OKANAGAN COLLEGE, KELOWNA CAMPUS
PRESENTED TO TERRY SCARBOROUGH’S SECOND YEAR ENGLISH CLASS
OCTOBER 29, 2019
1 INTRODUCTION TO MARLOWE AND DOCTOR FAUSTUS
Thank you, Terry for inviting me to talk about one of my favourite plays, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. My book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected came out earlier this year, and it examines this play in-depth. Like Aristotle’s Poetics, Hegel’s writings on tragedy, and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, my book is a theory of tragedy, or an idea of how tragedy works. In this talk, we’ll go through the action of Faustus act by act, and end by a special treat: interpreting the play through the lens of different theories of tragedy.
The critic AC Swinburne called Marlowe “the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse.” George Bernard Shaw called him “the blank verse beast.” TS Eliot called him “the bard of torrential imagination.” Who was Marlowe? Anyone know when he was born? 1564. Who else was born that year? Hint: some people think that he was Marlowe. Marlowe lived a life of intrigue, moving from the highest to the lowest levels of society. In his plays, he savaged Catholicism, but he was rumoured to be a Catholic sympathizer, or, worse yet, a raging atheist. For this reason, Cambridge wouldn’t give him his master’s until the Privy Council confirmed that his absences were excusable: he had been conducting espionage on her majesty’s secret service. He hung around unsavory characters. One of his roommates was the revenge tragedian Thomas Kyd, who was arrested when they lived together for writing papers “denyinge the deity of Jhesus Christ.” He was a notorious brawler, and when he has a character in one of his plays say that one must “now and then stab, as occasion serves,” one wonders if he is referring to himself (Young Spencer in Edward II). He also kept company with spies, double agents, and folks involved with the Babington plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. If nothing else, learn from Marlowe to keep better company: he was stabbed at a dive bar and died at age 29. At his death, his output towers over Shakespeare, who was born the same year. Marlowe at 29 had Faustus, the two parts of Tamburlaine, and Hero and Leander. The best works Shakespeare had at 29 were The Comedy of Errors and Richard III.
Faustus is one of my favorite tragedies because excitement is in the air. This is the English Renaissance. Renaissance from re- ‘back again’ and naissance ‘birth’. It was a rebirth because the Greek and Roman classics were being rediscovered in England. A lot of things had been lost in the Middle Ages, including the art form of tragedy. Most people think that, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in the fifth century BC, tragedy was an art form available to playwrights. Not true. The first English tragedy wasn’t written until 1561 when Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville wrote The Tragedy of Gorboduc. The catalyst for the creation of English tragedy was the rediscovery of the tragedies of Seneca the Younger. From 1559 to 1580, John Heywood translated Seneca’s plays into English. You probably know Seneca as a philosopher and the tutor to the degenerate Roman emperor Nero. But he also wrote ten tragedies. When playwrights began imitating the political bloodbaths of Senecan tragedy with the existing English morality play, English tragedy was born.
When was Faustus written? Between 1588-1593 in the heyday of the English Renaissance. This was the age of colonialization. This was the age Greek and Roman classics were being rediscovered. This is the age of boundless ambition. You can even see evidence of the boundless energy of rediscovery in the text. Look at who Faustus mentions in the opening lines, all classical authors. First, he mentions Aristotle: “Yet level at the end of every art, / And live and die in Aristotle’s works. / Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me!” (1.1.4-6). The Analytics are two volumes on logic, reasoning, and scientific knowledge. Next, he mentions the physician Galen: “Galen, come! / Seeing ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus, / Be a physician, Faustus” (1.1.12-14). Next, he mentions Justinian, the famous Roman Emperor and lawmaker from the sixth century who codified Roman law. Aristotle, Galen, and Justinian were very much part of the intellectual culture in the English Renaissance: in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, written about a decade later the jolly knight Falstaff tells us he reads Galen. Late sixteenth century England was a time of incredible rediscovery, exploration, renaissance. Marlowe’s Faustus is the first man of this new age.
It’s been said that many of Marlowe’s creations are overreachers. In another tragedy, Tamburlaine conquers kings, and then steps on them to ascend the throne. Faustus is also of this overreaching mode. He’s mastered philosophy (Aristotle), medicine (Galen), law (Justinian), and theology. He has mastered every available arts and science. In his ambition to become master of reality, he is appetite incarnate. He doesn’t even need Mephistopheles to tempt him, he is so ambitious. In a ridiculous scene, when Mephistopheles gets teary eyed reminiscing on paradise lost, Faustus tells the devil to suck it up: “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,” he says the Mephistopheles (1.3.87). Faustus embodies the energy of Renaissance England.
