Critics have long recognized that Doctor Faustus is both a tragedy and a morality play. Because Faustus despairs, tragedy wins out in the end; but along the way semi-allegorical characters periodically wrestle over the soul of Faustus, reminding us of the contrasting medieval pattern of fall and redemption. Mr. Clifford Davidson¹ sees significance in Faustus' Wittenberg background and relates his hardened heart to the Lutheran emphasis on the bondage of the will. Such an emphasis, with its concomitant insistence that fallen man has no power to initiate his own repentance, is surely present in the play, underlying the sense of tragic inevitability. On the other hand, the speeches of the Good and Evil Angels, the Old Man, and Faustus himself convince us dramatically, if not theologically, that repentance is a constant possibility. This plays against the overly deterministic first element and helps to restore the balance of initiative between hero and opposing force important to the tragic effect. Contributing to and sustaining this tragic balance is a third structural pattern: the inverted saint's life.

Marlowe was accused in his own time of holding unorthodox religious views. One target of his attacks, according to both the Kyd deposition and the Baines memorandum, was Scriptural miracles. Kyd and Baines report statements by Marlowe that such miracles were not the work of God but of clever conjurors who could trick simple people with their arts: "Moyses was but a Jugler and … one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he"; "it was an easy matter for Moyses being brought up in all the artes of the Egiptians to abuse the Jewes being a rude and grosse people."² We cannot know how seriously these assertions were made; but even if they were only jesting tavern talk it may have been this idea of the saint as magician that led Marlowe to see in his magician, Faustus, a kind of inverted saint. In any case, the events and language of the play present a parody of the conventional saint's life so consistent that it can hardly be an accident.

The saint's life is a didactic biography. As biography it follows the course of the subject's life. As a didactic work, however, it tends to stress certain features of every holy life, so that a kind of predictable pattern usually emerges, containing some or all of the following elements: early life (sometimes wordly and sinful), conversion to God, sacramental reception into the church, struggle against various temptations of the devil (sometimes overcome with the direct aid of God or his agents), miracles and mystic experiences (sometimes climaxed by a form of the beatific vision), holy death. Doctor Faustus turns the whole pattern upside down to tell the story of a man who after an orthodox early life is "converted" to the devil and seals his pact with a diabolic sacrament; who undergoes a series of "temptations" by the Good Angel and his own conscience, from which his mentor Mephostophilis "rescues" him; who performs "miracles" that are quite literally conjuring tricks; whose heavenly vision is a Greek strumpet; who is received at his death by his eternal master, Lucifer.³

Thus one can see three dramatic movements operating simultaneously in Doctor Faustus. As a Christian soul, Faustus is caught between his two angels, swinging between remorse and desperate pleasure-seeking, not lost until the final moment. In theological terms he is not damned until he dies; deliverance is always possible if he will repent and call for mercy, and in the dramatic tradition of the morality such deliverance was often postponed until the last minute. At several points Faustus seems capable of breaking through to God before the devils return him to spiritual insensibility.

But against the hope for an eleventh-hour rescue raised by the morality elements is the increasing sense of inevitability in Faustus' downward career. The morality upswing demands only a change of heart; but Faustus loses his freedom to change as he hardens into the constricting mold of proud despair. It is his pride (like Lucifer's before him) that initiates the despair—and it is, of course, this same pride that gives him heroic stature in the tragic context: that is, in human terms rather than divine. Faustus respects reason and justice, the great human distinction and the great human achievement. It follows that when he turns to "Jeromes Bible" in the opening scene he finds not the message of grace to the humble but the cold logic of damnation: "Stipendium peccati, mors est … Si peccasse, negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas." And if the wages of sin is death and all are sinners, the proud human intellect can come to only one conclusion:

Why then belike we must sinne,
And so consequently die,
I, we must die, an everlasting death.⁴

The interaction of pride and despair directs Faustus' course throughout the play. Having made the diabolic pact he often longs to repent, but pride in reason and justice still blinds him to the mercy that lies beyond them. Christian theologians have always recognized the arrogance at the core of despair, the stiff-necked refusal to beg as a gift the salvation one cannot earn.⁵ Faustus is by turns anguished, hysterical, remorseful—but never humble.

