Chapter 7

Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental

Fantasy

In violation of chronology, I have reserved the discussion of Doctor Faustus to

the conclusion of this study because I consider it to be Marlowe’s most powerful
trauma narrative. Coming after the discussion of Marlowe’s dramatization of the
slaughter of thousands of French Protestants, this claim requires us to turn again
to Ruth Leys’ distinction between trauma as external wounding and trauma as
an internal, psychological wound or vulnerability (Trauma 9–10). There is little
extreme physical violence in Doctor Faustus: a scratched arm, a few broken pates,
some bumps and bruises, and Faustus’s concluding dismemberment constitute all
the real physical harm of which the play can boast.1 Blood flows, but reluctantly.

1
 As my list’s omission of the Old Man’s torture at the end of 5.1 (found only in the
A-text) and reference to Faustus’s concluding dismemberment indicate, my argument in this
chapter is based on the B-text of Doctor Faustus. Neither the A-text nor the B-text can be
said to represent with any certainty Marlowe’s authorial intentions or the play as it was first
performed (see my introduction to my edition of the B-text, 23–5). Consequently, scholars
have often chosen between the texts on the basis of aesthetic criteria: surveying the debate,
Andrew Duxfield concludes that “Any argument for the originality of either the A text or the
B text posits the superiority of its favored text as a basis for its originality; passages of text
which an editor or scholar deems to be of an inferior standard are automatically passed off
as the work of the revisers or a collaborator” (10). Significantly, the aesthetic standards used
to privilege the A-text over the B-text are similar to those used to dismiss The Massacre at
Paris as a corrupt, inferior play. Thus, Kuriyama contends that “acceptance of the B text
as ‘original’ or authoritative leaves us with a work that is, to put it plainly, an aesthetic
monstrosity and a critical nightmare. It is no wonder that critics sensitive to the poetic and
psychological unity of Faustus have often chosen to use the 1604 text in spite of Greg’s
arguments, for regardless of its flaws the A text has an aesthetic integrity far superior to that
of the B text” (“Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus” 177). My argument throughout this study
has been that Marlowe’s traumatic aesthetics disrupt conventional aesthetic expectations,
especially those associated with notions of tragic unity, and I have consequently chosen the
B-text precisely because of its seeming lack of “aesthetic integrity.” Although the B-text
allows me to develop my argument about Marlowe’s traumatic aesthetics more sharply than
the A-text would have done, however, I consider my argument to be largely compatible
with both texts. If the B-text’s expanded comic middle foregrounds the theatricality of
Faustus’s magical world more emphatically than the A-text, in both texts the silence of
God as Other is central. I am not at all claiming that I think that the B-text more closely
represents Marlowe’s authorial intentions than the A-text, however. I accept that the
B-text more than likely incorporates the “adicyones in doctor fostes” (Foakes 206) for
146 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

More intensely than Marlowe’s first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, although
along similar lines, Doctor Faustus dramatizes the internal vulnerability of its
tragic protagonist. As in Dido, in Doctor Faustus this internal vulnerability takes
the form of the demand of the Other, to which the wounded subject Faustus
responds by attempting to elaborate the “fundamental fantasy” epitomized in his
contract with Mephostophilis and Lucifer. As the book’s introduction outlines,
the fundamental fantasy or primal scene in psychoanalytic theory is the fantasy
scenario by which the individual responds to the desires and demands of the Other.
It is the individual’s response to the question “What does the Other want from
me?” To the infant confronted with messages from the adult world, what Jean
Laplanche describes as “enigmatic signifiers” (New Foundations 126) saturated
with desires beyond the infant’s comprehension, the question is overwhelming
and is experienced as trauma. To master the trauma, the child articulates a fantasy
response to the question. Žižek comments that

fantasy functions as a construction, as an imaginary scenario filling out the void,

the opening of the desire of the Other: by giving us a definite answer to the question
‘What does the Other want?’, it enables us to evade the unbearable deadlock in
which the Other wants something from us, but we are at the same time incapable
of translating this desire of the Other into a positive interpellation. (115)

Tragedy, whether the tragedy of Oedipus or of Antigone, is the paradigmatic

fundamental fantasy. It organizes the internal trauma of the Other’s demand into
agonistic narratives of individual agency facing an external threat of wounding.
The intimate Other whose demands and desires provoke the question “What does
the Other want from me?” need not be human. Laplanche locates the Other firmly
in the subject’s most intimate human relations: mother, father, siblings; Žižek’s
argument focuses on the political Other. As we saw in the first chapter on Dido,
however, for Derrida in The Gift of Death the traumatizing intimate Other is God.
“We fear and tremble,” Derrida writes, “before the inaccessible secret of a God
who decides for us although we remain responsible” (56), a God whose demands
at once establish and defeat any notion of adequate, reciprocal exchange in the
responses they call forth.
Faustus’s Other, like Aeneas’s, is God. As much as Faustus may attempt to use
his magic to transform his world in imitation of classical myth, however, he and
Aeneas inhabit vastly different fictional worlds and are called by the respective
deities of these worlds in radically different ways. Jupiter, in effect, supplies

which Henslowe paid William Bird and Samuel Rowley in 1602 and that, in general, it is
impossible to distinguish with any certainty in either version of the play the pen of Marlowe
from the work of revisers and possible collaborators. Nonetheless, even though the name is
ultimately a placeholder for multiple agencies and mediations, I follow here both versions’
title-page attributions of the play to Marlowe (“Ch. Mar.”) and am assuming a consistent
aesthetic purposiveness or, perhaps more precisely, a consistent aesthetic effect to the play
in its B-text version.
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 147

