The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  The demonization of Faustus began immediately after his death circa 1540. Luther’s successor Philip Melanchthon testified that Faustus’s corpse was found ‘lying near the bed, with his face turned toward his back. The devil had killed him.’ The grotesque spectacle of Faustus’s mangled corpse became a staple ingredient in the Faust legend. Melanchthon introduced the story of Faust’s pact with the devil in order to provide a legalistic basis for Satan’s ghastly intervention at the end; the devil had come to claim his own. Melanchthon also stressed the crucial analogy between the German magician and his biblical prototype. Faustus’s botched attempt to fly at Venice, where he suffered a bad fall, reenacted Simon’s fatal flight at Rome.

  The elaboration of the Faust myth coincided with the outbreak of the German witch-hunts. Luther took a hard line on witchcraft: ‘I should have no compassion on these witches,’ he stated, ‘I would burn all of them.’ In 1586, after a bad harvest at Trier, the authorities burned ‘a hundred and eighteen women and two men’ who had confessed ‘that the prolongation of the winter was the work of their incantations’. The Faust myth focused attention on the interesting question of whether male magicians were just as culpable as their female counterparts. Recently enacted statutes in Saxony and the Palatinate made trafficking in spirits a capital offence. Melanchthon’s student Augustine Lercheimer, one of the main sources for the Faust legend, complained about inequities of class and gender. It was scandalous for the authorities to execute ignorant female witches, while educated male wizards, who knew better what they were getting into, went scot-free. His associate, the publisher and compiler Johann Spies, presented the German History of Dr John Faustus in the form of a trial narrative: the History vociferously argued that sorcerers deserved to be executed.

  Spies buttressed his case with further anecdotal evidence that Faustus was the reincarnation of Simon the Magician. He added the magician’s trip to Rome, where Faustus plays tricks on the Pope and performs for the emperor, and his love affair with Helen of Troy. Spies drew Faustus into the campaign against academic magicians by giving him a doctorate in theology from Wittenberg and an insatiable curiosity about the universe. The History satisfies this curiosity with Mephistopheles, the infernal spirit who tenders Faustus twenty-four years of faithful service in exchange for the scholar’s body and soul. The political application of the Faustus myth became plainer than ever. The devil claimed the offender whom the authorities had failed to prosecute. This category included men like John Dee and Giordano Bruno, both of whom migrated to Saxony in 1587. Or Judge Dietrich Flage, a former rector at the University of Trier and a prominent juror there until he was convicted of diabolical magic and burned at the stake: ‘He is like Dr Faustus; a great big book could be written about his magical deeds.’

  Yet Dr Faustus stubbornly refused to do the cultural work that he had been invented to perform. Instead of scaring people away from magic, he drew them in. Using the incantations from Spies’s book, a medical student at Tübingen offered in writing to make a pact with the devil in exchange for help with his loans. The ministers at Strasbourg worried that the History had made the prospect of practising magic so alluring that others would follow Faustus’s example, despite his miserable end. Even the mutilated corpse provoked the question of what the harmless magician had done to deserve such a horrible fate. The municipal authorities at Strasbourg, Basel and Tübingen tried to suppress Spies’s History, but these measures only enhanced its cult status.

  Moreover, would-be sorcerers like the needy medical student were bound to discover that the devil did not come when you called him – did not, indeed, exist at all. The Cambridge student Thomas Fineaux, who ‘learned all Marlowe by heart’, clearly saw that Faustus’s story lent itself to sceptical conclusions. Following in the footsteps of Marlowe’s magician-hero, Fineaux ‘would go out at midnight into a wood & fall down upon his knees & pray heartily that the devil would come & he would see him; for he did not believe there was a devil … Marlowe made him an atheist.’

  * * *

  Marlowe stuck closely to the story that came down to him via P.F.’s Damnable Life, but he presented it from a sceptical point of view. The author of Spies’s History fervently believed in witchcraft and the devil; Marlowe’s Dr Faustus provokes disbelief. Instead of following his source, Marlowe interrogates it.

