SOURCE: "Marlowe and God: The Tragic Theology of Dr. Faustus," in PMLA, Vol. 83, No. 5, October, 1968, pp. 1378-85.

Apart from Shakespearean drama, few Elizabethan plays have been so frequently and thoroughly studied in recent decades as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Yet it remains as problematical a work of art today as it was thirty years ago. Interpretations based on the biographical evidence of Marlowe's atheism are now in disrepute, because scholarly investigations of Elizabethan thought and dramatic traditions would convince us of the orthodoxy of Marlowe's artistic theme and moral attitude. But if earlier "biographical" studies of Dr. Faustus were partial and unsatisfactory, they were at least in touch with the poetic splendor of its lines and the metaphysical terror of its final scene. In more recent "corrective" studies the element of fire in Marlowe's tragic thought is quite put out; only the ironies of Faustus' overreaching ambitions and the choric homiletic pieties remain.

Much more knowledgeable about Marlowe's art and Elizabethan culture than were earlier readers, we see Dr. Faustus differently. Indeed, we study a text different from that used by earlier scholars, who preferred the 1604 Quarto to the longer 1616 Quarto with its explicitly and harshly moralistic conclusion. We now know from W. W. Greg's splendid researches that the 1616 Quarto is a far more respectable (that is, less corrupted) dramatic text than is the 1604 Quarto.¹ But before we accept the moralism of the 1616 Quarto as a key to Marlowe's tragic intention, we must ask whether it represents a more authentic version of the Dr. Faustus which Marlowe (and possibly a collaborator) originally conceived. I am not alone in thinking that despite its flaws, cuts, and evident corruption, the 1604 text is, as a whole, more powerful and artistically compelling than is the 1616 text.² Indeed, if the 1604 Quarto is, as Greg argues, a memorial reconstruction of a truncated and degraded performance version of Marlowe's play, then it is a uniquely remarkable one which reproduces the main plot with extraordinary accuracy, which restores more memorable and unmistakably Marlovian passages than it omits, and which again and again either corrects errors in the 1616 text or offers more terse and vivid readings. Frederick S. Boas remarked (and Greg agrees) that the 1604 Quarto contributes as much to the presently accepted text of the main action of Dr. Faustus as does the 1616 text, which is markedly superior only in the representation of the comic sequences.³ To the main action as portrayed in the 1604 Quarto, the 1616 Quarto adds only the puzzling Pope Bruno episodes, and the pedestrian allegorical sequences and choruses of the last scenes, which seemed to Greg out of character with the total artistic conception of the play.⁴

While bibliographical investigations have not solved the complex problems of Marlowe's text, much less the problems of interpreting Marlowe's artistic intention, they have swept away some dubious assumptions which have muddled critical inquiry. For too long critics have talked about the text of Dr. Faustus as if it were a massive ruin, when there is no real evidence thAT ANY IMPORTANT SCENE HAS BEEN LOST OR REPLACED BY hack comedy. The artistic jumble and anticlimax of the fourth act is a consequence, I think, not of textual corruption but of the fundamental incapacities and limitations of Marlowe's imagination. Lacking a sure instinct for dramatic design,⁵ he reproduces in Dr. Faustus the narrative failings of the tragical history of Dr. Faustus as it is related in the Faustbook. In Marlowe's play, as in his source, the hero's defiant, blasphemous choice of black magic is a splendid beginning; his final moments of dread and despair are a powerful conclusion. But between these two poles of spiritual crisis, the history of Faustus lacks dramatic intensity and narrative substance; the emphasis falls on the astonishing adventures in sorcery, which can be far more easily talked about than acted out, and which do not in themselves sustain the essential drama of the hero's progress toward damnation.

Of course, Marlowe might have found alternatives to the slapstick comedy from the Faustbook which he incorporated in his fourth act. He might have created absorbing scenes of spiritual discovery in which Faustus, increasingly aware of the futility of his bargain with the Devil, turns with true longing toward salvation. Greatly portrayed, Faustus' spiritual struggles—his waverings between exhilaration and despondency, stoic resolution and despair—might have provided an essential core of psychological and moral action between the first and last acts. But though Marlowe superbly portrays his hero on the heights of aspiration and in the depths of despair, he does not trace the path which leads Faustus from one spiritual extreme to the other. Not interested in, or perhaps capable of, depicting psychological nuance and process, he allows the allegorical machinery of good and bad angels to conventionalize and externalize Faustus' spiritual struggles, even while he ekes out his fable with seriocomic episodes from his source.

