SOURCE: "'Within the massy entrailes of the earth': Faustus's Relation to Women," in "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, edited by Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama, pp. 203-219, AMS Press, Inc., 1988.

All images or portrayals of extrahuman figures, gods and devils, ghosts and witches, are necessarily extensions and exaggerations of human characteristics, for human characteristics are all that we know. To isolate a human characteristic and portray it as belonging to a devil, or an angel, is to express an attitude toward that characteristic; to tell, or to dramatize, a story involving supernatural happenings necessarily involves allegorizing human affairs, whether or not the author believes in the literal truth of the supernatural happenings. The imaginations of secular humanists find resonant meaningfulness in such works as the Divine Comedy because those works express powerful evaluations through their heightened portrayals of facets of our common humanity. Accordingly, in discussing the role of women in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus I am going to naturalize all supernatural events. That is, I will regard supernatural elements as expressions of an attitude toward or judgment of a natural or ordinary version of such an event or figure.

The Faustus that we encounter as the play begins is a man who, having devoted his youth to study, has risen from lowly origins, from "parents base of stock," to eminence in learning. Despite his achievements in enterprises that once "ravished" him, he now feels depleted and restless, wondering at life's lack of savor. It is not clear how old we are to imagine him, but the experience rendered seems easily analogous to those that today might be described as midlife crises. In order to escape the emptiness that has overwhelmed him he turns to the forbidden, which seems to promise, as the forbidden always does, a deep and general fulfillment of undefined desire. Faustus expresses this vague desire initially in terms of a magnified vision of the satisfactions he has already—of power, praise, and knowledge. His first imagination of the delights to be found in necromancy extends the range of his past achievements, but does not initiate new realms, except for one slight suggestion. Faustus's life, as described by the prologue and by himself, has been notably barren of sexuality, women, and love. His imagination touches on the realm of the sensuous when he anticipates that the spirits will "fly to India for gold … And search all comers of the new-found world / For pleasant fruits and princely delicates." He approaches a slightly more sensual note when he says, "I'll have them fill the public schools with silk, / Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad" (I.i. 109-113, 117-118).¹ Though most of his dazed visions are of the power and status he associates with forbidden knowledge, rather than of love, his expression of delight in the magic that is to realize them is suffused with the aura of the sexual: "'Tis magick, magick, that hath ravish'd me" (I.i. 137). That suffused swoon suggests that we should see Faustus as a man whose sexual and erotic energies have been diverted into the successful pursuit of knowledge and fame, and who is therefore left with a vague feeling of unsatisfied emptiness, the satisfaction of which he associates with powers that derive from forbidden knowledge.

One would not expect a person like Faustus to be aware that he seeks erotic satisfaction through forbidden magic, since if he knew what he wanted he would not need magic to get it. One would expect, as is so in the play, evidence of the nature of his desire to come only slowly into view. Accordingly, in this anticipatory section the sensual notes are distanced into metaphors and images. Cornelius says that the spirits will "fetch the treasure of all foreign wrecks, / Yea, all the wealth that our forefathers hid / Within the massy entrailes of the earth" (I.i. 173-174). The image suggests not only lost sexual potency—the treasures, hidden within the feminine earthy entrails—but also the deep past, containing for Faustus parental images, associated with that potency, that in turn suggest some of the difficulties involved in recovering it. Faustus responds, with a kind of swooning sensuality, "O, this cheers my soul! / Come, show me some demonstrations magical, / That I may conjure in some bushy grove / And have these joys in full possession" (I.i. 178-180). The image of the "bushy grove" rings in the same range as the "massy entrails," vaguely suggestive of genitalia, but the first images of women appear in a distanced and aestheticized association with diabolical spirits when Valdes says that they will appear "like women, or unwedded maids, / Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows / Than has the white breasts of the queen of love" (I.i.154-156).

