SOURCE: "Demonizing Magic: Patterns of Power in Doctor Faustus," in Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 111-42.

The European Subject

The prologue to The Tragical! History of Doctor Faustus sets the forthcoming material apart from what has come before on the Marlovian stage—from "the pomp of proud audacious deeds," from marches of war and sports of love that "overturn'd" "courts of kings" in Carthage and beyond (prologue 4-5).¹ Though Edward II may be implicated in the latter, the turn marked here is primarily from the broad, cross-cultural landscapes of imperialist competition to "only this" (Prologue 7), the "fortunes" of a man born of "parents base of stock" (Prologue 11), schooled in Germany, and sitting, as the play opens, in his study. While his fortunes include an Icarian rise to things "above his reach" (Prologue 21) and a fall to "devilish exercise" (Prologue 23), they are notably circumscribed, spatially within Europe, temporally within a period of twenty-four years, and textually by a legendary tradition of Faust tales. The center of the drama, too, is not the exterior space of public display but an interior scrutiny of self and soul, of self in terms of soul. Though Faustus, like Barabas, Tamburlaine, and Dido, makes a name for himself by flaunting his unorthodox powers in public, the transgression for which he is called to make account, by us and those onstage, is finally against God, himself, and his eternal fate.

In Marlowe, the division between non-European and European spaces and subjects can only be tenuous; for, as the preceding chapters have argued, the plays insist that the boundaries between "ours" and "theirs" depend upon who is setting the terms, from what place and perspective, and for what purpose. Though the A-text of Faustus points primarily inward, to a struggle of soul, the B-text points also outward, to and from a context of imperialism.² The fact that the same story can go either way suggests the close connection between "domestic" and "imperialist" concerns. Yet the Faust tale, with its European setting, its Christian framework, and its repeated inscription in legend (which, in the case of the Faustbooks, is canonized as "English" and "German"), announces itself as European, its landscape of devils notwithstanding. Marlowe's version, in either version, does stand out within the corpus of his works because of its unique engagement with Europe and European legend, as with the self, soul, and "mind of man" (1.1.62). Despite the prologue's suggestions to the contrary, Edward II stands beside it, with its focus on the English body politic and an English king's body bringing English audiences even closer to home, and with its diminishing landscape pressing the history into an increasingly interior representational space, which is physically inside the king's body.³ Both plays, like Marlowe's others, vigorously refute the rigid categorization of self and other; yet, in their distinction from the imperialist plays, they expose critical differences not between the alien abroad and the alien at home, but between society's circumscriptions of the alien.

It seems no coincidence that Faustus has become the most canonical of Marlowe's plays and appears regularly and singularly in anthologies and course syllabi, despite the fact that, after The Massacre at Paris, its text is the least reliable in the Marlovian corpus. The most recent Norton Anthology of English Literature singles out the "tremendously successful" Tamburlaine to introduce an accomplished and uncontroversial Marlowe, emphasizing the play's innovative use of blank verse and its (implicitly admirable) valorization of human ambition.⁴ The play anthologized, however, as more important to an understanding of Marlowe and Elizabethan literature and life is Faustus. In order to justify its centrality, the headnote must normalize the play's otherwise alienating elements. Faustus's bargain with the devil and his damnation, we are told, "would have been taken seriously in a time when everyone believed in the reality of devils." While admitting that his inevitable fall disrupts Marlowe's "characteristic" glorification of ambition, the editors diffuse the tension created by this discrepancy by fitting Faustus's "fiendful fortune" (Epilogue 5) seamlessly into a tradition of fortunate falls, of the angels in heaven and humanity in Eden. Ultimately, what is made to argue for the play's importance is that certain scenes (one which occurs in different versions in the A- and B-texts) stand out as the work of "no other Elizabethan," an endorsement that distinguishes Marlowe as an exemplary though unique Elizabethan author.⁵

For Marlowe's contemporaries, Tamburlaine was largely the text of choice in incriminations and emulations of the author.⁶ Yet, like the Norton editors, modern critics attempting to recover a definitive Marlowe have privileged Faustus as pivotal, as if a text that deals directly with "the mind of man" would be more likely to reveal his. Even with Christianity providing the terms of debate, the play's ideology has been produced in radically different ways, as unquestionably transgressive or unquestionably orthodox.⁷ Though the conflict has been split between the two existing texts, the question of whether Faustus is damned—generally assigned a subversive answer ("no") in the A-text and a conservative one ("yes") in B—remains as vital and vexing (and misleading, as I will suggest) to these readings as the issue of Hamlet's delay has been to Hamlet.⁸ Even so, what has prevailed amid and despite all the controversy are interpretations of both play and playwright that discover a largely unconflicted ideological stance. It has been only with the death of the author (and perhaps also of God) and with the growing critical agreement that neither text is an "original Marlowe" that Faustus's indeterminacies have earned a prominent place in the story.⁹

The impulses behind the canonization and clarification of Faustus are no doubt varied. In part the privileging of the text and of stable readings of it in the face of glaring textual corruption and critical controversy suggests a desire to find the play distinctively knowable and familiar—a desire that is itself complicit with the kinds of imperialist self-constructions Marlovian drama reacts against. At stake is an assumption crucial to the self/other divide: that "we" are subjects with meaningfully individuated bodies and (Christian) souls, while "they" are objects. Their bodies or, more often, body parts were produced as marvels to and for our gaze, and their souls, when not ignored, provided something to save (to justify colonization) or blame (to justify aggression). When described by the Persians, Tamburlaine becomes a spectacular collection of limbs, joints, postures, eyes, and curls, all promising the divinely ordained destiny his competitors need to see. In Part 2, the Christian king deploys Christian dictates against "the infidel," whether the elusively irreligious Tamburlaine or the Mohammedan Turks, in order to break rather than engender faith, to be aggressively untrue to his vows of peace because "they" are.¹⁰ "Their" souls otherwise do not matter. And though Ferneze castigates Barabas as "the infidel," he is interested in the Jew only as a prop of profit.

Faustus's interior dimensions, however, do claim center stage as the subject of almost everyone's speculation—from the scholars', to the angels', to the devils', to his own, and likewise to ours. In turning at once to Europe and to a struggle of soul, the play fosters the illusion that Europe is the domain of a uniquely interiorized self. While Tamburlaine may discourse upon "beauty" and "perfect bliss," and the Jew of Malta upon money, murder, and revenge, it is only Faustus who speculates upon the power and possibilities of "that within" (Hamlet 1.2.85).

Marlowe's simultaneous evocation and rejection of the morality tradition, in which the saga of soul was played out externally, reminds us that Faustus is not an Everyman; his choices matter not as they impact universally upon a cosmic battle between good and evil, God (who, as critics have often noted, is absent here) and the devil, but as they impact particularly upon him, "the man that in his study sits" (Prologue 28).¹¹ These are his fortunes, good or bad, and he, his perception, and his self-perception become the determining factors.

At stake also in the canonization and stabilization of the play is the assumption that the European subject is ultimately knowable, unlike non-Europeans whose methods and motives elude "our" grasp. While African or New World natives might attack European visitors erratically, without apparent provocation, European aggression is repeatedly inscribed within a comprehensible pattern of negotiation; while we might wonder about "them," we are given little room to wonder about "us." Faustus is deeply invested in the illusion of knowability, choosing a career path with definitive limits, writing himself into a contract with non-negotiable terms, and ostensibly giving his life "a shape and a certainty that it would otherwise lack."¹² In studying magic and emulating Agrippa (whom, he tells us, "all Europe" [1.1.119] honored), Faustus plans to be "resolve[d] … of all ambiguities" (1.1.81) touching the cosmos and his place and power within it.¹³ To decide whether the "form of [his] fortunes" and Marlowe's complicity with them is "good or bad" (Prologue 8) is to produce "us" as subjects whose meanings can always be recuperated even (if not especially) from corrupted and controversial texts.

Yet while the play provokes such inscription, it does so only to prompt its spectators to reconsider their assumptions about the superiority and uniqueness of the European subject. In his choice of domestic subjects, Marlowe disrupts the great divide instituted most prominently within imperialist discourse, between Europe as the locus of the self and elsewhere as the locus of the other. For in Faustus the European subject on display is a notorious other, a black magician whose practice was not neutralized in early modern social discourses into a comforting pattern of fortunate falls. To the contrary, black magic was set repeatedly against white or "natural" magic and orthodox religion as "'an execrable and monstrous thing" that "consist[ed] wholly in the operations and powers of demons."¹⁴ In Edward II and The Massacre at Paris, too, the "heroes"—Edward, the "homosexual" king, and the Machiavellian Duke of Guise—are comparably other. More than Dido, Tamburlaine, or Barabas, these subjects, because they are European, bring home the point—and for imperialist discourses, the problem—that otherness resides not only abroad but also, more immediately, at home.

