SOURCE: "Magic and Poetry in Doctor Faustus," in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1964, pp. 56-67.

Magic is not only the subject of Doctor Faustus, it is the means by which the dramatic illusion generates power and conviction. As in Tamburlaine, Marlowe evidently conceives the stage as an area liberated from the limitations which nature imposes on the world around; the restraining conditions of probability here seem to be in abeyance, and Marlowe's stage affords scope to realise the gigantic fantasies of his heroes. In Doctor Faustus the stage assumes the properties of a magic circle, within which dramatic spectacle is transformed into enchanted vision, and poetry is endowed with the power of conjuring spirits. We do wrong to feel, as many critics have done, a kind of embarrassment, or even intellectual superiority towards the necromantic elements in the play, for it is precisely through the business of magic that Marlowe effects the heightening and tension necessary to the tragic experience. Few would claim that the play maintains its tragic intensity throughout, or that a sense of structure was one of Marlowe's strengths as a playwright. The farcical episodes which occupy the middle of the action do not have a very sophisticated appeal, and whoever actually wrote them, they remain Marlowe's responsibility as the chief architect of the play. However, the clowning with the Pope, Emperor and the rest, frivolous as it is, should not obscure from us the subtler effects which Marlowe obtains from stage-magic elsewhere in the tragedy. Theatrical trickery is certainly stuff to thrill the groundlings, but the same exploitation of Faustus' supernatural powers in terms of dramatic illusion also underlies those moments of poetic rapture and tragic grandeur that constitute Marlowe's supreme achievement. There was one controlling idea behind the dramatising of the Faust-Book: that the drama, particularly the poetic drama, is itself a kind of enchantment.

The notion of drama as the art of illusion is at least as ancient as the rival view that drama imitates life; the two concepts are not really contradictory, though they have their respective origins in the literary theories of Plato and Aristotle. Shakespeare, as we should expect, lent his support to both views: Hamlet's advice to the players restates the mimetic function of drama, "whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," while in The Tempest Prospero's speech at the conclusion of the masque pays memorable tribute to the imaginative power of illusion. But most of our critical terminology for discussing drama has come down to us through the Aristotelian tradition of mimesis, and in judging characterisation and action in all kinds of drama we almost inevitably look for probability and truth to nature. Sir Philip Sidney, surveying the popular drama of his day in The Apologie for Poetry, scorned it for the neglect of those unities of time and place which critical authority held to be the basis of credible dramatic action:

…you shal have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or els the tale wil not be conceived. Now ye shal have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bounde to take it for a Cave. While in the meantime two Armies flye in, represented with foure swords and bucklers, and then what harde heart will not receive it for a pitched fielde? Now, of time they are much more liberall, for ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in love. After many traverces, she is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours space…

Sidney did not live to see Marlowe endow the popular stage with poetic genius, but whether his criteria would have been different if he had written during the 1590s, during the flourishing of the London theatres, is of less interest than the fact that Sidney's description here suits exactly the treatment of time and place which we find in Doctor Faustus. The action covers twenty-four years of Faustus' life, and ranges over most of Europe in presenting his adventures: far from trying to concentrate his plot in the manner of a Corneille or a Racine, by observing on his stage the same physical limitations which would govern it as a location in the real world, Marlowe exploits the stage as a world free from the laws of time and place. His stage is exciting precisely because it is not true to nature in the respects laid down by Sidney, and evidently in this disregard for probability he was perpetuating the habits of popular drama. No doubt Marlowe's play, like those of his predecessors, would have been better constructed if more attention had been paid to the unities, affording concentration and probability, and no doubt some tightening-up along these lines would have spared us from the low farce in the middle of the play (the episodes included in the 1616 Quarto but omitted from the 1604 Quarto suggest a play of potentially variable length: with twenty-four adventure-packed years to choose from in the source book there was no lack of material). But a neo-classical Doctor Faustus would be a radically different play, for the most successful effects of Marlowe's tragedy are also derived from his conception of dramatic illusion. Even his poetry is employed to convince us of the reality of impossibilities.