You know who he reminds me of?—another fellow in another age of 1980s excess Freddie Mercury, who once sang “I want it all.” Not only did he “want it all,” he had the audacity to define when he wants it: he “wants it right now.” And then he clarifies the scope of his appetite: though he wants it all and he wants it now, if you want the truth, “It ain’t much I’m asking.” He’s telling us that, well, you know, to want all right now is not to want enough. Insatiable appetite for knowledge, sensuality, and to be wanted characterize both Faustus and Mercury: death is no deterrent to the will. Remember, when Mercury wrote that he wanted it all, he already knew he had AIDS, which, at that time, was a death sentence. AIDS would not stop Mercury from wanting it all, nor would the loss of a soul stop Faustus.
2 PROLOGUE
Let’s consider the play’s structure. It begins with a choral prologue, a feature Marlowe borrows from Seneca’s plays. In the prologue, the chorus tells the audience what’s going to happen. It’s a big spoiler. Note all the classical references in the prologue: Mars, Carthage, the invocation to the Muse, and comparisons between Faustus and Icarus. To find a voice for English tragedy—in its infancy at this point—Marlowe marries Roman myths with the story of Faustus, a German magician from the Middle Ages. English tragedy is the child of pagan Rome and Christian Germany.
Consider how he gives a new English understanding to the ancient myths. Do you know the myth of Daedalus and Icarus? Daedalus build King Minos the labyrinth. Since Daedalus knew the secrets of the labyrinth, Minos imprisons Daedalus and his son Icarus in a high tower. Daedalus fashions waxen wings, warns his son not to fly too close to the heat of the sun, the son ignores the dad’s warning, flies where the eagles dare and plunges into the Icarian Sea. Let’s see how Marlowe plays on the myth:
That shortly he was graced with doctor’s name,
Excelling all whose sweet delight disputes
In heavenly matters of theology;
Till, swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted more with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursèd necromancy. (17-25)
Marlowe conflates Lucifer’s fall from grace with Faustus’ fall through the myth of the flight of Icarus. It adds another layer of depth into the play. As a side note, you can see how, centuries later, James Joyce finds his artistic voice in the same way differently in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. In this work, he identifies his protagonist with the mythic Daedalus by naming him Stephen Daedalus. Instead of a comparison with Lucifer, however, Joyce likens Ireland itself—a country he calls “a sow which eats her own farrow”—with the tower. Stephen is trapped in the tower of Ireland in his novel. And how does the artist escape the tower of Ireland? In a stunning twist, art provides the waxen wings for Stephen to soar free. The point of this digression is to show you how, if you keep taking Terry’s English classes, you can catch and appreciate the aesthetic beauty of how artists do new things with old stories.
3 FIRST ACT
Act one sees Faustus exhausting the limits of all the orthodox faculties one by one: philosophy, medicine, law, and theology. As he reaches the limits, he seeks dominion that “Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man” (1.1.63). Valdes and Cornelius come to show him the dark arts and Faustus proves to be a quick learner. By scene three he has succeeded in summoning Mephistopheles. There’s a nice jab at the Catholicism when Mephistopheles’ true form proves to be too ugly, and Faustus commands the devil to “return an old Franciscan friar; That holy shape becomes a devil best” (1.3.25-26). England, since Henry VIII had been excommunicated by Pope Paul III, did not recognize the authority of friars and popes. I am sure in Protestant countries such as Germany, Marlowe’s play would have been popular, and less popular in Catholic countries such as Italy.
Act one also sees Faustus’ negotiations with the devil: he gives up his soul for twenty-four years of the devil’s services. This includes: living in voluptuousness, having the devil attend him, give him whatever he asks, answer all his questions, slay his enemies and aid his friends, and be in general obedient to his will. If there is any doubt of how Faustus and Marlowe’s characters are overreachers, just compare how “normal” folks make a pact with the devil. The violinist Vivaldi and blues guitarist Robert Johnson were content to give the devil their souls just to play violin and guitar. Faustus negotiates much more. That makes this play dramatic and exciting. How much is the soul worth? To Johnson, it was worth a guitar. To Vivaldi, it was worth a violin. To Faustus, it is worth power that “Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man” (1.1.63).
Have you ever thought about tragedy as a valuing mechanism? Tragedy really dramatizes a gambling act. You want something. If you’re Faustus, you want world dominion. If you’re Macbeth, you want the Scotch crown. If you’re Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, you’re after the American dream. If you’re in a revenge tragedy, you want revenge. Now, to get what you want, you have to ante up. If you’re Faustus, you ante up your soul. If you’re Macbeth, because you were too nice of a guy, to get the crown, you have to put up “the milk of human kindness,” or, in other words, your compassion. If you’re Loman, you have to ante up your dignity to pursue the American dream. If you’re a revenger, you have to ante up whatever stands in your way. Now, depending on what you pledge, you can see how much it is worth. How much is world domination worth? To Faustus, one soul. How much is mastery of the violin playing worth? To Vivaldi, also one soul. When you read tragedy, think of it as a valuing mechanism for human values. The more amazing the wager, the more life is worth.