I do not mean to oversimplify either Marlowe's failings or the artistic problems which he faced in writing Dr. Faustus. Just as his hero seeks the unattainable, Marlowe attempts in art the impossible: namely, to translate into specific human terms and effective theater his amorphous, rhapsodic idea of man's transcendent potentialities. His inability to fashion appropriate artistic correlatives for his metaphysical vision is perhaps more apparent to us than it was to "credulous" Elizabethans, who, we say, were awed by a few squibs, or by flights of poetic fancy and seriocomic sorceries. But perhaps even on the Elizabethan stage, the scenes of Faustus' magical arts did not seem magical enough, because several of them are omitted from the briefer 1604 Quarto.

Even clothed in the conventionalities of the Faustbook, Marlowe's fascination with the supernatural is very much the expression of a unique temperament. The elements of the supernatural in other Elizabethan plays are merely literary, drawn from folklore and popular superstition, and allied to the fantasy of dreams rather than the speculations of philosophy. For Marlowe, however, the dream of transcendent or supernatural power has momentous intellectual seriousness; it is his unique "philosophical" contribution to the Renaissance theorizing about power which in Machiavelli and Bacon takes a more purely pragmatic form. It is revealing that Marlowe, who established the Machiavellian herovillain on the Elizabethan stage, could not fix his attention on the petty arena of politics or on the paltry goal of wealth and political sovereignty. The sweet fruition of an earthly crown is no medicine for Tamburlaine's dying fury, nor is it, even in Tamburlaine, Part I, an adequate object for Tamburlaine's essentially metaphysical longings.⁶ Nothing merely earthly or merely human could be commensurate with Marlowe's passion for the heroic.

We do not know how Marlowe's metaphysical longings struck his contemporaries. We do know that his plays fascinated them, and we know what they thought about Marlowe's blasphemous life and death. We must necessarily distinguish between Marlowe's life (as Elizabethans perhaps imagined it) and his art. But we cannot assume that the two are completely unrelated. We do not arrive at a more just and scholarly interpretation of Dr. Faustus by ignoring contemporary opinions about Marlowe and by putting aside the ideas attributed to him by contemporary accusers. Similarly we cannot argue that the Baines note and the Arian disputation said to be Marlowe's tell us nothing about the mind which created Dr. Faustus, while we seek the key to Marlowe's artistic intention in pedestrian plays which he probably never saw.⁷ No doubt Marlowe's contemporaries exaggerated as well as distorted his heterodoxy. Vehement accusations of atheism were notoriously casual and inaccurate in the Renaissance, and Marlowe was the kind of man who incited other men's malice and enmity. But while the evidence of his "atheism" is circumstantial (and the circumstances themselves are doubtful), one is nevertheless struck by the correspondence and consistency of the accusations made We must against and Marlowe by Kyd, Baines, and others.⁸ We must wonder, furthermore, whether the legend of Marlowe's atheism could have flourished well into the seventeenth century, if Dr. Faustus, his one play that held the Jacobean stage and reading public, had seemed as obviously orthodox to viewers then as it does to scholars today.

This is not to say that the scurrilities of the Baines note or the Arian arguments of the theological disputation correspond to the profounder vision of Dr. Faustus, which though written in the last year of Marlowe's life, when he was publicly flaunting his heresies, seems far less a manifesto of heroic defiance and aberrant enthusiasms than do his earliest plays. Paul Kocher would explain the apparent retreat toward orthodoxy in Dr. Faustus as Marlowe's instinctive shudder before the possibility of hell.⁹ But this psychological conjecture ignores the insistent ironies of the play, which embody Marlowe's lucid intellectual awareness of his hero's failings and failures. From the beginning, mean sensual appetites intermingle with Faustus' Promethean aspirations. From the beginning, he is too glutted with self-conceit to see that his mastery over Mephistophilis is mere appearance and that he defies heavenly law only to accept the bondage of hell. Hungering for immortality, he trades his hope of salvation for twenty-four years of pleasure and profit, but even the terms of this ridiculous bargain are not honored, because he never attains the powers or the knowledge which magic promised. On the stage, he is never more than a master of illusions, pranks, and magic shows, who grows enamored of his own shadows, and who parodies divine omnipotence, even as in turn he is parodied by the silly clown.¹⁰ Aware at last that he cannot command the elemental forces of nature, he would lose himself in them; in ironic peripeteia, his creative impulse becomes a passion for self-annihilation.