The methods with which Marlowe, Shakespeare and their contemporaries went to work make it easy to understand why the unities of time and place were never properly accepted in Elizabethan drama. It was essentially a narrative art, transposing for the stage stories from non-dramatic sources, and retaining that multiplicity of incident which was so much to Elizabethan taste, as we can also see in the Faerie Queen and the Arcadia. The chronicle play, with its seemingly intractable material drawn from the flux of history, was a characteristic Elizabethan invention. In dramatising these narratives playwrights found certain means of compressing or externalising action in the stage conventions surviving from the moralities and interludes. Thus, Marlowe uses the rather awkward device of the Good and Bad Angels to project the conflict over Faustus' soul as though he were the everyman of the older allegorical drama, and the counsel offered by the saintly Old Man is clearly derived from the same tradition. The conventions of the soliloquy permitted Marlowe to schematise and compress a train of thought, as in the opening scene of the play, where Faustus' review and rejection of each branch of learning is presented in formal terms that summarise and represent an interior process independent of time. The physical shape of the projecting stage itself, in a theatre open to the sky, also assisted the playwright in freeing his scenes from any localised setting.

On a stage where the laws of material reality are suspended at will, Marlowe's disregard of probability is at one with Faustus' flouting of divine commandment, and Faustus' demonic power over nature is both image and source of the drama's hold upon its spectators. We are, as literally as possible, spellbound. As with Tamburlaine's astounding progress, the spectators collaborate readily in this vicarious experience of infinitely extended power, which affords a conscious exhilaration and sense of release. At its simplest level, the illusion enlists merely a kind of wish-fulfilment or indulged fantasy; the havoc which Faustus creates at the Pope's banquet, like Tamburlaine's treatment of captive kings, is an obvious appeal to our secret and anarchic fantasies, thinly veiled in good Protestant sentiment.

Few Elizabethan playwrights had any qualms about the spectacular, and in Doctor Faustus Marlowe seems to exult in the power of dramatic illusion: the first entrance of Mephostophilis, the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, the vision of Helen, each show Marlowe's love of strong visual appeal. But the pull of the magic stage is not dependent on spectacle alone, and what Marlowe cannot present in material form he conjures in lyrical, almost ecstatic poetry, so that we are caught up in Faustus' swelling aspirations of becoming a "demi-god":

How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I'll have them read me strange philosophy
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg …

In later scenes there is more in this vein, which recalls Tamburlaine's vaunting speeches, where the insistent future tense opens up vistas of fantastic splendour. The characteristic Marlovian mode extends the boundaries of the drama far beyond the physical limits of the stage, and the elemental powers of the universe seem to attend at the summons of this mighty rhetoric. Well might Faustus say, "I see there's virtue in my heavenly words". The visions which haunt the imaginations of Marlowe's ambitious heroes are as much a part of the action as the machinery of spectacular showmanship, and expressed with that vividness and brilliance which the Elizabethans termed enargia. Marlowe's poetry is an important vehicle of dramatic illusion; its purpose is to make us feel as much aware of the visions described as though we were seeing them with our own eyes:

Learned Faustus,
To find the secrets of astronomy,
Graven in the book of Jove's high firmament,
Did mount him up to scale Olympus' top,
Where, sitting in a chariot burning bright
Drawn by the strength of yoked dragons' necks,
He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars,
The tropics, zones, and quarters of the sky,
From the bright circle of the homed moon
Even to the height of primum mobile;
And, whirling round with this circumference
Within the concave compass of the pole,
From east to west his dragons swiftly glide
And in eight days did bring him home again.

Here the verbal tense shifts from past to present to reinforce the illusion, and under the spell of this poetry the invisible regions are revealed before us, transcending the narrow confines of the stage: the poetry partakes of that power with which language calls forth the spirits of another world. Whatever else in Marlowe's play would have displeased Sir Philip Sidney, here indeed is that "vigor of his owne invention" which Sidney attributed to the true poet, in a passage that draws more upon Platonism than upon the Aristotelian doctrine of mimesis:

Nature can never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.