  Speaking on the poet’s behalf, Marlowe’s Prologue disavows the high style and heroic matter of his earlier work. The poet will not be ‘sporting in the dalliance of love / In courts of kings where state is overturned’ (Dido), ‘Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds, / Intends our muse to daunt his heavenly verse’ (Tamburlaine) (3–6):

  Only this, gentlemen. We must perform

  The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad.

  To patient judgements we appeal our plaud,

  And speak for Faustus in his infancy:

  Now is he born, his parents base of stock,

  In Germany, within a town called Rhode.

  Of riper years to Wertenberge he went …

  (7–13)

  Marlowe retains the rhetorical framework of Johann Spies’s trial narrative, but suspends judgement about the defendant’s guilt or innocence. His pronouncement that the actors will ‘perform / The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad’ calls attention to the imaginative licence of theatrical productions. The shape of Marlowe’s story has already been determined, but the details remain subject to reinterpretation in performance. The Prologue’s ‘appeal’ to ‘patient judgements’, as if the audience constituted a higher tribunal, hints that the guilty verdict rendered by The Damnable Life can be altered in the playhouse.

  Marlowe formulated his intentions at a moment when the word ‘perform’ was itself undergoing a historic shift in meaning, from its older sense of ‘to complete’, ‘to carry out an action’ (‘I laboured and did my best to perform this book’), to the modern one of ‘to play a part’. The newer meaning introduces an element of illusion or trickery. Early performances of Dr Faustus were notoriously successful at blurring the distinction between performance and reality. There were numerous stories about an extra devil who appeared among the actors while the play was being staged. Philip Henslowe obtained a dragon-machine solely for performances of Dr Faustus, and doubtless used it in the frightening scene where Lucifer first appears.

  FAUSTUS. Ah, Christ, my Saviour,

  Seek to save distressèd Faustus’ soul!

  Enter LUCIFER, BEELZEBUB and MEPHISTOPHELES.

  LUCIFER. Christ cannot save thy soul for he is just.

  There’s none but I have int’rest in the same.

  FAUSTUS. O, who art thou that look’st so terrible?

  LUCIFER. I am Lucifer,

  And this is my companion prince in hell.

  (II.iii.87–93)

  The terrible-looking dragon ‘performed the form’ of The Damnable Life: after Faustus sells his soul to the devil, Lucifer comes to claim his own. Yet the very staginess of this spectacular device exposed the purely performative elements of Marlowe’s play. A keen-eyed theatregoer remarked in 1620 that contemporary performances of Dr Faustus had

  Shaggy-haired devils run roaring over the Stage with Squibs [firecrackers] in their mouths, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tiring-house and the twelve-penny Hirelings make artificial Lightning in their Heavens.

  These threadbare devices intensified the emotional impact of Marlowe’s text even as they undermined its content. How many ‘patient judgements’ recalled that Christ can save whomsoever He wants?

  The exercise of patient judgement requires close attention to Marlowe’s text. Another word that solicits attention in his Prologue is ‘Wertenberge’. Modern editors always emend this to read ‘Wittenberg’, in conformity with The Damnable Life. But Wertenberge was more than a printer’s error. ‘Wirtenberg’, in its standard sixteenth-century spelling, was the independent Rhineland duchy of Württemburg. The duchy was well known to English Protestants as a stronghold of Calvinism. Moreov
er, it was Faustus’s birthplace in Manlius’s frequently reprinted life of the magician.

  Johann Spies’s decision to send Faustus to Wittenberg proved to be a tactical blunder. When Marlowe’s Cambridge contemporary Fynes Morrison journeyed to Wittenberg, where he interviewed residents about Faustus in 1591, he ‘could never have any memory of his end’. Faustus’s academic history turned out to be a patent fraud, motivated by the need to make Faustus into an anti-Luther, and facilitated by the verbal resemblance between Wittenberg and Württemburg. After Augustine Lercheimer, one of the main sources of the German History of Dr John Faustus, read Spies’s book he grew incensed at the idea that Luther and Melanchthon, the leading theologians at Wittenberg, would have given a master’s degree in divinity, much less a doctorate, to a ‘shithouse’ like Faust. Marlowe’s choice of Württemburg over Wittenberg defamiliarized the sinner’s origins; it notified patient judges that the so-called facts of Dr Faustus’s damnable life varied according to the ideological preferences of the author who produced them. The Faust who took his degree at Wittenberg came from nowhere.

