Despair and Damnation: Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Here's a good one for the Halloweeny season: Christopher Marlowe's most famous play.  A scholar sells his soul to the Devil for ultimate knowledge and power!

Correction: In this episode, I misidentify the author of "The Devil and Tom Walker" as Nathaniel Hawthorne.  It is, of course, Washington Irving.

Extra musical selection from "Faust" by Charles Gounod, perf. Orchestra And Chorus Of The Théâtre National De l'Opéra.

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• 17:04 (Cont.) Despair and Damnation: Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and thanks for joining me here on the Classic English Literature Podcast.  We are heavily into the Elizabethan theatre by now, up to our necks in the blank verse. I thought we’d give ol’ Mr. Shakespeare some time off and instead return to his erstwhile companion, peer, and rival, the dashing Mr. Christopher Marlowe.  The Cambridge wit is good for some over-the-topness, the really theatrical theatre – remember Tamburlaine?  Woo!  Marlowe turns everything up to 11 – like an early modern Nigel Tufnel or Kenneth Branagh.  Well, today we look at Marlowe’s greatest creation: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus!  

But before we bargain away our souls to the Devil, you should know that my email is classicenglishlitetature@gmail.com.  Let me know how you’re doing!  The poddie has a presence on all the hippest social media platforms, so follow and like, guys, follow and like!  And would you do me a solid?  Tell your friends and family about the show – word of mouth is a great way to grow our audience, and the Clubhouse has an infinite capacity!  Thanks for helping!

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The term “Faustian bargain” has entered the lexicon, and we usually hear it applied to the powerful in society: the politicians, the corporate titans, high school English teachers – the 1%, you know what I’m saying.  When someone makes a Faustian bargain, they have sacrificed their moral principles in order to indulge their ambition or their ego. A deal with the devil, as the hoi polloi would have it.

The term comes, of course, comes from a quasi-legendary German scholar, variously called Johann Georg Faust, Georg Johann Faust, Johann Faust, or Georg Faust, who lived roughly from 1466-1540 or 1480 to 1540 or 1480 to 1544, and was born in Knittlingen or Heidelberg.  Despite such unsettled facts – and I suppose we could even entertain the possibility that there are two different fellas rejoicing in the name Faust – 17th century people certainly took him as a historical personage. Between 1506 and 1535, there is a scattering of records referring to this character, mostly as an itinerant magician and con-man, though some speak of him as a respectable astrologer and physician.  He has been connected with the Protestant movement in Germany at the time and the Catholic Church denounced him as a blasphemer.  But other than these rather spartan facts, we’ve little to go on historically, and the accretion of legend around whatever historicity may obtain has made it rather difficult to treat Faust as anything but a legendary and literary character.

Interestingly, he is mentioned in Martin Luther’s Table Talk, a collection of notes from his conversations with students that came out in 1566, some 20 years after Luther’s death.  Now, do remember his name, as it will be the answer to a special bonus question later in the episode.  How very exciting!  And Faust supposedly features in a lost anonymous publication called the Historia von D. Johann Fausten from 1587.  From this text, we presume, comes The English Faust Book of 1592, and it’s from this version of the legend that Marlowe takes his cue.

And I suppose that’s our cue for the quick and dirty summary.

Doctor Faustus is bored.  Really bored and frustrated.  He has simply learned everything there is to know in the world: rhetoric, philosophy, law, divinity, – piece of piss. The only thing he doesn’t know is magic.  He decides to devote his formidable mind to the black arts.  A Good Angel pops up and says, “Read the Bible!”  But Faustusreckons that God has already condemned him as a sinner, so an Evil Angel says, “You’re a wizard, Johnny!” 

Two other scholars, Valdes and Cornelius, teach Faustus the basics of necromancy and are clearly gifted tutors for, on his first try, Faustus summons the devil Mephistopheles, whom Faust dismisses, demanding he come back dressed as a monk – a more appropriate garb for devils, Faustus jokes.  The magician proposes the terms of the bargain that will forevermore bear his name: in return for his immortal soul, Faustus demands twenty-four years of ultimate power and self-indulgence, courtesy of Mephistopheles.

I would like to pause to note that Faustus bargains his salvation for 24 years of sex, drugs, and rocknroll.  Only 24?  Why not 50, or a hundred?  Why did he start negotiating so low?  Mephistopheles takes the deal to Lucifer who, I presume, laughs his fiery posterior off before immediately agreeing.

