SOURCE: "Marlowe: Dr. Faustus," in his Christian Fantasy from 1200 to the Present, University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, pp. 73-92.

Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous Architecture of the world:
And measure every wandring plannets course:
Still climing after knowledge infinite,
And alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares,
Wils us to weare our selves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect blisse and sole felicitie.…
(Tamburlaine Part 1, II.vii.21-8)

These remarks might just have been made by Dante, whose Commedia was partly the product of a desire to fathom the furthest limits of reality, while at the same time being the expression of a scientific urge to know and to chart the unexplored. Dante, however, was both more and less ambitious, in that he was exploring a more than natural universe, one-in which his imagination was to be directed and educated by realities beyond it. Tamburlaine's universe has much less of the divine in it. His ruling principle is nature, not supernature; and nature gives us our aspiring minds, not God (11. 18-20). The speech quoted ends rather strangely, for, instead of telling us that he seeks the final key to the mysteries of the world, as we might now expect, Tamburlaine says that his 'perfect blisse and sole felicitie' lies in 'The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne'. We come down to earth and vulgar reality with rather a jolt. But in this Tamburlaine becomes like all Marlowe's other aspiring heroes. For, while their spirits lift them beyond the earth, they cannot put their ultimate desires in any other but earthly terms. This is to be seen most tellingly, and with most condemnation, in Dr Faustus, Marlowe's scholar-magician, who, unlike Tamburlaine, lives in the world of intellectual conquests, and could have found best satisfaction for his thirst in theology, which would have taken him beyond the limits of the earth; but chose instead to go in search of worldly pleasures. Tamburlaine, as military conqueror, has to fall back on earthly prizes as his goal. We should look back to the comment of Theridamas, Tamburlaine's chief captain, for the understanding of that last line:

And that made me to joine with Tamburlain,
For he is grosse and like the massie earth,
That mooves not upwards, nor by princely deeds
Doth meane to soare above the highest sort.
(11.30-3)

In other words, for all his aspiration, Tamburlaine has his feet on the ground, indeed cannot leave it. Theridamas perceives that the upward spiritual urge here expresses itself as what we may call a horizontal drive outwards. He is the practical man who knows 'what it comes down to', as Tamburlaine's speech literally came down to its seeming bathos.

But, while this is what happens, there is also for us still the sense of strain in converting or reducing the spiritual impulse to a mere material satisfaction. And this is what, in greater or lesser degree, these heroes of Marlowe's register: the sense that somehow they have mistranslated. Much of Tamburlaine's speech is restless, involving continual movement towards some grand object. That the named object should be so mean, so abrupt, can only suggest its inability to satisfy; and that is what we find in the play, where no sooner has Tamburlaine gained one crown than he seeks another, and then more, until he wears himself out. Only in his vision of his queen Zenocrate does he retain something of the spiritual thirst that in part animated the speech we have quoted (Part 1, V.i. 160-73; Part 2, II.iv.15-37). And just as with Tamburlaine, but far further back in his psyche—indeed, on the evidence, long before the play in which he is the protagonist begins—we feel that Faustus had an imaginative energy more nearly associated with the life of the universe, but one which he has let dwindle to mere secular ambition.

Nevertheless there are real differences between Tamburlaine and Faustus, who makes a pact with the devil to grant him the powers his impatient imagination seeks. Where Tamburlaine's energies are directed at overthrowing mortals, Faustus challenges the authority of God himself, and seeks to violate the laws on which nature is founded. Tamburlaine portrays the energy that drives him as the same as impels the gods and nature both:

The thirst of raigne and sweetnes of a crown,
That causde the eldest sonne of heavenly Ops,
To thrust his doting father from his chaire,
And place himself in the Emperiall heaven,
Moov'd me to manage armes against thy state.
What better president than mightie Jove?
Nature that fram'd us of foure Elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds.…
(Part 1, II.vii. 12-20)

Despite various blasphemies by Tamburlaine he still portrays himself, particularly in Part 2, as a scourge of God, His mortal agent, in his overthrow of heathen empires and corrupt Christian armies alike.¹ But Faustus does not go with the grain of reality like this. Initially at least he wants to be a 'Demi-god' and do as he pleases,

Be it to make the Moone drop from her Sphere,
Or the Ocean to overwhelme the world.
(Dr Faustus, I.iii.266-7)²

And to do this he allies himself with God's prime enemy, Lucifer. Of course, the very fact of having a Christian moral scheme of good and evil in this play alters our attitude to him; and not just by imposition, but in truth, because we see how much Faustus, in contrast to Goethe's Faust, wants for himself. Part of the difference between Tamburlaine and Faustus lies also in the fact that Tamburlaine releases some of his ambitious energies in practical warfare and expresses them in almost limitless territorial expansion, whereas Faustus is an intellectual who can range freely only, in Sidney's phrase, 'within the Zodiack of his owne wit', and thus tends to be more extreme and inaccurate in his ambition. Therein lies much of the tragic potential of the play; but the moral edge is much keener, and involves the indictment of a man whose intellect may be vast but whose true imagination is very limited. The effect in any case is that, whereas Tamburlaine's imagination can wonder at the fabric of the universe as it is, Faustus can only become excited at the thought of changing it. For all Tamburlaine's ceaseless battles, he is the one really capable of contemplating the universe; by contrast the scholar Faustus does nothing but act and move.