And not just within the confines of Europe—the play points us also to an othemess within the self. Though Faustus is given a unique interiority, it is a source and center of crisis. Despite imperialist discourses that seemed to suggest otherwise, the self was a radically unstable site of knowledge.¹⁵ Hamlet, arguably the most introspective of Shakespeare's characters, if not also on the Elizabethan stage, is also the most elusive, appearing most definable when he is taking his passion and cue from others and least when he articulates what it means for him to be or not to be.¹⁶ Even as he attempts to look inward, in his famous set piece, to determine what it means to be, he returns to externals, to the wearying "fardels" (Hamlet 3.1.75) of the world which in his view circumscribe existence, and displaces his anxiety about what or whether being means onto the "undiscover'd country" (3.1.78) of the afterlife. Ultimately he can only garner identity from men who act (the Ghost, the player, Fortinbras's men, and Laertes), modeling his behavior on theirs, however fleetingly. As he does so, interiority gives way to action, which proves finally more able to be suited to the word and to tragic form and meanings than whatever lies within.

In asking the quintessential question, "Why does Hamlet delay?," critics have recast his internal dilemma in terms of action. Yet the question is misleading, for in giving a definitive effect, it presupposes a definitive cause rooted knowably within a knowable self. In the play's opening line, Shakespeare poses another question—"Who's there?" (1.1.1)—that defies answer both within the initial scene and throughout: just as the guards, wrapped in a fog of unknowing, have no immediate answer, neither does the play. Though Lear, in madness, fixates on an image of humanity that will tell him who he is, neither Hamlet nor his play proffers a stable image of "unaccommodated man" (King Lear 3.4.106-7) that works in reason.

In Faustus as well, interiority complicates rather than clarifies identity. Though Faustus seems sure of his ability to know himself and his fate, we are not, especially when alternative texts ("Homo fuge!" [2.1.77]) appear and disappear on his arm and alternative voices continually interrupt his resolve. In constantly reiterating his resolve to be resolved, Faustus himself casts doubt on what he is doing and what he knows about what he is doing. Like Barabas, the more he talks about his motives and ambitions, the less clear they become, even though he, unlike Barabas, charts his journey in terms of soul. Just as Barabas voices desires for profit, revenge, and power, but achieving all, is satisfied with none, so similarly does Faustus contemplate taking command of "a world of profit and delight / Of power, of honor, of omnipotence" (1.1.54-55), only to carry through with the most menial tricks, as critics have often complained, his bargain with the devil notwithstanding.¹⁷

While it is tempting given the interior terms of the drama to locate a singular motive behind his actions—to see him trying, as Dollimore has argued, to "escape agonised irresolution" and "an impasse of despair" or, as Greenblatt contends, "to give his life a clear fixed shape"—Faustus's almost haphazard articulations of purpose argue against such clarity.¹⁸ Though we know that there is "nothing so sweet as magic is to him" (Prologue 26), because he gives such different reasons for his choice we do not know exactly why. We cannot be sure whether his point is to "settle" (1.1.1) his studies, the shape of his life, or the fate of his soul, to "be great emperor of the world" (1.3.104) and to command "all things that move between the quiet poles" (1.1.57), to be "as cunning as Agrippa was" (1.1.118) and garner comparable fame, to gain a wife or lover (as suggested in his initial and final requests), all of the above or none.

Instead of assigning Faustus a governing interiority that gives his fortunes a definitive and meaningful shape, Marlowe positions that interiority as a manipulable construct (like Barabas's status as Jew or Tamburlaine's barbarity). Like Barabas and Tamburlaine, Faustus emerges as the subject of a discourse dictated from without by those who have more of a stake in his soul than he, a subject whose fortunes are framed by and within the self-authorizing displays of the devil. Though he attempts to create and sustain the illusion that he is writing himself into a knowable position of knowledge and power, it is not he but Lucifer's agent Mephastophilis who acts "of [his] own accord" (1.3.44), who invests Faustus's choice with meaning and hands him the dagger of his own undoing, and who in the B-text turns the pages to lead Faustus's eye toward damnation. And it is not he who demonstrates his power by transgressing, but Lucifer and Mephastophilis who demonstrate theirs by coercing him into a position of transgression, appropriating him as a convenient and necessary other.

As I have argued, the imperialist plays dramatize similar manipulations. Yet what is significantly different here (as in Edward II) is that the appropriation is played out in terms of interiority. In Marlowe's Europe, thoughts are subjects, and the discrimination that he locates there is one that reaches into the self, into the soul and "mind of man."

The Renaissance Magician

The Renaissance magician in general and the figure of Faust in particular provided the perfect subject for this self-scrutiny, for across Europe they were among the most visible targets of demonization within the domestic discourse of the early modern period. During the medieval period, the magician emerged prominently within literary texts as a kind of Vice figure whose tricks catalyzed the more important fates and actions of others.¹⁹ In the Renaissance, however, the magician's, especially the black magician's, fortunes were more centrally and significantly on display. With the eruption of the witch craze in the 1550s came an outbreak of texts demonizing magic, such as Jean Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers (1580), Francis Coxe's A short treatise declaring the detestable wickedness of magical sciences (1561), and of course, James I's prominent Daemonologie (1597).²⁰

In the early sixteenth century, Faust became a sort of cult figure, the story of his pact with the devil told and retold across Europe on all levels of society, in ballads, books, and plays. Almost immediately after the historical Faust's death in the late 1530s, the legend arose, and before the emergence of the seminal German Faustbook (Historia von D. Johann Fausten), published in 1587 and heavily influenced by Martin Luther's writings, at least two other German collections of tales existed in manuscript alongside oral counterparts.²¹ The German Faustbook was translated into English sometime during or before 1592, and Marlowe brought its material to the stage shortly and spectacularly thereafter.²² The subject was sure to sell seats in the theater (and perhaps to vacate a few, as the actor playing Faustus, on one by now well-known occasion, allegedly conjured up a real devil and sent audiences running).²³ On the stage too during the period was an unusually large number of magician plays—such as Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Jonson's The Alchemist—which, though their magicians were not as black, nonetheless problematized the magician's place and power²⁴

Ironically—and, I would argue, not coincidentally—while the Renaissance magician was such a prominent subject, he was also one of the least well-defined (along with the sodomite, to whom I will return). Not only was magic separated into black and white; it was also divided into learned and unlearned practice.²⁵ On the one hand, figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Cornelius Agrippa were promoting occult philosophy that, in adding knowledge of divine mysteries to natural philosophy, could lead the mind intimately close to God's.²⁶ On the other hand, in less learned circles, the village "cunning men" and "wise women" were curing everything from headaches and toothaches, to dog or scorpion bites, to "the falling evill," to demonic possession, and were detecting treasures, thieves, witches, stolen goods, and good matches.²⁷

These distinctions, however, were not as absolute as they might seem. While Agrippa embraced magic as a means to spiritual enlightenment in his influential De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (1533), he also saw it in more earthly terms as giving access to power, profit, love, revenge, and advantage in disputes.²⁸ And what made the social space of these practices even less distinct was that it bordered on that of other traditionally legitimate fields of knowledge, such as religion, humanism, medicine, science, and law.²⁹

Yet despite, if not because of, the slippery liminality and legitimacy of "white" and popular practices, magic was given its clearest and most prominent form as it was demonized and criminalized, especially during the mid-sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, the period of the witch craze. Black magicians and witches, distinguished inconsistently (if at all) from each other, were repeatedly invoked as the dark side of safe practices, which therefore seemed destined to go astray. Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers and James's Daemonologie allowed occult philosophers no other fate than joining pridefully in league with the devil and accused both Pico della Mirandola and Agrippa of witchcraft. Others also condemned Agrippa as "the blackest of black magicians," and one of his followers, John Dee, once in high favor at Elizabeth's court, was ultimately forced to defend himself against charges of being a conjurer.³⁰ The cunning men and wise women faced less prominent fates, but their activities were outlawed nonetheless as felonies.³¹ Yet while these incriminations treated magic as if it were a matter of black and white, they simultaneously reinforced the slipperiness of its legitimacy, making clear that at any moment natural magic could become unnatural, divine pursuits become demonism, and white become black.

The witch craze and the demonization of magic more generally no doubt served a number of political, social, and psychological purposes, as Keith Thomas, among others, has argued.³² Wherever there was uncertainty, the black magician and his alleged ally, the devil, offered certainty; wherever uncontrolled desire, an impetus for repression; wherever dissent, a sure excuse for suppression. Their malign presence could explain away otherwise ordinary but perplexing problems: "greefe, sicknesse, losse of children, com, cattell or libertie," unexpected success, unmotivated crime, and even erotic fantasies and wet dreams.³³

Yet importantly, the demonization of magic allowed both church and state an important image of their control over the self, over the interior dimensions of mind and soul. Because the practice of magic was so inclusive, extending from the unlearned to the learned and touching the most mundane as well as the most ethereal aspects of existence, the figure of the magician was a sort of "everyman," invested in some way in knowledge or self-knowledge. To send him or her to hell for a career of vaguely defined "transgressions" was to mystify the boundaries of the law, to criminalize knowing and self-knowing, and to monopolize the right and ability to distinguish self from other, the saved from the damned. It was also to universalize transgression, to put all in danger of unwittingly selling their souls to the devil and all in need of regulating structures that would in some way save them—providing, of course, they could be saved, which in the case of Calvinism, with its doctrine of election, was not always possible.³⁴ Still for Calvinists, too, the demonization of the magician was an especially potent reminder that the fate of self and soul was in the hands of a higher authority, whose decision one could decipher (as much as one could) only by following church doctrine. In any case, the example of the magician put the self in a dangerous place of unknowing beneath the authority of an omniscient church or state.