Aeneas with his fundamental fantasy and demands that he live it out: he calls
Aeneas to fulfill his imperial destiny as the man chosen to redress the trauma of
Troy by founding Rome. The God of Faustus’s Reformation cultural context, in
contrast, demands not exaltation but abjection. God, according to Calvin, demands
that we traverse our fundamental fantasy and acknowledge our subjective
destitution. In his insightful Lacanian reading of Calvinism, Kevin Cameron
remarks that “Unlike those predestined to damnation, you will never hear the elect
utter the plea, ‘what do you want from me?’” (22) because Calvin demands that
we abandon the idea that there is something in me, what Lacan calls agalma,
that makes the Other desire or choose me.2 God is not an “accepter of persons”
(Institution 397r), Calvin writes. God does not elect some to be saved and others
to be damned because of something inherent in them. Faustus may seem to have
traversed the fundamental fantasy because he rejects God, but in fact his rejection
of God is his way of establishing the fundamental fantasy: his soul is his agalma,
which he assumes the devil desires. Faustus can remain in the realm of desire only
by rejecting God and striking his contract with the devil. To complete the two
biblical sentences that he quotes in his opening soliloquy would be to accept the
doctrine of predestination (the gift of God is election)—“What will be, shall be”
(1.1.48)—which eliminates agalma, the notion that there is something in us that
attracts God’s mercy, his call to salvation. When he strikes his deal with Lucifer,
however, Faustus creates the illusion at least that there is something in him more
than himself (“Is not thy soul thine own?” [2.1.67] Faustus asks) that an Other
(Lucifer) wants. Faustus’s fundamental fantasy of course is externalized, with all
the devils, fireworks, and stage machinery necessary to sustain the fantasy even
when Faustus begins to entertain interior, metaphysical doubts. The doubting,
skeptical Faustus is the Lacanian barred subject whose fundamental fantasy is the
externalized demonic world created and circumscribed by his contract and whose
agalma, his soul, both condenses and alienates his desire as the desire of the Other
(Mephostophilis, Lucifer). Faustus desires to be desired by the Other. Ultimately,
however, the play reveals the void that Faustus’s theatricalized fundamental
fantasy seeks to conceal.
The traumatizing demand of God as Other constitutes the context within
which Doctor Faustus may be considered to be Marlowe’s most powerful
trauma narrative. As the Prologue announces, this tragedy deliberately eschews

2
 In Le Séminaire Livre VIII: Le Transfert, Lacan introduces the notion of agalma
in the context of a discussion of Alcibiades’ love for Socrates in Plato’s Symposium as the
secret thing that the seemingly undesirable Socrates possesses that causes others to desire
him. Lacan later adds that “l’agalma, c’est aussi quelque chose autour de quoi l’on peut, en
somme, attraper l’attention divine” (177). For Doctor Faustus, his agalma, his soul, is the
means by which he attempts to attract diabolical attention. As Dylan Evans observes, Lacan
later replaces the notion of agalma with the objet petit a: “Just as the agalma is a precious
object hidden inside a relatively worthless box, so the objet petit a is the object of desire
that we seek in the other” (125) and, more to the point here, the object of desire we seek to
be for the Other.
148 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

the loci and kinds of violence typical of tragedy as a genre and of Marlowe’s
other tragedies:

Not marching in the fields of Thrasimen,

Where Mars did mate the warlike Carthagens,
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love
In courts of kings, where state is overturned,
Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds,
Intends our Muse to vaunt his heavenly verse. (Prologue 1–6)

Rather, “Only this, gentles: we must now perform / The form of Faustus’
fortunes, good or bad” (7–8), fortunes that take the form of the response of
a private individual to the call of his God, a call whose traumatizing effect
the Protestant Reformation had intensified by removing the images, rituals,
and intercessory figures who might shield the individual from the divine
Other and by promulgating the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination,
which problematized the individual’s ability to respond to the demand of this
divine Other. As both McAdam and Adrian Streete have observed, Calvinist
conceptions of Christ further diminished the subject’s ability to respond to the
divine call. McAdam contends that “the perfect (often wrathful) Father, and
the perfect, regenerated (sometimes wrathful) Son are inimitable and therefore
not viable models in a truly Oedipal narrative of self-fashioning” (Magic and
Masculinity 88). Consequently, Streete argues, “the attempted appropriation of
Christological mimesis by the subject in early modern culture might well be
read as a pathological drive towards a masochistic ‘union’ with the deity that
the subject knows s/he will not achieve” (154). “What does the Other want from
me, anyway?” The Protestant Reformation rendered this question all the more
insistent as it obfuscated the answer. In Doctor Faustus, the form Faustus’s
fortunes take is flight from this traumatic question into the tragic answer of the
contract Faustus signs with Mephostophilis and Lucifer. The play, however,
suggests that there is another, even more terrifying, response than Faustus’s
tragic one. “What does the Other want from me?” Nothing. The question is as
much a fantasy as the answer.
The play begins with Faustus contemplating the question. Sitting alone in
his study Faustus pores over books to glean from their signifiers an answer to
others’ desires. “[T]his the man that in his study sits” (27), the Prologue informs
us immediately before it leaves the stage; the play’s first scene then begins with
“Faustus in his study” (1.1.0 s.d.). The play’s opening, then, returns the audience
to the primal scene of the Protestant Reformation, the scene of private reading,
through which the individual sought to understand God’s demands. As Brian
Cummings remarks, this scene is at the core of Martin Luther’s “conversion,”
through the reading of Romans, to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, a
doctrine that conflicted with the Church’s established teaching that good deeds
also played their part in salvation (Cummings 63). The unmediated reading of
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 149

the Scriptures became a central Protestant practice, one in which the reader
appealed to God not tradition for guidance.
Faustus’s private reading draws Faustus out of himself into a series of
responses to others that involve him in economies of exchange. “Settle thy
studies, Faustus, and begin / To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess”
(1.1.1–2): Faustus splits himself into speaker and addressee, subject and the
other whose desire he needs to know in order to fashion himself accordingly.
Determining his own desire, however, only further alienates Faustus in the
desires of others. All four of the arts that Faustus considers then discards in this
soliloquy as suitable or desirable for his profession—logic, medicine, law, and
divinity—immerse him in circuits of exchange whose enabling presupposition
is mortality. The end of logic is “to dispute well” (8); it “Affords … no greater
miracle” (9). As the foundation for the production of consensual knowledge
through such means as debate, logic insists that otherness be recognized, it
requires that self and other share at least one common assumption or first
premise from which argument, or the negotiation of desires, can proceed, and
it binds self and other together by its rules. All three of these requirements are
encapsulated by Faustus in the Greek phrase “on kai me on” (12): being and
not being or, if one reads kai as “then,” being then not being. For otherness
to be recognized, logic must distinguish between things that are and things
that are not: this is the ontological basis for the law of identity, by which
arguments can be judged as valid or invalid. Logic must also provide a common
first premise for self and other, and it is no surprise that the first premise of
the classic (pseudo-Aristotelian) example of the syllogism is “All humans are
mortal”: being then not being. Here logic finds its anchor in the real world: “All
humans are mortal” is not just valid but true. To deny its truth is to abandon
all common ground with others (if one can deny this, one can deny anything),
to refuse to negotiate or exchange. It is not to dispute well but to put an end to
all disputation. Medicine even more concretely immerses Faustus in exchanges
with others based on mortality: “Be a physician, Faustus, heap up gold, / And be
eternized for some wondrous cure” (13–14). Yet though he has “Bid on kai me
on farewell” (12), it returns when Faustus reminds himself that “Yet art thou still
but Faustus, and a man” (21). Similarly the law: before dismissing it as “Too
servile and illiberal for me” (34), Faustus cites from Justinian’s Institutes two
laws, both of which concern inheritance, what happens to goods and property
when their (male) owner, a father in the second instance, dies, is dispossessed
by mortality. Moreover, the universality of this “universal body of the law” (31)
is based upon substitutability, a human generalizability possible only if humans,
all humans, are mortal.
More than logic, medicine, or law, of course, divinity confronts Faustus with
the traumatizing demand of the Other. Faustus turns to “Jerome’s Bible” (36) to
“view it well” (36). His scrutiny finds only an intensification of what he has been
attempting to abandon:
150 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Stipendium peccati mors est. Ha,