It is the peculiar nature of Faustus' sin that allows tragedy to operate in a Christian morality context. The grace is offered but the protagonist personally blocks his own escape to it. Despair renders his vision intensely subjective, thus allowing dramatically for a dual view of God—tyrannic antagonist as well as loving father—without outrage to orthodoxy. It is possible, depending on one's predilections, to see one or the other God as existing only in Faustus' diseased mind. God does not appear in his own person, unequivocally. The Good Angel and the Old Man may be taken as his agents, but they may also be merely a delusive inner voice and a fallible human being. The certitude of God, a hindrance to the questioning spirit of tragedy, is blurred in a haze of subjectivity.

Faustus' career as an anti-saint performing an exact parody of the traditional words and deeds of the third pattern, shares with the tragic pattern an inevitable progression to a preordained end; and with the morality pattern the down-and-up movement of temptation and triumph. A more detailed analysis of the play will serve to clarify the parody strain and its interaction with the other two kinds of structure.

The prologue begins the parody of sainthood by describing Faustus' early devotion to divinity (11. 14-19). As the man destined for heroic virtue eventually becomes dissatisfied with lesser endeavors, so Faustus starts by turning away from the limitations of divinity. These limitations are, from the orthodox point of view, mainly in himself; his use of logic in reasoning from the wages-of-sin and all-men-are-sinners texts shows him reducing God to a level with earthly concerns. That his whole study of divinity has been poisoned with pride is evident from his boast to Valdes and Cornelius:

And I, that have with subtle Sillogismes
Gravel'd the Pastors of the Germane Church,
And made the flowring pride of Wittenberg
Sworne to my Problemes …
(1, i, 134-137).

For Faustus, theology was merely a field in which to display his gifts of reasoning. It is fitting that his "subtle Sillogismes" should lead him away from the divinity he never really understood in its essence. The inversion is complete when he turns to magic, finding a new heaven in "Lines, Circles, Letters, Characters" (I, i, 75-78). The saint aspires through faith to be God's child; Faustus parodies the idea in his determination to father a god.

A sound Magitian is a Demi-god,
Here tire my braines to get a Deity.⁶

There is deep irony in his delighted imaginings:

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please?
Resolve me of all ambiguities?
Performe what desperate enterprise I will?
(1, i, 106-108)

He will. All ambiguities will be resolved in the end, only too clearly; all enterprises will be desperate because Faustus will live in despair; spirits will fetch him what he has pleased to choose—damnation.

Valdes and Cornelius are the first of Faustus' "spiritual advisors."⁷ They encourage the new ambitions of their convert with rewards significantly phrased:

Val.: Faustus, these bookes, thy wit, and our experience,
shall make all Nations to Canonize us …

Cor.: The miracles that magick will performe,
Will make thee vow to study nothing else.⁸

These preceptors indoctrinate Faustus in his anti-religion. They promise to supply him with books: Roger Bacon and "Albanus" (probably Albertus Magnus), the Hebrew Psalter and the New Testament—for incantations. They will teach him the rites and ceremonies, instruct him in the rudiments of his new discipline. They are, in fact, preparing their catechumen for his formal reception into the "church," in the manner of a saint's life. There is even a reminder, as one would expect in the case of a saint, that this candidate will in time go beyond his instructors:

Val.: First I'le instruct thee in the rudiments,
And then wilt thou be perfecter than I
(1, i, 193-184).

In scene iii Faustus' first rite is a parody of baptism. Instead of renouncing the devil and all his works, Faustus renounces the Trinity ("valeat numen triplex Jehovae").⁹ When he performs the two central symbolic acts of baptism, sprinkling holy water and making the sign of the cross, the object is to invoke not God but Mephostophilis. The parody continues with the entrance of Mephostophilis garbed, by Faustus' order, in a Franciscan habit, to match his role as spiritual guide. The guidance itself carries on the mockery, for Faustus is told how to win hell:

Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring
Is stoutly to abjure all godlinesse,
And pray devoutely to the Prince of hell
(1, iii, 278-280).