The ironic lesson of Faustus' tragedy is clear enough, I suppose, but it is not clear to whom the lesson was addressed. Was it intended for the mass of Elizabethan theatergoers, who had neither the intellectual capacity nor the daring to emulate Faustus' career and who would, if at all, damn themselves in more conventional ways? Similar to other men in his vanity, Faustus is extraordinary in his hubristic daring and in his heroic willingness to embrace a dreadful fate, though he first puts aside the thought of the inconceivable future and later cringes before his self-imposed destiny. From a prudential viewpoint Faustus' choice of necromancy is foolish as well as self-destructive. His thirst for the absolute ignores the alternative path of caution and acceptance which is always open. One can be saved like the Old Man, not doomed like Faustus, just as one can be an Ismene, not an Antigone; a Horatio, not a Hamlet. The way of survival—of the mean—is announced and exemplified by the Chorus of Marlowe's play, which, shaken by the spectacle of tragic suffering, moralizes the error of tragic daring.

To walk the path that the Chorus delineates, however, is not to be Faustus. For though the Chorus speaks of the bough that might have grown straight, its metaphor of growth and fulfillment is earthbound and passive. The heroic choice is not between alternative paths of self-fulfillment but between the self-destructiveness of mighty strivings and the salvation that demands self-abnegation and the denial of heroic aspiration. For inevitably man's attempts at greatness must break against a universal order which is predicated on, and which demands, human obedience and denial. Thus Marlowe's heroes do not cry out, like Hamlet and Lear, against worlds out of ethical joint. Like figures of Greek mythology, they hurl the gauntlets of their will and ambition at whatever gods may be. Their defiances are Promethean, their flights of aspiration Icarian, their challenges Titanic. It is not enough for Tamburlaine to subdue the monarchs of the earth. Ultimately and inevitably he must set his standards against the heavens.¹¹

We could more confidently speak of Dr. Faustus as a cosmic tragedy if its plot sustained the philosophical magnitude of the opening scenes, where fundamental questions are raised about man's destiny. Unfortunately, however, the great concluding scene seems to lack the intellectual resonances of the first act. The earlier philosophical questioning of human limitations seems to have no bearing on the ultimate drama of Faustus' spiritual anguish, which seems wholly personal, and emotional, and explicable by Christian doctrine. What Faustus has dared or done seems now irrelevant, because, according to doctrine, he need only repent and have faith to be saved. As an intellectual rebel, Faustus has mythic significance. As a writhing sinner, he seems merely another example of religious despair. To be sure, Faustus proclaims the uniqueness of his fate as one hounded by an unrelenting God for having committed the unpardonable sin of daring.¹² But scholars insist that Faustus is mistaken; they would see him as the victim of his own illusions, not as the sacrifice to a universal order hostile to human greatness.

Perhaps the desire to conventionalize the viewpoint of Dr. Faustus is an inevitable reaction against earlier attempts to magnify Marlowe's importance as intellectual rebel and prophet. Certainly there is a need to reexamine the usual and familiar generalizations about Marlowe and his age. But it is not easy to demythologize a writer who was a legend in his own time and who serves modern scholars as an exemplar of the restless questioning spirit of late Renaissance thought. A useful beginning might be the recognition that there is little of the "Faustian" as Goethe conceived it in Marlowe's Faustus, even as there is little that is modern or scientific in Marlowe's thought. No compeer of Bacon or Galileo, Marlowe's "philosophy" was felt, not argued; poetic, not intellectual. Empiricism, naturalism, mathematical rationalism—the main currents of late Renaissance philosophic thought that converged in the scientific revolutions of the early seventeenth century—were alien to him. He could not insist on the standard of rationalism when he yearned always for mysteries that lay beyond human reason and experience—beyond the here and now of Renaissance humanism. Thus where Bacon seeks the scientific knowledge that eradicates mysteries and enables man to control a world of natural "second causes," Marlowe's Faustus aspires to a control of nature which is immediately miraculous and "divine." Where the modernity of Renaissance humanism lay in its increasing concern with the purely natural and human, Marlowe was fascinated by the superhuman and by the very metaphysical speculations which seemed to a Bacon and Montaigne barren and futile. Despite a wide-ranging skepticism about religious belief, he hungered for an altitude of thought and experience. He brooded over the nature of the Diety, whose supreme authority and limitless power provide (in Tamburlaine as well as in Dr. Faustus) a measure of human potentialities and limitations. His God is no tired vaudevillian, as Sartre imagines; his heroes' blasphemy is not a denial of God but a challenge to His supremacy. They do not deify mankind; they would be gods.