The association of women, both in their sexual and aesthetic ranges, with forbidden magic appears more obviously when Faustus succeeds in conjuring Mephistophilis. Faustus's fearful ambivalence toward his enterprise is suggested not only by the ugliness of Mephistophilis's first appearance, but also by the opposition between Mephistophilis's "fainting soul" at the mention of the "everlasting bliss" of which he is forever deprived, and Faustus's scornful dismissal of his futile yearnings. Faustus prescribes "manly fortitude" for Mephistophilis's heart-sickened sense of deprivation, but as though in consolation for his own parallel deprivation, asks for twenty-four years of "all voluptuousness" (I.iii.319-320). Mephistophilis's poignant nostalgia echoes Faustus's yearnings for the joys he anticipated in magic, which will culminate when he foregoes the asexual Christian heaven, for which Mephistophilis yearns, in exchange for the sensuous heaven of Helen's kiss.

Faustus's mind veers sharply from dreams of voluptuousness to the more familiar ones of the power to be found in forbidden knowledge, but the hidden association of that forbidden realm with the sensual is suggested first by the rapidity with which Faustus's mind moves past his first request, and second by the fact that one doesn't generally have to make a pact with the devil in order to live voluptuously. These considerations indicate that Faustus associates sensuality both with forbidden knowledge and power, and with ensuing diabolic punishment, and that, moved by frustration, he has embarked on magic in a desperate effort to achieve the sensual, despite the fear with which he surrounds it. He remains only half aware that the forbidden knowledge he seeks derives, at least in part, from his desire to know, in the biblical sense, a woman. After his first slight motion in that direction he deflects his attention to less problematic fantasies of power, which only extend what he has already achieved in more ordinary ways. He can scarcely entertain images that betray the true nature of his desire.

The issue of women arises a second time in a context similar to the first. Faustus, having signed the pact, questions Mephistophilis about hell only to dispute with him about its existence. Since he is talking to a devil, his dispute seems illogical; and equally illogical seem Mephistophilis's assurances not only that hell exists, but also that he, even at that moment, inhabits it, for a clever devil would be happy for Faustus to doubt his and hell's existence. But the illogic of the sequence emphasizes its emotional content as Faustus's mind moves toward and away from the vision of hellish deprivation that he has already associated with sensuality. That association is deepened when Faustus says,

 let me have a wife,
The fairest maid in Germany, for I
Am wanton and lascivious
And cannot live without a wife.
(II.i.527-530)

While Faustus might have trouble getting the "fairest maid in Germany" for a wife without a devil's aid, the relative innocence of his demand is striking, even to the association of the "wanton and lascivious" with the legality of marriage. But the degree to which Faustus feels not only the sensual, but also the domestic realm embattled and colored with the diabolical appears clearly when Faustus perceives the "wife" that is brought as a "she-devil" and a "hot wrote." In effect, as he approaches his desire for forbidden sensuality he associates it with the familial and domestic in asking for a wife, but an approach to a fulfillment of his embattled desire appears to him in hideous and threatening images from which he again retreats. Faustus finds himself in a dilemma wherein tainted images of women pervade the innocent domesticity by which he tries to avoid the forbidden sexuality. Accordingly, Mephistophilis supports Faustus in his declaration that he will have no wife, saying, "Marriage is but a ceremonial toy: / And if thou lovest me, think no more of it," and promises Faustus sexual satisfaction, but in images that, like those earlier, are remote and aestheticized:

I'll cull thee out the fairest courtesans,
And bring them ev'ry morning to thy bed:
She whom thine eye shall like, thy heart shall have,
Were she as chaste as was Penelope,
As wise as Saba, or as beautiful
As was bright Lucifer before his fall.
(II.i.535-542)

The sexual overtones are diminished in part by the mythological removal, but also because the "fairest courtesans" are imagined coming to Faustus's bed "ev'ry morning," rather than in the darkness of night in which pacts are made. The issue of women becomes even more remote when women's beauty is expressed in an image of male beauty, "As was bright Lucifer before his fall," in a way that homosexually colors the erotic content.²