Periodically Marlowe suspends the parody and turns the values right side up again. Thus, in between Faustus' conversion to magic and his mock baptism is a short scene in which two scholars fear for the soul of their colleague. Their brief conversation gives the sense of danger necessary to balance and intensify the blasphemous comedy of the conjuring scene. In the conjuring scene itself, the danger is again asserted, this time even more tellingly, by Mephostophilis. He abandons his role as hell's advocate long enough to describe movingly the fall of the angels and their endless despair:

Why this is hell: nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I that saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternall Joyes of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hels,
In being depriv'd of everlasting blisse?
(1, iii, 301-305)

The words have a double impact because they are so incompatible with the role of the speaker. He concludes with an almost involuntary plea that Faustus abandon the desires that terrify even a devil (11. 306-307). Faustus is too exhilarated to heed the warning, but it registers with the audience.

The second act¹⁰ shows Faustus' ceremonial reception into the devil's church and his temptations by hope. Following are the third and fourth acts describing his conjuring miracles. The order of events is significant, for in the saint's life a period of trial and temptation often precedes activity as an instrument of grace, just as in Christ's life, the model for these others, the temptation in the wilderness comes before the ministry.

The first soliloquy of Act II presents Faustus in despair, wavering between stoic resolution and the desire to escape into hope. He starts wistfully, trying to think of a way out, then stiffens, wavers again at the thought of repentance, falls back once more with a recollection of the diabolic syllogism (God does not love sinners), and finally resolves to be loyal to Belzebub.

Now Faustus, must thou needs be damn'd?
Canst thou not be sav'd?
What bootes it then to thinke on God or Heaven?
Away with such vaine fancies, and despaire,
Despaire in GOD, and trust in Belzebub,
Now go not backward Faustus, be resolute.
Why waverst thou? O something soundeth in mine eare.
Abjure this Magicke, turne to God againe.
Why he loves thee not:
               The God thou serv'st is thine
                 owne appetite
Wherein is fixt the love of Belzebub,
To him, I'le build an Altar and a Church.
And offer luke-warme bloud, of new borne babes
(II, i, 390-401).

The language of the passage suggests the spiritual trials of the saint: "vaine fancies"; "be resolute"; "I'le build an Altar and a Church." When the Angels enter, Faustus is again tempted by "Contrition, Prayer, Repentance" (II, i, 405). The Bad Angel assures him they are merely lunatic illusions; he must turn his thoughts from heaven to earth. So Faustus relapses into his former state, rejoicing at his deliverance: "Faustus thou art safe.! Cast no more doubts" (II, i, 413-414).

Once tested, Faustus is ready for his sacramental entry into Lucifer's church. He invokes Mephostophilis as one would the Holy Ghost ("Veni veni Mephostophile"),"¹¹ and hears from him that Lucifer is ready to receive his votary.

In the course of this sacramental shedding of blood, Faustus becomes a demonic Christ. He repeats the words "Consummatum est," to signify that his blood like Christ's has done its work (II, i, 417).¹² But that work is to sell what Christ bought, to give back to hell the soul that Christ won from it with his blood. W. W. Greg points out that by the terms of the contract Faustus' nature is altered. He keeps his human soul but becomes "a spirit [i. e. a devil] in forme and substance."¹³ This amalgam of human and diabolical suggests a parody of the dual nature of Christ, at once human and divine.

The congealing of Faustus' blood and the mysterious "Homo fuge" represent his second temptation by grace. He wavers again, but stays in despair, and Mephostophilis is quick to produce "somewhat to delight his minde," a dance of devils. The latter phenomenon is to offset the effect of the congealed blood and the strange inscription, which come from God. In the play's total inversion, it is the inscription that seems an evil hallucination. Faustus thinks his senses deceived when he sees it (1. 467); for this anti-saint, the true visions are the "shews" of Mephostophilis. The latter, still the preceptor, concludes the scene by presenting his pupil with a book, to be persued well and guarded carefully. Faustus has his false Gospel and the sacrament is complete.