Further, Tamburlaine's imagination is such that he can look beyond himself, to wonder at the heavens and, every wandering planets course' or become lost in the contemplation of the nature of beauty through his beloved Zenocrate: he is in a way a genuine intellectual. We sense the force of Tamburlaine's imagination throughout, whether in the impulse that drives him to conquest or in his continual flights of aspiring verse. But the imagination is not so evident in Faustus. There is restlessness and desire for power, but the limited instances of this occur only at the beginning of the play. And all of them are directed not at going out to the world, but at bringing all things into the self:

     I'le be great Emperour of the world,
And make a bridge, thorough the moving Aire,
To passe the Ocean with a band of men,
I'le joyne the Hils that bind the Affrick shore,
And make that Country, continent to Spaine,
And both contributary to my Crowne.
The Emperour shall not live, but by my leave,
Nor any Potentate of Germany.
(I.iii.332-9)

I'l e … I'le … my … my': it is all self-directed, absorptive, centripetal; the irony is that, in contrast to Tamburlaine, Faustus can only do it in league with other powers. The syntax is chipped and broken up, a little shopping-list of greedy ambitions: this is no Michelangelo, but a Pizarro. There is only one moment in the play where the imagination of Faustus really soars like Tamburlaine's, and that is when as the end approaches he asks for Helen to be brought to him.

O thou art fairer then the evenings aire,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand starres:
Brighter art thou then flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to haplesse Semele:
More lovely then the Monarch of the sky,
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd armes,
And none but thou shalt be my Paramour.
(V.i.1781-7)

But, unlike Tamburlaine's Zenocrate, this Helen is an infernal succuba, copulation with whom is damnation: Faustus's wonder here is at once glorious and corrupt.³ Further, the soaring syntax of the lines is an index not so much to a soaring soul as to one driven by terror at approaching hell-fire; the passionate lyricism here expresses the use of Helen as a respite. Indeed it is arguable that in Faustus the most powerful imaginative moments come not from aspiration but from desperation: not from a secular imagination but from one made helplessly aware of Christian realities.

O I'le leape up to my God: who puls me downe?
See see where Christs bloud streames in the firmament,
One drop would save my soule, halfe a drop, ah my Christ.
Rend not my heart, for naming of my Christ,
Yet will I call on him: O spare me Lucifer.
Where is it now? 'tis gone. And see where God
Stretcheth out his Arme, and bends his irefull Browes:
Mountaines and Hils, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.
(V.ii. 1938-46)

Whereas Tamburlaine's restless spirit has always been moving towards some object, Faustus spends much of his energy in running away from one, whether God or hell: the force of his imagination is, as it were, negative.

Faustus is the only 'fantasy' Marlowe wrote, a fantasy set in a world surrounded and interpenetrated by a heaven and a hell, a devil and an incarnated Christian God. For much of the play we see present on the stage Mephostophilis, one of Lucifer's agents, as he seeks to secure Faustus's soul for his master. Just as in the play Everyman, and in contrast to Dante's Commedia, there is no fantastic world as such here, aside from the presence of Mephostophilis—unless we say that this world is made fantastic by being portrayed as so much of a platform between two supernatural realms. The presence of God, however, is more immediate and pervasive than at first appears. The play is one in which it seems that Faustus alone decides his ultimate destiny; but in fact that destiny is determined and shaped by the collision of his will with God's and the ultimately supernatural character of reality. God is as it were present by His absence: the more Faustus turns from Him, the more he activates divine opposition to him; at the end he is acutely aware of 'the heavy wrath of God' (V.ii.1946). That opposition is seen through a number of surrogates—Faustus's own extraordinary ignorance, the devils themselves, the process of erosion of the capacity to repent, and the ironies and collapsing structure of the play itself. We are told in the prologue that Faustus' 'waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And melting, heavens conspir'd his over-throw' (11. 21-2): the natural law of melting by the sun is the means through which the heavens work. The play thus testifies to God's power; but not to His cruelty, for Faustus continues to invoke only a dark image of Him: indeed His aspect and Faustus's wretched experience are a direct reflection of Faustus's wretched soul.

Two forms of 'fantasy' are opposed in Faustus (as, if differently, in Pearl and The Faerie Queene). Faustus himself is a mere fantasist who wants to remake the world to suit with his own desires. He thinks that the universe is a composite of adjustable matter:

All things that move betweene the quiet Poles
Shall be at my command: Emperors and Kings,
Are but obey'd in their severall Provinces:
Nor can they raise the winde, or rend the cloudes:
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as farre as doth the mind of man:
A sound Magitian is a Demi-god,
Here tire my braines to get a Deity.
(I.i.83-90)

But, while Faustus is enjoying such limited powers as his pact with the devils gives him, it is Mephostophilis who on question tells him of the immutable character of the universe; Mephostophilis the devil who depicts for him a cosmic and spiritual 'fantasy' he cannot comprehend:

FAUSTUS. Think'st thou that Faustus, is so fond to imagine,

That after this life there is any paine?

Tush, these are trifles, and meere old wives Tales.

MEPHOSTOPHILIS. But I am an instance to prove the contrary:
For I tell thee I am damn'd, and now in hell.

FAUSTUS. Nay, and this be hell, I'le willingly be damn'd.