But these floating promises do not emerge from image into action, for in the next scene Faustus is in the throes of suicidal despair, alleviated only by the "sweet pleasure" he derives from "blind Homer's" songs of "Alexander's love and Oenone's death." Faustus associates his despair with regret for the lost joys of Heaven, but actually experiences an intensified form of the same ennui that prompted his efforts in necromancy. The lascivious delights he anticipated have been so meagerly provided that it is little wonder that Faustus ignores the good angel's voice, and pursues the course toward Helen's heavenly kiss. He distracts himself by seeking more knowledge from Mephistophilis, but the deeper drift reappears when Lucifer and Beelzebub tell him not to call on Christ or think of God, but rather to "Think on the devil. / And on his dam too" (II.ii.645-646). Once again, an image of coupling, or of marriage, is associated with the diabolically ugly, in contrast to the aestheticized and distanced sensual images which are defined as an alternative heaven. However, this sublimated sexuality is still thought of as leading to hell, which contains the more immediate, and therefore uglier, images of closer relationship and sexuality.

Some of the psychological sources of Faustus's estrangement from sexuality are suggested in the show of the seven deadly sins by which Mephistophilis diverts Faustus. Somewhat surprisingly, Pride's speech has more sexual content than Lechery's. The latter says, "I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fried stockfish, and the first letter of my name begins with Lechery" (II.ii.707-710), an adequate self-definition, but one notably lacking an aura of sensual delight. When Faustus closely approaches sexuality, it appears to him in its most debased version. Within the comic debasement of Pride's speech, however, more sensual resonance is allowed. He says,

I am Pride. I disdain to have any parents. I am like to Ovid's flea; I can creep into every corner of a wench; sometimes, like a periwig, I sit upon her brow; next, like a necklace I hang about her neck; then, like a fan of feathers, kiss her lips, and then turning myself to a wrought smock do what I list. But, fie, what a smell is here! I'll not speak another word, unless the ground be perfum'd, and cover'd with cloth of arras.

(I.ii.663-670)

Pride's claim of parentless self-authorship is traditional, but his disdain, when coupled with the diminutive sexual exploration suggested by the images that follow, suggests a person acting like a small child in order to steal sensuous gratification from a mother-like, because so much larger, woman. The image that suggests the fulfillment of a sexual act—"turning myself to a wrought smock do what I list"—brings with it disgust—"what a smell is here! I'll not speak another word, unless the ground be perfum'd."

When we naturalize the sequence, that is, see it as Faustus's fantasy, it suggests that in order for Faustus to generate images of heterosexuality he has first to eliminate parental images. Only having done so can he make the sexual claim, which for him still involves the sin of pride. But having strategically disdained to have parents, he reintroduces elements of a parent/child relationship in the image of the flea's sexual exploration, which in turn generates the disgust associated with sexuality that he sought to eliminate along with parents. The context in which this episode occurs justifies the significance I have attributed to this passage, for as a precondition to this diversion Faustus has promised Lucifer that he will "never look to Heaven," and never more name God. Since the idea of God extends from an image of paternal authority, Faustus has his glimpse of sexuality only when he declares himself in prideful rebellion from that authority. The sequence reveals that Faustus thinks himself unworthy of making a sexual claim, and fears paternal reprisal for seeking sexual knowledge, in both senses of the word. The sequence anticipates in little the structure of the entire play.

The kind of punishment he fears appears in the events which he encounters on his journey with Mephistophilis, which turn either on delight in ridiculing others or on fear of being ridiculed. The ridicule takes the specific form of jests about cuckoldry, though the emblematic horns first appear disjoined from the wayward women who make them grow. While those jests, which bear on Faustus's relation to paternal authority, occupy the foreground of the action, Faustus's relationship to women continues in the background. There images of women take fuller and more solid shape, but do so in a context of Faustus's demonstration of his necromantic skills to figures of authority rather than in association with his own desire.