The legend of Faust, a particular favorite of Protestant reformers, brought the lesson emphatically down to earth, perhaps more than any other example. Historically, the picture of the "real" Faust is sketchy at best. Although he seems to have been making a name for himself in Germany during the first half of the sixteenth century, that name itself, ironically, was obscured. The original Faust, Georgius of Helmstadt (or Jorio or Jeorius and the like), a "doctor" of some sort and, for a short term, a schoolmaster, became confused with Johannes, an astrologer.³⁵ Georgius was known above all as a showman, at once embraced and alienated within learned circles. Although patronized by the Catholic middle classes, he was ostracized by civic authorities and was banned from Ingolstadt in 1528 and Nuremberg in 1532.

Precisely what he showed is unclear, but whatever it was, it earned him the reputation of being "a vagabond, an empty babbler and a knave: worthy to be whipped," "a shit-house full of devils," and "the Devil's brother-in-law" (a title he allegedly claimed for himself).³⁶ He was also, almost inevitably, accused of sodomizing his schoolboys—a charge that is not surprising, given the ease with which sodomy was applied across the board to all sorts of "others."³⁷ Though the historical material suggests that he was at worst (if not also at best) a bombastic fraud, after his death he was turned into a notorious black magician doomed to an afterlife in hell. The Protestant reformer Johannes Gast (under the influence of Luther) initiated the transformation in 1548 and reported that Faust had sold his soul to the devil and had been fetched, supplying his broken neck, "the classic retribution for those who sell their souls" thus, as the ocular proof.³⁸ And it was this demonic side of the story that prevailed.

While the legend emphatically inscribes the end of Faustus's life and practices as extraordinarily transgressive, it also presents his earlier exploits as notably ordinary. The author of the English Faustbook, an unidentifiable P. F., Gent., describes him as "a worldly man" who "named himselfe an Astrologian, and a Mathematician, and for a shadow sometimes a Phisitian, and did great cures; namely, with hearbs, rootes, waters, drinks, receipts, and clisters."³⁹ Armed with magic, the English Faustbook's Faustus becomes a sort of Epicurean cunning man and spends his time traveling about the universe, visiting the Great Cham (who allegedly gave Barabas a hat), a Turkish Emperor, and a harem of Turkish concubines, and writing home about it; feasting with students, consorting with "Doctors and Masters" (p. 89), and producing such "strange sights" as fruit in winter (p. 111); cozening a Jew out of money, making a match between lovers, and marrying—and having a son by—Helen of Troy!

In other accounts, he appears as a "brilliant heretic among stuffy academicians," who delved into "forbidden knowledge" but whose crimes were similarly innocuous, the worst consisting of frightful conjurations—of the Cyclops "with Greeks dangling from his teeth," for example—which (like Marlowe's play) terrorized audiences, and the best, of stealing food and drink from the King, of England to serve to his own guests.⁴⁰ Despite the triviality of his deeds, he was nonetheless assumed to be a black magician, infernally in league with the devil. Though P. F. praises "the excellency of his wisdome" in divinity, he centers on Faustus's "very ungodly life" (p. 2), emphasizing how "the wicked wretch," "inflamed" by his power over Mephostophiles and fully "resolved in himselfe" "to doe whatsoever the Spirit and his Lord [Lucifer] should condition upon" (p. 7), "forgot the Lord his maker, and Christ his redeemer, [and] became an enemy unto all man-kinde" (p. 10).

The legend served, of course, as evidence of the reality of the devil, providing Protestantism and its daily scrutiny of self and soul a useful impetus and "ally."⁴¹ The publisher of the German Faustbook, Johann Spies, introduces the tale as "a fearful example of the Devil's deception and of his murder of body and soul, so that it might be a warning to all Christians."⁴² The story also usefully implicated Catholicism (as does Marlowe), displaying the fate of one who "went to Hell for the same reasons that all good Catholics were going there: … for the vain presumption that he might try to deserve redemption."⁴³ Yet that "vain presumption" was not isolated in Catholics nor the message directed primarily toward them. For it was the Protestant populace that was to see the disastrous fruits of "forbidden knowledge," to witness the violent demonization of one who started off pursuing a fairly "normal" career.

P. F., Gent., who seems heavily invested in the Protestant cause, offers the story as a lesson for "the stiffe-necked and high minded," cautioning them "to feare God, and to be careful of their vocation, and to be at defiance with all divelish workes." It is unclear here who qualify as the "stiffe-necked and high minded" and what constitutes "divelish workes." Yet instead of obscuring the message, this lack of clarity amplifies it by bringing us all into the picture, cautioning all to "take God alwaies before our eies, to call alone upon him, and to honour him all the dayes of our life, with heart and hearty prayer" (pp. 128-29). If we do not, we too risk falling to a "frightful end" and finally was and fatally becoming (or proving ourselves already) "they."

Noticeably on the Renaissance stage, where hegemonic forms of power were more likely to be questioned than affirmed, magicians (at least the ones we know of) faced less serious consequences, even when devils were involved. Friar Bacon, Faustus's ancestor or heir, admits to having "dived into hell / and sought the darkest palaces of fiends," but his prize possession and preoccupation is an outrageous "brazen head," allegedly able to "unfold strange doubts and aphorisms / And read a lecture in philosophy" (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 2.25-28).⁴⁴ When he sleeps through the head's great moment of revelation, he vows that he will break his crystal and repent, which he does. It is not he but his attendant Miles (a descendant of the Vice) who rides to hell on the devil's back, but even his fate is produced as comic. Meanwhile, Friar Bacon survives to become a prophet for England's glorious future, and as his necromancy gives way to national politics, his magical arts are redeemed as part—an innocuous part—of the status quo. This ending is a far cry from the final image of the English Faustbook's Faustus, whose soul is sent to hell and, as if that is not enough, whose brains are left clinging to his chamber wall, his teeth scattered into its several corners, and the rest of his body ripped apart and thrown outside on a pile of horse dung.

The magicians who follow are increasingly identified with power plays that set them in the mainstream of social and political negotiations and neutralize the otherness of their magic. Colonialist readings of The Tempest treat Prospero as the consummate colonizer, working his way back into a position of authority by imposing a legitimating narrative of his mastery upon a "brave, new" island "world" and upon those who come or live there.⁴⁵ Though these interpretations bring out an important and, in earlier criticism, generally suppressed political edge vital to Prospero's and Shakespeare's dramas, they are limited by a singularity of focus like that marking earlier studies. Whereas before we were given a magician—and usually a good, white magician—and not a colonizer, now we are given a colonizer rather than a magician.

Yet Prospero is clearly both; his magic is integrated into, and not subsumed beneath, his political purposes. Part of what is at stake here, in addition to colonialism, is the magician's social place. Colonialist critiques take issue with Caliban's identity as a "thing of darkness" (The Tempest 5.1.275); yet Prospero's pursuit of "secret studies" (1.2.76-77) marks him also as an other, forcing him into a literal position of alienation. While the play does not finally redeem him, it does normalize his magic. Magic becomes a not-so-extraordinary means to political power, allowing Prospero to reclaim a place, however good or bad, within the society of Milan. At the end of the play, Alonso declares "this business" "as strange a maze as e'er men trod" (5.1.242-43), but Prospero assures him and us in his monolithic way:

                 I'll resolve you
(Which to you shall seem probable) of every
These happen'd accidents.
(5.1.248-50)

As we wait for his next self-authorizing narrative, we are not to "infest" our minds "with beating on / The strangeness of this business" (5.1.246-47), and as the wheel comes full circle, initiating a new chain of events and narratives in Milan, the strange business of magic seems little different from the strange business of state. When Jonson picks magic up in The Alchemist, it becomes just one of many "natural follies" (Prologue 23) fit for gulls and gulling, one more means of fraud within a community of metaphoric "fiend[s]" (5.4.138) all out for worldly, not otherworldly, gains.