What, sleeping, eating, walking and disputing?

(I.i.522-8)

The materialism of Faustus here is of a piece with his conception of the soul as a solid commodity: 'Had I as many soules, as there be Starres, / I'de give them all for Mephostophilis ' (I.iii.330-1).⁴ Faustus is condemned through the failure of his own fantasy, the fact that his earthly imaginings blind him to the far more miraculous and here terrible truths of the universe. In effect the play becomes a critique of that fantasy which tries to exist in opposition to Christianity.

For all the glorying by Faustus in the pictures created by his impatient imagination, one of the central ironies of this play is precisely how lacking in imagination this ambitious wizard is. The devils 'do their best' to tell Faustus of the true nature of what he is doing, even appear to warn him against it:

FAUSTUS. Where are you damn'd?

MEPHOSTOPHILIS. In hell.

FAUSTUS. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

MEPHOSTOPHILIS. Why this is hell: nor am I out of it.

Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God,

And tasted the etemall Joyes of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hels,

In being depriv'd of everlasting blisse?

O Faustus leave these frivolous demandes,

Which strike a terror to my fainting soule.

FAUSTUS. What, is great Mephostophilis so passionate

For being deprived of the Joyes of heaven?

Leame thou of Faustus manly fortitude,

And scome those Joyes thou never shalt possesse.

(I.iii.301-14)

This 'ubiquitarian' notion, whereby 'Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd, / In one selfe place: but where we are is hell' (II.i.510-12), could be said to be a means of further heightening Faustus's materialism: he thinks of hell as a solid place of physical torments if it exists at all (and he is eventually given his own image of it); he does not understand the notion of hell as separation from God.⁵

At least, he does not understand it yet: he has come very close to realising and experiencing this truth by the time of his last, agonised soliloquy. It is here that we encounter one of the organising principles of the play: the spiritual law of action and reaction by which, the nearer to his end Faustus comes, the more he comes to believe in the reality of a God whom his refusals have made him unable to serve, and of a hell which he cannot avoid. At first he thinks of Mephostophilis as some sort of a genie he has called out of a bottle, and does not believe the devil when he tells him that it was not his supposed necromantic powers that called him up, but the peril into which he had placed his soul, 'For when we heare one racke the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures, and his Saviour Christ; / We flye in hope to get his glorious soule' (I.iii.275-7). Gradually, however, he becomes more nervously aware of the possible reality of the divine system he has so scorned. And, as he does so, the fantastic powers he has derived from his league with Lucifer are increasingly used not to satisfy his ambition but as anodyne or diversion, to shut out the disturbing thoughts that begin to plague him. It is, to say the least, ironic that Faustus should be reduced to using the powers granted to him by the devils simply to wall off the dawning knowledge of what he has done; whenever he suffers anything like an attack of repentance, he is glad to have his mind entertained by a pageant of the devils, the Seven Deadly Sins or a succuba of Helen, 'That heavenly Hellen, which I saw of late, / Whose sweet embraces may extinguish cleare, / Those thoughts that do disswade me from my vow, / And keepe mine oath I made to Lucifer' (V.i.1762-5). It is not surprising, therefore, to find that pleasures used for the avoidance of pain rather than for their own sake should be often trivial or absurd: anything, even a pageant of Seven Deadly Sins or playing silly tricks on a horse-courser, will serve to divert.

The other spiritual law in the play is the Christian one by which Faustus's frequent refusals of God make him ultimately unable to repent—the law of despair. The man who had all freedom of choice ends with none, out of his own heart. At first he would have spirits 'Performe what desperate enterprise I will' (I.i.108): that word 'desperate' takes on an aspect of mordant anticipatory humour when seen in the light of its usage later in the play; as again when, during his bargain with the devils, Faustus uses what is to him theological gibberish in saying that he has 'incur'd eternall death, / By desperate thoughts against Joves Deity' (I.iii.316-17). Later, after the Good and Evil Angels have view for attention in his soul, he begins to sense that

My heart is hardned, I cannot repent:
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But feareful ecchoes thunder in mine eares,
Faustus, thou art damn'd.…
(II.ii.569-72)

After this and some bullying by Lucifer, Faustus is almost unable to use his will at all, and the pattern of his behaviour switches from thoughts of repentance to despair at his inability to repent: the apparently active mind of the first scenes becomes wholly passive. Typical is his reflection during his pranks with the Horsecourser:

What art thou Faustus but a man condemn'd to die?
Thy fatall time drawes to a finall end;
Despaire doth drive distrust into my thoughts.
Confound these passions with a quiet sleepe:
Tush, Christ did call the Theefe upon the Crosse,
Then rest thee Faustus quiet in conceit.
(IV.iv.1478-83)

After a last-minute visit by a good Old Man, who still bids him 'call for mercy, and avoyd despaire', Faustus is powerless: 'I do repent, and yet I doe despaire' (V.i.1733,1740). Though he desires to repent he can no longer will it. He asks for grace, here and later, and yet despairs of receiving it. This psychic hell is brought to a pitch of immediacy in the last speech and hour of his life. And, throughout, the growing confinement of his will is imaged: first in the fact that the devils give him powers far narrower than he had expected; then in the gradual reduction of the time available to him; and then in the place of final constriction which he reaches simultaneously with the paralysis of his will.⁶

These two processes—the growing awareness of the reality of heaven and hell, simultaneous with an increasing inability to do anything with this knowledge—give the play an extraordinary symmetry and ironic intensity. These ironies and principles are activated rather then generated by Faustus: his behaviour and his psychological development become means of throwing into relief the divine realities which ultimately govern them. Certainly if one continually chooses in one direction, habit if nothing else makes it impossible to choose in the opposite; but despair, the belief that God is hostile, is another matter. God is no humorist here: the ironic neatness of the psychic inversions does not reflect His local choices, but rather the action of the universal order, the symmetry of the spiritual cosmos, that Faustus has persistently ignored and sought to violate with his chaotic greeds.