The cuckoldry theme takes shape in parodic form when Robin plans to practice conjuring with the help of Faustus's stolen magic books. Dick warns that Faustus will conjure him in punishment, to which Robin boasts "an my master come here, I'll clap as fair a pair of horns on's head as e'er thou sawest in thy life." Dick says he need not bother, for "my mistress hath done it," and then suggests that Robin has been "sneaking up and down after her" (II.iii.737-739).

That episode preludes those that occur after Faustus, having quenched his thirst for more abstract knowledge on a pretechnological flight with Mephistophilis, arrives at the Pope's palace, where he wishes now to be "an actor." In this sequence the theme of cuckoldry intertwines with the challenge to authority, both of which are introduced and brought into alignment with another reference to Faustus's desire.

When Faustus and Mephistophilis are in the Pope's court to witness the celebration of his "triumphant victory" Faustus says,

Sweet Mephistophilis, thou pleasest me,
Whilst I am here on earth, let me be cloy'd
With all things that delight the heart of man.
My four and twenty years of liberty
I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance,
That Faustus' name, whilst this bright frame doth stand
May be admitted to the furthest land.
(III.i.836-842)

The reference to pleasure and dalliance has no obvious connection to the Pope's triumph, nor does it logically follow that such dalliance should bring Faustus fame. However, the lapse in ordinary logic emphasizes the emotional links between sexual desire, or dalliance, the desire for fame into which it is deflected, and the connection between both factors and the need to undermine figures of authority through ridicule. For while no appropriate action emerges from the image of dalliance, what emerges instead is the portrayal of a pettily cruel tyrant, who wishes to use Bruno as the footstool to his papal throne. The cuckoldry theme, though not expressed through action, is linked to the Pope's humiliation when, after the reference to dalliance, Mephistophilis suggests to Faustus that he may

… dash the pride of this solemnity;
To make his monks and abbots stand like apes,
And point like antics at his triple crown:
To beat the beads about the friars' pates,
Or clap huge horns upon the Cardinals' heads.
(Ill.i.859-865)

As Mephistophilis and Faustus succeed in rescuing Bruno from the Pope,³ and mock his spiritual power, Faustus temporarily asserts his superiority to this version of paternal authority, separated as it is from women and sexuality. However, that authority will overwhelm him most fully at the time he most closely approaches women and sexuality.

The cuckoldry theme reappears, still separated from, but now juxtaposed to, an image of women when Martino announces Faustus's intention to show the emperor all his progenitors, and to "bring in presence of his Majesty / The royal shapes and warlike semblances / Of Alexander and his beauteous paramour" (IV.i.1 167-1172). This mention of a heterosexual couple brings immediately in its wake a reference to Benvolio, through whom the cuckoldry theme will be most fully articulated. As Faustus dares to "pierce through / The ebon gates of ever-burning hell" (IV. i. 1224) in order to entertain the Emperor, the thrice-repeated line, "Great Alexander and his paramour," resonates through the dumb-show in which the shade of Alexander kills Darius, places his crown upon his paramour, and embraces her; it echoes as well in the Emperor's longing to see the mole on her neck. Though doubly distanced, this action represents the closest approach so far to that pleasurable dalliance Faustus has so desired. This distanced satisfaction is linked to cuckoldry when Benvolio, who has mocked, "and thou bring Alexander and his paramour before the Emperor, I'll be Actaeon and turn myself into a stag" (IV.i. 1256), wakes to find his now enhorned head caught in the window-frame.⁴ The cuckoldry motif acquires menacing tones by being articulated through the myth of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and dismembered by his hounds for having stolen a glimpse of Diana naked. The association of cuckoldry with dismemberment, which in turn prefigures the hellish punishments Faustus is to incur, explains the tentative and uneven approach to the issue of sexuality we have observed. As Faustus moves into contact with actual women or female spirits, even though they are distanced from him by being associated with other men, references both to cuckoldry and to dismemberment develop in crescendo proportions. This interweaving suggests that Faustus, to approach sexuality, must encounter an image of himself not only humiliated but also dismembered. The comic sequence here displaces onto other figures the price which Faustus, in the final tragic action, will pay for his glimpse of Helen.