Instead of placing Marlowe in the very vanguard of Renaissance humanistic thought, then, we should recognize that his bent of mind is more medieval than modern, and his response to experience is more antihumanistic than humanistic. Man as such does not delight him—nor woman either. His Zenocrate and Helen are incarnations of poetic aspirations, not of feminine beauty. His recollections of Ovid, as in Faustus' dying speech, translate rhapsodic sensuality into metaphysical dread. We look in vain in his plays for an appreciation of the enduring qualities of the human spirit, or for those personal relationships which are treasured in the more genuinely humanistic art of his contemporaries. Indeed, very near the surface of Marlowe's enthusiasms is a desolate sense of the emptiness of much of existence; and at the heart of his "philosophy" is something that might be called "contempt for the world." He cannot rejoice in the human (much less in human self-sufficiency) because he considers that which is merely human worthless. The humanistic enthusiasms of the early Tamburlaine are not to be found in Faustus' opening speech,¹³ which implies that man's condition is merely pitiful; he lives like a criminal under the sentence of death, and his crime is inherent in his humanity.

Other Elizabethans felt the pang of mortality more immediately and sensuously. They knew that all must pass and that no ecstasy can make the stars stand still. But they also knew the preciousness of youth, of beauty, and of love. For a despairing Faustus, however, the beauty of Helen is no anodyne. There is no depth or intensity of experience that compensates for mortality, no accomplishment that does not seem ultimately trivial. Because death is a metaphysical outrage which annihilates the meaning of existence, Marlowe's heroes begin as lovers of the world they would remake—they would seize their day—and end as nihilists. Other Elizabethan tragic heroes learn how to die and, in learning this, rob death of its infinite terror. Their victory is denied the Marlovian hero, who can never accept the elemental facts of his humanity.

Renaissance humanists inherited the ancient saw that all philosophy is learning how to die. For Marlowe, however, the crux of philosophy is why men must die. He knows the traditional justifications for the ways of God. He links Faustus' rebellion to the original impulse to sin in Lucifer and Adam, and he thinks on the cure which Christ's sacrifice dearly bought. But he will not, like Christian apologists, explain original sin as a collusion of feminine vanity and masculine uxoriousness. In Dr. Faustus, as in Greek mythology, man's primal disobedience is a Promethean impulse. It is the questioning mind, not unruly passions, that threatens the divinely established order. For with knowledge enough man—even a sinner like Oedipus—could become like the gods.

Not convinced of the beneficence of universal order, the Greek mind could equate tragic hubris with nobility and altruism. It could imagine a fearful Zeus, who had usurped supreme power in the universe, denying man the gifts of civilization which might threaten his own supremacy. Apologists for an omnipotent and loving Christian God could not imagine a Promethean kind of disobedience. Since divine law is necessarily perfect, man's disobedience is necessarily vicious or absurd. The very desire to fathom supernal mysteries becomes, in Christian apologetics, a symptom of man's spiritual malaise. The Old Testament answer to a Job is ad hominem in the largest sense: what right has man to question? The argument of Paradise Lost is similarly ad hominem. Milton does not rationalize the edict against tasting moral knowledge; he insists rather that the edict is one which only the egotistical, undisciplined, or self-conceited would wish to overstep. In fact, the limitation seems arbitrary only to those incapable of self-knowledge, who are seduced by Satan or make a god of their own appetites.

Marlowe would not argue the contrary. The mood of exultation in the first part of Tamburlaine fades in Part 11, where Marlowe intuits the inhumanity of titanic aspiration. In Dr. Faustus he anatomizes the vices of the would-be superman, who spurns splendid accomplishments because they do not satisfy an ignoble egotism. Faustus practices medicine without compassion for human suffering, and worse still, he would abandon his studies because his fame is already established and the conquest of death eludes him. He despises the petty quiddities of the law, but he is not inspired by a nobler ideal of justice. Incapable of selfless dedication to his studies, he can use the very chop logic he scorns in philosophy to justify his abandoning of theology and his pursuit of black magic. Because he is glutted with self-conceit, his altruistic schemes are self-aggrandizing: he dreams of pleasure and profit.

