Dr. Faustus

Doctor Faustus

In Tudor Dynasty the `most nearly Satanic tragedy that can be found' is Doctor Faustus tells the story of a certain doctor named `Faustus', meaning `auspicious' becomes an avid follower of the Black Magic and his Temptations go unabated as he desires the famous ‘Hellenic Beauty Helen’ for his company which was unusual for Helen had long been dead. Faustus strikes a deal with Mephistophilis “a servant to great Lucipher” that he will give his soul in exchange for A Kiss from Helen;

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--''[kisses her]''     
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--             
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Mephistophilis explains that Faustus must “buy my service with his soul” by signing a contract:

But Faustus, thou must bequeath it solemnly
And write a deed of gift with thine own blood,
For that security craves great Lucifer.
If thou deny it, I will back to hell.

Subsequently, as Faustus draws blood and prepares to write the contract, Mephistophilis reminds him once more to “Write it in a manner of a deed of gift”. It would seem that this is not a “purchase” at all. As per Lucifer’s deal: “he will spare him four and twenty years, / Letting him live in all voluptuousness,” during which time he will have Mephistophilis as his personal servant “Having thee ever to attend on me”. At the end he will give his soul over to Lucifer as payment and spend the rest of time as one damned to Hell. This deal is to be sealed in Faustus's own blood. After cutting his arm, the wound is divinely healed and the Latin words "Homo, fuge!" (Fly, man!) then appear upon it.

With blank verse and prose, Marlowe sets the story in Wittenburg, Germany with Faustus selling his soul to the devil. At the end of his twenty-four years, Faustus is filled with fear and he becomes remorseful for his past actions, yet this comes too late. Marlowe creates doubt about the freedom of Faustus's will early when Faustus asks the Good Angel if it is too late to repent. The Good Angel replies: "ever too late, if Faustus can repent". The issue is raised again:

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemn’d t o die?
Thy fatal time doth draw to final end;

When fellow scholars find Faustus the next morning, he is torn limb from limb, with his soul carried off to hell. Moreover, by magnifying his hero's aspirations (never presume to be `great emperor of the world' or strive `to gain a Deity') and sharply curtailing his realization (gains few of his grandiose dreams).

The roots of Doctor Faustus lie deep in the fertile loam of medieval legend. Faustus rejects God, and in doing so, effaces the traditional theological idea that the soul is “on loan” from God, and thus not his to give away. The stories surrounding magicians were typical Magus legends, the hubristic magician, sought to purchase from St Peter the power of the Holy Spirit. St Cyprian, performed many miraculous deeds and was eventually converted, martyred and canonized. Theophilus introduced into the tradition the diabolical blood pact. The entire drama thus occurs within the human psyche. Faustus appreciate Divinity as useless because he feels that all humans commit sin, and thus to have sins punishable by death complicates the logic of Divinity. He dismisses it as "What doctrine call you this? Que sera, sera" (What will be, shall be).

Doctor Faustus adopts and alters the schema of the morality play to its tragic format. The morality plays conclude with the redemption of the often-erring hero, Marlowe's drama 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.

The man who earlier exulted, `The emperor shall not live but by my leave', now serves the emperor. In order to make his contract appear less threatening, he convinces himself that hell is only a fable and confounds it in Elysium. When Mephistopheles comes from hell to seize his `glorious soul' Faustus employs fallacious reasoning to convince himself and ignores Mephistophilis’s passionate warning

`to leave these frivolous demands
Which strike a terror in my fainting soul' (I.III.83±84).

Mephistophilis 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!', 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.

Doctor Faustus questions why man is put on the earth. We see in Faustus a man opposing and questioning the order of the cosmos and railing against the confines of human knowledge. While the play shares many of the characteristics of medieval morality plays it cannot be defined solely in this way. Faustus can be seen as a tragic hero who through his thirst for knowledge and his desire to go beyond the accepted wisdom of his time is ultimately destroyed.

Faustus appreciate Divinity as useless because he feels that all humans commit sin, and thus to have sins punishable by death complicates the logic of Divinity. He dismisses it as "What doctrine call you this? Que sera, sera" (What will be, shall be). Marlowe also allows him to confuse opposites and blur distinctions (he sees his necromantic books as ‘heavenly’ and, more damnably, he signs away his soul to Mephistophilis with Christ’s last words on the cross” “Consummatum est,” “It is finished” or “completed.”