All the action between this sequence and the next serious demonstration of Faustus's power turns on these motifs. Benvolio, in revenge for having been humiliated, cuts off Faustus's "false head," vowing that he will "nail huge forked horns" on it, and Faustus turns the tables by enhorning the heads of Benvolio and his companions so that they must slink into obscurity to hide the disgrace of their "brutish shapes." This action slides into the episode of the horse-courser, which recalls the Actaeon image when the horse-courser thinks he has robbed the sleeping Faustus of his leg. The horse-courser and carter episodes elide with the Robin and Dick plot line when Faustus disposes of all those figures in the Duke of Anholt's court, where he also, for the first time, experiences domestic warmth. When the duke appears with his pregnant wife, Faustus gently attends to her, and seeks to please her by sending Mephistophilis to fetch grapes from the other side of the world. As he meanwhile demonstrates his knowledge of the globe's seasons, that rather charming domestic episode brings him, in the sequence of the drama, to the brink of his damnation.

Before discussing the last episode, however, I should note that so far the uses Faustus has made of his pact with the devil have been as innocent as possible. Despite Faustus's desire for twenty-four years of lasciviousness, there have been neither sexually suggestive episodes nor references to behind-the-scenes sexuality. Despite his aspiration for power over all worldy potentates, Faustus has only saved Bruno from a tyrannically cruel Pope, entertained the Emperor by showing him a vision of Alexander and his paramour, and brought the Duchess a bunch of grapes. It would seem that the most damnable thing he has done is to anticipate modern technology by getting grapes out of season and by achieving an aeriel view of the world.

The forbidden knowledge and power he so desired has been used either trivially or generously; he hardly seems to have become an evil man, and the last episode in the court of the Duke of Anholt suggests only gentle domesticity. That disproportion between the relatively benign naturalist portrait of Faustus and the aura of the damnable which surrounds him casts into relief the significance of the last episode, which places Helen, the first realization of the long-promised sexual pleasure and the immediate cause of his damnation, not in distant places but in the domestic comfort of Faustus's home. That home is characterized by lovingly attentive friends, at whose request he first raises the apparition of the "peerless dame of Greece." Her appearance takes on an intimacy and an immediacy to Faustus's ordinary life lacking in the other episodes, and that domesticity, in combination with Helen's more than mortal beauty, suggests an alternative to the Christian heaven. But that alternative heaven is also associated with sexually fraught contention: "No marvel though the angry Greeks pursued / With ten years' war the rape of such a queen / Whose heavenly beauty passeth all compare" (V.i.1698-1701).

The association of Helen with strife might be attributed only to the traditional tale were it not that the aura of contention that she carries intensifies and becomes part of Faustus's personal drama.⁵ Just as Helen, unlike the other sensual figures, enters into Faustus's domesticity, so now does the warning voice approach Faustus not in the relatively abstract form of a good angel, but in the unexplained but quite naturalistic form of the Old Man. With his appearance the elements previously suggestive of Faustus's fears of woman and sexuality take dramatic shape. The Old Man's words, their force increased by the lack of circumstance to explain his appearance, carry tones of affectionate paternal concern—he calls Faustus "gentle son." Though he does not mention Helen, his entry immediately after her first appearance suggests that his intense description of Faustus's evil flows from Helen's appearance. He says,

O gentle Faustus, leave this damned art,
This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell,
And quite bereave thee of salvation.
Though thou hast now offended like a man,
Do not persever in it like a devil.
(V.i.1706-1709)

Though he refers to magic in general, the image of its power to "charm thy soul to hell" carries forward the resonance of the images surrounding Helen, and the last quoted lines suggest that all that has gone before can be regarded as ordinary, or manly, offense, but that only Faustus's traffic with Helen makes him "like a devil."