It is, we may add, in that stoppage of the will at the moment of maximum perception of what it will cost not to be able to use it that what there is of tragic effect in Dr Faustus lies—not in any frustration of a supposedly adventurous intellect by a jealous God and the snares of hell. There is little about Faustus for much of the play to awaken our sympathy or admiration. Our involvement with him grows to the extent that he grows in the spiritual awareness of his position. And our sense of waste comes from the loss of this growth of soul in his inability to do anything with it. It is a sense which as said is keenly edged with irony, but it is not the less tragic for that.

A remarkably complex network of ironies and structures governs the entire play—a play which has often been seen as lacking in organisation. If Tamburlaine's imagination and mind could be said to dilate through the play, the process in Faustus's case is one of shrinkage, in conflict with divine reality. As said, the devils give him less than he asked for: indeed the man who expected to have the power to make 'the Moone drop from her Sphere, / Or the Ocean to overwhelme the world' (I.iii.266-7) is allowed only to play tricks with fireworks on the Pope or to call up a succuba or enjoy practical jokes with a stupid horse-courser or a rude knight. The great and swelling necromancer of the early scenes turns into an obsequious household conjurer, amusing the Emperor by calling up a shade of Alexander, or fetching grapes from the other side of the world for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt.⁷ Even more remarkable is the fact that Faustus never repines at these limitations: indeed he derives much pleasure and a certain Lilliputian pride from his trival exploits.⁸ And 'Lilliputian' may be the apposite word; for perhaps we are to picture his ambition as having been shrunk to pygmy size during the play. These middle scenes of the play are often poorly written, without much creative intensity; and on those grounds they have been argued to leave the play without a dramatic centre. It may be, however, that at a deeper level that is, in effect, the point. The void in the play might be said to express the void that is in Faustus. Alternatively, we may see these scenes as simply random and disconnected episodes of delusive pleasure thrust by Faustus between his initial act and its consequence—this serving to collapse the two ends of the play together.

This notion of a spiritual vacuum, a hollowing-out of a centre so that the peripheries collapse in on one another, is evident from the first. The prologue begins with negatives, 'Not marching in the fields of Thrasimen … Nor sporting in the dalliance of love … Nor in the pompe of proud audacious deeds, / Intends our Muse to vaunt his heavenly verse': we learn about Faustus by way of what he is not. The starveling announcement of the play's subject comes as anticlimax:

Onely this, Gentles: we must now performe
The forme of Faustus fortunes, good or bad,
And now to patient judgments we appeale,
And speake for Faustus in his infancie.

The suspense created by the previous lines and the grand pause with which they end suddenly give way to stumbling rhythm and banal, repetitive-sounding diction ('performe I Informe of Faustus fortunes'). Now we are warned that this figure will tax our patient judgments. We are told that the prologue will speak for Faustus 'in his infancie': in fact it does no more than tell us that he was born of base parents in the German town of Rhode. The rest of the speech is a remarkable piece of temporal telescoping.

At riper years to Wittenberg he went,
Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up;
So much he profits in Divinitie,
The fruitfull plot of Scholerisme grac'd,
That shortly he was grac'd with Doctors name,
Excelling all, whose sweet delight's dispute
In th'heavenly matters of Theologie,
Till swolne with cunning of a selfe conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow:
For falling to a divellish exercise,
And glutted now with learnings golden gifts,
He surfets upon cursed Necromancie:
Nothing so sweet as Magicke is to him,
Which he preferres before his chiefest blisse;
And this the man that in his study sits.

We are given an account of Faustus's total history in advance (this is quite in contrast to Marlowe's other plays): 'swolne with cunning of a selfe conceit, / His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And melting, heavens conspir'd his over-throw'. The sequence of events is distorted, for the speech then returns to talk of Faustus's growing fascination for necromancy: one feels his beginning and end come together.⁹ This is also conveyed by frequent switches of tense: 'Now is he borne', 'to Wittenberg he went', 'his kinsmen chiefly brought him up', 'he profits in Divinitie', 'shortly he was grac'd with Doctors name', 'His waxen wings did mount above his reach', 'heavens conspir'd', 'glutted now', 'He surfets', 'Nothing so sweet as Magicke is to him', 'he preferres', 'this the man that in his study sits'. The whole is a microcosm of the temporal shrinkage that we are to witness throughout the play.