  Marlowe’s Dr Faustus introduces himself as a textual fabrication, classically trained in the disciplinary regimes that his creator recalled from Cambridge. His opening monologue recalls comparable moments in the work of other academics that turned to magic. The scholar’s habit of sceptical inquiry leads him to reject the traditional disciplines (logic, medicine, law and divinity) in favour of conjuring. The rapid-fire succession of books, quotations lifted out of context and excerpts in different languages reminds the audience that Faustus has himself been fashioned out of literary materials. So, in a grammatical register, does Faustus’s habit of referring to himself in the second and third person, as if he were someone else. ‘Why, Faustus … / Is not thy common talk sound aphorisms?’ (I.ii.18–19)

  Despite his impeccable scholarly credentials, Dr Faustus makes a number of curious mistakes. He reads from Aristotle’s Analytics, but quotes the definition that Cicero bequeathed to humanist dialecticians: ‘the end of logic is to dispute well’. When he goes on to discard Aristotle, he says farewell to a phrase – on kai me on, ‘being and not-being’ – that appears nowhere in Aristotle. He then quotes Aristotle when he thinks he is citing the physician Galen; and misquotes (ever so slightly, so that we cannot be sure whether Dr Faustus or Marlowe himself is misremembering) the jurist Justinian. When he turns to the Scriptures (‘Jerome’s Bible, Faustus, view it well’) he does not read from St Jerome’s Bible, but instead gives his own Latin translation of two verses from an English Bible, artfully arranged in passable blank verse lines.

  The usual interpretation of this scene is that Marlowe wanted to emphasize that his protagonist is a bookish dunce. The claim is true as far as it goes, but Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is too well informed to be wholly credible in this role. Numbskulls do not get everything wrong in just the right way – substituting Ramus for Aristotle, attributing Aristotle’s most famous line on medicine to Galen, saying goodbye to being and not-being and making up their own Scriptural verses in Latin. The erudite author, Christopher Marlowe, did know the right citations and scripted the wrong ones into Faustus’s part. This line of reasoning strengthens the impression that Dr Faustus is an imaginary being, a player speaking the words of another. One can, of course, argue that Marlowe did not bother to check his sources; but substituting a careless author for a learned one scarcely improves the Doctor’s credibility.

  Faustus’s gravest errors occur when he turns to the Scriptures, translating his own Latin as he goes along:

  ‘Stipendium peccati mors est.’ Ha!

  ‘Stipendium,’ &c.

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

  ‘Si pecasse negamus, fallimur

  Et nulla est in nobis veritas.’

  If we say that we have no sin,

  We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.

  Why then belike we must sin,

  And so consequently die.

  Ay, we must die an everlasting death.

  What doctrine call you this, Che serà, serà,

  What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu.

  (I.i.39–50)

  Faustus chops each of the Scriptural verses in half, in both cases citing the divine condemnation while omitting the promise of redemption that follows. After proclaiming ‘The reward of sin is death,’ St Paul writes, ‘but the gift of God is eternal life’ (Romans 6:23). After declaring that we deceive ourselves if we say that we have no sin, St John adds that ‘If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:8). Dr Faustus reads the Scriptures with the selective mentality of a humanist dialectician. He lifts brief extracts out of context to fashion a credible syllogism and jumps to sweeping conclusions. The physical presence of the Bible extends the meaning of Faustus’s pronouncements, but also diminishes his control over that meaning. He thinks he is interpreting the Scriptures while the Scriptures are interpreting him.