The normalization of magic on the stage stands in striking contrast to the demonization advanced so prominently by Protestant propagandists. Though the magicians produced onstage are incriminated for foolishness, colonialism, and fraud, they are not damned or even, finally, arrested. Their practices stand as a part of, and not apart from, the sometimes unsavory routines of social and political negotiation. Yet while the plays do not participate in the kind of demonization effected by church and state, neither do they directly address or subvert it. For in taking the magician out of the hands of the devil, they take him or her also out of the context of religion and contest of soul—out of the cultural register, that is, in which magic was so visibly and coercively inscribed. The exploitation that these plays display is one assigned for the most part to the magician, who, instead of being dominated, coerced, or deceived, uses knowledge and art to dominate, coerce, or deceive. And what results is another kind of appropriation—this time without the demons—one that incriminates magic as a conforming rather than transgressive part of society's standard operating procedures.

Yet there were two prominent texts circulating in the early modern period that did directly address and subvert the demonization of magic: the one, Reginald Scot's remarkable The discoverie of witchcraft (published in 1584) and the other, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (to which I will return). Like no other author of the era, Scot protested against "Bodins bables" and exposed the witch craze for what it was: a manipulation of the powerless by the powerful.⁴⁶ In The discoverie, he makes a significant distinction between "naturall magicke" and what was being designated as witchcraft and, aligning himself with Agrippa at several points, describes the former as a divine art "wherein a man may learn the properties, qualities, and knowledge of all nature" and "set forth the glorie of God, and be many waies beneficiall to the commonwealth" (p. 290). At the same time, he presents its sinister counterpart not as a malignant extension or inevitable abuse of these pursuits, but as a product of "nothing else but knaverie, cousenage, and old wives fables."⁴⁷

Setting himself up as an advocate for the poor (among whom he counts himself) and enlisting the aid of Sir Roger Manwood, their "verie father," Scot accuses witchmongers, whose "names give more credit to this cause than their writings," of "pursu[ing] the poore, … accus[ing] the simple, and … kill[ing] the innocent; supplieng in rigor and malice towards others, that which they themselves want in proofe and discretion, or the other in offense or occasion."⁴⁸ The most vulnerable and common targets of this malice are those "least sufficient of all other persons to speake for themselves,"⁴⁹ particularly "women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles: [the] poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as knowe no religion" (p. 7), or those who have "leprosie, apoplexie, or anie other strange disease" (p. 23). Scot declares their alleged offenses (giving themselves or their children to the devil, boiling infants, and being cannibals, for example) "untrue, incredible, and impossible" (p. 32). "If more ridiculous or abhominable crimes could have beene invented," he adds, "these poore women (whose cheefe fault is that they are scolds) should have beene charged with them" (p. 34). At one point his frustration with these fictions erupts and he "exclaims" in unusually large type: "Good Lord! how light of credit is the wavering mind of man! How unto tales and lies his eares attentive all they can?" (p. 96).

The text is clearly not without its biases; the skepticism with which it treats the demonization of the underclasses does not extend completely across gender, national, or racial bounds. For though Scot insists that witches are not "real," he implies that "scolds"—some of the stuff on which witches are made—are. And while he doubts that any "honest man in England [or] in France" has seen a witch eat another human being, he acknowledges that "Anthropophagie and Canibals" (p. 33) do exist elsewhere. Later, he admits being suspicious of rumors (reported by "manie great and grave authors") that "certeine families in Aphrica" "bewitch whatsoever they praise" and so cause it to wither, decay, and die. Still, he discredits absolutely only the "superstitious fooles" who assign this "mysterie" to witches "here in Europa" (p. 484). And while he doubts that witches sacrifice their children, he is sure that Jews do.⁵⁰

Despite these biases, however, his "discovery" offers a strong voice against the exploitation of vulnerable factions of the populace—the poor, the aged, the ill, the ugly, or the religiously or socially incorrect. In his text it is the witchmonger and not the witch who challenges the authority of God, blaming divine acts on witches (whom, he reminds us, Christ, Moses, and Job never mentioned) and audaciously presuming to be omniscient judges.⁵¹ Scot himself seems to have been in sympathy with Protestant, if not Calvinist, reform. Yet the witchmongers he attacks, though not identified explicitly as Protestant, are condemned for tactics deployed vigorously by Protestantism. He mentions, for example, that they conjure up witches when they are confronted by "any adversitie" or "the hand and correction of God" (p. 1). He notices, too, that since "the springing up of Luthers sect, … priests have tended more diligentlie upon the execution of them; bicause more wealth"—for some unexplained reason—"is to be caught from them" (p. 16). Because he is more preoccupied with how this process happens than with why, his incriminations do not go as far as they might. Still, The discoverie at once separates magic and religion and shows how they were being brought coercively together in the service of church and state. Despite its radicality, the text incited only limited and fairly neutral contemporary comment; yet tellingly, King James not only banned it but also directed his own Daemonologie specifically against the German Johann Weyer, who "defended" witches by declaring them deluded and melancholic, and against "one called Scot an Englishman."⁵²

Doctor Faustus or Mr. Hyde

It was not until Francis Bacon began reforming traditional conceptions of what qualified as legitimate knowledge that the place ascribed to magic came seriously and directly under fire. On the stage, however, Marlowe brought religion and magic together even more pointedly than did Scot and opened up the subject's relevance to a greater portion of the populace, insisting that the damned are not born but made. Ironically, the transformation of Faust resembles the demonization of Marlowe himself, who, with the help of his "monstrous opinions" and unorthodox dramatic art, was metamorphosed into a notorious atheist … His Christian contemporaries pressed the elusive "facts" of his life into a singular and singularly reprehensible trajectory, assigning it a clear-cut meaning and universal relevance and using it to warn "all Atheists" "in all the world" "to forsake their horrible impiety."⁵³ It is precisely that kind of strategic shaping, and how it was played out upon the magician and extended to implicate all, that his play undertakes and undermines.

In an important treatment of the play, Jonathan Dollimore has argued that Faustus is finally bound by the "limiting structures" of Protestantism, which elevated the self by placing him/her newly within an unmediated relation to God while at the same time subjugating him/her by still demanding total submission to that God.⁵⁴ This framework, especially in its most radical, Calvinist form, "holds the individual subject terrifyingly responsible for the fallen human condition while disallowing him or her any subjective power of redemption." What this dilemma produces, Dollimore contends, is despair and defiance, and with them a "mode of transgression identifiably protestant in origin."⁵⁵ It is this mode, according to the argument, that Faustus embraces, defying the limitations that constitute him and provoke his revolt.

I would argue, however, that while the play certainly critiques Protestantism's catch-22, it does so not by exposing how Protestant ideology engenders trangression within the individual subject but, more subversively, by showing how it imposes a transgressive identity on that subject from without. For even though Faustus indulges in "unlawful things" (Epilogue 6), the play does not define him as a willful and defiant trangressor. Rather, it presents him as the subject of Lucifer's manipulations, unwittingly coerced into a transgressive position to provide the necessary ocular proof of the devil's (and with it, ironically, Protestantism's) power.

Lucifer is an imperialist, wanting Faustus's "soul" in order to "enlarge his kingdom" (2.1.39-40). Importantly, although Faustus is the subject of choice for this self-authorizing "enlargement," he is not the only subject available. There is also the ostler Robin, for example, who steals one of Faustus's books and who, in attempting to conjure up naked maidens, free wine, and other such "spirits," necessarily conjures up spirits of the other sort. The often-noted parallels between Faustus's activities and those of the tavern folk show us, however, not only that the difference between their learned and unlearned pursuits is not in itself great, but also that the difference between their value as learned and unlearned subjects is. The tavern figures exist on the margins of their society, where their licentiousness is licensed and its threat neutralized, where their names blur into a category of class and distinguish status more than selves. Faustus, in contrast, is embedded and renowned in mainstream culture, a figure of learning, "grac'd with doctor's name" (Prologue 17), "that was wont to make [the] schools ring with sic probo" (1.2.1-2), who is watched and followed by a fan club of scholars, and who could sign his name in blood if only his blood would cooperate—a figure, that is, of sound and significant mind and soul whose radical transformation would mean. To provoke and contain his transgression would be to create an unforgettable spectacle of power. And that is precisely what Lucifer does.

In Marlowe's play as in other inscriptions of the Faust legend, the representation of Faustus (like that of Tamburlaine) is significantly conflicted, producing a disruptive gap between his fairly innocuous existence as a sort of carnivalesque showman and his increasingly ominous career as a conjurer. On the one hand, he produces grapes out of season for the Duchess of Vanholt, conjures up "such spirits as can lively resemble Alexander and his paramour" (4.1.50-51) and tricks and plagues a pope, a knight, a horse-courser, and various other commoners. On the other, he embraces Mephastophilis, makes a pact with the devil, and signs with his own blood. Though in the source material the latter seems to evolve almost causally from the former, Marlowe's constant vacillation between Faustus's public antics and his soul-searching interactions with the devils amplifies the difference between them. In the process, it diminishes our sense of Faustus's sense of purpose, making his actions seem not only trivial but also arbitrary, as if he is following rather than leading the way to "settle" his studies and his soul.