This kind of depiction of the 'hollowing-out' of Faustus is done with such extraordinary subtlety that it seems fair to speak of a magical use of words that far outmatches his own use of spells. The magic that is the play is used for a spiritual end, the instruction of other souls; but that of Faustus is used only for himself. The one expands outwards; the other contracts. 'Of course' Marlowe wrote the play; but who wrote Marlowe writing it? The vatic notion of creation was one particularly prominent in the Renaissance:¹⁰ it was the period's rendering-down of the literature of granted vision to the literature of ventriloquism. At any rate, we need not suppose this far just now: it is sufficient that the evacuation of Faustus's soul shows the existence and the workings of spiritual law in the universe of the play.

The same process is at work in Faustus's opening speech, where he reviews all branches of learning and opts for necromancy. This speech might appear a condensed history of Faustus's deliberations over a number of years, or as a review of the current state of his intellectual life before he selects magic. But in fact we have already been told that Faustus is a necromancer:

For falling to a divellish exercise,
And glutted now with learnings golden gifts,
He surfets upon cursed Necromancie:
Nothing so sweet as Magicke is to him,
Which he preferres before his chiefest blisse;
And this the man that in his study sits.
(Prologue, 11. 23-8)

The whole of Faustus's soliloquy thus becomes redundant. While he looks as though he is choosing, he has already made his choice. Then what is the soliloquy for? It is a way of giving spurious rationalisation to a predeterrmined choice—a choice made not from any love of superior learning, but out of greed for power. The soliloquy, with its apparently careful weighing of the arguments for each discipline before moving on to the next, is in fact a sham, a skin of rationality over a void of power-lust and materialism, so that Faustus may persuade himself that the process by which he arrived at necromancy was inevitable. The central instance of this twisting of evidence is Faustus's summary dismissal of divinity as he flicks through the Bible:

Stipendium peccati mors est: ha, Stipendium, & c.
The reward of sin is death? that's hard:
Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas:
If we say that we have no sinne we deceive our selves,
and there is no truth in us.
Why then belike We must sinne, and so consequently die,
I, we must die, an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera:
What will be, shall be; Divinitie adeiw.
(I.i.74-83)

Faustus here omits the saving clauses concerning Christ's grace and mercy to repentant sinners: 'but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord' (Romans 6.23); 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness' (1 John 1.9). It is unlikely that Marlowe intended to portray Faustus here as ignorant of the very theology of which we have just been told he is a master (Prologue, 11. 15-19).¹¹ Unless we are prepared to accept at face value and apply retrospectively Mephostophilis's claim near the end of the play (V.ii. 1886-9, not in the A text) that he directed Faustus's reading of the Bible, it is clear that sense is made of the scene only when we view it in terms of Faustus directing and limiting his own reading. And certainly Mephostophilis did not claim responsibility for the earlier distortion of texts from logic by Faustus,¹² or his contemptuous citation from law (I.i.34-8, 55-63). Thus what seems to be a consideration is not really a consideration at all: even as Faustus appears to treat law or divinity as if they could matter to him, he is intent on proving them worthless, nonentities, by any means. The very mention of other disciplines before they are dismissed increases the sense of shrinkage.¹³ As we follow the speech it shrivels away to nothing, a perverted conjuring-trick. Faustus presents us with apparent substance only to reduce it to shadow; the irony of the play is that he himself is to turn from substance to shadow, under the spiritual laws of a magician far greater than he. It is certainly interesting that we first see Faustus at work perverting words, and in particular the Word: as suggested earlier, far greater Words that have become flesh, not to mention the true-speaking spell that is the play, are to conjure with him.

This greater conjuring is evident throughout the first soliloquy, where we are always aware of larger truths which make nonsense of what Faustus is doing. Indeed the very existence of irony suggests an intellectual perspective of which he is incapable. He is himself already a hollow man: an intellectual with no real wisdom, a man involved with creations of mind whose only interest is in personal and physical gratification, a theologian who knows neither truth nor virtue. He tells himself to 'sound the depth of that thou wilt professe' (he often thus addresses himself as someone else): he does not know to what depths that will lead him. He bids himself apply his selected branch of learning to being 'a Divine in shew': this rejection of the spiritual for the material and external recurs on Mephostophilis's first arrival, when Faustus, finding him too ugly, tells him to assume the garb of a Franciscan friar, since 'That holy shape becomes a devill best' (I.iii.254). (Incidentally, since the devils portray themselves as relatively helpless beside God's power, Mephostophilis's holy disguise, worn throughout the play, may become other than a mere blasphemous joke, and he appear to us as the agent of God he may in fact be construed indirectly to be.) Faustus takes leave of analytics, saying, 'Bid on kai me on farewell', but it is precisely not farewell that he is taking of the issue of being and not being: he may turn away from metaphysics, but it will not release him. Moving on in distaste from medicine, because it can do no more than repair the body, Faustus asks, 'Couldst thou make men to live eternally, / Or being dead, raise them to life againe, / Then this profession were to be esteem'd': we are suddenly aware that this fantastic power is at the centre of the Christian religion,¹⁴ and that it is God's power not man's; and to this ignorant blasphemy is added further irony, for Faustus will experience the fact of eternal resurrection, and it will not be the joy he thinks it. The latter of his legal quotations—'Exhereditare filium non potest pater, nisi—' ('A father cannot disinherit his son, except—')—is also ironic, for it can obviously be applied to Faustus's relation to God and the reasons for his own disinheritance.¹⁵ Turning in revulsion from the discipline of law Faustus tells us,

This study fits a Mercenarie drudge,
Who aimes at nothing but externall trash,
Too servile and illiberall for mee.
(I.i. 61-3)

From someone who has just bid himself 'be a Divine in shew', and who is about to gloat over the material gain and applause he will derive from the practice of magic, this can only be crushingly ironic; less directly so is the 'servile and illiberall', which describes precisely the imprisoned condition of Faustus's spirit during the exercise of that magic power designed to free it. With truth beyond his wit Faustus now says, 'When all is done, Divinitie is best'. And, when he moves on to consider necromancy, his spiritual stupidity is strikingly caught in his assertion, 'Negromantick bookes are heavenly'.¹⁶ His complete ignorance of spiritual matters, his allegiance to nothing but the physical, is in large part to be his undoing in his relations with the devils.