The aura of diabolic sexuality associated with Helen comes into sharper focus when the Old Man says,

For, gentle son, I speak it not in wrath,
Or envy of thee, but in tender love,
And pity of thy future misery.
And so have hope, that this my kind rebuke,
Checking thy body, may amend thy soul.
V.i.1719-1723)

Since Faustus is not at the moment satisfying his bodily desires, the warning words, "checking thy body," can only function to highlight Faustus's sexual desire for Helen. The vision generated by the Old Man's words centers the play's most extreme polarity around the figure of Helen. On the one hand, she is associated with the most dire imaginings of unspeakable hellish pain, while on the other hand she is associated both with the bliss of an alternate heaven and with a kind of domestic peacefulness. That ironic disparity heightens the portrait of Faustus as a man for whom the sexual has become so permeated by a sense of evil and fear of punishment that it has swept into its orbit all related areas of life—all association with women and the comforts of domesticity. The drama can be seen in this light as Faustus's uneven efforts to reclaim that lost area of his humanity, interpreted by him as diabolical. His approach to Helen, his most daring and most direct approach to the sexual, consequently releases the most horrendous images of inner corruption and of avenging fury, both in the Old Man's distinctly paternal appearance, and in supernatural threats.

Since for Faustus the theological heaven excludes so much that is ordinarily human, it is small wonder that he cannot quite manage a repentence that would leave him in the state of emptiness implied at the play's beginning. Though he is moved by the Old Man's words, which "comfort [his] distressed soul," instead of remaining in the protective presence of this seemingly benevolent figure, he sends him away, leaving himself more vulnerable to Mephistophilis's powers. In a sense he chooses Helen along with the fearful punishments and the self-loathing he associates with her. Mephistophilis threatens that if Faustus should revolt from Lucifer he will "in piecemeal tear thy flesh," as Actaeon was dismembered by his hounds, and as Faustus will finally be dismembered, but for having claimed rather than for having disclaimed Helen.

Faustus's vision of Helen finally fulfills the promises of "four and twenty years of dalliance." Once again signing a pact in blood, this time Faustus explicity trades his soul for Helen's kiss:

One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart's desire—
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late
Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean
Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow,
And keep my oath I made to Lucifer.
(V.i.1759-1765)

If one leaves aside the moral obliquy that surrounds necromancy, and if one sees the supernatural and diabolic contexts in which she appears as expressive of Faustus's interpretation of his sexual longings as diabolic, and of his consequent inability fully to actualize an image of a woman's body, the scene itself renders heightened erotic passion with an almost Lawrentian mystique. Helen's incredible beauty suggests an alternative to Christian immortality, and to her kisses is attributed a kind of sexual transcendence: "Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies." The line may have been intended to show the demonic power of the spirit, but naturalistically it renders an orgasmic passion that Faustus immediately associates first with the challenge of another man, and then with a heroic version of courtly love. He says,

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 wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss,
O, thou art fairer than the evening's air
Clad in 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 Arthusa's azured arms:
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
(V.i.1772-1787)

After expressing his love in the image of her encompassing beauty, he imagines himself struggling for her. But he seems also to imagine himself in struggle with paternal images to achieve her, since he thinks of himself as Paris fighting Menelaeus. Aside from the fact that Menelaus, as a king, becomes an elevated paternal image, and that Paris is a king's son, such a reading is supported by two details. First, Faustus adds rather needlessly that "Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack'd." Since at the beginning of his necromantic career he envisioned himself as Wittenberg's protector, directing spirits to "wall all Germany with brass, / And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg," his desire now to see Wittenberg destroyed places his desire for Helen in opposition to the service of his city. The implication is that he equates himself with the son-like prince Paris, whose violation of the older man's marital rights resulted in Troy's destruction. Second, his desire for Helen is further linked to his challenge to paternal authority when the Old Man, who has already acquired paternal force, re-enters just as Faustus declares his love. Though the Old Man previously claimed that it was not from envy that he warned Faustus against Helen's enchantments, his reappearance at just this moment suggests exactly that.⁶ These details together suggest that Faustus's desire for Helen is embedded in the oedipal fears earlier suggested by Pride's speech, which he momentarily overcomes in his vision of an heroic courtly union with her. He envisions himself wearing her colors on his crest, and returning to her for a kiss, a kiss which elides with the domestic when he compares her beauty to that of the "evening air"—a contrast to the morning in which he previously envisioned beautiful paramours coming to his bed. Though the heterosexual vision is distanced by Helen being defined as spirit rather than as body, and by her beauty being compared to Jupiter's rather than to Semele's (as in the previous image of the fairest courtesans), the passage as a whole overcomes the psychological barriers to an imaginative knowledge of heterosexual love.