But if we say that at the start Faustus is arrogant, vain, and guilty of the cardinal sin of pride, then we have also to say that his "fall" is neither a simple moral degradation nor a conventional seduction from conscience and belief. Compare, for example, the pattern of his fate with that of Macbeth, who before he succumbs to the temptation of power is at the height of his nobility.¹⁴ From the moment he decides to murder Duncan, Macbeth's path is precipitously downward; his life becomes a darkening horror of self-hatred and murderous acts. Faustus' tragic career is more paradoxical, because even as his grand illusions fade and his intellectual powers dissipate in petty shows and sensuality, his moral awareness grows. By strict Christian tenet, Faustus may be more innocent at the beginning of the play than at the close; to an audience, however, he is most arrogant, most contemptuous of other men, most scornful of religion before he falls. His fall is a moral education and discovery, during which he is humanized, not degraded. Though he speaks of his hardened heart and would have the Old Man tormented, for misery loves company, he gains in damnation a humility, compassion, and sympathy for fellow human beings which he did not before possess. Where Macbeth's fall increasingly isolates him from other men, Faustus' fall is a means to communion with others. At the last he is surrounded by men who would pray for him and protect him from the Devil, but Faustus will not allow them to risk their lives and'souls for him. I do not mean to oversimplify our response to the Faustus who cringes before Mephistophilis and Lucifer, and who would lose himself with Helen. I would suggest, however, that Marlowe's portrayal of the dying Faustus is far more poignant and disturbing than many scholars will admit. If Faustus were obviously lost and corrupted, there would be no final problem of interpretation, no need to pore over Elizabethan sermons and theological treatises to explain why he is not saved. It is only because Faustus seems so much more gracious in the fifth act than in the first that the reason for his damnation must be argued out, frequently with such doctrinal casuistries as turn the God of infinite love into a petty legalist.¹⁵

Faustus claims that his doom was sealed by his blasphemous defiance of God. Theology denies his claim on the ground that no trespass has irrevocable consequences and no human act is beyond divine pardon. Yet even theology admits that human acts may have irrevocable consequences. After original sin, man's nature and his destiny were irrevocably changed. Knowing good and evil, he forfeited the paradise of innocence and entered the world of moral and mortal experience, from which only grace might redeem him.

Grace is grace, say the reprobates of Measure for Measure, despite all controversy. But grace in Dr. Faustus is problematical because Marlowe would have it so. He could have shown in the last scene a Faustus who is tormented by the legions and the prospect of hell as he reaches toward a glorious heaven beyond his grasp. Marlowe chose instead to make Lucifer merely a spectator to the final agony of his victim, who shrinks more from the wrath of God than from the terror of hell. Mephistophilis may define hell as the absence of God, but Faustus finds the presence of God unbearable, because he sees, not the loving Father, but the wrathful Jehovah who cast the rebellious angels down to hell.¹⁶ There is pity on earth but not in heaven, though Christ's blood streams in the firmament. We can, of course, cite theological reasons why Faustus must be damned: he lacks faith, he does not believe in God's redeeming love, he is guilty of the sin of despair. But we cannot by references to Christian doctrine resolve the aesthetic issues of a play that calls doctrine into question. We cannot argue the theological reasons why Faustus does not merit God's pity, when the audience is deeply moved, when the Old Man pities Faustus, and even Mephistophilis was touched to momentary compassion. Shall the audience and a fallen angel pity what God cannot?

That Marlowe's God is a deity of power, not love, has been suggested by various critics,¹⁷ and can be inferred from his plays, the arguments of the Arian disputation, and the ideas attributed to Marlowe by his contemporary accusers. But we cannot from such various sources abstract a single static Marlovian theology which explains the world view of Dr. Faustus. For the Arian disputation denies the divinity of Christ, and the scurrilities of the Baines note jeer at Christ as a lewd effeminate imposter. Yet in Dr. Faustus the Sacrifice is real; indeed Faustus' attempts to parody it merely accentuate his hybristic blindness. Because the Baines note records, not Marlowe's most private convictions, but the outrageous heresies he chose¹⁸ recklessly to flaunt in public, we need not choose between it and Dr. Faustus as his final religious "testament." Nor need we attempt the impossible task of reconciling the one with the other. But we can note the illuminating ways in which the ideas of the Baines note converge with, as well as contradict, the tragic theology of Dr. Faustus.

