loving and merciful, and shows human beings to be free to shape their own spiritual destinies. The Good and Evil Angels, after all, seem to give dramatic form to Faustus's freedom to choose: he has a choice between good and evil, and he chooses evil in full knowledge of what the consequences will be. As late as Act 5, Scene 1, the Old Man appears on stage to drive home the availability of God's mercy if only Faustus will sincerely repent his sins. Looked at from this perspective, it is Faustus and not God who is responsible for the terrible fate that greets him at the close of the play.
This critical debate serves to remind us that it is difficult to evaluate how much sympathy the play arouses for its protagonist without taking into consideration its treatment of the Christian God. If you think the God of the play is fundamentally benevolent then you are less likely to feel favourably disposed towards Faustus than if you think he comes across as a harsh and punitive cosmic despot. It is clear, though, that the play offers textual evidence in support of both views. Once again, we find Marlowe refusing to be pinned down to one interpretation.
2 Reading Doctor Faustus
2.3 Acts 3 and 4: What does Faustus achieve?
Act 2 points repeatedly to the failure of Faustus's attempt to secure power and autonomy through his pact with Lucifer: in Act 2, Scene 1 Mephistopheles declines his request for a wife, and in Act 2, Scene 3 he refuses to tell him who made the world. Acts 3 and 4 cover the bulk of the twenty-four-year period that Faustus purchased with his soul. How do they make us feel about what he actually achieves through his embracing of black magic? Are we encouraged to feel it was worth it?
Activity
Please have another look at Act 4, Scenes 1 and 2 (pages 35–43). On the basis of these scenes, would you say that Faustus has realised his dreams of power and pleasure? What evidence would you offer in support of your view?
Now read the discussion
Yet is this all there is to say on this matter? As usual with this play, there is another side to the story, especially if we consider Act 3. Earlier we looked at Faustus's desire to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’, and speculated how, in a climate of military conflict with Spain, it might have endeared him to the play's original audience. At the time of the play's first performances, the Catholic Church would have been viewed by many with comparable hostility. In 1570 the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I and released her Catholic subjects from their allegiance to the Protestant heretic queen; in 1580 he proclaimed that her assassination would not be a mortal sin. Read with this context in mind, Act 3, Scene 1, in which Faustus makes a fool of the Pope under cover of his magician's cloak of invisibility, looks like a bid for audience approval, by its portrayal of the Catholic Church as decadent and corrupt, and mired in absurd superstitions like the ceremony of excommunication. By casting Faustus in the role of Protestant hero, this scene seems designed to elicit a favourable response to his conjuring skill.
We need to remember as well the limitations of the theatre, in particular of Marlowe's open-air theatre, where plays were performed in broad daylight with little in the way of props, scenery or artificial lighting see Figure 4). In these conditions, it is not hard to grasp why so many of Faustus's adventures as a magician are reported rather than enacted: the Chorus to Act 3, for example, tells us that in order to learn ‘the secrets of astronomy’ (3.1.2), Faustus scaled Mount Olympus ‘in a chariot burning bright / Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons' necks’ (3.1.5–6). This sounds anything but a hollow experience, and when discussing Acts 3 and 4 we should give due weight to the descriptions Marlowe provides of activities he was unable to enact on stage, especially given that these descriptions probably had a powerful impact on the play's original audience, who were much more accustomed to listening to long and often complex speeches (sermons, for example) than we tend to be nowadays.



Figure 4: William Dudley, The 1587 Rose Theatre: A Cutaway View, 1999 for the onsite exhibition which was also designed by Dudley. Used with the permission of William Dudley. The Rose was the site of the first recorded performance of Doctor Faustus on 30 September 1594
The mention of the play in performance leads us to an important characteristic of drama, which makes it different from other literary forms such as the novel and poetry: plays are written to be performed whereas novels and poems are written to be read. This means that a play is not so much a fixed and finished literary text as a blueprint for actors and directors who will have to make decisions about how it is going to be translated from the page to the stage. They will have to ask themselves questions, such as what is actually happening on stage at any given moment? How should a particular speech be spoken by the actor playing the part, and which actor is best suited to play the part? A director will also need to make decisions about set design, costumes, lighting, music and other sound effects. All of these aspects of performance will contribute to the meaning of the play, and they will differ from one production to another.