It would be a mistake to see Faustus only as a remarkably obtuse scholar. It would be fairer to say that, just as he limits his reading here, so he limits and reduces himself by going against the grain of spiritual reality. The ironies show that he is out of touch with true value, or they would not be operative. His poverties of mind and spirit are in part the product of his belief that he can be a god altering reality as he will—in short, the consequence of a megalomaniac imagination which, meeting with divine fact, erodes the faculties of its owner.

Other ironies scatter the play. Faustus calls men's souls 'vaine trifles' (I.ii.289), but it is he who is the vain trifler, he too who pursues trifles through necromancy. He tells Mephostophilis not to be so gloomy about hell but to cheer up (I.iii.311-14). He enters into the bond with Lucifer, "Seeing Faustus hath incur'd eternall death, / By desperate thoughts against Joves Deity' (I.1. 317): it is a mere formula to him here, but is later to become all too real, especially the 'desperate thoughts'. It is ironic that throughout the play Faustus should show more terror of God than of the devils. His belief that Mephostophilis will protect him from God shows him approaching the kind of 'doom of Nonsense' that has been seen in Milton's Satan;¹⁷ the process goes one stage further when, seeing the inscription 'Homo fuge ' on his arm after he has signed the bond with Lucifer in his own blood, he asks, 'whether should I flye? / If unto God, hee'le throw me downe to hell' (II.i.466-7).¹⁸ Nor are the scenes in which the clowns try to use Faustus's magic books for their own purposes without an element of satire. Their triviality reflects on that of Faustus; and their poverty makes their need for magic more real. Wagner, Faustus's servant, says of Robin, 'I know the Villaines out of service, and so hungry, that he would give his soule to the devill, for a shoulder of Mutton, tho it were bloud raw' (I.iv.349-51). When Robin replies, 'Not so neither; I had need to have it well rosted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so deere, I can tell you', we are left in no doubt how much more practical, and aware of the reality of hell, this supposedly ignorant man is.¹⁹

The last scene of the play is full of dramatic inversions of the first,²⁰ which collapse the two ends of the play together. The man who' surfeited' upon necromancy is now himself eaten—'The jawes of hell are open to receive thee'—and will be fed with 'soppes of flaming fire'.²¹ The man who sat restlessly in his chair at the outset of the play is now shown a burning chair in hell on which he will sit writhing for all eternity. The 'Demi-god' who said, 'All things that move betweene the quiet Poles / Shall be at my command', now finds himself the victim of their inexorable movement:

Stand still you ever moving Spheares of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come.

The man who has tried to live beyond the bounds of nature is now at nature's mercy:

Faire nature's eye, rise, rise againe and make
Perpetuall day: or let this houre be but
A yeare, a month, a weeke, a naturall day,
That Faustus may repent, and save his soule.

The third line parallels the shrinkage of time to this point in the play itself, and also, analogously, the shrinkage of Faustus's desires throughout. This is also seen in the way that Faustus, who once asked to be a god, now asks to be less than a beast or even an object, a mere gas (11. 1952-6); and in his crazed haggling for the blood of Christ which he sees as streaming in the firmament—'One drop would save my soule, halfe a drop, ah my Christ'. Now Faustus realises only too immediately the full natures of hell, heaven and the immortality of the soul which he treated as a mere commodity. Earlier, when his blood became too thick for him to sign the bond with Lucifer in the words' Faustus gives to thee his soule', he asked, 'Why shouldst thou not? is not thy soule thine owne?' (II.i.456-7); now he finds how truly it is his own.

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soule?
Or why is this immortal] that thou hast?

The question of who is 'running the show' is one that is continually present in this play. The very subject of learning that Faustus chooses to permit him to change the world is the one that offers that urge least scope. For a necromancer helped by devils, every change in the world, every metamorphosis or magical being, is an illusion constructed by demons. Faustus's fantasy is built on the phantasmal, the unreal: it is literally a lie, not even a fiction. What he becomes he becomes in show only; and this adds to the sense of a void at the centre of the play. Further, it is a show stage-managed by Lucifer, Mephostophilis and the other devils, who are the most evident 'playwrights' within the play. In their play, it is not Faustus who controls them but they who control Faustus: he has the chief part in their 'fantasy'; and their fantasy will grasp reality in the shape of Faustus's soul. In their greed and ambition they are in a sense another version of Faustus; in their cool insight into the true issues at stake, however, they differ from his self-deluding imagination. As said earlier, it is all a matter of perspective to some degree. Who is writing this play, this fantasy? Is it Marlowe? Faustus? Mephostophilis? Or is it God? (Even Marlowe's actual authorship of parts of the play is in doubt.) Faustus is a magician; the clowns of the play practise magic too; and there is larger magic beyond both, in Marlowe as the creator of the play, and in God as the maker of the universe. This tapering, and the constant ironic perspective, give the play its 'ripple effect' outwards. For, as for Mephostophilis himself, he may have power over Faustus through Faustus's assent, but he can himself be viewed as an agent of God's justice. As said, even his ironic guise of Franciscan friar can be seen as hell itself in the habit of heaven. Nor are the devils free agents. They cannot accomplish the dramatic upsets of nature that Faustus first asks of them (I.iii.264-70). They cannot name who made the world. They cannot give Faustus a wife. Nor can they tell Faustus much more of the planets, stars and heavens than is already familiar knowledge to him.²² And the strange thing about these devils, or at least about Mephostophilis, is that they apparently cannot lie.²³ They make no attempt to conceal from Faustus what they are, or the nature of hell, or the fate of his soul.