Act one ends with a comic interlude where Wagner, Faustus’ boy, and the clown parody the earlier action. They have some fun with names when Wagner summons Belcher and Balioll or “Belly-all,” the comic version of Belial. Wagner’s clearly thinking about food. The clown Robin can’t get the devil’s names right either, referring to “Belly-all” as “Banio,” or “brothel.” His mind is in the gutter as well. Comedy often laughs at bodily functions. And the scene ends with a crack at Faustus’ name. Wagner says something completely bombastic and Robin replies: “God forgive me, he speaks Dutch fustian” (1.4.75). “Fustian” means “rant” or “gibberish” and is, of course, a play on Faustus’ name.
3 SECOND ACT
Act two begins with Faustus debating the momentousness of his pact with the devil. He wavers back and forth, and, as he wavers, to add to the dramatic effect, he’s visited by the Good Angel and the Evil Angel, who vie for Faustus’ soul. At the stroke of midnight, Mephistopheles returns to seal the deal. There’s a false start as Faustus’ blood coagulates as he tries to write “Faustus gives to thee his soul” (2.1.67). The momentousness of the undertaking is such that his very body revolts at the thought of giving over the soul. In a mockery of Christ, Faustus ends the ceremony by declaring consummatum est, “It is done,” the last words of Christ as he died on the cross. Christ had died to redeem humanity for their sins.
After the deal goes down, Faustus begins testing Mephistopheles with the pertinent questions of the day. You can see from their exchange the questions fascinating to Elizabethans. Where is hell? Is it possible to control the weather? Can we predict the path of the planets to come up with a better horoscope?
In act two is another comic scene. The clown Robin seems to have gotten a job as a valet; he’s looking after people’s horses at an inn. And he’s stolen one of Faustus’ conjuring books. In a caricature of Faustus, Robin tells his friend Rafe (or modern Ralph) how he’ll use his diabolical powers to “make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked” and cast a spell over the kitchen maid so that Rafe can “wind her to thy own use” (2.2.3-4 and 29-30).
What’s the point of these comic interludes? These comic interludes seem to be a feature of Elizabethan tragedy. The Elizabethans learned how to write tragedy from copying Seneca and reading Chaucer’s description in the Monk’s Tale. The bodycount and pile of corpses they got from Seneca. The fall from grace and reversal of fortune they got from Chaucer. There are no comic interludes in either Senecan tragedy or Chaucer’s Monk’s description of tragedy. These comic interludes seem to be peculiar to Elizabethan tragedy. Even a generation after in the neoclassical tragedies of Racine and Corneille, you don’t find it. And you certainly don’t find it in the tragedies of the German romantics such as Goethe and Schiller. Nor do you see it in American tragedy in the twentieth century.
Shakespeare’s night porter in Macbeth is another example of comedy within tragedy. It’s a very peculiar Elizabethan thing. Like Marlowe, the humour emerges from the bodily functions. Among other things, the night porter in Macbethgives a little sermon on alcohol and sexual performance. A little bit, you know, okay. Too much, not good. Have you thought about the function of these comic interludes? I’ve always thought that the comic interludes to tragedy is the same as soda water to cigars. If you watch cigar aficionados like Arnold smoke big stogies, you’ll notice they don’t have them in one go. Since cigars don’t have accelerants, they go out if you’re not drawing. When they go out, you cleanse the palette with soda water. Then you’re ready to enjoy the cigar again. That’s how I see these comic interludes. They relieve the tension. They cleanse the palette, so you’re ready for serious action. These interludes are one of the gems of Elizabethan tragedy. It’s a particular innovation of this time that doesn’t occur before or after. Too bad.
Bevington and Rasmussen, the editors of the “Revels Plays” edition that I’m using, have set the comic scene between Robin and Rafe in act two. I’m not sure which edition Terry has you guys using, but this scene could also be in act three of your text. That’s where it is originally, but there’s a problem with the entrances and exits so the editors in my text have moved the scene into the second act.
This is a good segue into the text of Doctor Faustus. The play itself dates to 1588 (or as late as 1592). But the original play is lost. What we have is the “A-text,” written down in 1604 and the “B-text,” written down in 1616. The A-text is shorter. The B-text has more scenes, more devils, and more characters. The A-text focuses more on the tragedy of Faustus. The B-text focuses more on the spectacle of theatre. For example, the B-text adds a whole scene involving papal intrigue: while in Rome, Faustus and Mephistopheles rescue and whisk away the German Antipope Bruno, who has been captured by Catholic Italian forces. The A-text may have been written together from actors’ memories. The B-text seems to have been commissioned by an independent impresario with the instructions to take what worked well in the first decade of performance, and to build more of a spectacle around these scenes. The debate has shifted back and forth, and it is the consensus of late that the A-text is closer to what audiences saw at the original productions of 1588.