Even if we set these discrepancies aside and look only at the darker necromantic side of Faustus's life, which in the sources is inscribed as willfully and knowingly transgressive, we find that it too is conflicted on Marlowe's stage. The prologue, while ostensibly leaving it up to us to decide whether the "form of Faustus' fortunes" is "good or bad," nonetheless explains his fall as that of an occult philosopher turned black magician who, "swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit," "did mount above his reach" (Prologue 20-21). It suggests also that the "heavens conspir'd his overthrow" (Prologue 23), evoking the Protestant dilemma that Dollimore places at the center of the text.⁵⁶ Yet, like Machevill's opening speech in The Jew of Malta, its terms do not adequately define the figure or the fortunes we are about to see. Barabas may follow to some degree in Machevill's footsteps, but neither he nor his drama is defined exclusively or primarily in the terms of Machiavellianism that Machevill, hoping to reclaim his dominance, leads us to expect.

Though not a personality per se, the Chorus in Faustus seems to have its own agenda too and, like the Good and Bad Angels, the scholars, and the Old Man, to be determined to impose a moral on the tale. Yet just as Marlowe flaunts and denies the morality tradition, turning its voices into a sort of background noise that is often not heard and when heard, of negligible impact, so also does he undermine the Chorus, proving its terms inadequate to the task.⁵⁷ For despite its omniscience, the Chorus's terms are notably abstract and (like the Norton headnote) transform the wavering circumstances of Faustus's resolve and the questionable circumspection of his "cunning" into a neat and clearly sighted Icarian pattern of rise and fall.

The choric prefaces to Acts 3 and 4 are less problematic because they record rather than interpret the events that occur between the acts. Yet when the Chorus returns to speak the epilogue, it frames the tale with the kind of reductive aphorisms that Faustus has long been criticized for relying on and underscores, by amplifying, the "sins" of the prologue. For the Chorus, the moral is simple: we are to "regard" the "hellish fall" of a "learned man," a "branch that might have grown full straight" and, if we count ourselves among "the wise," "only to wonder at unlawful things" (Epilogue 1-6). Once again, Faustus's tale is obscured by abstraction, and the Chorus leaves its substance vague, giving only a beginning and an end and omitting all the complicating factors in between which preoccupy the play. Here indeed, "Faustus is gone" (Epilogue 4)—the play as well as the figure.

Within the frame, as if in defiance of such moral packaging, Marlowe presents an alternative text and an alternative vision of Faustus as an impatient if not sometimes careless scholar, taking a course of action whose consequences he does not fully see. When he appears to settle his studies, he fixates on precisely the kind of "finite, static irreducibles" he pretends to abjure, missing the real point of these disciplines as of intellectual pursuits more generally and looking for a kind of immediate use-value such studies generally resist.⁵⁸

Critics continue to load his turn from divinity to necromancy with transgression, but it is Faustus and not Marlowe who presents it as a radical departure. For although Faustus embraces magic, passionately, as a ravishing art more powerful and less limiting than others, he has clearly been searching for a "miracle" (1.1.9) all along, hoping to "make men to live eternally" (1.1.24) or raise them from the dead, to "be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure" (1.1.1.5) and so on. His choice is part of a series of choices for and against studies—law, medicine, logic, divinity—which are legitimate and legal. The roulette wheel could have stopped at almost any point, and Faustus seems to stop it here, almost arbitrarily, because after he surveys "the end of every art" (1.1.4) there seems to be nothing else left.

It is clear very quickly, of course—as Faustus turns to "necromantic books" and then summons Valdes and Cornelius, who are "infamous through the world" for "that damned art" (1.2.30-31), to teach him "concealed arts" (1.1.103)—that Faustus has undertaken black and not white magic. What is not clear, however, is that he understands the implications of his choice. In the first place, he does not present his turn to magic as a turn against divinity per se. Divinity is the last study he casts aside but not the only one, and its position seems more coincidental than consequential. In fact, as he begins his necromantic pursuits, he brings divinity into them, suggestively (even if accidentally) ignoring their incompatibility. His initial conjuring circle is filled with "Jehovah's name, / Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd" in otherwise safe cabalistic fashion, as with

The breviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and erring stars
By which the spirits are enforc'd to rise."⁵⁹
(1.3.8-14)

In addition, he makes Mephastophilis dress as "an old Franciscan friar" (1.3.25) and declares his own words "heavenly" (1.3.27). His only direct rejection of "the threefold divinity of Jehovah" (1.3.16-17) comes in Latin, in a prefabricated conjuring ritual presumably not of his own making, and one that the illiterate portion of the audience would not have understood. Until Mephastophilis explains that he always comes "when we hear one rack the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ" (1.3.47-48), Faustus does not make the connection.

It is not until Act 2, after Mephastophilis has introduced the idea of damnation, that Faustus begins to think in terms of his soul. In the English Faustbook, before finalizing his pact with Lucifer, Faustus ponders "how he might obtaine his request of the divel without losse of his soule" (p. 7) and then conveniently forgets "Divinitie or the immortalitie of his soule" (p. 15) when he finds no way to avoid that loss. Marlowe's Faustus, in contrast, initially discounts the matter of soul. In rejecting divinity he admits and regrets that we "must die, an everlasting death" (1.1.47), but he never specifies quite what that "everlasting death" is. Although he knows he is dealing with devils, at first he is too "glutted with conceit" (1.1.79) of his worldly powers to consider otherworldly consequences. He treats the soul nonchalantly as a "vain trifle" and "damnation" as a word which "terrifies not him," and gives his "ghost" to "the old philosophers" (1.3.60-63) who do not believe in eternal punishment or reward. And he continues to believe that "hell's a fable" even after Mephastophilis offers himself as "an instance to prove the contrary" (2.1.137). Ironically, Faustus even uses hell as a positive image, rather than the ultimate negative reality, to represent his glowing past, boasting that he

     made the flowering pride of Wittenberg
Swarm to my problems as the infernal spirits
On sweet Musacus when he came to hell,
(1.1.115-18)

treating the infernal afterworld as a place of fame. And when he sets up Agrippa as his role model, he thinks only of the honor, and not the potential hazards, Agrippa's conjured "shadows" (1.1.1.19) brought.

Significantly, too, Faustus discounts not only hell but also heaven. He scoffs, for example, when Mephastophilis becomes "so passionate / For being deprived of the joys of heaven" (1.3.83-84). Rejecting the idea that "after this life there is any pain" (2.1.135), he ignores the possibility that there is any immortal pleasure either. By the end of the play, however, Faustus does believe that his soul is at stake in his bargain with the devil and calls desperately to God, acknowledges that Christ's blood "hath ransom'd me" (5.2.92), curses Lucifer, and vows to burn his books. Ironically, it is Mephastophilis, his infernal tutor, who has taught him to believe, to understand and desire "heavenly joys" and, in believing himself deprived of them, to understand and resist damnation—Mephastophilis, that is, who leads Faustus to heaven in order to send him to hell.

From the outset the infernal spirit is clearly in charge of the show. His predecessor in the English Faustbook initially refuses to reappear at the time Faustus appoints, but Marlowe's devil behaves like a "pliant" (1.3.29) spirit, ready to change costumes at Faustus's command and to come and go as he orders. Yet while Faustus takes credit for his "obedience and humility" (1.3.30), Mephastophilis emphasizes that he has come of his "own accord," ostensibly to persuade Faustus to sign away his soul. Almost immediately, Faustus is already pledging allegiance to the principle that "there is no chief but only Belzebub, / To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself (1.3.57-58), and while part of their agreement is that Mephastophilis remain at his beck and call, the fact that the spirit engages him in a sustained and instructive discourse suggests a darker purpose, more devious and more subtle: to teach Faustus to read the consequences of his choice as damnation and to resist. For it is only when Faustus believes in salvation and fears its loss that he will rebel against Lucifer, and it is only when he rebels against Lucifer (not God) that he provides a fitting subject for a display of the devil's power to contain and destroy.

Notably, instead of covering up the torments of hell (as we might expect from one trying to sell damnation), Mephastophilis continually brings them into view. Granted, he periodically conjures up spirits "to delight [Faustus's] mind" (2.1.82), to enforce the reality of hell in non-threatening if not desirable terms, making devils dance before him and bring him "crowns and rich apparel" (stage direction) or displaying a comic array of easily subjugated Deadly Sins. Yet he also produces a darker, more immediate, and more sustained vision of damnation, presenting hell as a state of absolute and limitless negation. Though Faustus thinks of hell as a remote if not fictional place, Mephastophilis insists, in a well-known passage, that

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be;
And to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purify'd,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
(2.1.122-27)

Hell is a place of limitless limitation, for "ever" boundlessly bounded by the knowledge of what it is not. Lest Faustus take refuge in the pleasure of the world, as he does throughout, Mephastophilis makes clear that the world itself will dissolve, leaving only two undeniable options, heaven and hell.