Stipendium peccati mors est?
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 serà, serà,
What will be, shall be. Divinity adieu. (1.1.37–48)

As Cummings has noted, Faustus’s syllogism is Ramist in its rigor (263). On

kai me on returns with a vengeance to undergird the articulation of the Calvinist
version of “All humans are mortal” (Luther called this “the devil’s syllogism”
[Snyder 30–31]). Kai has been intensified from “and” or “then” to a “therefore”
in which is condensed the deadliness of the Other’s demands. Because we are
(innately sinners), we eternally will not be, will “die, an everlasting death.” That
is what the Other wants from me. In Streete’s forceful phrasing, Calvin “calls
on the Calvinist subject to internalise the desolation of death as a prerequisite
of selfhood” (147). Critics commonly observe that Faustus has omitted the most
important portions of the verses out of which he constructs his syllogism, the
portions on divine grace, thus taking the syllogism as a sure sign of Faustus’s
reprobation. Melvin Storm argues that Faustus “ignores completely what the same
Scripture teaches of redemption, a consideration that would clearly invalidate the
conclusion he reaches” (42). A.N. Okerlund offers the harsh verdict that “here is
the consummate intellect willfully forfeiting the power to reason” (261). Yet the
continuations of the scriptural passages, Romans 6:23 and 1 John 1:8–9, do not
significantly affect Faustus’s conclusion. “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23): the gift of eternal
being is outside the exchange economy by which the individual responds to the
divine Other, an economy in which all responses lead to not being. “If we say that
we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and truth is not in us. If we acknowledge
our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8–9): here, the price to be paid for the ontological
transformation that would render the first premise of Faustus’s syllogism false
is, paradoxically, complete abjection: a response to the Other—the confession of
one’s status as sinner—that opens one to the possibility of everlasting annihilation.
Although one might want to substitute “Calvinist” for “Christian,” one can concur
with Hillary Gatti’s argument that “The Christian solution to the drastic conclusion
to the syllogism is rejected on two grounds: first of all because its concept of death
in terms of rewards and punishments leaves open the possibility of everlasting
torment; and secondly because it develops a doctrine which leaves man dependent
for his salvation on an act of mercy on the part of God” (116). As Robert Ornstein
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 151

suggests, Faustus’s rejection of salvation points to one of the fault lines between
Reformation theology and Renaissance humanism: “is not this salvation also hard
for one who would believe in the dignity of man? What value can a man claim
for his being if its criminality can be absolved only by confession and surrender?”
(1384).
Faustus turns to necromancy to escape these deadly economies. McAdam
remarks that “Marlowe’s tragedy may be described as fundamentally about the
displacement of salvation anxiety … onto the anticontract of the witch” (Magic
and Masculinity 55), but this displacement begins long before Faustus begins
his negotiations with Lucifer. Having “Bid on kai me on farewell” (12), Faustus
fantasizes about “being dead, rais[ing] them [men] to life again” (23). This
ambiguous line anticipates Faustus’s later declaration of his desire to “get a deity”
(62). If “being dead” modifies “them,” then Faustus in this line is stating his desire
for a godlike power that works within the logic of being and not being: he wants to
be able to convert the one into the other, the dead into the living. If “being dead”
modifies the subject of the line’s verb, however, then Faustus is declaring an even
greater ambition, to be dead, to have exited the mortal realm in which on kai me
on applies, yet still to be active within it, to “raise them to life again.” In short,
Faustus wants to be in a state of metaphysical exception, outside on kai me on yet
its sustaining legislator. Necromancy’s “Lines, circles, letters, characters” (51), the
overdetermined symbols of dreams, supply Faustus with the vehicles by which to
attain his desire, promising “a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour,
and omnipotence” (53-54) and a “dominion” (59) that “Stretcheth as far as doth
the mind of man” (60). Faustus desires to be unshackled from the logic of “what
is,” like the Sidneyean poet who “disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [to
nature], lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another
nature … freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit … [Nature’s]
world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” (The Defence of Poesy 175–85).3
Having discarded the books that spell out mortality as the inescapable response to
the traumatizing question “What does the Other want from me?”, Faustus imps the
wings of his fantasy response with another alphabet.
But “Lines, circles, letters, characters” (51) are found not only in books of
magic but also in contracts. In his contract with Mephostophilis and Lucifer,
Faustus marshals these signs into the legal instrument that gives tragic form to his

3
 Many critics have argued that Faustus is a (failed) artist figure. Thus Philip Traci in
“Marlowe’s Faustus as Artist” argues that “Faustus’ need to know both good and evil is a
part of his search as artist” (5). More recently, Cheney contends that Faustus “uses magic
to raise himself above God and Homer, to incarnate the poetic Word. Whereas the ‘books’
of both God and Homer create a spiritual or imaginative world within the mind, the ‘books’
of magic seem to create a real world outside the mind. Foolishly, Faustus believes that
magic is the power of love literalizing religion and poetry” (106). Richard Halpern draws
the connection between Faustus and the artist in more materialist terms: “Doctor Faustus
constructs an implicit but carefully weighed parallel between Faustus’s selling of his soul
and Marlowe’s selling of his play” (462).
152 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