Now Faustus begins to second-guess.  See, always start high.  But he signs away his soul in his own blood in a very legalistic manner. Faustus gets all the knowledge and power he wishes for, but in time, he begins to suspect that Mephistopheles screwed him out of heaven. He starts mentioning God, which upsets his demonic companion. Beelzebub and Mephistopheles return, strong-arming Faustus like a couple of loanshark leg-breakers, making sure that he’ll never again refer to the Divinity.

One of the enticing perks of the Faustian bargain is a chariot drawn by dragons. Faustus cruises the heavens and earth in this sick ride, eventually making his way to Rome during the Feast of St. Peter.  Some rather petulant pranks ensue – an invisible Faustus stealing the Pope’s supper, etc.  Like, this is what you do with infinite power?  Give the Pope a hotfoot? Sad.

Faustus returns home and his fame multiplies.  He delights King Charles V with a bit of conjuring and makes a laughingstock of a pompous knight.  He runs a few low-grade scams on hay-sellers and horse-traders – makes 40 bucks out of the horse deal.  40 bucks.  Infinite power and you run street hustles?  C’mon, Johnny!

Time flows by like this.  Among Faustus’s last great exercises of power is to summon Helen of Troy – this, incidentally, is where the “face that launched a thousand ships” line comes from – for a little pre-damnation hanky-panky.

Finally, Faustus tells his friends that he is forever and irrevocably damned, that his powers came at the supreme cost. They wish him cheery-bye and leave.  The Good Angel arrives one more time, pleading for Faustus’s repentance.  The Evil Angel gloats a bit.  The clock strikes eleven, and in his final soliloquy Faustus laments his fate. On the stroke of twelve, the demons close upon him as he pitifully begs God and the devil for mercy, but none is tendered, and they tear Faustus’s body as his soul plummets into the abyss.  The Chorus says, there’s a lesson here, folks.

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Marlowe’s play was probably written in 1592, given the circulation date of The English Faust Book and the 1593 date of Marlowe’s expiration.  We don’t get a published version until the quarto of 1604 by Valentine Simmes.  We call this the A text, both because it comes first and because scholars have generally thought it to be closer to Marlowe’s working script.  In 1616, John Wright published another quarto version we call the B text.  It includes almost 700 additional lines, while omitting a couple dozen from the A text.  Much of this material takes the form of prose comic interludes involving servants loosely mirroring the action of the main narrative.  Marlowe’s authorship of these scenes is highly questionable, hence the historical  privileging of the A text.  Recently, though, critics have seen them as rather integral to the play (as have directors, given that the A text is less than 1500 lines long – rather stingy for an Elizabethan afternoon out).  I’ll be using the B text in this episode, as it happens to be the one I own, and because even if the A text may reveal a more authentic representation of authorship, little has been lost in the expanded edition, and questions of authorship and intention can be needlessly burdensome in these instances.

One of the vexed questions surrounding Dr. Faustus is, “Just what point is Marlowe making?”  I mean, where do its theological or metaphysical sympathies lie? The play was one of the three most popular in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, at least as measured by published editions, and it courted a good deal of controversy – its onstage representations of necromancy shocked – and combined with Marlowe’s rumored atheism, Faustus had the seductive whiff of scandal about it.  

But the play itself is hardly Satanic in any approving way.  In fact, it’s, well . . . and I know this is a somewhat strange turn of phrase . . . it strikes me as noncommittally orthodox.  There’s nothing in it that shouts “Marlowe is a godless libertine!”  Actually, there’s nothing in it that a devout Christian of the time wouldn’t accept, theologically speaking. In the prologue, the Chorus sets a somewhat objective tone.  He says, “we must now perform the form of Faustus’ fortunes, good and bad: and now to patient judgments we appeal.”  As if to say, we don’t have an agenda here, we’re just showing you what happened, and you can make up your minds about it yourselves.  We’ve no moral skin in the game.  And note that it's “the form” of Faustus’s life – calling our attention to theatrical artifice.  So what’s Marlowe up to?  

You remember the film The Wild One, from 1953 with Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler, the leader of a motorcycle gang?  It’s most famous line: Mildred says, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” “Whadda you got?”  I kind of feel that way about Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.  The play rebels against everything – and I’ll explain what I mean momentarily – but ultimately it seems to me rather traditionalist without being dogmatic.  It’s rebellion as conservatism.  Or, maybe I should rein myself in a bit – at least a skepticism about progress.