  The so-called ‘devil’s syllogism’ based on Romans 6:23 and 1 John 1:8 held a special fascination for Marlowe’s contemporaries because it so closely resembled the Calvinist dogma adopted in England and Württemburg. Calvin too isolates the first half of Romans 6:23 and insists that ‘all sin is mortal’. Article 15 of the Church of England ended with the first half of 1 John 1:8 followed by a full stop. The Thirty-Nine Articles that constituted the Elizabethan Church nowhere suggest that all who confess their sins will be forgiven; on the contrary, God reserves the gift of grace only for the elect, who

  feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ …

  So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination is a most dangerous downfall.

  Critics rightly point out that Faustus is hideously mistaken about the Bible; but the Church he is rejecting has taught him to make precisely these mistakes. Marlowe, who had already been taxed with atheism, unveils in Dr Faustus the ecclesiastical basis of his own unbelief.

  The devil’s syllogism exposed a grave contradiction in Calvinist doctrine. Divine justice was supposed to terrorize the reprobate into good behaviour; yet the godless had ample reason to disbelieve in a God who had already condemned them to sin and damnation regardless of their earthly conduct. According to the twisted logic of Elizabethan theology, Faustus can hardly be said to think for himself at all. Since ‘God works in us good and evil’, Bible reading could only make things worse for the reprobate. ‘That the Lord sends his word to many whose blindness he intends to increase’, Calvin explains,

  cannot indeed be called into question … he directs his voice to them but in order that they may become even more deaf; he kindles a light but that they may be even more blind; he sets forth doctrine but that they may grow even more stupid.

  Had Dr Faustus seen the second half of the two verses from the Scriptures, he would have encountered the spiritual meaning of the biblical texts. For the elect, the acknowledgement of sin and death opens the way to the ‘gift of God … eternal life’. Every playgoer knew that ‘The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.’ Mercy, the gift of life, is the price that Christ paid with his mortal body to redeem mankind from sin and death. Since Faustus cannot see beyond the literal meaning of sin and death, he cannot receive the gift. Nothing remains for him but ‘Stipendium, etc.’, the literal reward of sin. Yet the letter turns out to have its own peculiar compensations in this play. Letters show Dr Faustus the way to magic: ‘Lines, circles, signs, letters and characters – / Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires’ (I.i.53–54). Wizards combined geometrical inscriptions (lines and circles), alphabetic letters and ‘characters’, such as the signs of the zodiac, to produce the magic spells that enabled them to communicate directly with demons. In one fell swoop, Marlowe captures the paradox of a culture that taught men not to believe in its own ultimate values.

  Mephistoph
eles and his fellow demons will only serve the magician in exchange for their own reward: ‘We fly in hope to get his glorious soul’ (I.iii.50). Without the gift of grace, Dr Faustus is reduced to a commodity. The sinner’s discovery that he possesses a market value underlies the Faustian pact; he deeds his body and soul to Satan in exchange for the service of Mephistopheles, his attendant demon, over a period of twenty-four years. The contract creates ‘the form of Faustus’ fortunes’, the literary commodity that Abel Jeffes claimed for his own and Christopher Marlowe sold to the players.

  When an accomplice asks ‘what shall we three want’, Faustus, speaking more truly than he knows, replies ‘Nothing’ (I.i.150–51). Every reader has noticed the discrepancy between what Faustus bargains for and what he gets. He means to wield godlike powers – ‘All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command’ (I.i.58–59) – but instead becomes a magician for hire and confidence man, and acquires the nickname Dr Fustian (that is, Dr Bombast or Dr Nobody). Towards the end of the play, he sells a stallion to a horse trader with the warning ‘ride him not into the water’ (IV.i.128–29). The trader, ‘thinking my horse had had some rare quality that he would not have had me known of’ (151–52), of course rides him into the water and nearly drowns when the horse disappears into the pond. Scepticism plays right into Doctor Nobody’s routine. If he tells the truth, his interlocutor assumes that he must be lying, covering up ‘some rarer quality’ that turns out, in the end, never to have existed. Faustus ultimately gets just what he said he wanted – ‘nothing’.