By creating a world more compelling in its imaginary vastness and beauty than the actors' scaffold which, stripped of the illusion, is all that actually exists, Marlowe's verse is performing the tasks which Elizabethans assumed to constitute the art of poetry. To move, to persuade, to convince, were the ends to which the poet applied his mastery over language, while the rhetoricians and figurists documented the means by which he was able to sway those whom he addressed.

Yet the transforming spell which this rhetoric exerts upon the drama never rests complete, for the tragedy will show that the magic is a cheat, and that Faustus, who would be a "demi-god", is "but a man condemn'd to die". The tragedy demands simultaneously the breathtaking sense of infinite time and space, the persuasive vision of supernatural wealth and beauty, and also the awareness that these are illusions, an underlying feeling of disenchantment. This sense of the emptiness of Faustus' ambitions, however vast and splendid they are, is first apparent in his interrogation of Mephostophilis, through the revelation that the demon has come of his own accord, not under the compulsion of Faustus' conjuring. In fact the characterisation of Mephostophilis in his grave and melancholy replies to Faustus, invests him and the infernal regions whence he came with a reality and dignity besides which the bravado of Faustus is now seen with critical detachment as a foolish deception we can no longer share:

F. Tell me, what is that Lucifer thy lord?
M. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits.
F. Was not that Lucifer an angel once?
M. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly lov'd of God.
F. How comes it then that he is prince of devils?
M. 0, by aspiring pride and insolence, For which God threw him from the face of heaven.
F. And what are you that live with Lucifer?
M. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, Conspir'd against our God with Lucifer, And are for ever damn'd with Lucifer.
F. Where are you damn'd?
M. In hell.
F. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
M. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think'st thou that 1, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss? 0 Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
F. What, is great Mephostophilis so passionate For being deprived of the joys of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.

In this first part of the play, the initiative seems to pass from Faustus to his attendant spirit: his disbelief in the pains of hell, his hubristic blindness, strike hollow against the measured affirmation of Mephostophilis that "Where we are is hell,/ And where hell is, there must we ever be", and his magic powers dwindle to a mere means of diversion when Faustus dismisses the subject and asks to be given a wife. Later, he calls upon Christ, and with a terrifying stroke of irony, he is confronted instead by Beelzebub. It seems as though the satanic powers have assumed complete control. There is a shift in the dramatic illusion; the fantasies of magic lose their conviction in the face of Mephostophilis' passionate suffering, Faustus' hubris serves as a foil to heighten the awesome reality of hell, and the demon seems paradoxically more tragic and human than the man. Having at the outset enlisted our belief in a stage free from the limitations of natural probability, Marlowe now sets off those boundless visions of enchantment against the eternal tortures of the damned, an imprisonment infinitely more terrible than the circumscription of nature's law, and in the device of this new perspective which secures our acquiescence, it is an illusion of much more compelling reality. Sufficiently compelling, at least, to foster one or two strange stories about contemporary performances, such as the following:

Certain Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certain nomber of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores. The players (as I heard it) contrarye to their custome spending the night in reading and in prayer got them out of the town the next morning.

The scenes with Mephostophilis in the first half of the play are a remarkable piece of dramatic writing. The creation of dialogue does not seem to have come easily to Marlowe, who preferred wherever possible the direct impact upon the audience conveyed in set speeches, with their greater scope for the soaring rhetoric of his mighty line. Even the earliest of Shakespeare's plays have a fluency and genuine engagement between the characters in dialogue that are seldom found in Marlowe's work. The dialogue between Faustus and Mephostophilis is a catechism, a formal interrogation, in which the demon expounds theology and astronomy and explains the terms of the bond Faustus wishes to make. Yet Marlowe manages to transform this rather cramped framework into a vehicle of astonishing dramatic interest: Mephostophilis is characterised through his reluctance to dwell upon the suffering that Faustus cannot grasp as real, and through those baffling retorts which reveal his unsuspected independent volition:

F. Did not he charge thee to appear to me?
M. No, I came hither of mine own accord.
F. Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? Speak.
M. That was the cause, but yet per accidens.