Let’s see if I can unpack that.  If you think about it, many of the social and cultural revolutions we’re familiar with are actually not “radical” in the usual sense of the word.  I remember a discussion in college once on whether Jesus of Nazareth was a revolutionary or not.  Certainly, his challenges to Second Temple Judaism and the Roman authorities, his teachings about mutual social responsibility, can seem pretty militant.  But, on the other hand, a close look at his motives seems to point to a reversion, to a time back to a simpler, more primitive, more personal relationship with the Deity; not so much a new dispensation, but a re-engagement with the old.

That got me thinking about movements like the 1960s counterculture, whose anti-war, anti-materialist values urged us literally back to Nature, back to the land.  Or the Punk movement of the 1970s, which sought to return to the primal and accessible rock and roll of the 50s, dispensing with the elitist superficiality of the corporate rock star.  These are rather innocuous examples.  But, more alarmingly, we might see the recent radical populist, nationalist,  and nativist movements across the globe as a more threatening case of radicalism in the service of a perverted traditionalism.

I certainly place Marlowe’s work nearer the innocuous end of the spectrum I just rather rashly constructed.

One of the “sources” for the play that I didn’t mention earlier is the 15th century morality play Everyman.  We’ve done an episode on that, so veteran litterbugs will make the connection, but if you missed the earlier episode, hit pause now, get yourself a bucket of salty popcorn and a fizzy drink, then mouse on over to Episode 28: The Birth of English Drama: Mystery and Morality.  We’ll wait for you to come back.

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Welcome back!  Now that we’re all on the same page (ha ha!): I didn’t mention Everyman as a source because it isn’t one.  Well, not in the same way that The English Faust Book is.  Marlowe doesn’t plumb it for material.  But certainly one cannot mistake the earlier play’s enormous gravitational pull here.  While we don’t have explicitly allegorical characters in Marlowe, we also do not have rounded psychological portraits.  Both plays explore questions of sin and salvation and both acknowledge the role of human agency in soteriology.  Faustus is an extraordinary everyman, who seems at first to covet higher order pleasures (supreme knowledge) rather than the more base avarice of Everyman.  But once Faustus makes his bargain, of course, he revels in the quite base pleasures of lust and gluttony and pride.  He hardly makes use of his power in any suprahuman capacity, craving merely the recognition and adulation of the mere humans he despises.

Which makes one wonder if a tentative criticism of Renaissance humanism lurks here.  As this early modern movement gained currency, traditional understandings of natural philosophy (science), the cosmos, the nature of humanity, and morality came under pressure.  Poet and priest John Donne, whom we will meet in a future show, lamented this crumbling of the center in a 1611 poem called “The Anatomy of the World”:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out,

The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

Donne anticipates Yeats’ “Things fall apart / the center cannot hold” by three centuries, and it's that sense of, I don’t know, intellectual and perhaps spiritual rudderlessness that may underlie some of Dr. Faustus.  But there’s a line a bit later in Donne’s poem – “And freely men confess that this world's spent,. When in the planets and the firmament. They seek so many new.”  Of course, Donne’s referring to the dawning scientific revolution – specifically the work of Kepler and Galileo, drawing on the work of Copernicus.  But the criticism works for Faustus’s situation at the beginning of the play.  In a single speech, the jaded scholar dismisses Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, St. Jerome – logic, economy, medicine, law, and divinity.  We are, of course, to take these as synecdoche for the entire range of human knowledge.  Faustus has reached its end, but is unsatisfied, and so his only course is to transgress into inhuman knowledge, seeking to “resolve . . . all ambiguities,” apparently those questions not yet resolved by human intellect.

By this reading, Faustus’s tragic flaw – his hamartia, as Aristotle would have it – is the classic hubris, excessive self-regard.  The Chorus invokes the myth of Icarus in the prologue as an analogy: “Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow.”  He has strayed from his lane, overreached, and in that overreaching has trespassed upon the provenance of God.  And this is the great suspicion of intellectual humanism by some at the time, and certainly beyond that.  Mary Shelley interrogates the limits of human knowledge in her Frankenstein.  Since the end of World War 2, humanity has had to reckon with weapons technologies that could end existence.  Today, we must deal with a physicalist scientism as we confront the bioethical issues of genetic engineering and cloning, and the revolutionarily disruptive potential of artificial intelligence.  The fear of human intelligence outpacing human wisdom is perennial.