Faustus has won his moment of freedom, the one kiss that is all that he realizes of the limitless sensual pleasure he anticipated. He has challenged but not dispersed the fears and dark associations that cling to images of heterosexuality. The naturalistic rendering of the scholars, who maintain their loving friendliness toward Faustus even when told of his pact with the devil, and his benevolent concern for them, contrast startingly with the aura of damnation, highlighting the disparity between the sense of evil evoked by the good and bad angels, and the naturalistic portrayal of a genially benevolent man who has broken out of his scholarly monasticism to kiss a girl. Since most of the action is supernatural, to naturalize it is necessarily to see it as representing the psychic consequence of Faustus's association of evil and guilt with the sexuality he has chosen.⁷ He does not experience himself as having chosen Helen and the domestic aura that she brings in her wake, but rather as being compelled by unknown forces that pull him down when he thinks he wants to "leap up to my God." Either way, he experiences himself as castrated, impotent, dismembered; Lucifer will tear him apart if he submits to God or if he does not, and submission to God represents a filial abasement to a paternal authority that equates sexuality of any kind with forbidden knowledge, civic destruction, and eternal torment. He tries to find a middle way between a heaven occupied by an angry father and the gaping jaws of a hell that contains the "devil and his dam"⁸ by seeing himself absorbed into an undifferentiated mist.

He struggles to evade the polarities evoked by his desires for and his fear of women by retreating from the impossible alternatives of an oedipal struggle to an infantile, preindividualized, state. After the angels show him visions first of the heaven he has lost, and then of the torments of hell, which must be "[his] mansion, there to dwell," he sees Christ's blood streaming in the firmament. That disembodied air-born vision still carries the restrictive definitions of heaven, and so he experiences himself pulled down by an unknown force. Next he pleads to become a "foggy mist" drawn "Into the entrails of yon lab'ring cloud" so that his soul might, like smoke, rise to heaven. He abandons the compromise flight toward the father when he imagines first his soul dispersed into the great round of metempsychosis, then the insensibility of beasts, and finally the total loss of self when he desires that his soul "be changed into little water-drops, / And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!" (V.ii. 1927-1980). But that strategy fails, for his sense of himself, a self that has risen from peasant origins to high prestige, will not succumb to a de-individuating oral merger. Instead he chooses hell and heterosexuality rather than yield to a heaven that contains only a forbidding God. Thought of in this way, the tragedy is not that Faustus is damned, but that he thinks himself damned for his desires, even as he claims them.

I am not arguing that Marlowe intended Faustus's damnation to be perceived in this way, though it is quite possible that he did so. I am arguing that a naturalized version of events that are defined as supernatural makes the contrast between the fierce supernatural condemnation of Faustus and the relatively benign figure that emerges when we see Faustus naturalistically revelatory of the psychological consequences of holding such beliefs. The play remains a rendering of those consequences whether Marlowe himself held those beliefs, wrote the play to expose them, or was hampered in the latter project by remnants of the former.

Notes

¹ All citations are to Doctor Faustus in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Though I have used the B text, the A text bears out substantially the same interpretation. Most of the passages on which I rely appear in both texts, but in subsequent notes I will indicate where the variations in the texts alter the emphasis (For the A text I use The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910]).