Activity
So how might consideration of Doctor Faustus as a text intended for performance affect our response to Faustus's career as a magician? A moment ago we discussed the way in which Act 4 in particular seems to emphasise the gap between Faustus's aspirations and his actual achievement. Does thinking about these scenes in terms of performance open up different possibilities?
Now read the discussion
The same might be said of the two appearances of Helen of Troy in Act 5, Scene 1. This scene is structured in such a way as to establish a clear contrast between Faustus's two encounters: with the Old Man, who urges piety and repentance, and with the legendary beauty Helen of Troy (Figure 5). Faustus chooses Helen, and many critics have echoed the Old Man's stern disapproval. Yet the critic Thomas Healy points out that in the theatre Helen is usually represented as so ‘strikingly beautiful’ that even if one agrees on a rational level that Faustus would be better off with the Old Man, on a visual level the Old Man loses out to Helen, who engages what Healy calls the audience's ‘emotional and aesthetic sympathy’ (Healy, 2004, p. 183). By the same token, a director might choose to portray Helen instead as a malign influence on the hero.
Reading Doctor Faustus
2.5 Morality play or tragedy?
Pity and fear are the emotions that, according to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, are aroused by the experience of watching a tragedy. At the start of this chapter we asked whether Doctor Faustus is a late sixteenth-century morality play, designed to teach its audience about the spiritual dangers of excessive learning and ambition. When the play was published, first in 1604 and then in 1616, it was called a ‘tragical history’; if we take ‘history’ here to refer not to a particular dramatic genre but more generally to a narrative or story, then the publisher described the play as a tragic tale. So what is a tragedy? In fact, ‘tragedy’ is a notoriously difficult literary term to define, for it seems to take various forms in different historical periods. But for the sake of discussion, we can fall back on the broad strokes of Aristotle's description (in the Poetics) of the tragedies he had seen in Athens in the fourth century BCE: tragedies are plays that represent a central action or plot that is serious and significant. They involve a socially prominent main character who is neither evil nor morally perfect, who moves from a state of happiness to a state of misery because of some frailty or error of judgement: this is the tragic hero, the remarkable individual whose fall stimulates in the spectator intense feelings of pity and fear.



Figure 6: This is the title page of the 1620 edition of the ‘B’ text of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1616: The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. British Library, London. c. 1891–6 C.39.c.26. By permission of the British Library
To what extent does Doctor Faustus conform to this description of a tragic play? Well, it follows the classic tragic trajectory in so far as it starts out with the protagonist at the pinnacle of his achievement and ends with his fall into misery, death and (in this case) damnation. From the beginning the play identifies its protagonist not as ‘everyman’, the morality play hero who ‘stands for’ all of us, but as the exceptional protagonist of tragic drama. Moreover, it is certainly possible to argue that Faustus brings about his own demise through his catastrophically ill-advised decision to embrace black magic. Perhaps most importantly, we have seen in the course of this unit that Faustus is consistently presented to us as an intermediate character, neither wholly good nor wholly bad: both brilliant and arrogant, learned and foolish, consumed with intellectual curiosity and possessed of insatiable appetites for worldly pleasure, a conscience-stricken rebel against divine power. We have seen as well how skilfully Marlowe uses the soliloquy to create a powerful illusion of a complex inner life: from Faustus's first proud rejection of the university curriculum and his exuberant daydreams of unlimited power, to his anguished self-questioning and final terrified confrontation with the divine authority he defied, the play gives us access to the thoughts and feelings of a dramatic character whose fall, whether or not we feel it is deserved, seems to call for a fuller emotional response than the Epilogue's moralising can provide.