But to simply see Faustus as an Everyman-style object-lesson in humility before God and Nature requires that we ignore numerous other aspects of the play.  For instance, it’s quite easy to reduce the above debate – as we have done in our own day – to a “science vs. religion” binary, and by the logic of such reductivism, if the play displays a skepticism about the “new philosophy” as Donne puts it, then it must have a more sympathetic view of religion and revelation.  

Well, don’t splint your shins jumping to that conclusion.  I know I said above that there’s nothing doctrinally controversial in Dr. Faustus, but that doesn’t mean that Marlowe wants some of that old time religion.

Recall that Marlowe was very probably part of Sir Frances Walsingham’s espionage service, a great part of its mission being the suppression of Catholics in Elizabeth’s realm.  Unlikely that as a playwright he would tacitly but publicly endorse that which was considered seditious.  The anti-Catholic stuff in the play comes off as rather broad and buffoonish, as if Catholicism did not deserve a more nuanced criticism.  Recall Faustus’s order to Mephistophilis, when the demon first appears, 

I charge thee to return, and change thy shape; 

Thou art too ugly to attend on me: 

Go, and return an old Franciscan friar; 

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

And, of course, there are the scenes at the papal palace, in which Faustus throws his voice, steals the Pope’s dinner and wine (in a rather crude parody of the Mass), and slaps him across the pontifical chops.  Low humor at best, slapstick, not designed to elicit sympathy at all for the old Church in the face of its contemporary challenges..  Marlowe mocks the superstitious atavism of the Church when the friars fetch bell, book, and candle to exorcise the Faustian poltergeist.

But, again, to pigeonhole the play as overt anti-Catholic satire demands a similarly reductive interpretation.  Even as Renaissance humanism is given a bit of the side-eye and the “old faith” comes in for some unsubtle ridicule, we’ve quite ample evidence that Dr. Faustus hardly endorses the progressive (as it might be conceived of in the late 16th century) Protestantism that supplanted Catholicism.  

Remember that Marlowe sets the play in Wittenberg, where “his kinsmen chiefly brought [Faustus] up.”  This German city looms large in European history, for it is the site of the Cathedral on whose door a turbulent Augustinian friar reputedly nailed up 95 arguments detailing the errors of the institutional Church.

game show music

It’s time for our bonus prize round!  You’ll recall that earlier in the episode, I advised you to remember the name of the author of a book called Table Talk: he is the same man who vandalized the cathedral door and sparked the Protestant Reformation.  So here is your bonus question:  What was his name?

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Time’s up, everyone!  If you said Martin Luther, you’re absolutely right!  Congratulations!  Now, I fully trust that everyone who listens to this podcast is a person of unimpeachable honesty and integrity.  So, if you knew the answer, please write it down on the back of a 20 dollar bill, along with your name, and send it to me here in the Clubhouse to claim your special bonus prize!  Again, congratulations to all our winners!

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Wittenberg is not found in the sources, so Marlowe consciously sets Faustus’ transgression at the site of Europe’s most convulsive cultural spasm.  The match that lit the fire, to mix my metaphors, was the Church’s selling of indulgences or pardons – a longstanding controversy for those who believed that such a practice reduced salvation to a commodity for the earthly comfort of the vendors.  For a refresher here, pop back to episode 14: A Wholly Vicious Man: Chaucer’s Pardoner.

But once the fire was set, a number of more complex theological issues rose in the smoke.  Regarding soteriology – that is, the theology of salvation (perhaps I should have said that earlier when I used the term.  Mea culpa) – Luther stressed two doctrines: sola fide and sola scriptura: only faith and only scripture.  

Have I mentioned these before?  I think I have, but honestly can’t be bothered to pore over old notes to see where.  Besides, even if I have, you’ve probably forgotten anyway.

Luther rejected the Catholic doctrine of salvation by faith and works, arguing that humanity was too corrupt to ever earn salvation, so it could only be secured as a free gift from God.  You had to have faith in that gift.  Furthermore, that faith should be nourished by the individual’s regular study and contemplation of the Holy Scriptures – the word of God, the primary articles of faith.  Hence the upswell of 16th century efforts to translate the Bible into vernacular languages, thereby facilitating study independent of a Church hierarchy and therefore a more authentic communion between the individual believer and their God.

Fun fact, Luther is said to have developed these doctrines while squatting in the outhouse.  Amazing the ideas you can have when thus occupied.

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that such a focus on potentially idiosyncratic textual readings lies at the heart of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.  We noted above Faustus’s frustration with his library, but I’d like to call particular attention to how he dispenses with theology as a subject:

Jerome’s Bible, Faustus; view it well. 