Marlowe's free thinking is evident in almost all of his art. He reveals aberrant sympathies in Tamburlaine and he snipes at Christian assumptions and professions in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. In Dr. Faustus his quarrel with Christianity continues. The Church is still for him a place of superstitious rites and false authorities.¹⁹ The true revelation of the divine is the universe itself, in which God's Apollonian creativity is manifest.²⁰ Marlowe could imagine his heroic Creator exacting a fearful sacrifice as the price of man's pardon. But he could not imagine, nor does he imply in Dr. Faustus, that this supreme and universal Power ever assumed man's inferior shape, contemptible weakness, and mortality.²¹

As a philosopher, Faustus is superior to the crude vulgarities of the Baines note but not to its mockery of Christ. He does not proclaim that Jesus is an unmanly pseudo-god, but by temperament, and with conscious ironic wit, he plays the role of an antichrist. Unlike the God who became man, Faustus is man who would be god, who would escape the human condition which Christ willingly assumed, and who deliberately seeks the satanic temptations which Christ rejected. Like Christ, but without Christ's love, Faustus has healed the sick, and he now spurns medicine because he cannot by it reenact Christ's miracles: he cannot, he complains, raise men from the dead or make them live eternally. Deliberately parodying the Sacrifice, he sells what Christ died to purchase; he signs the Devil's pact with his own blood and with Christ's words on his lips, even as later he dies with a paraphrase of the Last Words on his lips. But the irony of the last scene is very different from that of earlier moments where Faustus played the conscious parodist of Christ, for now the mock-Passion has become real; and Faustus' death is a sacrifice which, like Christ's, reveals the divine will—that is to say, it is in the sacrifices which the gods require that their law is revealed to us.

We can argue that Faustus too late—or with too little conviction—turns toward Christ. But we cannot say that the Faustus of the early scenes ignores the Sacrifice when he rejects his faith. He does not, as scholars would have it, describe Christianity without Christ or delude himself with schoolboy sophistries about the possibility of salvation. No character so foolish could claim the intellectual authority or the magnitude of accomplishment which is granted to Faustus by the Chorus and the speeches of the opening scene. If the impatient tone and the cursory quality of Faustus' deliberations seem to convict him of superficiality, we must remember that he is not for the first time considering the possibilities that lie within man's scope. Even as the play begins he is "settling" his studies: i.e., summing up intellectual accounts, reviewing the circumstances which led him toward forbidden pursuits. His accounting (as the dramatic occasion requires)²² is elliptical and poetic, not discursive; yet it has a philosophical amplitude. Faustus begins, as it were, at the beginning, with man's conception in sin; and he contemplates man's fate under the aspects of time and eternity. If all men must die because the wages of sin are death, then that is hard, since no man can escape sinning. Or rather that would be intolerably hard, except that Christ's sacrifice holds out the possibility of pardon and eternal life—a possibility which Faustus seems to ignore:

Jerome's Bible, Faustus, view it well:
Stipendium peccati mors est. Ha! Stipendium, etc.
    [He reads]
The reward of sin is death. That's hard.
Si peccase negamus, fallimur
Et nulla est in nobis veritas.
If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us.
Why then belike we must sin,
And so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera:
What will be, shall be! Divinity, adieu!
(I.i.38-49)

Ignoring the conditional quality of Jerome's sentence, Faustus seems to construct a faulty syllogism of inevitable damnation. Man, we protest, need not claim that he is innocent. He can be saved if he confesses his sinfulness and throws himself on the mercy of God. But is not this salvation also hard for one who would believe in the dignity of man? What value can man claim for his being if its criminality can be absolved only by confession and surrender? Faustus will not save himself by imitating Christ's submissiveness; he seeks instead to fulfill the "divine," and yet forbidden, potentialities of his own genius. His model of imitation is the God of force and creative energy whom Tamburlaine first "served" and then challenged.