In the process, in another move that would seem to undermine the devil's purposes, Mephastophilis presents heaven as the ultimate object of desire. Earlier, in an equally famous passage, and in response to Faustus's skepticism about the reality of hell (and how the devil can be out of it if he is damned), he retorts:

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that I 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?
(1.3.76-80)

Heaven becomes the place of "everlasting bliss," equal in "joys" to the horror of "ten thousand hells," where what Faustus most enjoys, worldly sensation (seeing and tasting), has a place. In posing the description as a rhetorical question, Mephastophilis prompts Faustus to participate in the answer (a resounding "no"), to "think" about the kind of deprivation that "is hell." He then warns Faustus to "leave these frivolous demands, / Which strike a terror to my fainting soul" (1.3.81-82; emphasis added), and though he means Faustus's endless questions, the warning resonates more broadly, encouraging Faustus to fear his more dangerous pursuits which might indeed "strike a terror" to a "fainting soul."

Lucifer also participates in the process, offering similar kinds of subliminal suggestions of heavenly joys. Hearing Faustus call on Christ, the devil appears to voice a heretofore unstated part of the bargain: that Faustus not talk of Christ or God (though ironically it was his talk of Christ, we are told, that elicited infernal attention in the first place). Significantly, this warning parallels Faustus's own warning to the horse-courser, to whom he sells a horse: "ride him [the horse] not into the water at any hand" (4.2.21). Both stand as conditions that beg to be broken, limits that beg to be crossed, and both produce the transgression they seek. The horse-courser, sure that his new horse had "some rare quality" that Faustus, in prohibiting water rides, "would not have had [him] know" (4.2.44), inevitably rides into the water, only to find his horse devolving into hay. Faustus, being told that he "should'st not think of God" (2.3.93), thinks automatically of God and vows "never to look to heaven, / Never to name God" (2.3.96-97) while doing both. Though the fate of the horse-courser teaches him nothing, it tells us a lot. We are ready to see Faustus fall, not from grace but into it, and into the devils' hands.

Helen and Hell

After his and Mephastophilis's first disputation on hell, Faustus begins to consider the possibility of damnation, sporadically but with increasing perturbation. At the beginning of Act 2, he dismisses thoughts of God as futile, ignores or does not hear the Good Angel's plea to "think of heaven and heavenly things" (2.1.20), and casually takes damnation as a given without further thought of what that means. After the second conversation, he is ready to "repent and curse" the "wicked Mephastophilis" for depriving him of heaven's "joys" (2.3.1-3). Mephastophilis urges him along by giving heaven a worldly shape, insisting that it was "made for man" while ostensibly arguing that man is "more excellent" (2.3.8-9). Yet although Faustus momentarily decides it was then "made for me" (2.3.10), he automatically breaks into debate on "divine astrology" (2.3.34) and speaks of the heavens as a physical and not metaphysical space. The next time he repents, he does so in a sort of childish anger, because Mephastophilis refuses to tell him who made the world, and his resistance there, as before and thereafter, is as short-lived as it is shortsighted.⁶⁰

It is with the vision of Helen, however, that his course takes a definitive turn, that his vacillation ceases and his calls to heaven become more sustained and sincere, that he becomes the other the devils have contracted. Critics have often singled out this moment as the point of no return, at which his damnation is finally sealed—either because he makes physical contact with a succubus, or because he gives in, or feels guilty for giving in, to sexual desire, or because he transgresses in some other definitive way.⁶¹ Yet such interpretations implicate Helen as a taboo in a way that Marlowe does not, presenting the union as an unforgivable violation of established religious, social, or psychological laws. As the variations between these readings (and between them and others that do not treat this as a pivotal event) suggest, Renaissance rules of demonology and behavior were anything but clear. (Even if they were, they would be sure to meet some turbulence on Marlowe's stage.)

Rather than transgression, what this moment signals is a change of heart and mind, a recognition and not a defiance of "heavenly joys," a desire for and not against heavenly immortality. For in seeing Helen, Faustus also sees the possibility of "eternal bliss" written out in (worldly not otherworldly) terms that he can comprehend. And what comes with that knowledge and the desire it generates is an experience of deprivation that at once puts Faustus in the kind of hell Mephastophilis describes and, by inspiring resistance, gives the devil a defiant and unwilling subject to control and contain.

Marlowe situates the episode as part of a frame that marks the beginning and end of Faustus's contracted career and of Mephastophilis's strategic efforts to "delight his mind." Immediately after signing away his soul, Faustus sets the terms of his desire by declaring himself "wanton and lascivious" and in need of a wife, preferably "the fairest maid in Germany" (2.1.141-42). The play underscores his focus in the tavern sequence, in which Robin anticipates using the powers in Faustus's magic book to make "all the maidens in [his] parish dance … stark naked before [him]" (2.2.3-4), and to make Nan Spit, the kitchen maid, give in to Rafe's sexual desires. Though Mephastophilis first scoffs and produces only "a devil dressed like a woman, with fireworks" (stage direction), whom Faustus rejects as "a hot whore," he then immediately encourages those desires by offering to bring "the fairest courtesans" "every morning to [Faustus's] bed" (2.1.153-53). "Shle whom thine eye shall like," he promises,

          thy heart shall have,
Be she as chaste as was Penelope,
As wise as Saba, or as beautiful
As was bright Lucifer before his fall.
(2.1.155-58)

Significantly, he not only compares the courtesans with women like Helen, prominently idealized in myth, with the long-suffering but ever-faithful Penelope and with "Saba," the wise Queen of Sheba.⁶² He also allies Lucifer with these figures, betraying the catalog's ominous elision of fallen and unfallen states, of the purest of women and the hottest of whores, suggesting that there is dangerously more to his enticements than meets the eye.

This exchange sets us up for, and renders us suspect of, the conjuration of Helen that completes the frame four acts later, and that emerges as the last of Mephastophilis's attempts to delight and deceive Faustus. Importantly, despite the devil's promises, we neither see nor hear further of the courtesans. To the contrary, Mephastophilis puts Faustus's erotic desires on hold, immediately diverting his attention from carnal to "scientific" knowledge and giving him books on almost everything else in the physical universe, from plants to planets. In the German and English Faustbooks, there is no such occlusion; part of Faustus's infernal tour around the universe lands him in a harem at the court of a Turkish sultan, where he can and does indulge his sexual longings.⁶³ In excluding the harem episode, the play confines the issue of desire within the frame, allowing Mephastophilis a pivotal site of and for resistance, a carrot to dangle before the conjurer's eyes at precisely the right moment to effect his fall.

That moment comes with the conjuration of Helen. No longer using Faustus's will to knowledge to distract him from desire, Mephastophilis now brings the two together, using eroticism to incite a new kind of knowing—of unreachable pleasures beyond though embedded in worldly experience. In this case as before, Faustus initiates the event, this time by requesting that Mephastophilis "glut the longing of [his] heart's desire" and let him "have unto my paramour / that heavenly Helen" (5.1.83-85). Accordingly, Mephastophilis, with the ostensible compliance he has shown throughout, "performs" the conjuration with the ominous "twinkling of an eye" (5.1.90).

In looking upon Helen, upon "the face that launch'd a thousand ships," Faustus is able to see a "heaven in her lips" and, for the first time, wants to be made "immortal with a kiss." "Her lips suck forth my soul," he tells us,

            see where it flies!
Come Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will J dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
(5.1.91-97)

What she offers that the abstractions of divinity do not is transcendence translated into physical terms that answer "the longing of [Faustus's] heart's desire." In kissing her, giving her his "soul" and taking it back again, he has a sort of out-of-body experience, paradoxically grounded in the body and producing a highly desirable experience that he can see, touch, and taste. Now and only now does he recognize and hope to transcend the temporal and spatial limits of earthly existence, to "dwell" eternally in a world, and body, beyond his own.⁶⁴

In the sources this scene becomes yet another of his worldly exploits; he and Helen get married and have a son, as mentioned earlier. When Faustus dies, these figures simply dissolve, and their significance fades likewise into the text's margins. In the play, however, it becomes a critical moment of knowing that he and Marlowe translate into Christian terms. In the next scene Faustus turns his desires from the heavenly Helen to a Christian heaven and for the first time tries desperately to "leap up" to God (5.2.70), whom he sees (or thinks he sees) "stretch[ing] out his arm" and "bend[ing] his ireful brows" (5.2.76-77). For the first time too, he sees, or thinks he sees, "Christ's blood stream[ing] in the firmament" and asserts that "one drop," or even "half a drop," "would save my soul" (5.2.71-72). Even if he must serve a thousand or a hundred thousand years in hell, he thinks he should be saved, since Christ's "blood hath ransom'd [him]" (5.2.92).⁶⁵ The point is not that Faustus now realizes the truth of heaven, but that he constructs a truth, a heaven, from the vision of Helen based on his desires—a seeable and touchable heaven whose physicality offers a comforting physical eternity for the soul.