3 Hero and author
What, if anything, does Doctor Faustus tell us about its notorious author? Having read the play, do you feel that it supports or invalidates the dominant view of Marlowe as the bad boy of Elizabethan drama? There is certainly no doubt that the play has a defiant streak, that it calls into question the justice of a universe that places restrictions on human achievement and demands the eternal suffering of those who disobey its laws. On this level, it does seem to be the work of an author disinclined to take orthodox beliefs on trust, who bears some resemblance to the restless, irreverent personality described and decried by the likes of Baines and Beard. However, we have seen throughout this unit that this allegedly rebellious figure produced a play that, if it questions divine justice, also insists on the egoism and sheer wrong-headedness of its erring protagonist, and powerfully conveys his feelings of guilt and remorse. Perhaps the play's ambiguity is a measure of how risky it would have been for Marlowe to write a more overtly subversive drama; yet one could also argue that the play's orthodox sentiments are too deeply felt to be dismissed as camouflage for the author's heretical opinions. In the end, all we can say is that Marlowe's treatment of the Faust legend is neither simply orthodox nor simply radical. With its stubborn resistance to single, fixed meanings, Doctor Faustus leaves the character and beliefs of its author in shadow. Yet if we cannot finally assess the accuracy of Marlowe's reputation as a rebel and outsider, I hope that your reading of the play has made clear why he also has a reputation as a pioneer of English drama.




Figure 5: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen of Troy, 1863, oil on panel, 33 × 28 cm. Photo: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/The Bridgeman Art Library. A representation of Helen of Troy, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, by the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2 Reading Doctor Faustus
2.4 Act 5, Scene 2: Faustus's last soliloquy
The play draws to a close with Faustus's final soliloquy, which is supposed to mark the last hour of his life.
Activity
Please reread this speech now, thinking as you read about how Marlowe uses sound effects to heighten the emotional impact of the soliloquy.
Now read the discussion
Critics have often commented on how skilfully Marlowe uses rhythm to underline the passage of time. Look, for example, at the second line: ‘Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’ (l. 67). Because this is a sequence of monosyllabic words, it is not entirely clear which of them are stressed. It would certainly be possible for an actor to give a more or less equally strong stress to each word, which is why O'Connor points out that the line seems to echo the striking clock we have just heard (p. 108). This echo effect is strengthened by the internal rhyme between ‘Now’ and ‘thou’. The monosyllabic words continue into the next line until the last word: ‘And then thou must be damned perpetually’ (l. 68). The sudden appearance of a long five-syllable word focuses our attention on it and alerts us to what it is that Faustus most fears: an infinity of suffering. This sparks his desperate and futile plea for time to stand still, and Marlowe underlines the futility through the use of enjambement, or run-on lines:
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day … (ll. 71–3)
Faustus wants time to stop or slow down, but the way one line of verse tumbles into the next, accelerating rather than slowing down the rhythm, seems to signal the inevitable frustration of that wish. Faustus himself grasps this: ‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (ll. 76–7).
Time really is the essence of this soliloquy, not only because the clock is ticking for Faustus, but because, as we have seen, what most horrifies him is the prospect not of suffering but of endless suffering. After the clock strikes the half hour, Faustus pleads with God to place a limit on his time in hell – ‘Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved’ (ll. 103–04) – only to come back to the awful truth: ‘O, no end is limited to damnèd souls’ (l. 105).
One of the most striking aspects of the speech is the way it reverses the dreams of power and glory that Faustus expressed in his first soliloquy. In that speech he declared his desire to be more than human, to be a ‘mighty god’, but now, as he faces an eternity in hell, he wishes that he were less than human: he longs to be transformed into ‘some brutish beast’ whose soul would simply dissolve into the elements when it dies (ll. 109–12), or that his soul might ‘be changed into little waterdrops, / And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found’ (ll. 119–20). In his final soliloquy, Faustus's self-assertive spirit collapses into a desire for extinction; his aspiration to divinity into a longing for annihilation as he seeks desperately to escape from ‘the heavy wrath of God’ (l. 86).
Does this final humbling of Faustus encourage a feeling of satisfaction that he has got what he deserved? That seems to be how the Epilogue sees things. As in the Prologue, the Chorus begins by acknowledging Faustus's greatness, but in essence it is issuing a warning to the audience that his terrible fate is what awaits all those ‘forward wits’ who ‘practise more than heavenly power permits’ (ll. 7–8). Yet it is arguable that the final soliloquy's powerful evocation of Faustus's agony, coupled with its stress on the horrors of the never-ending suffering to which he has been sentenced, are designed to make us wonder whether the savage punishment really fits the crime. Feelings of pity and fear might seem a more appropriate response to Faustus's end than the Epilogue's moral, as tidy as its concluding rhyming couplet.