fantasy flight from the Other’s traumatizing demands. Aristotle defines tragedy as
“a mimesis of a high, complete action” (Poetics 57). Following the medieval Fall
of Princes tradition, early modern English literary critics like George Puttenham
would place the emphasis on “high” in their definitions. According to Puttenham,
tragedy represents the “doleful falls of unfortunate and afflicted princes” (78).
Describing the arc of Faustus’s tragedy, the Prologue concurs: though “base of
stock” (11), Faustus is “graced with Doctor’s name” (16) but “His waxen wings
did mount above his reach, / And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow”
(20–21). The Icarian image draws the heavens into the plot to cast Faustus in
the role of the tragic “overreacher,” to use Levin’s classic term, punished for his
hubris.4 Faustus’s tragic overreaching takes on a different valence, however, if we
place the emphasis in the definition of tragedy not on height or greatness but on
action, the most important part of tragedy according to Aristotle (58–9). Action
implies three things: agency, spatio-temporal extension, and consequentiality.
Faustus’s contract may not create a golden world—in fact, by positing the at least
provisional absence of God, the world it creates is hell—but it does create the
fictional framework for the tragic action of Faustus’s drama of failed salvation. It
endows Faustus with agency: “Is not thy soul thine own?” Faustus asks himself,
“Then write again: ‘Faustus gives to thee his soul’” (2.1.67–8). It creates a
spatio-temporal field in which Faustus can exercise his agency: 24 years of wish
fulfilment between hell and the heavens. It adds consequentiality to that field of
spatio-temporal action: in exchange for his soul, “I, John Faustus of Wittenberg,
Doctor, by these presents do give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the
East, and his minister Mephostophilis, and furthermore grant unto them that, four
and twenty years being expired and the articles above written being inviolate, full
power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh, blood, into
their habitation wheresoever” (2.1.106–10).
Within these tragic parameters, Faustus’s fortunes unfold. Locked in a
metaphysical agon with Mephostophilis, the focus of the attention of such
characters as the good and bad angels, the Old Man, and the scholars, all of whom
exhort him to action of one kind or another, and fêted by such eminent nobility
as the Holy Roman Emperor, Faustus has become a figure of consequence. Even
Faustus’s inability to act, his failure to repent, is consequential: it produces the
dramatically and poetically riveting moment of his agonized last speech before it
arguably consigns him to damnation. Tellingly, in 5.1 Faustus does successfully
repent—of the attempt he makes to repent several lines earlier. “Hell strives
with grace for conquest in my breast” (65), and hell wins. “Entreat thy lord / To

4
 In The Overreacher (1952) Levin writes “Far from denying sin or its wages, death,
his [Faustus’s] course of action was premised on their inevitability: che sera, sera. This
led him, not to fatalism, but to an extreme act of will—namely, the commission of an
unpardonable sin” (132). Also, “Where the Mirror for Magistrates darkly reflected the falls
of princes, Marlowe exhibits the rise of commoners. His heroes make their fortunes by
exercising virtues which conventional morality might well regard as vices” (30–31).
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 153

pardon my unjust presumption” (71–2), Faustus implores Mephostophilis, “And

with my blood again will I confirm / The former vow I made to Lucifer” (73–
4). And Faustus does, “with unfeignèd heart” (75). Birringer has noted how the
process of Faustus’s repentance here echoes English Protestant descriptions of the
process of true repentance (175–6).5 This is parody with a point: true repentance,
repentance that can be attributed to the agency of the one repenting, is possible
only in a field defined by the absence of God’s determining influence, in the
hell of the deprivation of “the face of God” (1.3.75), to adapt Mephostophilis’s
terms. Significantly, Faustus’s penitence is inspired by the threat of external
wounding: “Revolt,” Mephostophilis tells Faustus, “or I’ll in piecemeal tear thy
flesh” (5.1.69). Faustus’s tragic fantasy constructs trauma as a threat coming from
without, redirecting attention from his trauma as a form of inner wounding or
self-alienation. The intensely physical nature of Faustus’s vision of hell in the
following scene extends this process, envisioning “damnèd souls” (5.2.120)
pitched “On burning forks. Their bodies boil in lead. / There are live quarters
broiling on the coals / That ne’er can die” (121–3). In stark and, I would argue,
deliberate contrast to Mephostophilis’s notion of hell as inner alienation, in
Faustus’s hell the wounds are inflicted from without. In hell’s “vast perpetual
torture-house” (119), it is an external agent, “the Furies” (120), who are “tossing
damnèd souls / On burning forks” (120–21). Faustus’s contract, then, provides a
specific answer to the traumatizing question of the Other’s demand. It supplies
the mediation between self and Other stripped by the Protestant reformation:
intercession (“When Mephostophilis shall stand by me, / What power can hurt
me?” [2.1.23–4]), images, rituals. It creates the fantasy of an evil agency operating
consequentially in a strictly delimited spatio-temporal field in response to the
demands of an other with whom one can negotiate. Indeed, it reworks “the wages
of sin is death” to Faustus’s advantage: like the clown Robin, Faustus will have
his mutton sauced (1.4.11), even if, as Mephostophilis declares at the beginning of
5.2, Faustus’s “pleasures must be sauced with pain” (16) in the end.
The process by which Faustus uses fantasy to externalize trauma is also at
work in his relationship with Helen.6 Having repented of his repentance under

5
 Birringer argues that Faustus’s repentance “contains all four parts [of repentance
specified in the Elizabethan Book of Homilies’ ‘The Second Part of the Sermon of
Repentance’]: the contrition that moves him, the confession, the appeal for and belief in
mercy, and the resolution to amend” (176). Max Bluestone finds Faustus’s final soliloquy
similarly ironic. Comparing the soliloquy to Thomas Merton’s Treatise of Repentance
(1597), Bluestone argues that “Faustus takes every step required” (76) by Merton for true
repentance, and yet, it seems, is damned. One might conclude, Bluestone suggests, that
“Faustus evinces all the steps to regeneration but paradoxically suffers damnation anyway
at the hands of a wicked or indifferent God” (79).
6
 Neil Forsyth in “Heavenly Helen” and Michael Keefer in “‘Fairer than the evening
air’: Marlowe’s Gnostic Helen of Troy and the Tropes of Belatedness and Historical
Mediation” provide useful summaries of the Gnostic and classical traditions about Helen,
the former turning her into a figure of divine wisdom and the latter including a strand that
154 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Mephostophilis’s threat of dismemberment, Faustus demands Helen as “my

paramour” (5.1.85) in order both to prevent further external trauma and to destroy
his internal wounding. The “sweet embraces” (87) of “heavenly Helen” (86) will
“extinguish clear / Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow” (87–8)
and allow him to “keep my vow I made to Lucifer” (89). Helen, of course, is a
fantasy, a spirit like the ones whom Faustus conjured to show before Charles V
the forms of Alexander and his paramour. But she is a fantasy that allows Faustus
to plug himself into the history of trauma as a tragic agent, as subject in pursuit
of the satisfaction of his desire in relation to the Other. Helen is the object that
he as (masculine) subject (tragically) wants. Michael Keefer remarks that Helen
“is a figure at once of desolation and desire” (39) and “an emblem of historical
memory, of unassuageable loss” (39). Indeed, she is the owner of “the face that
launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium” (5.1.92–3), the
object-cause of tragic rivalry between males that repeats itself through time and
into whose Oedipal narrative Faustus wishes to insert himself: “I will be Paris,
and, for love of thee, / Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked” (99–100),
Faustus rhapsodizes, “And I will combat with weak Menelaus / And wear thy
colours on my plumèd crest” (101–2). In her reading of the Oedipal dynamics of
the play, Kay Stockholder concurs that Faustus’s “desire for Helen is … linked
to his challenge to paternal authority” (215) and “is embedded in the Oedipal
fears earlier suggested by Pride’s speech, which he momentarily overcomes in his
vision of an heroic courtly union with her [Helen]” (216). Yet Faustus’s (slightly
absurd) posturing as tragic Oedipal subject here masks another relationship to
Helen, the potentially effeminizing relationship of barred identification.7 Helen is
like Faustus’s soul, the agalma that he alienated through his contract in order to
affirm his status as the object of the Other’s desire, as the object for the possession
of which contending forces tragically fight. Faustus’s desire for Helen might be
seen, then, as displaced or fetishized acknowledgement that the desired agon
over his own soul has not really taken place, a desire to identify with Helen that
simultaneously acknowledges that he is not Helen, not the object of the Other’s
desire. Faustus establishes the equation between his soul and Helen when he