Significantly, Marlowe prefaces the event with another conjuration of Helen, this time comic, that calls attention to the "shaping fantasies" at work here and at issue throughout the play. Shortly before calling for Helen himself, Faustus presents her to a group of adoring scholars who have held a "conference about fair ladies" and have decided that Helen "was the beautiful'st in all the world" and "the admirablest lady that ever lived" (5.1.9-12). As he brings her forth, what stands out is not her heavenly beauty or majesty which the scholars so long to see, but the ineptitude of their language, as they, with excessive superlatives ("admirablest," "beautiful'st"), transform a potentially erotic moment into comedy. When Helen passes across the stage, the Second Scholar admits, "Too simple is my wit to tell her worth / Whom all the world admires for majesty" (5.1.25-26), and we are inclined to agree, especially since his final phrase ("whom all the world admires for majesty") repeats exactly what the First Scholar has said only a few moments before. For them the vision shows "the pride of nature's works" (5.1.30), for us, their inability to see or appreciate even that. But when Faustus replays the spectacle, he invests it with a meaning beyond what they and we have seen.

Yet his own production of meaning is itself produced, framed by and within Mephastophilis's coercive manipulations, and is poised on the brink of Faustus's fall into a self-abnegating self-awareness. The image of Helen points back to Mephastophilis's catalog of courtesans, for like them, she is caught between the ideal and the corrupt, in some texts worshiped as a paragon of beauty and in others demonized as a whore, an object to desire and a subject to fear.⁶⁶ In Marlowe's play the image is comparably double-edged. For to know Helen is to know not only alluring possibilities but also deprivation and lack, to know and desire what is ultimately and eternally unreachable. It is no coincidence that Faustus's famous question, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships … ?" (5.1.91), recalls Mephastophilis's own rhetorical query, "Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God …" (1.3.77), or that his assertion that "all is dross that is not Helena" (5.1.97) matches the devil's warning that "all places shall be hell that is not heaven" (2.1.127). In fetishizing Helen as Mephastophilis has been fetishizing God, Faustus follows the devil's dangerous cues right into the experience of deprivation that the devil has described as hell. Immediately after he claims her as his only "paramour," she leaves and is replaced by the Old Man, who defines him in terms of exclusion, as one who "exclud'st," and so is excluded from, "the grace of heaven" (5.1.112). And this time, unlike before, the warning has a meaning—and what it means is hell.

It is at this point, as Faustus, led on by Mephastophilis, constructs an otherworld of desire and deprivation, that he becomes willfully defiant—not (as Dollimore suggests) against God, but against the devil. Calling out "my God, my God" (5.2.112), Faustus curses Lucifer "that hath deprived [him] of the joys of heaven" (5.2.107) and then, as devils enter, directs hell to "gape not" and Lucifer to "come not" (5.2.114). In a final gesture of resistance, he casts all infernal authorities aside, proclaiming, "I'll burn my books. Ah Mephastophilis!" (5.2.115), as if in recognition that he has been betrayed, as indeed he has. As he stands finally firm in his resolve, the devils "exeunt with him" (stage direction), producing an unforgettable spectacle that we are to watch and wonder at, a spectacle of a "fiendful fortune" and a "hellish fall" that instantiates not, as the Chorus would wish, "heavenly power" (Epilogue 4-5), but Lucifer's. The prologue's conspiracy theory is right; someone did "conspire" Faustus's overthrow, but it was not God.

At stake here finally is not Faustus's soul, but the ways in which his perception of his soul, his interiorizing self-awareness, is fashioned and framed in the service of another's power. Whether or not there is "any pain" for him "after this life," he is "damned" by the devils who claim him as their subject—but only by the devils, for, tellingly, God has not said a word. Milton's Satan will reiterate the lesson that Mephastophilis teaches: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (Paradise Lost 1.254-55). Yet it is a lesson as misleading in Doctor Faustus as it is in Paradise Lost, whose sinners seem to be in the hands of an angry God intent on setting the bounds of heaven and hell. Marlowe's devils encourage Faustus to believe that he is finally responsible for his fortunes, that his soul gives ultimate meaning to his self, and that he determines its fate. Yet all the while, they—like Protestantism itself—are setting the terms and determining the form of those fortunes, turning the tale of a magician into a Christian moral drama that, by producing the soul as a site of struggle, can only affirm their power.

Like Protestantism itself—which is here dressed in devils' robes and damned. In a radically subversive move, Marlowe reverses Protestant attempts to put the devil in the center of its authorizing narratives by putting those narratives in the hands of the devil. For Marlowe, the dilemma that Protestantism poses as it imposes a limited subjectivity is not that it cuts the individual off from redemption and so produces transgression, but that it defines the individual in terms of redemption and itself in terms of his or her transgression—in terms, that is, that deny the mind its own place outside of heaven or hell. Ironically, though the European other is doomed on the basis of a signifying interiority, she/he, like non-European counterparts, is necessarily deprived of it, of a self that constitutes itself in alternative terms. Faustus, indeed, is gone.

Notes

¹ All references to the play are to Michael Keefer's edition of the A-text unless otherwise noted. I have adopted Keefer's spelling of Mephastophilis throughout, except when discussing texts with alternative spellings (which I then use).

I agree with Keefer's and Leah S. Marcus's stipulation that the A-text comes closest to an original Marlowe. See Keefer, Introduction to Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: A 1604-Version Edition (Peterborough, Can.: Broadview Press, 1991), xi-xxii, and Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus," Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 13-22 esp. See also Michael J. Warren, "Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 111-47. For a creative (though somewhat farfetched) account of how censorship may have come into play, see William Empson, Faustus and the Censor: The English Faustbook and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, ed. John Henry Jones (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Roy T. Eriksen offers a useful survey of the changing critical preferences for the versions ("The Forme of Faustus Fortunes ": A Study of the Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (1616) [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987], 9-13).

² This is the argument put forth by Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy," 5, which I return to at the end of the chapter.

³ For an interesting study of the significance of enclosure in Marlowe, see Marjorie Garber, "'Infinite Riches in a Little Room': Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe," in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3-21.

⁴ M. H. Abrams, et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 1:792. The editors dismiss the more controversial parts of his life as "sensational information" of which we cannot be sure (1:792).

⁵ Ibid., 1:814.

⁶ Robert Greene, for example, as I mention in Chapter 1, targets "that Atheist Tamburlan." And, as David Riggs ("Authorship, Atheism and Tamburlaine," a paper presented at the annual Shakespeare Association of America Convention, Vancouver, B.C., 23 March 1991) and Marcus have pointed out, the authors of the Dutch Church libel threatened to rebel violently "Per Tamburlaine" (quoted in Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy," 16). I am much indebted to David Riggs for drawing my attention to this document and its implications.

⁷ See A. L. French, who discusses the critical shift from a "guiltless Faustus to a culpable one" ("The Philosophy of Dr. Faustus," Essays in Criticism 20 [1970]: 123). Critics have also argued for ambiguity, as they do about Marlowe's plays in general, but the tendency is largely in the case of Faustus to opt for one extreme or the other. See Max Bluestone, "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Doctor Faustus," in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 33-88.

⁸ Rene Girard is right, I think, to question the assumptions behind the question, to ask instead, "Why should a well-educated young man have second thoughts when it comes to killing a close relative who also happens to be the king … and the husband of his own mother?" ("Hamlet's Dull Revenge," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], 299).

⁹ See Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy," and Keefer, Introduction to Doctor Faustus.

¹⁰ See my discussion in Chapter 3.

¹¹ Compare Johannes Birringer's treatment of Faustus "alone with himself '(Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine: Theological and Theatrical Perspectives [New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984], 76). The absence of God problematizes readings that turn Faustus into moral drama, or even readings such as Jonathan Dollimore's (discussed below), for it is not he but Lucifer who is present to set the terms of damnation. See also Robert H. West, "The Impatient Magic of Dr. Faustus," English Literary Renaissance 4 (1974): 218-40.

¹² Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 197.

¹³ Jonathan Dollimore argues that Faustus wants to "escape agonized irresolution" (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 113), as I mention below. See also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 197, also mentioned below.

¹⁴ Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), 53.

¹⁵ Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning) has provided the seminal work on this topic.

¹⁶ In Franco Zefferelli's recent film version, which otherwise attempts to produce a very knowable action-adventure Hamlet (a la Mel Gibson), the soliloquy stands out as a significant rupture.

¹⁸ "Even as early as 1946, W. W. Greg finds the complaint frequently reiterated, especially by critics who see the discrepancy as proof of multiple authorship, and attempts to make sense of it as Marlowe's deliberate strategy ("The Damnation of Faustus," in Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Leech [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964], 92-107).

¹⁸ Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 112-13; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 197.

¹⁹ For a useful survey of representations of magicians before (as well as during) the Renaissance, see Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984).

²⁴ John S. Mebane surveys these texts in Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 96-108. Keith Thomas dates the witch craze 1550-1675 in his important study of Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971). Other useful studies of this phenomenon include: Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1956); and Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1911).