The next two "temptations" continue the inversion principle, but they are not simply repetitions of the first ones. They show the progressive hardening of Faustus' despair, preparing for the last scene when its weight will pull him down from a frantic leap to heaven. His conversation with Mephostophilis about heaven (II, ii, 570-580) shows him once more the anti-saint, tempted by heaven as true saints are tempted by the world and the flesh. "When I behold the heavens then I repent" (1. 570); that is, I am tempted to hope. His guardian devil assures him that heaven is not half so fair as earthly man. Still Faustus desires it; he makes an intellectual rejection of his magic. But the core of pride is still there. Faustus thinks his own will can turn him from evil. Because he lacks humility to ask for grace, the short essay into repentance is abortive. His heart refuses to follow his mind.

My heart is hardned, I cannot repent:
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven¹⁴
(11, ii, 589-590).

In this dilemma his thoughts turn to suicide. The next four lines recreate verbally the traditional allegorical figure of Despair, carrying the instruments of self-destruction:¹⁵

Swords, poyson halters, and invenomb'd steele,
Are laid before me to dispatch my selfe:
And long e're this, I should have done the deed,
Had not sweete pleasure conquer'd deepe despaire.

This is perhaps spelling out his condition almost too obviously, but it does create the desired impression of despair settling about him like a permanent aura, always with its implication of death. The suicide motif will reappear later. Faustus does not take his own life in the physical sense, but he is committing spiritual suicide. Now, however, he is recalled again by "sweete pleasure" to unconsciousness.

The fourth temptation takes Faustus a step further. Calling on Christ is his first open rebellion against the diabolic trinity: "O Christ my Saviour, my Saviour, / Helpe to save distressed Faustus soule" (II, ii, 652-653). Realizing his need for help, he is close to breaking out of despair. The devils must abandon persuasion and distraction for threats. The Bad Angel warns that they will tear him to pieces (1. 650); Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephostophilis appear, to frighten him into submission.

The parodic element in this rebellion is less apparent than elsewhere, until we recall the Protestant insistence on man's utter helplessness, of which God periodically reminds him. Lucifer's open show of power is equivalent in a sense to the God-directed sufferings that chastise and humble the souls of the elect. More openly parodic are Faustus' abject plea for pardon and his vow "never to looke to heaven" (II, ii, 665-666). Lucifer rewards his obedient servant with an appropriate vision. As Faustus prepares to watch the Seven Deadly Sins, he himself reminds us with unintentional irony of the contrast between this vision and that of the saints: "That sight will be as pleasant to me, as Paradise/was to Adam the first day of his creation" (II, ii, 673-674).

Acts III and IV, as we have them, have always been viewed as the weak part of the play, in terms of structure and dramatic interest. In the structure of the parodied saint's life, the pranks and tricks do have their place as the "miracles" that demonstrate the saint's peculiar gifts of grace. As God's favorites can sometimes prophesy the future, the devil's saint can recreate the past—Alexander and his paramour, for example. As Jesus and his saints used miracles to convince scoffers, Faustus uses his conjuring to discomfit the scornful Benvolio with a pair of horns. Faustus performs his cheap illusions to show the powers he has gained from the devil. That they amount to so little underlines for the audience the tragedy of Faustus' degeneration. Nevertheless, these scenes do not hold the interest dramatically (as spectacle they can be more successful, as a recent New York production showed). The ideas are not worked out and we lose sight of Faustus the man in all the buffoonery. It is significant that he has become a buffoon, but more inner characterization is needed if we are to feel the pity of it.

Faustus does not approach consciousness of his state in these two acts, except for a curious brief soliloquy which interrupts his practical joke on the horsecourser:

What art thou Faustus but a man condemn'd to die?
Thy fatall time drawes to a finall end;
Despaire doth drive distrust into my thoughts.

Confound these passions with a quiet sleepe:
Tush Christ did call the Theefe upon the Crosse,
Then rest thee Faustus quiet in conceit
(IV, v, 1546-1551).

This is startling enough in the middle of a prank, and critics have made various attempts to justify it or to blame it on an unskillful collaborator. It is certainly introduced without preamble, but Greg's condemnation of its "combined piety and bad taste""¹⁶ misses the point. The good thief was traditionally invoked against despair, as Lily B. Campbell notes.¹⁷ The passage thus reminds us of Faustus' despair and impending fate (tragic inevitability) and suggests at the same time that he may still be saved (morality promise of last-minute rescue). Unfortunately for Faustus, the story of the good thief is itself double-edged. It can be an antidote to despair, but it can also be a devilish encouragement to postpone repentance until the last breath, relying on God's great love. It is the latter application that prevails with Faustus, who makes no move to repent but "rests quiet." Unable to find the middle way of hope, he falls into the opposite extreme of presumption.