We can say that Faustus despaired because he misconceived the nature of God. But taking a larger perspective on Marlowe's art, we can infer that Marlowe despaired because he could not imagine a God other than the Deity of Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, even though with maturer sympathies he came at last to see that the untrammeled and transcendent "divine" will is an ethical horror. Can Marlowe's God forgive? No doubt he can forgive the Old Man, who bows his head in submission, even as Tamburlaine can forgive those who bow before his dreadful edicts. But this is the "charity" of satisfied will, not of compassionate love; its obverse is the damnation of Faustus, which echoes imaginatively the slaughter of the Damascan Virgins in Tamburlaine. Just as the fatal banners hang over Tamburlaine's tents at Damascus, "reflexing the hue of blood," at Faustus' damnation Christ's blood streams in the Firmament.²³ At the beginning of Dr. Faustus the sublime charity of the Sacrifice is poised against Faustus' consuming egotism; at the close of the play it is poised against the unpitying wrath of God. Thus while the tragic theology of Dr. Faustus admits the Incarnation, which is derided in Marlowe's "atheistic" pronouncements, the Godlike and the Christlike remain antithetical. The ethic of mercy is humane, promulgated by the Son, who became man. The ethic of heaven—of the cosmos—in Marlowe's view, is inhumane, futilely grasped at by an arrogant Faustus and exemplified on earth by Tamburlaine's dedications to power and the law of his own pitiless will.²⁴

Not surprisingly, then, we find nothing in Marlowe's plays that resembles the tragic acceptances of other dramatists. Rejecting his early Marlovian enthusiasms, George Chapman fashioned a nobler ideal of the stoic fortitude that endures and triumphs over adversity. But when Marlowe outgrew his jejune infatuation with power, he could not reach beyond the bitter pleasure of exposing his illusions. Thus no tragic fortitude sustains Faustus, who shrinks from absolute daring to wretched impotence, who, cringing before the Devil's physical tormentings, is less heroic than the Old Man, the mean of life over which the superman would soar. If we assume that Dr. Faustus, composed in the last year of Marlowe's life, is a piece of orthodox moralism, than we must wonder at the sordid and unregenerate circumstances of Marlowe's death. If, however, we see in Dr. Faustus Marlowe's testament of despair, then we see also a perfect correspondence between the nihilism of Marlowe's art and of his life. For it is the horror of the void—of loss and impotence—humanly experienced which is conveyed by Faustus' last soliloquy. Recoiling from the intellect that betrayed him, Faustus turns from thought to sensuality, from the pursuit of knowledge to the burning of books,²⁵ and to a longing for self-annihilation which is perhaps also exemplified in Marlowe's life. If Baines's account is accurate, Marlowe, in the last weeks of his life, courted the stake by publicly and repeatedly declaring atheistic and treasonous libels.²⁶ And finally, in a drunken, almost suicidal quarrel (which he seems to have provoked), he found a lasting escape from the vexation of his own thought.

Notes

¹ See the introduction to Greg's Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616, Parallel Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).

² See, e.g., C. L. Barber, "'The Form of Faustus' Fortunes Good or Bad"," Tulane Drama Review, VIII (1964), 93, n. 2.

³The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, ed. Frederick S. Boas (London, 1932), p. 23.

⁴ Greg, Parallel Texts, pp. 230-232.

⁵ One cannot attribute all the varied structural failings of Marlowe's plays to textual corruption. Tamburlaine, Part I, succeeds to the extent that it does despite a singular lack of dramatic form.

⁶ See Una Ellis-Fermor's acute discussion of poetry and idea in Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowe (London, 1927), pp. 27 ff.

⁷ Plays such as Nathaniel Woodes's Conflict of Conscience.

⁸ Kyd's apology and the fragments of the Arian disputation he said belonged to Marlowe are reprinted in F. S. Boas, The Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. cx-cxiii. Kyd's accusations against Marlowe and Richard Baines's note are reprinted by Paul Kocher in Christopher Marlowe (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1946), pp. 25, 34-36. Kocher argues very persuasively the consistency of atheistic ideas attributed to Marlowe by various contemporaries (pp. 27-32).

⁹ Kocher, p. 119.

¹⁰ See my earlier essay, "The Comic Synthesis in Doctor Faustus," ELH, XXII (1955), 165-172.