Back to act two. Act two closes with the Good Angel and the Evil Angel tempting Faustus. Faustus goes with the Good Angel, and cries out to Christ: “Ah, Christ, my Saviour, / Seek to save distrèssed Faustus’ soul!” (2.3.82-83). But, instead of Christ coming, the opposite happens: Lucifer himself comes to remind Faustus of their pact. To keep Faustus in line, Lucifer offers to show Faustus the seven sins. Here we see a repeating motif: Faustus, when he really thinks about it, repents and goes back to God. But what the devil does is to distract Faustus’ good intentions with little sideshows and promises of wealth. The play speaks to us on the nature of temptation. It seems we know what to do, but the devil tempts us with diversions: work a few hours overtime, check Instagram, Facebook, what’s going on on Twitter? Faustus doesn’t even enjoy the show the seven sins puts on, he tells the sins to scram. But they divert him long enough that he forgets about God, and, in the fight for Faustus soul, it’s the diversions that give Mephistopheles the advantage: 24 years goes by in a twinkling of the eye.
4 THIRD ACT
Let’s move on to act three. Act three find Faustus travelling through Germany (he starts in Wittenberg) and France on his way to Rome, the eternal city. We get a geography lesson from Mephistopheles on the sights along the way. It’s surprising, to an audience in the sixteenth century, such a trip is something on a scale that you need diabolical assistance. These days, I achieve the same thing getting a ticket on Expedia and listening to a tour guide. This brings us to an interesting point. To get the most out of classic works, not only do we have to follow the playwright’s imagination as we imagine all the scenes, how the characters look, how they move, we also have to imagine how Marlowe’s audience would have been wowed by all this. For example, take these three lines of Faustus talking about the sights in Naples:
There saw we learnèd Maro’s golden tomb,
The way he cut an English mile in length
Through a rock of stone in one night’s space (3.1.13-15)
There’s quite a bit involved in understanding them. First, you’ll have to know who Maro is. Maro is Publius Vergilius Maro. Back then, they referred to him by his cognomen, Maro. We call him today after his nomen, Virgil. Who knows, maybe in four-hundred years we’ll be calling him Publius: that’s what his family would have called him. Okay, so Faustus saw Virgil’s tomb. Virgil being the great Roman epic poet who wrote The Aeneid, the epic poem which recounts Trojan Aeneas’ journey to Italy. So what’s the connection? Well, Virgil today is known as a writer of epic, but back then, he was rumored to be a magician too. So that explains why Faustus talks about the mile long tunnel between Naples and Pozzuoli that Virgil built in one night: it ties in with the magic motif of the play. Because of his powerful magic, his epic poem the Aeneid was a popular fortune telling device at this time. Want to know the future? Flip open the Aeneid to a random page, read the verses, and, they will tell you. Handy, eh?
What else? To understand these lines, we also have to know something about Virgil’s celebrity in this era and Marlowe’s own debt to Virgil. Marlowe wrote another tragedy on Dido, the Queen of Carthage. She’s the queen that saves Aeneas when he gets shipwrecked escaping the fall of Troy. Marlowe’s primary source was Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid. Even a century after, when Purcell created the first English opera, it was the story of Dido that he set to music. So, if you know all these little facts, it’s possible for you to engage with all the layers of meaning in the text. The point of literature, I think, is to fill us with a sense of wonder and awe, and we can feel the wonder and awe when we can understand first the words, then the meaning the words convey, then how the contemporary audience would have reacted, and then why the writer chose to use such and such a reference. We feel wonder over how these writers and audiences of the past are alike and similar to us, and awe over how Marlowe puts together all these words, verbs, and adjectives imbued with so many layers of image and meaning. If you are into the wonder and awe, keep coming to Terry’s English classes!
What else is in the third act? There’s Mephistopheles and Faustus’ run in with the friars and the Pope. Predictably, there’s jokes at the Catholics’ expense. For example, Mephistopheles refers to the summum bonum or “highest good” of the monks as being belly cheer. We see the inversion of the Catholic theodicy in this joke and others, such as Faustus’ request that we discussed earlier for Mephistopheles to appear in the form of a Franciscan friar. This play, with some daring, turns religion topsy-turvy, and it’s been conjectured the Puritans who shut down theatre in 1642 likely used it as an example of why the theatre should be censored. People from more traditional backgrounds might look askance at Faustus’ declaration consummatum est (“It is done”) that we discussed earlier, or the profane “Last Supper” with his fellow scholars playing Christ’s disciples that comes up in act five.