In Act V we are again involved in the human tragedy. As the play moves toward its agonizing close, the parodic element is less important than the hero's intense inner experience; but it is still there. The rapturous lines to Helen of Troy, with their allusions to heaven, immortality, and ecstatic self-abandonment, are a blasphemous parody of the supreme mystical union with God:¹⁸

Sweet Hellen make me immortall with a kisse:
Her lips sucke forth my soule, see where it flies.
Come Hellen, come, give me my soule againe,
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lippes,
And all is drosse that is not Helena
(V, i, 1876-1880).

The great beauty of the poetry only increases its shock value. The tension between orthodoxy and blasphemy which runs through the whole play is at its strongest here.

Afterwards, the inevitability of the anti-saint's career works mainly to reinforce the tragic end of Faustus the man. Even before Helen the Old Man has come, bringing Faustus to an anguished awareness of sin in an abrupt switch from the drunken pleasures of the banquet. So dangerous is this emissary that Mephostophilis quickly hands Faustus a dagger in the hope that suicide will damn forever the soul the devil is in danger of losing. "Hell claimes his right" (1. 1832), and Faustus, always responsive to the dictates of justice, is about to execute himself when the Old Man stops him:

O stay good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps.
I see an Angell hover ore thy head,
And with a vyoll full of pretious grace,
Offers to poure the same into thy soule,
Then call for mercy, and avoyd despaire
(V, i, 1834-1838).

Faustus is moved to ponder his sins, but now the only result can be the hopeless, sterile remorse of Judas: "I do repent, and yet I doe despaire" (1. 1844). When Mephostophilis intervenes, his language ("traytor," "disobedience")¹⁹ suffices to remind Faustus of his contract and to turn him from mercy through the invocation of justice. Faustus succumbs fearfully and is rewarded with Helen.

Tension builds on the last night, as the devils await their prize and the scholars urge Faustus to repent, to "looke up to heaven" (V, ii, 1935). He cannot. His answer is that of Cain: my offence is too great to be pardoned (ll. 1937-1939).²⁰ As for reaching to heaven, "I would/lift up my hands, but see they hold 'em, they hold 'em" (11. 1953-1954).

In the final soliloquy, morality play, tragedy, and demonic saint's legend fuse in a terrible conclusion. We watch Faustus search frantically for a way out, knowing that he himself blocks that way. He cannot leap up to heaven ("who puls me downe?").²¹ He can look, at last, and for a moment he sees redemption:

See see where Christs blood streames in the firmament,
One drop would save my soule, halfe a drop, ah my Christ
(A, 11. 14631464).²²

But the verb is conditional. One drop "would" save him, if he had hope. He has none, and the vision is replaced by the angry face of God the Judge. Only justice is left.

The travestied saint's life in Doctor Faustus intensifies its tragic effect, increasing the stature of the hero while ensuring his downfall. By hinting at a possible "divine comedy" pattern of last-minute redemption, Marlowe calls attention to his ultimate overthrow of that pattern. Together with the great poetry and the portrayal of Faustus' grandly inquiring mind, the travesty establishes within Doctor Faustus the center of rebellion necessary in tragedy. It asserts definitely the freedom of the mind, to balance or at least protest the inevitable working of evil in Faustus and his world.

Notes

¹ "Doctor Faustus of Wittenberg," SP, LIX (1962), 514 523.

² Quoted by Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe (Chapel Hill, 1946), pp. 34-35. The admired "Heriots" is Thomas Harriot, mathematician, sceptic, one of the Raleigh circle which also included Marlowe.

³ The parody gives new, if ironic, life to the ancient identification of magician and holy man. E. M. Butler has traced the "myth of the magus" back to the sacrificial king-god of the seasonal fertility rites and to the tribal witch-doctor [The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 1-11]. The main features of the magus myth can be discerned in the Biblical accounts of Moses and Christ as well as in the legends of Pythagoras and Zoroaster. The line between magic and miracle is largely a Christian invention (p. 78). Once drawn, however, it placed a wide gulf between saint and Magician, and the latter suffered inevitable degradation. There is little in the Faustbuch to suggest a saint or even an anti-saint. The stature of Faustus is Marlowe's gift.