¹¹ 'Again and again the thought of man challenging or displacing the gods recurs in the first part of Tamburlaine, couched usually in allusions to Greek mythology. See, e.g., II.iii.18 ff.; II.vi.1-8; II.vii.12-15; IV.iv.71-72; V.ii.387-390, 447-448. It is revealing that the great apostrophe to man's aspiring mind "still climbing after knowledge infinite" (II.vii. 18 ff.) immediately follows a reference to Jove's deposition of Saturn, king of the gods. In Part II Tamburlaine threatens to turn his cavalieros against the heavens (II.iv. 103-106) when Zenocrate dies. And when he feels his fatal illness, he would "march against the powers of heaven" to "slaughter the gods" (V.iii.48-50). All references to Marlowe's plays are to The Complete Plays, ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1963).

¹² "But Faustus' offence can ne'er be pardoned. / The serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus" (V.ii.41-42).

¹³ 'Concluding his summary of his feats in medicine, Faustus remarks, "Yet art thou still but Faustus and a man." And to be but a man is of course to be subject to death.

¹⁴ In paralleling the careers of Faustus and Macbeth, Helen Gardner emphasizes only their degradations ("The Tragedy of Damnation," Essays and Studies, 1, 1948, 46 ff.). Yet we have only to compare the last scenes of Dr. Faustus with the last scenes of Macbeth to realize how different are the spiritual fates of the two "damned" heroes.

¹⁵ One example is W. W. Greg's argument that Faustus is ultimately damned because he makes love to a witch (Helen), in "The Damnation of Faustus," MLR, XLI (1946), 97-107.

¹⁶ Similarly Faustus' fellow scholars shrink from his side lest they tempt the wrath of God. The heavens can bum as well as hell. When the opening Chorus speaks of "melting heavens," it refers, not to tears of mercy and compassion, but to the heat of vindictive wrath. Indeed, "melting heavens conspired [Faustus'] overthrow."

¹⁷ 'See Kocher, pp. 71 et passim.

¹⁸ We can only speculate about Marlowe's motives for publicizing his atheism. See n. 26.

¹⁹ According to Baines, Marlowe said, "The first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe," and he accused Moses of tricking the Jews so as to implant an "everlasting supersition" in their hearts (Kocher, p. 34). To be sure, Marlowe's target in Dr. Faustus is the hated papacy. But Baines reports Marlowe's statement "that if there be any god or any good Religion, then it is in the papistes because the service of god is performed with more Cerimonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crownes" (Kocher, p. 35). Marlowe may well have been attracted to the solemn ritual and mysteries of the Catholic service.

²⁰ The first antagonism between Faustus and Mephistophilis arises when Faustus asks "who made the world." Faustus tries to think "upon God that made the world," but he is ordered by Lucifer (II.ii.108) to "talk not of Paradise or creation."

²¹ See the emphasis on the eternality and omnipotence of the deity in the Arian disputation, Kyd, pp. cxi, cxii.

²² The dreariness of the opening scene of Toumeur's The Atheist's Tragedy, where D'Amville discusses his philosophy at length with his accomplice Borachio, provides an instructive contrast to the brilliant opening scene of Dr. Faustus.

²³ Doctrinally, of course, Christ's blood is the symbol of redemption. But the immediate imaginative and emotional force of the line, I think, is to evoke the agony of the Crucifixion. When the red banners hang at Damascus (Tamburlaine), the Virgins are slaughtered at spearpoint, and in Part II, Tamburlaine would "set black streamers in the firmament / To signify the slaughter of the gods" (v.iii.49-50). In Tamburlaine, at least, bloody hues in the firmament are associated with implacable will and destructiveness. Equally revealing is the description of Tamburlaine's "mildness of mind / That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood" (IV.i.51-58). Such is the "mercy" of satisfied will at Damascus in Part I.

²⁴ This is not to agree with Una Ellis-Fermor that Marlowe envisions in Dr. Faustus a Satanic world order (The Frontiers of Drama, London, 1948, pp. 141 ff.). Cruelty, sadistic destructiveness, and vindictiveness are characteristic of the would-be god, Tamburlaine (or Lucifer), in his degradation, not of the wrathful deity of Marlowe's last play.

²⁵ It is interesting that Faustus' last despairing attempt to appease his angry God by offering to burn his books echoes Envy's sentence: "I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned" (II.ii.128).

²⁶ To read Baines's account of Marlowe's obscene and treasonous public statements—an account corroborated by others—is to know that whatever Marlowe's motive was, it was not a hope of winning believers from Christianity.