Stipendium peccati mors est. Ha! Stipendium, &c. 

The reward of sin is death: that’s hard. 

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas;

 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is 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!

Faustus reads the Bible as translated into Latin by the 5th century St. Jerome called the Vulgate.  As a bit of context, Jerome is one of the most prolific writers of early Catholicism whose spiritual focus tended more toward asceticism over against contemplation, and so a life of physical deprivation leaned toward the holy.  Faustus is not at all interested in that.  When he reads the passage, “The reward of sin is death,” his quirky exegesis takes him down an almost Calvinistic, predeterministic path – that we all sin, so we will all die (and here he takes death to be both physical and spiritual), and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Que sera sera.  Might be going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I’m enjoying the ride!  By this hermeneutical move, he concludes that his soul is worthless – thus the bargain for 24 years of bodily indulgence seems quite a canny one.

Western Christianity has never really gotten itself out of the conundrum posed by the heady brew of human fallibility, Divine omniscience, and free will.  Far, far greater minds than mine have attempted it – Aquinas, Plantinga.  It must remain forever elusive, or forever absurd, depending on your point of view.  But in this play, if we attend to a particular word, we get a sense of its sympathies.  That word is despair, and its adjectival form desperate.  Together, they appear 14 times.  We use the word colloquially to mean “hopeless” or “to give up hope.”  That’s what it means in Dr. Faustus, too, but it takes on a soteriological valence.  In the New Testament, it is the “sin unto death,” blaspheming against the Holy Ghost  To despair is to reject the testimony of the Holy Spirit to the saving power of Christ.  In short, it means that you do not believe that God can save you.  It appears in numerous passages in the Gospels, including Mark 3:28–29, Matthew 12:31–32, and Luke 12:10, as well as in the epistles Hebrews 6:4–6, Hebrews 10:26–31, and 1 John 5:16.

We usually understand Faustus’s damnation to be the ineluctable result of his hubris – or at least the hubris of his lust for knowledge and glory beyond the proper range of humanity – but I think that’s not quite what the play says.  Note some of despair’s appearances.  Early, Faustus agrees to “Despair in God, and trust in Beelzebub.”  As he begins to recognize his dire state, an Old Man urges Faustus to “call for mercy, and avoid despair.”  The magician is torn between a logical contradiction: “I do repent; and yet I do despair.”  Yet, throughout, various characters, like the Old Man and the Good Angel, continually remind an increasingly desperate Faustus it is “Never too late, if Faustus will repent.”  

There have been dozens and dozens of Faust legend retellings, from Goethe and Thomas Mann, to adaptations like Hawthorne’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” and Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” not to mention the innumerable ways TV shows have adapted the basic plot for episodes.  May I note a personal fondness for the 1968 episode of The Monkees, in which Peter sells his soul to play the harp.  Ah, my youth!  

Anyway, in most of these tellings, the Devil is defeated at the end.  The Faust character gets his soul back and Lucifer stalks away grumbling and twirling his mustache like the villain in a melodrama.  But Marlowe’s play does not end happily, at least not for Faust.  It’s not his intellectual hubris, but his belief in his own insuperable sinfulness that, ironically, damns him.  He doesn’t lose his soul to the Devil because of the shallow bargain at the beginning.  He loses it because he doesn’t believe he can be saved.  His last plea: “I’ll burn my books!”  startles in that, even now, he doesn’t understand what has damned him.

Dr. Faustus is a morality play, an Everyman, for a culture in which morality and truth have become something of an open question, for a society that was once subject to God but now, perhaps, seeks to thrive despite, or even without, God.  Maybe an anticipation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous declaration “God is dead,” which, despite many, many misunderstandings, was not the triumphalist cry of a radical atheist.  Rather, he saw it as an unimaginable moral and epistemological crisis – the breakdown of everything.  Marlowe’s play seems to treat religious normativism with suspicion and derision, but it also seems unsure that the relativism that accompanies humanism will fare any better.

That’s a happy place to leave today’s conversation, isn’t it?  Thanks for listening.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If so, can I ask that you tell just two people that you liked the show?  Word of mouth is a great way for us to grow an audience.  Another great way is to leave a 5 star review on whatever app you listen on.  Remember you can get hold of me on all major social media platforms.  Click the support the show button if you’re able to donate a little to keep the show running.  I appreciate all your support.  Thanks again, and until next time, stay well.