The middle scenes of the play have been universally condemned. I do not believe they can be redeemed on the grounds that the descent to mere buffoonery and triviality is a deliberate stratagem to underline Faustus' self-deception or the Devil's fraudulency. The play simply does not possess that kind of unity, and our uppermost impression, that this section lacks tragic intensity, is not to be argued away by over-sophisticated interpretation. Perhaps only Shakespeare at the height of his powers was able to sublimate clowning and farcical indignities to a level of high seriousness, as in Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra: even here he did not discard the knockabout-horseplay which was so firmly rooted in the traditions of popular drama. However different in tone, and whoever actually wrote them, the middle scenes in Doctor Faustus were licensed by dramatic usage and authorised by the source-book. That does not make them any better than they are, but we should perhaps not so much think of them as letting down the rest of the play as rather marvel at the poetic heights to which Marlowe was able to lift other parts of his material. His sins were those of omission rather than commission, though it is doubtful whether this troubled Marlowe greatly in the business of transposing the Faust Book for the stage: certain moments and situations suggested opportunities for effects of grandeur and rapture, which Marlowe exploited according to his gifts. That he did not raise all the material to the same exalted level indicates the limited range of his genius, and the best that may be said of these scenes of low comedy is that however frivolous, they are not on that account altogether tedious. Much more instructive is the fact that the same exploitation of scenic illusion underlies the farcical episodes and the scenes of great tragic intensity alike.

The vision of Helen is remembered for the brilliance of Faustus' invocation. Yet this scene depends too upon the presentation of magic in terms of theatrical spectacle. From its context the rapturous hymn to beauty gains a richness of meaning and implication which eludes us if we read it as a detachable piece of lyric verse:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest,
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
0, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

The speech is wonderfully articulated in three sweeping movements, the second strophe beginning with that evocation of the heroic world which reaches a minor climax in returning "to Helen for a kiss" before the final strophe takes flight to a yet more ecstatic pitch. Faustus commences, we notice, with a tribute to the power of beauty, as though he recognises in Helen's charms an enchantment akin to his own demonic powers. The properties of magic communicate themselves through the poetry, which in its imagery and rhythm first transforms Faustus and Wittenberg into Paris and Troy, and then metamorphoses Helen and her lover into gods. Here in the final part of the speech there is a curious reversal of roles implied in the images: Helen's appearance before Faustus is compared to that of Jupiter to Semele, and that of Apollo to Arethusa. In each case the literal sense asserts that Helen's beauty is figured in the male god, but the inclusion of Semele and "wanton Arethusa" assist the transposition which we naturally make, so that what we actually understand by these lines is that Faustus has himself assumed the majesty (and immortality) of the gods, while Helen really takes her place with the nymphs. It is a subtle effect, a species of enchantment that not only deifies but also suggests a sexual metamorphosis in the union with Helen.

Faustus' poetry invests Helen and himself with mythological splendour; it lifts them into another dimension of illusion, and clothes the nakedness of the stage. It is a kind of speech used on several occasions by Shakespeare, whenever the presence of a character was of itself insufficient to create the heightened awareness and romantic mood he required. So Romeo identifies the vision of Juliet at her balcony with the beauty of the stars, in a speech which simultaneously lends to Juliet an added loveliness and creates the necessary setting of night; Portia is transformed to a fabulous treasure in Bassanio's words, even before we have seen her,