suggested that the Helen who sparked the Trojan War was merely an image of the real
Helen, whom the gods spirited off to safety in Egypt for the duration of the war. Read in
light of the Gnostic tradition, Helen represents all Faustus desires. Read in light of the
classical tradition, her status as a simulacrum or fantasy becomes even more pronounced.
7
 McAdam argues that “Christ’s role of Oedipal son becoming like the (wrathful)
Oedipal father—a process that intimates the short-circuiting or narcissistic reduction
of Oedipal growth—effectively excludes all other men from this equation. Calvinist
masculinity becomes paralyzed through the course of a maternal fantasy (Diana/Helen)
that turns into a nightmarish anxiety concerning spiritual and sexual viability” (Magic and
Masculinity 89). Similarly, Philip Wion notes that when Faustus compares Helen to Jupiter
(5.1.107) Faustus’s fantasy “slides from desire for a woman to the suggestion of love for
a powerful and dazzling male” (195). My argument is that Faustus fails in the “negative”
Oedipal position as well as the “positive” position from which it is ostensibly a retreat.
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 155

kisses her: “Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies. / Come, Helen, come,
give me my soul again” (5.1.95–6). Faustus’s soul, his agalma, is alienated in
Helen at the moment of Faustus’s intimate union with her, and it returns to him
only through this alienation. This moment provides perhaps the most emphatic
illustration of L.L. James’s contention that “What is properly revealed in Faustus
… is that the subject is duped by his own desire (as the desire of the Other)” (30).
Like Helen herself, Faustus’s soul is a fantasy image Faustus constructs as part of
his answer to the question of the Other’s desire, but it is a fantasy he can possess
only through illusion and alienation.
The play provides numerous other indications that Faustus’s answer is
an illusion. Although such characters as the good and bad angels and the Old
Man reinforce on stage the illusion that Faustus has agency, their words contain
reminders of the limits of Faustus’s contract. “Contrition, prayer, repentance?
What of these?” (16), Faustus asks at the beginning of 2.1. “O they are means to
bring thee unto heaven” (17), the Good Angel replies, having two lines previously
exhorted Faustus to action: “Sweet Faustus, leave that execrable art” (15). But the
Evil Angel seems to be the more orthodox Calvinist when he tells Faustus that
contrition, prayer, and repentance are “illusions, fruits of lunacy, / That make them
foolish that do use them most” (18–19). Foolish because, according to Calvin,
even sincere, penitent believers can be reprobates: “Christ ascribeth to them faith
for a time … the more to condemn them and make them inexcusable” (Institution
221v). In a replay of this dialogue several scenes later, the Evil Angel makes even
clearer the spurious nature of Faustus’s agency. “God will pity me if I repent”
(2.3.16), Faustus states; “Ay, but Faustus never shall repent” (17), the Evil Angel
replies. “It is a terrible decree, I grant,” writes Calvin, “yet no man shall be able
to deny, but that God foreknew what end man should have ere he created him, and
therefore foreknew it because he had so ordained by his decree” (Institution 395v).
Faustus intends his contract with Mephostophilis and Lucifer to be an anticipatory
rehearsal of his own damnation, an attempt to master and turn to his advantage
the deadly exchange with the Other summed up in the syllogism of his opening
soliloquy. But Faustus is too late. Really, Faustus’s soul is not his own to sell or
to keep; God has already decided its fate before Faustus’s creation, outside of
the categories of space, time, and human agency. In short, beyond on kai me on,
beyond disputation, beyond call and response. The trauma to which Faustus is
responding, the trauma that he unwittingly acts out while attempting to flee, is not
the trauma of God’s call but of God’s silence. “What does the Other want from
me?” Nothing. He never asked.
The argument of this chapter thus far has taken God’s silence to support a
Calvinist reading of the play’s theology, agreeing with John Stachniewski’s
contentions that “the theology in the play [is] accurately dramatized Calvinist
dogma” (292) and, more significantly, that in Faustus’s subjectivity the play
dramatizes the subjectivity of the reprobate or, in Stachniewski’s apt phrase,
“what it could feel like to be at the sharp end of Reformation thinking” (292).
156 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Other readings, of course, have been offered.8 Pointing to the roles of the good
and bad angels and the Old Man, Paul Kocher influentially argued that “Faustus
has free will, free capacity to repent. It is his own fault that he does not, and
so he goes to a condign doom” (108). Kocher explicitly rejects “any theory that
Faustus’ fall is predetermined in a Calvinistic sense” (108). Any reading of the
play that seeks to pinpoint the exact moment of Faustus’s damnation implicitly
if not explicitly rejects Calvinist theology, according to which one is damned or
saved in a moment outside of time.9 Gerald Cox’s reading of the play, for example,
argues that “Faustus is damned not because some are mysteriously elected and
some equally mysteriously damned, but because he wilfully persisted in a sinful
condition until the end of his life” (136). Here the B-text Old Man’s words to
Faustus in 5.1 provide the touchstone for the play’s theology. “Though thou hast
now offended like a man, / Do not persevere in it like a devil” (36–7), the Old Man
urges Faustus, for “Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul, / If sin by custom grow not
into nature” (38–9). Within limits, one can accept arguments such as these: within
the context of God’s silence and as his response to it, Faustus articulates the tragic
fantasy in which he asserts his agency either by pursuing his own damnation or by
seeking to repent. David Webb argues that “just as a stripper delays gratification,
so, teasingly, the play flaunts a number of possible reasons why Faustus might
be damned, yet never allows the audience the satisfaction of certainty, and that
it is helped in this by having a self-dramatising hero” (31). Webb’s argument is
compelling, but it must be noted that such theological teasing is possible only
within a context from which God as the anchor of truth has withdrawn.
God’s silence in the play permits other, stronger readings, moreover, readings
that reveal the extent to which Faustus’s tragic mimesis is troubled by the play’s
own mimetic strategies. God’s silence may indicate not his absence but his non-
existence. “It is not even absolutely clear that God exists,” observes Lisa Hopkins,
“only that the Devil does” (Christopher Marlowe 84). The play provides no
positive evidence that God, whether Calvinist or Catholic, exists. The Prologue, to
which we might be tempted to accord a privileged relationship to the reality that