The fantasy of this drama may as we have suggested be conceived as one engineered by the deity. It is a fantasy in which a supernatural creation, a soul, is seen to shrivel and shrink before our eyes, under the direct action of its collision with divine laws it has sought to negate. Through the destruction of a perverted man the play then becomes a picture of God's power in action. It might appear that that picture is a harsh one, involving as it does the casting of a human soul into endless torment; but it can equally be argued that it is a picture of divine love, both because Faustus was offered every chance possible to repent, and because heaven thereby asserts itself to be a place which only love and those who love could understand or enter. Further, we have suggested that the darkened nature of Faustus's soul determines the nature of what he sees, and that the frowning God and the apparently inaccessible Christ of the play are the only forms of them that Faustus could understand. In this light their seeming remoteness from him expresses his from them; and the much greater presence of hell than of heaven in the play depicts his refusals. In the same way it can be said that the self-enclosure and blinkering in Faustus's mind as we see it in the opening soliloquy is extended in his bargain with Mephostophilis, and even in the enclosed aspect of the Christian universe of sin and punishment that comes to surround him.

Marlowe has often been seen in Dr Faustus as tom between sympathy with the ambitious imagination in Faustus and the need to judge it as damnable. Faustus is viewed as a product of the expansive Renaissance spirit, which from the evidence of most of his other plays, particularly Tamburlaine, Marlowe is said to have admired. It is certainly true that an impatience with knowledge based on bookish and outdated authority is a feature of many Renaissance thinkers, not least the Swiss doctor Paracelsus, on whom the Faustus story was founded.²⁴ It is true too that in the Renaissance the freedom given to the creative imagination (as we now call it) was far greater than before, so that, for example, Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) could have God tell man that

The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world's centre that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.²⁵

One should observe, however, that Pico was fully aware of how one who abused this freedom could find himself a path downwards to the bestial. There is not one Renaissance thinker of moment who allows complete licence to the imagination: all at some point demand that its flights be constrained within the bounds of good doctrine or sense. Faustus, of course, flies against those prescriptions. For him there is to be no limit, and no moral directive to his mind's ambition; and for this very reason, in the divine medium of the play, his imagination is shrunken and damned. Moreover, it is difficult even to see Faustus as a Renaissance seeker after knowledge. He is impatient with his existing knowledge, but does not seek to extend it; rather, what he wants is more power: 'O what a world of profite and delight, / Of power, of honour, and omnipotence, / Is promised to the Studious Artisan?' He has the bookish scholar's desire to be the centre of the world's attention, even so far as being a 'Demi-god', a 'Deity' (I.i.80-2, 89-90). In this, it may be remarked, he contrasts strikingly with Goethe's more intellectually inquiring Faust, who seeks for true experiential knowledge of nature's essence through magic, and who helps others rather than himself. For these reasons, while there is sympathy for Faustus's sufferings, the waste of his talents and his inability to repent, the play seems to cast him far more as a moral example than as a fully tragic figure. And the moral analysis is set partly in terms of Faustus's failure to comprehend the Christian fantasy that is the universe, and his preference for a materialist and selfish fantasy which proves no more than empty illusion—indeed turns literally into illusion in the form of the fraudulent pleasures given to him by the devils. The theme of a materialist and selfish fantasy was also seen in Pearl, but there the dreamer came to a truer understanding of spiritual things and the beginnings of an approach to heaven; Faustus portrays the opposite movement, the refusal and then the inability to absorb spiritual truths, and a steady journey towards a materialistic hell.

The Christian fantasy of Faustus lies precisely in the clash between the corrupt imagination of the protagonist and the spiritual frame of the universe. It is a Christian vision which for the first time in our survey exists in terms of a continued and unresolved struggle. While in Faustus the corrupt imagination is judged and put in its place (which here is hell), the conflict of the two sides is not overcome. That, we may say, marks the play as a Renaissance work: it registers the pull of the renegade human imagination against the divine. More important for our purposes, we will find that the issue of how far the imagination should be restrained or liberated is behind Christian fantasy from now until the nineteenth century.

The following abbreviations are used in references to journals.