²¹ We know only secondhand of the first collection (the Erfurt collection, probably by Wolf Wambach). The oldest surviving text is the Nuremberg manuscript of the 1570s. Throughout the 1560s and 1570s, oral Faust tales seem to have been commonly circulated throughout Europe. The Stationers' Register of 1589 lists "A ballad of the life and death of Doctor Faustus the greater cungerer," which may or may not have been the same as the extant "Judgement of God shewed upon one John Faustus," included in a seventeenth-century collection of ballads. For a fuller discussion of this history, see H. G. Haile, Introduction to The History of Doctor Johann Faustus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 1-13, and John Henry Jones, Introduction to Empson, Faustus and the Censor, 1-36. See also Keefer, Doctor Faustus, xxxvii-xlv.

²² Marlowe was almost certainly familiar with the English Faustbook, at the least. See John M. Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1:275-77.

²³ William Prynne reports in his Histriomastix (1633) of the "visible apparition of the Devill on the stage at the Belsavage Play-house, in Queen Elizabeths dayes, (to the great amazement both of the Actors and Spectators) whiles they were there prophanely playing the History of Faustus (the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it,) there being some distracted with that fearefull sight." Others, less intent on circulating antitheatrical propaganda, tell a similar story, and their accounts attest to the exotic appeal (and not the truth) of the subject. Excerpts of these accounts are quoted in Bakeless, Tragicall History, 1:299-301.

²⁴ Other magician plays include George Peele's The Old Wives Tales, and the anonymous John of Bordeaux, or the Second Part of Friar Bacon and The Merry Devill of Edmonton.

²⁵ Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, as well as Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), and Mebane, Renaissance Magic, have been particularly useful to my discussion of the place of magic in early modern England. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientifjc Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Joan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For studies pointing more directly to Marlowe and magic, see: James Robinson Howe, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Magic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Eriksen, "The Forme of Faustus Fortunes"; and William George Blackburn, Perilous Grace: The Poet as Protean Magician in the Works of Marlowe, Jonson, and Spenser (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1978).

²⁶ See, for example, Pico della Mirandola, Oration, 25-29.

²⁷ Reginald Scot, The discoverie of witchcraft (London, 1584), 244.

²⁸ Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 53-72.

²⁹ Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, offers the seminal treatment of the rivalary between religion and magic, and Mebane, Renaissance Magic, discusses the conflict between magic and other disciplines. See also Stephen Ozmont, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), and Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (New York: Blackwell, 1984).

³⁰ Yates, Occult Philosophy, 89-90.

³¹ Thomas discusses these practices and the attempts to regulate them (Religion and the Decline of Magic, 234-47). He records, for example, a law instituted in 1542 that declared it a "felony to use magic for treasure-seeking, for recovery of stolen goods, or 'to provoke any person to unlawful love'" (p. 245). Although it was revoked five years later, a similar though less stringent law was reinstated in 1563, and the penalties were made more severe in 1604 (not surprisingly, shortly after James I took office).

³² Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 476-79. See also Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 98.

³³ Scot, The discoverie of witchcraft, 1.

³⁴ I am much indebted to David Riggs for suggestions about the implications of Calvinism in this context.

³⁵ Haile, Introduction to The History of Doctor Johann Faustus, 4-5. See also Keefer, Doctor Faustus, xxxiii-xxxvii.

³⁶ From a letter written by Abbot Trithemius of Wurzburg (1507), quoted in William Rose, ed., Introduction to The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1963), 3; Philipp Melanchton, quoted in Jones, Introduction to Empson, Faustus and the Censor, 7; quoted in Haile, Introduction to The History of Doctor Johann Faustus, 4.

³ See Keefer, Doctor Faustus, xxxvi.

³⁸ Jones, Introduction to Empson, Faustus and the Censor, 7-8.

³⁹ I am using H. Logeman's edition of The Historie of the Damnable life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, by P. F., Gent (Gand: Librarie H. Englecke, 1900), 3.

⁴⁰ Haile, Introduction to The History of Doctor Johann Faustus, 6. I am referring here to the Erfurt collection of tales.

⁴¹ Thomas makes this point in Religion and the Decline of Magic.

⁴² Quoted in Jones, Introduction to Empson, Faustus and the Censor, 13.

⁴³ Haile, Introduction to The History of Doctor Johann Faustus, 8.

⁴⁴ Because the dates of both Greene's play and Marlowe's are uncertain, we cannot know which preceded.

⁴⁵ The seminal essay is Paul Brown, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism" in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48-71. See also Cartelli, "Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99-115, as well as Meredith Skura's critique of colonialist readings ("Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 [1989]: 42-74).

⁴⁶ From Scot's dedicatory epistle to "Maister Doctor Coldwell, Deane of Rochester and M. D. Readman, Archdeacon of Canterburie," in The discoverie of witchcraft. The title page includes the following warning: "Beleeve not everie spirit, but trie the spirits, whether they are of God; for manie false prophets are gone out into the world."

⁴⁷ Dedicatory epistle to Sir Roger Manwood in Scot, The discoverie of witchcraft.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Scot, Epistle to Maister Doctor Coldwell, The discoverie of witchcraft.

⁵⁰ "The Jewes," Scot writes, "held one kind of diabolical sacrifice, never taught them by Moses, namelie, to offer their children to Moloch, making their sonnes and their daughters to runne through the fire; supposing such grace and efficacie to have beene in that action, as other witches affirme to be in charmes and words" (The discoverie of witchcraft, 190).

⁵¹ Discussions of Scot tend to highlight this as the most important revelation of the text, not the idea of social or political coercion and victimization of the already disadvantaged. See Notestein, A History of Witchcraft, 67-72.

⁵² James I, Daemonologie, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1924), xi. Weyer's work, De praestigiis daemonum (1563), was less well known in England. See Yates, Occult Philosophy, 69.

⁵³ From Thomas Beard, The Theater of Gods Judgements, quoted above; see Chapter 1.

⁵⁴ Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 110.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 115.

⁵⁶ Others too (in different ways) have argued that the idea of heaven's conspiracy problematizes morality readings of the play. See, for example, Bluestone, "Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Doctor Faustus."

⁵⁷ Compare David M. Bevington, who offers the seminal treatment of Faustus's relation to the morality tradition, in From "Mankind" to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). See also: James A. Reynolds, Repentance and Retribution in Early English Drama (Salzburg: Universitat Salzburg, Institut für Anglisktick und Amerikanistik, 1982); Richard Waswo, "Damnation, Protestant Style: Faustus, Macbeth, and the Christian Tragedy," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974): 63-99; and Margaret O'Brien, "Christian Belief in Doctor Faustus," English Literary History 37 (1970): 1-11.

⁵⁸ Birringer, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine, 227. H. W. Matalene characterizes Faustus as one who "hates 'learning'—though he loves 'knowing'" and who indulges not in scholarly exploration but in "learning-avoidance" ("Marlowe's Faustus and the Comforts of Academicism," English Literary History 39 [1972]: 594-95). This "shallowness of study," Matalene argues, is the protagonist's "means of coming to feel his own potential, his power and worth as against other men" (p. 507).

⁵⁹ For discussion of how Christian cabalism presumably safeguarded magical practice, see Yates, Occult Philosophy, 75.

⁶⁰ See Faustus 2.3.69-85.

⁶¹ These readings are numerous and varied. Greg first implicated the scene as upsetting "the nice balance between possible salvation and imminent damnation," because here Faustus commits the unforgivable sin of "demoniality" ("bodily intercourse with demons") ("The Damnation of Faustus," 92-107). More recent interpretations have treated the scene as a symbolic rather than literal turning point. Kay Stockholder, for example, has argued that "Faustus associates sensuality both with forbidden knowledge and power, and with ensuing diabolic punishment" ("'Within the massy entrails of the earth': Faustus's Relation to Women," in "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Freidenreich [New York: AMS Press, 1988], 205) and that, in joining with Helen, he pays the "psychic consequences" of this association (p. 216). "The tragedy," she contends, "is not that Faustus is damned, but that he thinks himself damned for his desires" (p. 217). See also C. L. Barber, "'The Forme of Faustus' Fortunes Good or Bad," Tulane Drama Review 8 (1964): 94-119.

⁶² W. W. Greg (among others) makes this identification of Saba as the Queen of Sheba, whose story is told in 1 Kings x; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: Parallel Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 332, n. 546.

⁶³ The sultan actually checks up on Faustus's harem activities to see how powerful the conjurer really is, though at things other than conjuring.

⁶⁴ Although Stockholder argues that what Faustus is coming to terms with is heterosexual desire rather than, as I contend, the idea of immortality, she too sees Helen as embodying "an alternative to Christian immortality" ("'Within the massy entrails,'" 214).

⁶⁵ He does use an inappropriate (though not surprising, in light of his situation) rhetoric of bargaining, showing that his idea of salvation is not exactly orthodox.

⁶⁶ In Troilus and Cressida, for example, which looks at the discrepancies within her representation, Troilus and Paris put her on a pedestal while Cressida defames her as a wanton "merry Greek" (1.1.112).