² Constance Brown Kuriyama, in Hammer or Anvil, Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe's Plays (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 95-136, uses evidence like this to argue for a previously homosexual association with necromancy. While I do agree that homosexual elements are strong in the play, I believe the strongest struggle depicted is toward the heterosexual.

³ This reference, based on a story in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, to a rival for the papal diadem might, as has been suggested, also be seen as a veiled reference to Giordano Bruno, whose challenge to church authority in general could be expressed in this way. If that is what Marlowe intended, then the action in which Faustus and Mephistophilis rescue Bruno from the Pope might be seen as Marlowe's devious way of supporting the magic for which Faustus seems condemned, against orthodoxy as represented by the Pope. If one reads the sequence that way, it augments the argument that the tragedy is not that Faustus was damned, but rather that he succumbed to conventional attitudes toward damnation. To read the play in this way involves supposing that Marlowe constructed the play as a psychomachia. Many aspects of the play make that thesis plausible, particularly the appearances of the good and bad angels, and of the Old Man, and it would make the play into a very sophisticated psychological analysis of the mechanisms by which institutional authority maintains itself through engendering deep-seated guilt. That is the direction in which this reading tends, but I think it more likely that Marlowe's ambivalence appears in the two readings that the end makes possible. The reference to Bruno, however, does not appear in the A text, and its authenticity has been questioned, but the argument for the psychomachiac reading remains plausible on the other grounds.

⁴ In the A text the cuckoldry motif appears more subtly; while Benvolio's counterpart grows horns, he is not stuck in the window frame, and Robin says to Rafe that "my master and mistress shall find that I can read, he for his forehead, she for her private study: she's borne to beare with me, or else my Art fails" (938-940). On the other hand, the theme of dismemberment gets greater emphasis. Robin, while using Faustus's conjuring books to make "al the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked before me," tells Rafe to "keep out, or else you are blowne up, you are dismembered, Rafe" (933-935). Also, Wagner echoes Pride's speech when he says to the Clown that he will "turn al the lice about thee into familiars, and they shal teare thee in peeces" (378-380).

⁵ It might be said that when Faustus brings a woman into his all-male but tranquil domestic life, all hell breaks loose.

⁶ The Old Man might be seen as appropriately punished for prying into Faustus's sexual life when he says that Satan begins to "sift me" in his pride.

⁷ Seen in this way, the two theological puzzles that emerge from the final action appear in a different light. Those puzzles are, first, that despite the doctrine stated in the play that repentance can never be too late, Faustus's damnation after his glimpse of Helen seems inevitable. The old man, after witnessing that scene, gives up on him, declaring "Accursed Faustus, miserable man, / That from thy soul exclud'st the grace of Heaven, / And Fliest the throne of his tribunalseat!" (V, i, 1739-42), and the good angel, though in a tone of sad lament rather than of glee, concurs with the bad angel in the inevitability of Faustus's damnation. Second, the doctrine of free will is undermined by hints of determinism when Mephistophilis reveals that he "damned up" Faustus's passage to heaven, that he actively sought Faustus and was not passively called to him, a deterministic suggestion that is echoed when Faustus blames "the stars that reign'd at [his] nativity," the parents that "engender'd [him]" and Lucifer, as well as himself, for his damnation. These disparities show the theological concerns of the play warped by the psychological pull of the protagonist who, confronted with a vision of Heaven void of women and inhabited by an angry, father-like God who seems an extension of the Old Man, and a Hell full of torture and torment but nonetheless containing images of women, chooses the latter.

⁸ The A text omits the "devil and his dam," making slightly less overt the link between hell and heterosexuality, but it includes a passage that gives a much more emotionally full sense of self-disgust and loath-someness in association with Helen when the Old Man, pleading with Faustus to mend his ways, says,

Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears,
Tears falling from repentent heavinesse
Of thy most vilde and loathsome filthinesse,
The stench whereof corrupts the inward soule
With such flagitious crimes and hainous sinnes
As no commiseration may expel.
(1277-1282)