In fact, because there is an A-text of 1604 and B-text of 1616, we can see infer that there was some backlash to some of the risqué religious elements: certain cuss words have been cut out from the text “snails,” “zounds,” “sblood,” and so on. Do you know what they’re abbreviations of?—“snails” is for “God’s nails,” “zounds” is for “God’s wounds,” and “sblood” is, of course, for “God’s blood.” Their cuss words were based on the wounds of Our Lord the Saviour on the cross. In fact, there are urban legends around this play that during the scenes where the devils come on stage, sometimes the actors would be confused: where did that extra devil come from? No doubt it was an Elizabethan devil that happened to be flying over and, when he heard the actors wracking the name of God, came down to investigate.
Since it’s so close to Halloween, I’ll share with you my own diabolical Faust story. True story. In 2014, I took the ViaRail across Canada, sleeper cabin. So many things happened on that trip that in the one week, I accumulated years of experiences and memories. I had to bring something to read on the train: what better thing to do than to overlook the Rocky Mountains, sip on a beverage, and read classic literature. Well, every ten years or so, I revisit the German scientist and artist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s interpretation of the Faust legend. It was time.
Faust is a German legend. That’s why Marlowe’s Faustus starts off in Wittenberg, Germany. And that’s why Goethe, the granddaddy of German letters, immortalizes him in his two plays, Faust: Part One, written in his youth, and Faust: Part Two, written in his eighties. The historic Johann Georg Faust was an actual scholar, alchemist, doctor, and magician from Helmstadt, Germany who lived from 1480-1541. He claimed to be able to perform the miracles of Christ: at one point he was referred to as the “demigod of Heidelberg.” He died, perhaps, in an explosion when an alchemy experiment went bad. Hence the legend that Faustus’ body was found dismembered from devils tearing him apart.
In 1587, a German “chapbook” or cheaply produced book came out which collected all these stories of the actual Faust from the fifteenth century. This book was a bestseller, reprinted several times in the same year in German, and translated into English shortly after. Marlowe’s play—except for the comic scenes—follows the so-called “English Faust Book” closely. It pretty much is the “English Faust Book” set into blank verse with the addition of some comic scenes. Goethe, when he wrote his Faust, had access to both Marlowe’s play and the “German Faust Book.” By the way, “Faustus” is just the Latinized version of the German name “Faust.” In a strange coincidence, faustus is also the Latin adjective meaning: “fortunate, lucky, or auspicious.”
On my train trek across Canada, I brought Philip Wayne’s verse translation of Goethe’s Faust. I also brought my Norton edition, which has the German text and a crappy but literal translation on the facing page. Also, on this train trek, I was going to experiment with different sleeping patterns: our eight hours of sleep is a very modern thing. I was going to break up the eight hours of sleep into three long naps throughout the day. So that meant I would be up in the middle of the night. On the first night, I set the alarm for 3am. I got up, and started reading Goethe’s Faust. In no time, I got to the scene where Faust summons up the earth spirit with a powerful spell. It was going great. But then I thought, “You know, to really get at the heart of poetry, I need to read it out loud.” Yes that was good. And then I thought some more: “To really feel the jingle and the jangle of the metre, I should be reading the German out loud.”
I was reading the spell to summon up the ancient earth spirit out loud, and quite loud, because, on the train, the noise of the tracks conceals quite a bit. Now, as I was doing this, I heard a banging in the sleeper cabin behind me. I thought it might be train noise, but no, definitely banging. In the cabin behind me was where Maria, one of the train attendants, was staying. She had help set me up by explaining how the beds folded down. You see, in the sleeper cabin you get a washroom, a little sink, and a bed in a 6’ x 4’ space. The bed folds down over everything, so if you have to use the washroom in the middle of the night, you have to fold up your bed. Maria was from the islands on the westcoast of BC, a Catholic lady originally from Quebec. I got up, went to her door, and knocked. When she answered, she looked white as a sheet, I said I heard some noise and asked if everything was okay. She said yes, and it was a little bit awkward and then I went back to my room.
The next day, I saw Maria in the breakfast cabin. She came up, and apologized. She said, “Sorry, I had a bad dream.” I said, “That must have been some dream.” She replied, “Yeah, I thought the devil came up to me and was sucking out my soul.” At that point I got some goosebumps: when this dream came up to her, I had been in the next cabin reciting out Faust’s spell to conjure up the earth demon! Anyways, when this happened, I must have looked a little weird and she must have felt a little sheepish so we sort of headed our separate ways.