… the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand,
And many Jasons come in quest of her …;

and, most magical of all, the silent Hermione is at last restored to her husband, transformed to a statue, before she becomes alive indeed: a double metamorphosis. Faustus' verbal transfiguration of Helen may help to disguise the limitations of the boy actor, but as the rhapsodic verse sweeps us from Bankside and Wittenberg to the Golden Age, we become aware of an undertone of dramatic irony which runs counter to the soaring curve of his vision. His very urgency, while it impels our imaginative participation, yet betrays his desperation; there is no mistaking the anguished recollection of his bond in the cry,

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,

or the hint in the succeeding lines that Helen is a phantom, a demonic spirit who would indeed suck forth his soul:

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

The ironies reveal a lurking horror even to those spectators who failed to recall the Metamorphoses of Ovid, where Semele was reduced to ashes by her heavenly visitor, and where the embrace of Arethusa was unattainable, since she was transformed into rippling water to evade the lustful clutches of Alpheus. The dramatic excitement in the speech is generated entirely in terms of illusion: we are made to confess to both the glamour and the sham of the vision, for each have a "reality" of their own. The tragic insight depends upon this double awareness.

Marlowe skilfully manages the foreboding which now gathers over the closing episodes of the play. Faustus' farewell to the scholars is well placed as a subdued and elegiac prose prelude to the catastrophe, that sustained soliloquy which by a staggering tour de force keys the emotional pitch of the tragedy to almost unendurable climax. In sheer virtuosity there was nothing in Elizabethan drama to match Faustus' last speech for several years to come. The kind of advance in the technique of the soliloquy which it represents can be measured by comparing it with the soliloquy at the opening of the play. There Faustus' rejection of legitimate studies is displayed in a schematised logical progression which summarises and crystallises the steps which led him to necromancy. The speech is evidently contrived, and within its conventions it does not require us to suppose that it represents any particular moment in Faustus' psychological history. The conception of the final soliloquy is radically different: it does move in the plane of time, as the stark simplicity of the first monosyllables announces:

Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live.

The effects Marlowe is striving for here are those of spontaneity; the conception is much more inward, and dramatises the fleeting thoughts as though they were actually passing through Faustus' mind at the time. Instead of the predictable controlled development of the opening soliloquy, here are confusion and contradiction, the very process of the struggle to come to terms with the situation. Of course, the deliberate preconceived movement of the earlier speech befits our impression of the confident Faustus which the beginning of the play requires, and the action must open on a comparatively low emotional pitch, while at the catastrophe the situation demands a frantic and desperate Faustus, and high tension. But the soliloquies are not accounted for in terms of their contexts alone: there is an essential difference in their dramatic representation of inner processes. In the final speech, Marlowe created what was virtually a new vehicle for articulating with immediacy the flux and uncertainty of a mind under pressure. It is only the exaggeration of this vital difference to say that previous soliloquies demanded an orator, while this calls for an actor. As an attempt to turn the speech of distraction into poetry, Faustus' last soliloquy has affinities with Kyd's development of Senecan rhetoric, particularly in his invention of stage madness as an occasion for wild and whirling words.

The licence Marlowe boldly permits himself with metre here is the fundamental means of creating an impression of bursts of rapid speech punctuated by irregular pauses. Figures of repetition, like "Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again", "See, see, where Christ's blood …", "Mountains and hills, come, come", and climatic constructions, such as

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd,

allow the poetry to take wing, until the flight is sharply arrested often by means of a heavy caesura. A static delivery is impossible, and the strenuous vehemence carried by the disjointed verse insists upon the physical movements implied by the sense. It is impossible to give full weight to "O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?" with the same gesture as in

Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! 0, no, it will not harbour me.

The chimes of the clock are a further cue for action, and this device illustrates how Marlowe succeeds in organically relating the speech to the stage, compared with the static and perhaps literally sedate character of the opening soliloquy. This final scene has returned to Faustus' study, where the play began; yet however localised, the swift transitions which the soliloquy makes in its verbal imagery, from the heavens and planets, to the earth with her mountains and thence to the ugly gaping of hell-mouth, seem to conjure the whole creation to witness the catastrophe. It is a magnificent recollection of the medieval stage which transforms Faustus' study into a microcosm.