“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,    
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’ed”

Here Faustus both clings to his cleverness by quoting, out of context, an amorous line from Ovid “Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night”

Doctor Faustus is a Tamburlaine on the intellectual level; his ambition for the ultimate knowledge; and if knowledge for him means power, the same can be said in some degree of the view implicit in the whole Bocanian tradition” But Faustus is not merely a man who seeks the practical fruit of knowledge: symbolizing in his own behavior the story of the Fall of Man through eating of the tree of knowledge. He had had a less aspiring mind he would have been a better man: less imaginative, less interesting, and less daring, he would also have been more virtuous. In the end of the play he cries:

Adders and Serpants, Let me breath a while      
Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer,    
I’ll burn my books,—ah, Mephistophilis.”

Here we have the germ of a truly tragic situation—corruptio optima perrima, the corruption of the best becomes the worst. Marlowe’s real difficulty comes when he has to illustrate the kind of knowledge Faustus has obtained by his compact with Mephistophilis and to present the kind of life he is now able to lead. Marlowe was at loss to illustrate superhuman knowledge and power in concrete dramatic situation. Milton, face with  the problem of putting divine wisdom into the mouth of God say what Milton had already been maintaining for some time; Bernard Shaw, presenting in Back to Methusaleh his Ancients who have achieved a wisdom beyond anything yet available to man, puts into their mouths the views that Shah had been long arguing.

Christopher Marlowe

Have you ever wondered why so much controversy still surrounds the life, works and death of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)? His legend has become all the more mysterious in the centuries since he lost his life in a barroom brawl. Or did he die? Perhaps, he lived on to give us the great works of Shakespeare, or perhaps some other plays. And, if these historical stories about his life are not fantastic enough, modern retellings have helped to keep our imaginations alive.

In Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life, Lisa Hopkins tries to sort fact from fiction to create a more realistic picture of this literary master: his life, his adventures, his works, and even his death. By presenting the history of the Marlowe controversy, along with more modern interpretations of his life and work, Hopkins contributes to serious discussion. She explains that writings about Christopher Marlowe have ranged "from the nonsense of the authorship conspiracy theorists to brilliant explorations of his individual works or his career as a whole." This book is an attempt to cover all of these areas, starting with an overview of his canon, moving to his early life and education, discussing the creation of his works, then touching upon the "afterlife" of his works.

Hopkins explores the depth of Marlowe's writing. Even though he only lived for a short time, the few works we have from him are innovative in form and genre. "To some extent," Hopkins says, "all of Marlowe's theatre can be seen as probing and testing what society will and will not tolerate, particularly in the specific arenas of religious dissidence, lack of conformity to the norms of heterosexuality, and unwillingness to accept constituted authority." The subject matter of his plays can't be surprising, really, especially considering the dramatic life he led outside of the theatrical realm. Historical evidence suggests that he played the part of a spy. And outside of these daring escapades, "he was associating with men who constituted risky and sometimes violent company."

The life he led was violent, so it's not a shocker that his death was far from natural. Some theorists say his death by stabbing might have related to his work as a spy, while others believe it had something to do with his religious beliefs (or unbelief). Hopkins writes, "Dying in odd circumstances, which we will perhaps never fully understand, he was buried hugger-mugger in a location we can no longer precisely identify."

With the mystery of his life, and the uncertainty of the circumstances surrounding his death, it seems fitting that we don't even know where he was buried. There's more than a little tragedy in his dying so young, and with so few works to make up his canon. Hopkins says, "With him died attitudes toward religion, sexuality and society, which we are unlikely ever to be able to reconstruct in their original complexity." The few works he did leave us are in "a hopeless muddle."

If his works were incomplete or muddled, at least we have them. We also have the legends that have been passed down to us through literature and legend. He is always a part of the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy; and what little we know of his life has become the subject for countless bits of fiction.

Perhaps most notable among the recent fictionalized Marlowe characters is his appearance in "Shakespeare in Love." As Lisa Hopkins explains, "Rupert Everett's benevolent and more successful Marlowe acts as role model to the young Shakespeare, buying him drinks and helping him to think of a better plot for his projected play... before dying in a brawl in a Deptford pub."

Of course, as with any fictionalization, the movie takes liberties with some of the facts literary scholars hold to be true. Hopkins writes, "Though the film makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, it does include some interesting pretensions to historical accuracy, it does include some interesting suggestions: "Doctor Faustus," we are told, is an early work, while Marlowe has just finished writing "The Massacre at Paris "on the day of his death."

In spite of the years that have intervened to separate us from any concrete answers to the Marlowe legend, we still look for answers. Every historical bit of paper is examined. Perhaps, we'll discover some unknown manuscript that will answer all of our questions.

Hopkins writes, "Perhaps the ultimate fascination of Marlowe... is the ways in which he defies easy assimilation into the modern world and retains his mystery."