But then it gets better. So I told you I was reading Philip Wayne’s brilliant verse translation of Goethe’s Faust. A nice Penguin edition, I love Penguins. On the cover is an image of Mephistopheles flying over Wittenburg. Now, I would be sitting on the train, and there’s only so many places you can sit on the train before you run into everyone. And every so often, Mariah would walk by and we would chat. And I could tell as we were chatting she was looking at my book to see what I was reading: you can always tell when someone is looking, but trying to pretend that they’re not looking. It makes it so much more obvious. Because of what happened, I would sort of tuck the book away into the corner whenever she came. Again, just like a surreptitious glace, when you try to surreptitiously scoot something away so as not to draw attention, you draw that much extra attention.
We played this game until one day, me and Mariah were chatting, and the cook came out. “What are you reading?” he asks, and, before I could do anything, grabs the book which I had laid upside down on the table. “Oh, Faust,” he says, “isn’t that the story of the guy that makes a bet with the devil and gets his soul sucked down into hell?” At this moment, I could see a pale expression come over Maria’s face, like “Oh my God!” Without saying a word, she got up and left. I didn’t really know what to say either. I could say: “Your dream had nothing to do with me, I swear.” But how could I even say that? Luckily, the train was just about at Winnipeg. The crew change happens there, the western crew catches the train back home, and the eastern crew pick up. I never saw her again, but once in a while, I think back on this experience on the ViaRail.
What else is in act three of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus? After Faustus boxes the Pope on his ears, there’s a comic scene between Robin and Rafe. With Faustus’ magic book, they succeed in summoning Mephistopheles. Apparently, souls, like apples, come in different grades. Mephistopheles is so mad that he has come so far to collect two such unworthy souls that he turns Robin into an ape and Rafe into a dog. As befits the “bodily functions and appetite” theme in these comic scenes, Robin replies that as an ape he’ll never run short of being fed nuts and apples, and that Rafe, as a dog, will have an unending supply of porridge. Dogs, at this time, could always be found licking out porridge pots.
5 FOURTH ACT
The action shifts to Spain in act four. Mephistopheles and Faustus go to visit Charles V. There they entertain the Holy Roman Emperor by conjuring up shades of Alexander the Great and his paramour. After entertaining Charles V, they start to head back to Germany, and Faustus reminds us that twenty-four years have almost passed:
Faustus: Now, Mephistopheles, the restless course
That time doth run with calm and silent foot,
Short’ning my days and thread of vital life,
Calls for the payment of my latest years.
Therefore, sweet Mephistopheles, let us make haste
To Wittenberg. (4.1.100-105)
They are going full circle, going back to Wittenberg, where Faustus will find heaven or hell. If he repents, he will find heaven. God’s mercy is infinite. If he fails to repent, he will find hell. And again, in the horse-dealer scene, Marlowe reminds us that Faustus’ time draws to its end:
Faustus: What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
Thy fatal time doth draw to final end.
Despair doth drive distrust unto my thoughts.
Confound these passions with a quiet sleep.
Tush! Christ did call the thief upon the cross;
Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit. (4.1.139-144)
Faustus recollects here a scene from the Gospels, Luke 23:43 where Christ and two thieves are set upon crucifixes at Calvary (not cavalry, which are troops on horseback). One thief asks Christ if he is the Messiah, why doesn’t he save them. Perhaps the incorrect thing to say. The other thief, however, has faith, and says to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:43). He has faith, and Jesus responds “Amen I say to you today you will be with me in Paradise.” The key is that the thief has faith. Faustus, however, has no faith. He despairs: “Despair,” he says, “doth drive distrust unto my thoughts.” What is despair? Do you recall the scene where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. He says: “This sickness is not unto death,” meaning that, even though he’s dead, he’s not going to die from whatever sickness he had, since Jesus is going to raise him. Kierkegaard would ask years later: “Okay fine, Lazarus didn’t have the sickness unto death. But then, what is the sickness unto death?” His answer was “Despair. Despair is the sickness unto death.” So with Faustus, we can see a species of this sickness of despair in him. He repents (which is good), but he despairs (which is bad because it’s the sickness unto death. His repentance is a sort of negative repentance. Because he despairs, he can’t find God’s grace. We can see Marlowe play with this theme between despair and repentance elsewhere, for example later on in act five Faustus says:
Accursed Faustus, where is mercy now?
I do repent; and yet I do despair:
Hell strive with grace for conquest in my breast:
What shall I do to shun the snares of death?
Likewise, after the Good Angel and the Evil Angel vie for Faustus’ soul in act two, Faust comes ever so close to going back to God, but ultimately concludes:
My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent.