8
 In addition to the readings discussed below, see also Angus Fletcher, “Doctor
Faustus and the Lutheran Aesthetic”; Michael Hattaway, “The Theology of Doctor
Faustus”; Thomas McAlindon, “Doctor Faustus: The Predestination Theory”; G.M. Pinciss,
“Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus”; Joseph Westlund, “The
Orthodox Christian Framework of Doctor Faustus.”
9
 In “The Damnation of Faustus,” W.W. Greg famously located Faustus’s damnation
in his demonialism: in the first clause in the first contract, which specifies that Faustus be
transformed into a spirit (2.1.95), and in his union with Helen in 5.1. T.W. Craik counters
both points in “Faustus’ Damnation Reconsidered.” Campbell in “Doctor Faustus: A Case
of Conscience” suggests that Faustus is damned because he commits two mortal sins: he
abjures God (1.1.48, 1.3.53), and he despairs (2.3.18–23). G.B. Shand (“Directing Doctor
Faustus”) argues that Faustus is damned when he signs the second bond (5.1.71–4),
while Michael Boccia (“Faustus Unbound: A Reconsideration of the Fate of Faustus in
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus”) contends that Faustus is not damned at all.
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 157

the play intends to establish, speaks only of the “heavens” (21). Even the vaguely
defined role in the play that the Prologue attributes to them—of having “conspired
his [Faustus’s] overthrow” (21)—is far from self-evidently manifested in the play
itself. The Elizabethan Book of Homilies assures its readers that “whosoever
giveth his mind to Holy Scriptures, with diligent study and burning desire, it
cannot be (saith S. John Chrysostom) that he should be left without help, for either
God Almighty will send him some godly doctor to teach him … or else, if we lack
a learned man to instruct and teach us, yet God himself from above will give light
unto our minds” (sig. B3r–B3v). In the play, however, it is Mephostophilis who
plays, or claims to have played, the role of godly doctor or God:

’Twas I that, when thou wert i’the way to heaven,

Damned up thy passage. When thou took’st the book
To view the Scriptures, then I turned the leaves
And led thine eye. (5.2.95–8)

Mephostophilis claims to have eclipsed God; he, not the heavens, “conspired his
[Faustus’s] overthrow” (Prologue 21).
Mephostophilis’s claim is contentious enough that no edition of the B-text of
which I am aware places Mephostophilis (invisible) on stage in the play’s first
scene. Indeed, the opening stage direction, “Faustus in his study,” suggests that
Faustus begins the play alone. The metaphysical company he soon attracts—
the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, who enter the play after line 68 of the first
scene—does not clarify the status of the heavens. One of the major topics of
debate in criticism of the play has been the ontological status of these angels,
with critics generally adopting the solution that they are both projections of
Faustus’s psyche and possessed of some kind of (mostly theatrical) existence
independent of Faustus. G.M. Pinciss can be taken as representative: “Whether
they are reflections of Faustus’s own mental processes or independent of them,
these allegorical figures objectify the inner conflict in the hero; through them the
contest for his soul is dramatized” (“Cambridge Years” 257). In this respect, as
Martha Tuck Rozett has argued, they represent a significant departure from the
morality play tradition from which they are derived: “The Good and Bad Angels
do not speak to Faustus in the manner of the virtues and vices of the moralities.
Rather, they articulate the inner vacillations that Faustus experiences at crucial
moments in the play, without his conscious awareness of their presence on the
stage” (218). “Who buzzeth in mine ears I am a spirit?” (2.3.14), Faustus asks after
the Bad Angel has told him that “Thou art a spirit. God cannot pity thee” (2.3.13).
This and similar instances lead Ruth Lunney to conclude that the play strains if
not breaks the connection between the angels and Faustus. If the angels have an
existence independent of Faustus’s psyche, it only imperfectly and intermittently
connects with Faustus’s world, and the disconnection between Faustus and the
angels directs the audience’s attention away from the moral considerations of the
morality plays towards new, psychological considerations. “In looking at Angels,”
158 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Lunney contends, “we may still ask, ‘What does this scene demonstrate?’—but
our main interest has become, ‘Why does Faustus behave this way?’” (142). The
play’s major devils—Lucifer, Mephostophilis, and Belzebub—seem to possess
an existence even more independent of Faustus’s psyche than the good and bad
angels, and critics routinely note the irony of their overwhelming presence in
comparison to the heavens’ absence. “The devils are the only effective influence
on Faustus,” John Cox remarks, “and they appear in large numbers” (113), in
contrast to the “ineffectual” (113) operations of the play’s few agents of good,
such as the Good Angel and the Old Man. The play deploys the devils’ presence
perhaps most devastatingly in Lucifer’s entrance on stage to answer Faustus’s
impassioned attempt at repentance in 2.3. “O Christ my Saviour, my Saviour, /
Help to save distressèd Faustus’ soul” (2.3.84–5), Faustus pleads, only to have
Lucifer immediately answer his prayer with “Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is
just. / There’s none but I have interest in the same” (2.3.86–7). If we are to believe
the father of lies, the link between heaven and earth, Christ, has been removed;
the heavens have conceded the realm in which Faustus plays out the drama of his
salvation to Lucifer and his demonic companions.
But why believe the father of lies? Although the question might seem to
be, in proper Faustian fashion, wilfully perverse, it gestures not so much to the
orthodox idea that Faustus could be saved if only he would believe the truth but
more fundamentally to the self-consuming and ontologically unstable nature of
the fictional reality that Faustus has attempted to establish in the face of God’s
absolute non-existence. Immediately after having conjured up Mephostophilis,
Faustus attempts to stabilize the paradox of having called upon the devil to
“Resolve me of all ambiguities” (1.1.79) by commanding Mephostophilis to depart
and return again as “an old Franciscan friar, / That holy shape becomes a devil
best” (1.3.26–7). With a kind of sartorial sarcasm Faustus attempts to stabilize
the relationship between signs and truth as one of straightforward and complete
inversion. Dressed as a friar, Mephostophilis will appear to be precisely what he is
not; his cowl will unequivocally speak the secret truth of his real demonic nature
by a negation known only to Faustus, indeed constructed for Faustus’s exclusive
benefit: to others, Mephostophilis is invisible. Significantly, in Marlowe’s source,
the English Faust Book, Mephostophilis appears as a “gray friar” (Martin 240)
without Faustus’s prompting. Marlowe’s Faustus, in contrast, actively seeks to
control Mephostophilis’s appearance. He has called upon the devil to resolve
him of all ambiguities, and he attempts to be the agent of that resolution: by
conjuring Mephostophilis and then dressing him as a friar, Faustus intends to
resolve the ambiguities of the existence of others beyond him, the ambiguities
of the enigmatic “Lines, circles, letters, characters” (1.1.51) of his necromantic
books, into the straightforward signification of crude anti-clerical satire. Faustus
exhibits this desire to reduce the equivocation of signification later in the play
with his buffoonery at the papal court. From disguising themselves as cardinals in
3.1 to throwing fireworks amongst the monks performing the dirge at the end of
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 159