⁴ I, i, 65-73. All Doctor Faustus references, unless otherwise noted, are to the B text of 1616 in W. W. Greg's edition of the parallel texts (Oxford, 1950). The B text is generally accepted by modern editors as more reliable than the A quarto of 1604. Probably neither version is entirely Marlowe's work, but the main plot displays a unity and progression which indicate that his collaborator or collaborators, however inferior as poets, did not misunderstand the play's design. The authorship problem is thus not crucial to this discussion.

In all quotations I have expanded abbreviations and regularized i and j, and u and v.

⁵ For example, Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte I, XXII, 74, in Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus … series latina, XXXIV, 1266-1267. It was pride, says Augustine, that turned Judas' repentance (Matt. 27: 3-5) into despair; he could not humble his heart. The pride at the center of despair emerges clearly in one locus classicus, Cain's defiant declaration to God after killing Abel: "Maior est iniquitas mea, quam ut veniam merear" (Gen. 4: 13).

⁶ I, i, 88-89. The reading of A and B 2, "to gaine a deitie," loses half the point. Both Greg and Boas favor B's "get," in the sense of "beget."

⁷ Unless we count Mephostophilis, who in the B text later confesses (V, ii, 1989-1992) that before his visible entry he had guided Faustus' eyes to the fatal Scripture passages.

⁸ I, i, 141-142 and 158-159. Italics mine, excluding proper names. C. L. Barber ["'The form of Faustus fortunes good or bad,'" Tulane Drama Review, VIII (Summer, 1964), 99] gives another, not necessarily conflicting, interpretation of the constant use of religious language for Faustus' necromantic pursuits: the repeated, involuntary invocation of heaven and things divine by Faustus, Valdes and Cornelius, and Mephostophilis shows the inadequacy of blasphemous magic as a substitute for the lost joys of heaven. "In repeatedly using such expressions, which often 'come naturally' in the colloquial language of a Christian society, the rebels seem to stumble uncannily upon words which condemn them by the logic of a situation larger than they are."

⁹ I, iii, 242-243. On "numen triplex Jehovae" as the Trinity, see Boas' note on this passage in the Arden edition.

¹⁰ I follow Boas' act divisions, believing with him that "the prevalent practice of a merely scenic division … has … done injustice to the structural quality of the play" (p. vi).

¹¹ II, i, 417.

¹² See John 19: 30.

¹³ "The Damnation of Faustus," MLR, XLI (1946), 103; II, i, 488.

¹⁴ Other passages suggest a Christ-parody: Faustus' desire to raise the dead and grant eternal life (I, i, 51-53), and his "graveling" of the German pastors (I, i, 134-135), perhaps meant to recall the youthful Christ confounding the doctors of the law.

¹⁵ Despair is represented in medieval and Renaissance iconography as a figure in the act of self-destruction. In allegorical narrative and drama, Despair or a similar figure usually presents the hero with a choice of weapons for suicide (see Skelton's Magnyfycence, Book I of The Faerie Queene, and Arnoul Greban's Mystere de la passion; in the latter case the victim is Judas). Cf. also Arieh Sachs, "The Religious Despair of Dr. Faustus," JEGP, LXIII (1964), 625-47.

¹⁶ Greg, Doctor Faustus (parallel texts), p. 118.

¹⁷Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience," PMLA, LXVII (1952), 236. One example is woodcut 4 of the Ars moriendi, a popular late medieval tract, in which the good thief appears with Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene to preserve Moriens from despair [facs. of editio princeps, c. 1450, ed. W. Harry Rylands (1881)].

¹⁸ The spelling "Hellen" in B (A has "Helen") may be just a type-setter's whim, but it affords a neat epitome of the heaven-hell inversion.

¹⁹ V, i, 1847-1848.

²⁰ See note 5 above.

²¹ V, ii, 2048.

²² Line 1463 does not appear in B, but even the staunchest foes of the A quarto refuse to omit it from their editions.