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven
But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears:
‘Faustus, thou art damned!’ (2.3.18-21)
Act four closes with two scenes. Now Faustus has come full circle back to Germany. In the horse-dealer episode, he’s back in Wittenberg and in the concluding scene, he’s in an adjoining duchy called Vanholt. You can see from the Vanholt episode how far we’ve coming along in the last 400 years: to get out of season grapes back then, you needed a miracle or diabolical assistance. Today, to get out of season grapes, you go down so Save-on-Foods. Passages like this fill me with wonder, as I think of how, things that seem miraculous today will be, in the distant future, commonplaces.
6 FIFTH ACT
Now, act five, this is where the blank verse jingles and jangles the best. It is full of purple passages. “Purple passage” is the term for a brilliant lines out of a work of literature. The colour purple was associated with majesty, as to make the colour purple in the old days required grinding down tens of thousands of a particular type of shell in a laborious process. And so a purple passage is a like a line that lords it lesser line. The most famous must be Faustus reaction when Mephistopheles brings him Helen of Troy:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? (5.1.91-92)
A textbook example of synecdoche, the poetic device of using a part (in this case “the face”) to represent the whole (Helen herself). Then consider this:
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
The STARS move STILL; time RUNS; the CLOCK will STRIKE;
The DEVil will COME, and FAUStus MUST be DAMned.
O, I’ll LEAP up TO my GOD! Who PULLS me DOWN?
See, SEE where CHRIST’s BLOOD streams IN the FIRmaMENT!
One DROP would SAVE my SOUL, half a DROP. AH, my CHRIST! (5.2.74-80)
Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw called Marlowe “the blank verse beast,” and we can see why from this passage how Marlowe raised the power of blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter to express the profoundest moments of the soul in pain. He quotes the Roman poet Ovid in the first line in a wicked reversal: Ovid’s plea “Run slowly, slowly, ye horses of the night!” was originally an invocation to delay the dawning day so that the lover could have another moment with his beloved. Then, Faustus imagines himself in a sort of delusional frenzy jumping up to heaven, but unable to escape hell’s gravity over him. Then, in one of the wickedest images, Faustus sees the blood of Christ streaming in the heavens. What is this? A comet? Or is it like the plane of the Milky Way galaxy on a clear night? The image is unsettling. What is Christ’s blood doing streaming in the firmament? And where is Christ?—Faustus has called out to him a couple of times and up pops the devil instead. The more I think about this wonderful line, the more I wonder at what sort of diabolical intellect behind this image. I mean, who sees this sort of stuff? But it’s pure poetry: even though the logical mind rebels, the image makes innate sense.
How does blank verse work? In each line, there’s ten syllables: “The STARS move STILL; time RUNS; the CLOCK will STRIKE.” The ten syllables can be subdivided into five metrical feet, each of which has one short and one long syllable: “The STARS” that’s one “move STILL” that’s the second “time RUNS” that’s the third, and so on. If you rhyme the line endings as well, you get sonnets. But this is blank verse, so no rhymes. English sort of naturally works itself into iambs so Marlowe’s lines have a good flow. Consider this more modern poet, who also wrote in iambs: “I WILL not EAT green EGGS and HAM! I WILL not EAT them SAM I AM!” Iambic pentameter was the meter of Shakespeare and later, of Milton. It really captures a perfection in the English language. Driving, powerful, onwards streaming. It was in the 1560s, or a generation before Doctor Faustus that the poets began writing the first verse plays such as Gorboduc. But it took a Marlowe to bring it to its full powers of expression in Doctor Faustus. Not only is the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics happening in the English Renaissance, the poets are also finding ways of the national language to express the English identity. And I think it’s important to consider not only the vitality that streams through this play because they were going through a Renaissance, but to also consider the vitality of England inventing its national meter in blank verse. Homer and Vergil wrote in dactylic hexameter. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton had iambic pentameter
Besides the purple passages in act five, what else do we notice? One thing, as the play draws to the end, is that there are no women in this play. That’s sort of odd. The only other play that I know of in any language without women is Seneca’s Thyestes. And the other touching thing about act five is that Faustus has his first real conversation, that is, a conversation not with underlings, devils, and royalty. In his conversations with the Old Man and the scholars, he talks with equals, he tells them of the diabolical pact and we get the first real conversation: “Oh, by the way, I’ve been doing all these great things the last 24 years because I made a pact with the devil.” “What?!? Time to turn back to God, my friend!” Which brings us to the final question: what is this play about? Is it a Christian play, like the old morality plays that predate it, that warns good Christians not to fly too close to the sun on waxen wings because hell awaits?