E in C

Essays in Criticism

ELH

English Literary History

ELR

English Literary Renaissance

ES

English Studies

JEGP

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

MLN

Modern Language Notes

MLQ

Modern Language Quarterly

MP

Modern Philology

N & Q

Notes and Queries

PQ

Philological Quarterly

SEL

Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

SP

Studies in Philology

TSLL

Texas Studies in Literature and Language

UTQ

University of Toronto Quarterly

Notes

¹ Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946) pp. 79-86, gives a thorough critique of this view.

² References to Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus are to the texts in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

³ W. W. Greg, 'The Damnation of Faustus' (1946), repr. in Clifford Leech (ed.), Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) pp. 103-6, sees Faustus as committing 'the sin of demoniality, that is, bodily intercourse with demons' (p. 106). Judith Weil, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin's Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) pp. 73-5, points out the blasphemies and corruptions of the speech in its perversions of biblical and other Christian language; and at p. 195 n. 39 argues the weakness of one case made against that of Greg—by T. W. Craik, in 'The Damnation of Faustus Reconsidered', Renaissance Drama, 2 (1969) 192-6.

⁴ J. C. Maxwell, 'The Plays of Christopher Marlowe', in Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 2: The Age of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1963) p. 173. On Faustus's materialism see also Leo Kirschbaum, 'Religious Values in Dr Faustus' (1962), repr. in Willard Farnham (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'Dr Faustus ': A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969) pp. 77-87; Michael Mangan, Christopher Marlowe, 'Dr Faustus ': A Critical Study, Penguin Masterstudies (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987) pp. 45-6.

⁵ Cf. The New Catholic Encyclopaedia, 17 vols (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) IV, 1007: 'separation from God is the theological idea of hell'.

⁶ For other aspects of confinement in Faustus see Frank Manley, 'The Nature of Faustus', MP, 66 (1968-9) 220-1; Marjorie Garber,' "Infinite Riches in a Little Room": Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe', in Alvin Kernan (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1975-6, n.s., I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) pp. 5, 17-21.

⁷ Roland M. Frye, 'Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The Repudiation of Humanity' (1956), in Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations, pp. 56-7.

⁸ See also A. L. French, 'The Philosophy of Dr Faustus', E in C, 20 (1970) 137.

⁹ See also James Smith, 'Marlowe's Dr Faustus', Scrutiny, 8 (1939) 39-40, 49.

¹⁰ See for example C. D. Baker, 'Certain Religious elements in the English Doctrine of the Inspired Poet during the Renaissance', ELH, 6 (1939) 300-23.

¹¹ French, however, is prepared to accuse Marlowe of such blatant self-contradiction (E in C, 20, pp. 126-30).

¹² On which see Mangan, Dr Faustus, pp. 31-2.

¹³ J.B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) p. 165, finds this sense of shrinkage one of the dominant impressions conveyed by the play.

¹⁴ See also French, in E in C, 20, p. 128; and Roy T. Eriksen, 'The forme of Faustus fortunes ': A Study of 'The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus' (1616) (Oslo: Sorlum; and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987) p. 36.

¹⁵ Eriksen, 'The forme of Faustus fortunes, p. 37, also makes this point.

¹⁶ See also Mangan, Dr Faustus, p. 34.

¹⁷ By C. S. Lewis, in his A Preface to 'Paradise Lost' (London: Oxford University Press, 1942) p. 95.

¹⁸ Weil, Marlowe: Merlin's Prophet, p. 62, cites James H. Sims, Dramatic Uses of Allusion in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966) p. 25, referring Faustus's reaction to the 'Homo fuge' ('If unto God, hee'le throw me downe to hell') to Psalm 139. 7-10 on the omnipresence of God, in hell as in heaven. Weil remarks, 'For the joyful psalmist, God is everywhere. In order to express his hope of escape, Faustus has chosen words which point to an inevitable reunion with God.' This further extends the idea of all in Faustus happening within the divine presence.

¹⁹ See also Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study, p. 135.

²⁰ On such inversions see also, for example, Smith, in Scrutiny, 8, pp. 36-7; Helen Gardner, 'The Damnation of Faustus' (1946), in Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations, p. 39; J. P. Brockbank, Marlowe: 'Dr Faustus' (London: Edward Arnold, 1962) pp. 56-9; Leonard H. Frey, 'Antithetical Balance in the Opening and Close of Doctor Faustus', MLQ, 24 (1963) 350-3.

²¹ C. L. Barber, '"The form of Faustus' fortunes good or bad" ', Tulane Drama Review, 8 (1963-4) 106-12.

²² Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) pp. 175-6, remarks, 'Mephostophilis' answers disappoint Faustus.… The devil's knowledge is drab.… All he [Faustus] draws from Mephostophilis is a denial of the crystalline sphere introduced to explain the phenomenon of planetary trepidation. Marlowe may have been indebted to Augustinus Ricius for this modification of orthodox Ptolemaic cosmography, but the dramatic point is that this sphere is invisible and that Faustus is unable to entertain any knowledge that is not empirical.'

²³ Cf. Mangan, Dr Faustus, p. 86: '[Mephostophilis] rarely lied to Faustus. Indeed we have seen him being astonishingly honest with Faustus … hardly ever lying or deceiving.' This of course does not suggest that the devils could not lie, only that it is amazing that they did not.

²⁴ Henry M. Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic into Science (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951) pp. 12-16.

²⁵ Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) p. 225 (tr. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes). A similar view, of the poet as creator, is advanced by Sidney in An Apologie for Poetrie (quoted above, pp. 71-2).