This is the supreme example of Marlowe's ability to create dramatic illusion through his poetry. Faustus' flights into other magical realms, away from the here and now, have in earlier scenes been the dramatic occasions for extending the fixed "realities" of the stage into the imaginary dimensions of poetry. The resources of the dramatist have corresponded to those of the magician. Not elation but terror now inspires Faustus' vision of all that lies beyond the physical boundaries of the stage. He conjures the elements in vain, and even if Marlowe's groundlings failed to applaud the full brilliance of giving such a strange context to a line from Ovid, "O lente, lente currite, noctis equi" they would nevertheless recognise in the Latin another esoteric piece of sorcery, which it is. Faustus' magic is no longer of any help to him, but in the imagery of his lines we as spectators seem to become part of a cosmic audience attending his last hour. The theatre scarcely seems able to contain the scene, and yet, paradoxically, Faustus' utter helplessness conveys an almost claustrophobic awareness of confinement, as though the study is a cage from which he is frantically trying to escape.

One cannot say which is the more "real", the illusion of a vast scene embracing heaven, earth and hell, or the illusion of a stage that has shrunk to cramping dimensions. But both are mutually dependent. Faustus is at bay, trapped in a corner, and yet his end is a universal drama. The dramatic effect, perfectly accommodated to the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, is derived principally from Marlowe's solution to the problems of space and time, the same problems which neo-classicism solved in terms of the unities. The awareness of Faustus' existence in these two simultaneous illusions of space generates tremendous dramatic tension and corresponds to a similar duality in the plane of time, each equally illusory. Faustus is now trapped by the clock, and by a bold theatrical device time passes with unerring swiftness: the minutes have diminished to seconds, just as the stage seems to have contracted, and closed in upon the doomed man. Yet we are intensely aware too of timeless infinity, of the imminence of perpetual damnation. The whole tragic conflict is epitomised and crowded into this final scene, for these contrary tensions dramatise that antithesis between human and superhuman for which Marlowe saw no certain reconciliation.

Doctor Faustus in its own time considerably extended the range of dramatic techniques, and it is not surprising that the play had its imitators. The treatment of necromancy in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 2 (where Margery Jourdain the witch is introduced), merely exploit the unsophisticated appeal of spectacular conjuring tricks, but Shakespeare also made an unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the effects of Faustus' last soliloquy in Richard the Third's speech on the eve of his defeat:

Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No—yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself …

There is ample evidence that the popularity of Doctor Faustus survived the turn of the century, and even Jonson's Alchemist pays homage to Marlowe's play, reducing the theme to comic terms by presenting the illusion of magic power as a series of delusions: Sir Epicure Mammon's luxurious fantasies are doubtless meant to parody the rhapsodic poetry of Faustus. Ultimately, however, it was Shakespeare who learned most from Marlowe's exploitation of theatrical illusion, and he developed the dramatic ideas found in Doctor Faustus nowhere more effectively than in Mabeth and The Tempest. The fear and guilt that haunt Macbeth and his wife through their soliloquies and hallucinations transform the stage to a nightmare world that supplants "reality", "and nothing is but what is not". As Faustus was shown the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, so the witches reveal the procession of phantom kings before Macbeth. In The Tempest, however, the powers of magic are not satanic: Prospero's virtue is a condition of his art, which he employs in the cause of merciful justice. The image of the stage itself as a magic circle becomes explicit in the closing lines of Prospero's Epilogue, and we may not be deceived if we catch an echo of that earlier magician in his words:

              Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

The conceit is well-turned, for the spectators are here reminded of the necessary part they themselves bear in working the enchantment. Shakespeare bade farewell to the theatre with a play that celebrated his own art through the nobility and virtue of a magician. What better tribute could be paid to Marlowe, whose Faustus was damned, but whose genius redeemed the magic of stage illusion from the censure that it lacked both dignity and beauty.