There’s an ongoing debate over when exactly Faustus’ soul is condemned. Some say that he seals the deal way back in act two when he signs the contract with Mephistopheles because the contract stipulates that Faustus becomes “a spirit in form and substance” (2.1.97). Others say it’s when Faustus takes Helen to be his paramour in act five since he commits the sin of demoniality. I think Marlowe means for us to understand that, until he’s dragged down to hell, Faustus’ has a choice to turn back to God. Otherwise why have deep into act five a scene where the Old Man and the Good Angel attempt to persuade Faustus to go back onto the straight and narrow way? What do you think? Does Faustus have free will? Does the question of predestination or free will change how you look at the dramatic qualities of the play? When the play came out, Calvinist theologies which did not believe in free will (how can will be free if God foreknows everything) were in vogue.
7 DOCTOR FAUSTUS THROUGH THE LENS OF LITERARY THEORY
Since we’ve been talking about magic, let’s close this evening with talk about literary theory, which is a sort of magic in itself. A theorist is a powerful magician who can make texts speak in tongues. You can do interesting things with theory. Let’s start with Aristotle’s Poetics, which, interestingly, wasn’t available in England in Marlowe’s time. It was one of those lost works which hadn’t been rediscovered yet. In an Aristotelian reading of Faustus, Faustus is somewhat like us. We can identify with the hero: that is how tragedy makes us feel pity (because he suffers) and fear (instead of Faustus, the devil could be drawing us down to hell). Through some kind of hamartia, which is a tragic flaw or error, Faustus undergoes a reversal in fortune. The error is that he associates with devils and practices forbidden arts. Through his destruction, because we feel pity and fear, we undergo catharsis, or a cleansing of pity and fear. When we undergo catharsis, become a better judge of human action, of how character and intention are intertwined. The moral of the story in the Aristotelian reading is: don’t do what Faustus did.
The next major theory of tragedy was from the German philosopher Hegel. He saw that the tragic arose when two opposing, irreconcilable, and equally justified ethical forces collided. In Faustus, these two opposing ethical forces are the right to knowledge and our loyalty to God. God created us; we owe him allegiance. But we also have a right to knowledge, since we already have become mortal because we ate from the Tree of Knowledge. But God holds back on our knowledge of the spheres, of astronomy, of the inner workings of hell. Both these irreconcilable forces break out in Faustus, and he is destroyed. In his destruction, the institution of the church is restored.
After Hegel came Nietzsche, and his theory of tragedy. In Nietzsche’s analysis, there are two colliding mental states, exemplified by the Good Angel and the Evil Angel. The Good Angel voices the rational and conscious mind, which Nietzsche named after Apollo, the sun god. The Evil Angel voices Faustus’ subconscious desires. The subconscious force Nietzsche referred to as the Dionysian, after the Greek god of dreams, intoxication, and ecstasy. These two forces wrestle internally for control of Faustus’ fate. When they collide, Faustus is destroyed, but, in his destruction, the veil is lifted off of reality. We see how good and evil do not matter, but what matters is how Marlowe transforms Faustus’ story into the aesthetic phenomenon of art.
Risk theatre finds that each dramatic act in tragedy is also a gambling act. In the risk theatre analysis, Faustus bets that he can have his cake and eat it too. In the risk theatre analysis, Faustus bets that he can have world dominion and keep his soul. He bets that at the end of 24 years, he can repent. The scenes between the Good Angel, who tries to get Faustus to repent, and the Evil Angel, who distracts Faustus with the world’s pleasures. But Faustus takes on too much risk in making the pact with the devil. Because he’s taken on too much risk and concentrated his powers too far on one position, he triggers a low-probability, high-consequence event: at the end of 24 years, he finds that, when he most needs to repent, he can’t. He’s become too jaded. He had a good plan to eat his cake and have it too. A sort of Voltaire plan. Voltaire, who cursed the church when he lived, but had the last sacraments administered as he lay dying. But something happened that he didn’t think would happen. The years of power and pleasure hardened his heart. Risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. Risk triggers the unexpected ending. When audiences see what happens to Faustus, they emerge from the theatre with a higher understanding of how more things can happen than what we expect will happen. Do not concentrate your powers too far on one position. Keep the powder dry. Have a Plan B. Risk theatre dramatizes risk gone awry on the stage so we become more robust off stage.
So these are four interpretations of the same play. Notice how theory allows you to draw quite different conclusions. This is the magic of theory.
The full transcript of this talk is available on my blog, https://melpomeneswork.com/okc-doctor-faustus/
For more on Risk Theatre, see https://risktheatre.com
Thank you, remember to tell people about risk theatre, and see you down the road!
Theatre expert Edwin Wong will present his 21st century theory of tragedy called “risk theatre,” which posits that tragedy puts people face-to-face with unexpected implications of their actions by simulating the profound impact of highly improbable events. Risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action, he asserts.