3.2, Faustus and Mephostophilis engage in these scenes in the blasphemous but
straightforward inversion of signifiers into their opposites.10
The play refuses this resolution, however. Like the Bad Angel and Lucifer,
Mephostophilis unexpectedly emerges as a speaker of the orthodox Christian
“truths” that Faustus is attempting to negate. When Faustus questions
Mephostophilis concerning the nature of hell, the demon informs Faustus that

  … this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think’st thou that I that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (1.3.74–8)

He then urges Faustus to “leave these frivolous demands, / Which strikes a terror to
my fainting soul” (79–80). Reciting the traditional Augustinian notion of hell as the
deprivation of God’s presence (of which he claims to have first-hand experience),
Mephostophilis here plays to excess the role Faustus has assigned him and reverses
the facile relationship between signifier and signified that Faustus had attempted
to establish: like the whores of Middleton’s city comedies, Mephostophilis only
appears to be evil but has a heart of gold, one touchingly concerned about Faustus’s
salvation. Yet such a sentimental reversal of signification is only a passing stage on
the way to the irresolution of stable meaning when we consider that Mephostophilis
is here playing his role to cement his explicitly stated goal of obtaining Faustus’s
soul. “What will not I do to obtain his soul?” (2.1.72) Mephostophilis will later
exclaim, and here he progresses further toward that goal by provoking Faustus
with his unexpected performance. “What, is great Mephostophilis so passionate /
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?” (1.3.81–2), Faustus mockingly replies:

Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude

And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.
Go bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove’s deity,
Say he surrenders up to him his soul. (83–8)

10
 Faustus’s inversion of signifiers can be seen as participating in what Huston Diehl
has described as “an emergent Protestant aesthetics, one that restrains the power of the
image to elicit awe and wonder by forcing the spectator to become conscious about how
it signifies” (38). After the Protestant Reformation, Diehl contends, “the implicit relation
between visible images and God is suddenly disrupted and forever changed. The intimate
bond late medieval culture had established between the visible and the divine is irrevocably
severed” (22). She suggests that Doctor Faustus “is conflicted because it celebrates the
human imagination and yet forces a recognition of the insubstantiality, impotence, and
silliness of all imagined things—including, even, itself” (81). My argument focuses not on
the impotence but the instability of images or signifiers once the connection between the
visible and the divine has been severed.
160 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Mephostophilis’s words and passion might be true, they might be lies, and this
uncertainty undoes the simple, binary ontological stability that Faustus is trying
to create and to which Mephostophilis’s definition of hell as the absence of God
appeals. They are expertly performed and calculated to sucker Faustus into deeper
ironies than his simple sarcasm anticipated.
As further discussions between Faustus and Mephostophilis about the nature
of hell illustrate, God is the Lacanian point de capiton or anamorphotic blot of the
play’s fictional reality, the traumatic kernel of the real that must be inferred from
the breaks and gaps in that reality and retroactively posited as their cause. After
signing his contract with Lucifer in 2.1, Faustus decides once again to “question
thee [Mephostophilis] about hell” (115): “Tell me, where is the place that men
call hell?” (116). Mephostophilis’s answers here are not as straightforward as they
were in 1.3. He initially replies with the evasive “Under the heavens” (117) and
then after further prompting adds:

Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortured and remain forever.
Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven. (119–26)

Faustus can perhaps be forgiven for dismissing Mephostophilis’s answer as “a

fable” (127) and “mere old wives’ tales” (135). Although Stachniewski rejects an
atheist reading of Faustus’s responses, dismissing them as “a bravuristic sally”
(330), their skeptical import should be taken seriously. Mephostophilis’s answer
provides a series of seemingly mutually exclusive definitions of hell—it is a
place, it is not a place, it will be multiple places in the future—whose coherence
is possible only if one believes in the existence of a God able to reconcile such
impossibilities. At this point, and in contradiction with his thinking at most points
in the play, Faustus professes not to believe in the existence of such a being:
“Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine / That after this life there is any
pain?” (133–4). By dismissing hell as merely the product of “fond” imaginations,
Faustus implies that he does not believe in the existence of the punitive deity for
whom such a place of pain is necessary and by whom its existence is rendered
possible in spite of its seeming incoherence. Yet such a being must be posited if
Mephostophilis’s existence and Faustus’s own experience are to be explained: to
Faustus’s assertion that “hell’s a fable” (127), Mephostophilis responds “Ay, think
so still, till experience change thy mind” (128), offering himself as “an instance
to prove the contrary, / For I tell thee I am damned and now in hell” (136–7). If
hell, in all its contradictions, exists, God must exist; hell exists, ergo—. Faustus is
not the only one in the play reluctant to draw the appropriate conclusion, however.
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 161

In 2.3 Faustus questions Mephostophilis on what might seem to be merely a finer

point of Ptolemaic astronomy: “But is there not coelum igneum et christalinum?”
(60), fiery and crystalline spheres or heavens above the usual nine generally
posited by Ptolemaic astronomy. Perhaps in revenge for Faustus’s dismissal of
hell in 2.1 as a fable, Mephostophilis answers Faustus with “No, Faustus, they
be but fables” (61), a reply that can be taken as an oblique, and paradoxical,
assertion of atheism given that Ptolemaic astronomers considered these additional
spheres to be the location of God’s throne.11 As if to force Mephostophilis to speak
unironically, Faustus counters with “I am answered. Now, tell me, who made the
world?” (67–8). Mephostophilis refuses, and, significantly, Faustus himself must
supply an answer: it is “God, that made the world” (75). Into the gap created by
Mephostophilis’s silence Faustus inserts the fiction of God, a fiction that sustains
not only abstract definitions of hell and heaven but also the concrete drama of
Faustus’s damnation. After Mephistophilis exits, Faustus histrionically exclaims
“Ay, go, accursed spirit, to ugly hell! / ’Tis thou hast damned distressèd Faustus’
soul. / Is’t not too late?” (77–9).
To make the play’s heterogeneous fictional reality cohere, we too, audience
members and critics, must posit God as that reality’s quilting point, the encompassing
ontological fiction that allows such seemingly ontologically disparate characters as
Faustus, the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, and the devils, to interact on the same
stage. In contrast to a play like Shakespeare’s Henry V, however, the play does
not invite such representational transcendence of the sheerly theatrical. Having
lamented the insufficiency of theatrical representation—“may we cram / Within
this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt? (12–14)—
Henry V’s Prologue begs its audience to set their “imaginary forces” (18) to work
and “Suppose” (19). Doctor Faustus, however, displays no such humility in the
face of its audience. Tamburlaine Part One’s Prologue tells its audience to “View
but his [Tamburlaine’s] picture in this tragic glass / And then applaud his fortunes
as you please” (7–8). Doctor Faustus presents its audience with the form of its
protagonist’s fortunes and allows its audience to suppose as it pleases, to fill out
the gaps in its theatrical representations with its own imaginary forces. In 5.1, for
example, the audience must fill out empty theatrical space with their imaginations
if they are to participate in the Christian reality to which the Old Man gestures in
his effort to prevent Faustus from committing suicide:

11
 In Ptolemaic astronomy, the first through seventh spheres are the planetary spheres
of the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn respectively. The eighth
sphere is the sphere of the fixed stars. The earth is at the centre of the spheres. The writer
of The Compost of Ptholomeus Prince of Astronomers, a frequently-reprinted digest of
Ptolemaic astronomy, calls the spheres “skies” and notes that some astronomers posit
the existence of a number of immobile “skies” beyond the ninth (which they consider
completely empty): “There [have] been some astrologians say that above these nine skies
one is immobile, for it turneth not, and above it is one of crystal, over the which is the sky
imperial, in the which is the throne of God” (sig. E1v).
162 Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

I see an angel hover o’er thy head

And with a vial full of precious grace
Offers to pour the same into thy soul. (55–7)

If some sort of device suspended from the theater’s heavens is used to represent
the angel and the vial of grace, the audience must use their imaginations to
transcend the inevitable insufficiency of the representations and to distinguish
them from the magic tricks that Faustus performs earlier in the play, such as his
trick with the false head in 4.2 or his apparent loss of a leg in 4.4. The play forces
the audience to use their imaginations even more actively in 5.2. If the descending
and re-ascending empty throne upon which the Good Angel sermonizes poses
few problems, the Hell Mouth is a void that the audience must fill out with their
imaginations if they are to give existence to the hell that the Bad Angel describes
after exhorting Faustus to “let thine eyes with horror stare / Into that vast perpetual
torture-house” (118–19). And if Faustus is to be considered more than delusional,
the audience must employ all their imaginary resources when Faustus in his final
soliloquy proclaims:

O I’ll leap up to heaven! Who pulls me down?

One drop of blood will save me. O my Christ—
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ—
Yet will I call on him—O spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ’Tis gone,
And see, a threatening arm, an angry brow. (147–52)

Simon Shepherd comments that “There is nothing to confirm the truth of Faustus’s
visions beyond the power of his poetry” (97). That power, however, depends upon
his audience’s imaginations. Faustus’s imperative, “see,” allows the audience to
fill the theater’s heavens with their own theological fictions; it equally permits
them to see nothing at all, to let the play’s fictional reality collapse back into a
heterogeneity of theatrical devices—costumes, props, voices, gestures, characters
ranging from the allegorical to the realistic—whose only coherence comes
from their scripted contiguity on the stage. And if “The only thing we see is the
theater,” contends Ian Munro, then “What we see at the end of the play is a body
caught within the machinery of the theater, unable to escape, unable to find a
point of reference that exceeds it. But in that theatrical domination lies the specific
blasphemy of the piece: that this is only theater, that there is no law beyond the
script” (313).
If in Edward II the collapse of representation into its medium produces an
erotic frisson, in Doctor Faustus its effect is anxiety. As in the Tambularlaine
plays and The Massacre at Paris, the mimetic strategies of Doctor Faustus leave
the spectator no distance, collapsing the boundary between the stage and the
audience into a theatrical “now” that works on the actors’ and the audience’s own
traumatic fantasies. Andrew Sofer contends that “Faustus unleashes the energies
of conjuring precisely by blurring the boundary between representing magic and
 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy 163

performing it” (13). Sofer forcefully illustrates his point by asking the provocative
question, “if Alleyn the actor utters blasphemy, might he not damn himself
merely by quoting Marlowe’s notorious dialogue?” (15). Is blasphemy any less
blasphemous for being theatrical, for being performed as part of a play? It is not
altogether surprising that one contemporary anecdote claims that Alleyn wore a
surplice and cross when performing the role of Faustus (Sofer 1). Starting from the
various anecdotes about extra devils appearing on stage during the performance
of the play, Genevieve Guenther details the way in which the anxiety that Alleyn
seemed to have experienced extended itself into the audience through a similar
collapse of the boundary between theater and reality.12 Guenther remarks that

What the reformers [in the 1580s and 1590s] argued is that magical language
has no intrinsic spiritual efficacy—that it cannot control the devil or any other
supernatural being—yet in so arguing they did not go on to dismiss conjuration
as a superstitious fiction. Rather, they placed magic within a providential
eschatology, recasting it as an expression of God-permitted diabolical agency.
Devils appeared to magicians, the reformers argued, because Satan himself
staged conjurations as theatrical spectacles, which he used instrumentally to
ensnare people into damnation. (47–8)

The very theatricality of the magic in Doctor Faustus, Guenther argues, “seemed to
produce a mirror effect in spectators who feared that their own interest in Faustus’s
magic was theologically dangerous. The metatheatrical doubling solicited their
terrifying identification with Faustus, whereby their absorption in the events on
stage served as evidence of their own reprobation” (48-49). Like Massacre at
Paris, then, Doctor Faustus leaves its audience with no detached position from
which to observe Faustus’s tragedy. The tragic form of Faustus’s fortunes takes
place within a traumatic theatrical space that provokes that audience’s own
anxiety and “response-ability.” The audience as much as Faustus must confront
the question, “What does the Other want from me?”

12
 Guenther cites two anecdotes at length, the first from William Prynne’s
Histriomastix (1633) and the second from the sixteenth century concerning a performance
of the play in Exeter. Prynne recounts “the visible apparition of the Devil on the Stage at
the Belsavage playhouse in Queen Elizabeth’s days (to the great amazement both of the
actors and spectators) while they were there profanely playing the History of Faustus (the
truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it), there being
some distracted with that fearful sight” (556r). The anecdote about the Exeter performance
narrates that at the beginning of 1.3, “as a certain number of [actors playing] devils kept
every one his circle there, and as Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, on a sudden
they were all dashed, every one harkening other in the ear, for they were all persuaded,
there was one devil too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to
pardon them, they could go no further with this matter” (Chambers 3.424).
This page has been left blank intentionally