DOCTOR FAUSTUS by Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world. Increasingly available translations of classical texts were a powerful influence on English literature and art. Christian and pagan worldviews interacted with each other in rich and often paradoxical ways, and signs of that complicated interaction are present in many of Marlowe's works. England, having endured centuries of civil war, was in the middle of a long period of stability and peace. Not least of the great changes of Marlowe's time was England's dramatic rise to world power. When Queen Elizabeth came to power in 1558, six years before Marlowe's birth, England was a weak and unstable nation. Torn by internal strife between Catholics and Protestants, an economy in tatters, and unstable leadership, England was vulnerable to invasion by her stronger rivals on the continent. By the time of Elizabeth's death in 1603, she had turned the weakling of Western Europe into a power of the first rank, poised to become the mightiest nation in the world. When the young Marlowe came to London looking to make a life in the theatre, England's capitol was an important center of trade, learning, and art. As time passed, the city's financial, intellectual, and artistic importance became still greater, as London continued its transformation from unremarkable center of a backwater nation to one of the world's most exciting metropolises. Drama was entering a golden age, to be crowned by the glory of Shakespeare. Marlowe was a great innovator of blank verse, unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The richness of his dramatic verse anticipates Shakespeare, and some argue that Shakespeare's achievements owed considerable debt to Marlowe's influence. Like the earlier play, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus is a play of deep questions concerning morality, religion, and man's relationship to both. England was a Protestant country since the time of Queen Elizabeth I's father, Henry VIII. Although theological and doctrinal differences existed between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, the former still inherited a wealth of culture, thought and tradition from the latter. Christianity was a mix of divergent and often contradictory influences, including the religious traditions of the Near East, the heritage of classical Greco-Roman thought and institutions, mystery religions, and north European superstition and magic. Sorcery and magic were part of widespread belief systems throughout Europe that predated Christianity. These early beliefs about magic were inextricable from folk medicine. Women in particular used a mix of magic and herbal medicine to treat common illnesses. But as Christianity spread and either assimilated or rejected other belief systems, practitioners of magic came to be viewed as evil. In the fifth century CE, St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential Christian thinker after St. Paul, pronounced all

sorcery to be the work of evil spirits, to distinguish it from the good "magic" of Christian ritual and sacrament. The view of the sorcerer changed irrevocably. Magic was devil-worship, outside the framework of Church practice and belief, and those who practiced it were excommunicated and killed. The Protestant Reformation did not include reform of this oppressive and violent practice. Yet magic continued to keep a hold on people's imaginations, and benign and ambiguous views of magic continued to exist in popular folklore. The conceptions of scholarship further complicated the picture, especially after the Renaissance. Scholars took into their studies subjects not considered scientific by today's standards: astrology, alchemy, and demonology. Some of these subjects blurred the lines between acceptable pursuit of knowledge and dangerous heresy. As this new Christian folklore of sorcery evolved, certain motifs rose to prominence. Once Christ was rejected, a sorcerer could give his soul to the devil instead, receiving in exchange powers in this life, here and now. Numerous Christian stories feature such bargains, and one of the most famous evolved around the historical person Johanned Faustus, a German astrologer of the early sixteenth century. Marlowe took his plot from an earlier German play about Faustus, but he transformed an old story into a powerhouse of a work, one that has drawn widely different interpretations since its first production. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is first great version of the story, although not the last. In the nineteenth century, the great German writer Johann Wolfgang van Goethe gave the story its greatest incarnation in Faust. Faustus' name has become part of our language. "Faustian bargain" has come to mean a deal made for earthly gain at a high ethical and spiritual cost, or alternately any choice with short-lived benefits and a hell of a price. The chronology of Marlowe's plays is uncertain. Doctor Faustus's composition may have immediately followed Tamburlaine, or may not have come until 1592. Two versions of the play were printed, neither during Marlowe's life. The 1604 version is shorter (1517 lines), and until the twentieth century was considered the authoritative text. The 1616 version is longer (2121 lines), but the additions were traditionally thought to have been written by other playwrights. Twentieth century scholarship argues that the B text (of 1616) is in fact closer to the original, though possibly with some censorship. The Penguin Books edition used for this study guide uses the longer B text as the basis while incorporating sections of A that are recognizably superior. Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one. While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one of the plays central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage. Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology, quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He resolves, in

full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power. The plays attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustusas many readers havea hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustuss pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end. The sin of pride is also an important theme of the play Doctor Faustus, as pride is arguably the mother of all other sins. No form of knowledge is satisfactory to Faustus, and his dissatisfaction comes from pride. He does not wish to be constrained by human limits. Faustus wants supernatural power. Faustus is expressing a deeply sacrilegious thought. Within the Christian belief system, power over life and death belongs to God. Resurrection of the dead is for Christ and within God's power at the end of time. Through Christ's sacrifice, death has already been conquered, and through God's grace even a sinner can be reborn. Faustus is not interested in this kind of salvation. He seeks a base, earthly mortality. He therefore is unsatisfied with being mortal, subject to the laws of nature and God. This sin is Faustus' greatest transgression, replicating the sin of Satan himself. According to the Christian tradition, Satan originated as one of the angels, but defied God and led a rebellion in heaven. Satan and his angels were defeated and cast into hell. Christian theology, particularly in the medieval Scholastic tradition, had devoted considerable attention to the nature of Satan's sin. Satan's sin was not that he tried to replace God, but that he sought an independence from God. This attitude was summed up much later, in Milton's famous line for Satan: "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." Satan seeks an existence apart from God's dominion, even if it means the agonies of hell, foremost of which is separation from God's love. Faustus' sin parallels that of the archfiend. He seeks deification, a power apart from God's and not subject to him. Faustus' problem is that he refuses to accept limitation on human potential. He also rejects, on every count, the fundamental values of Christianity. Serving others, as a physician, is not enough. Faustus takes the selected passages from scripture, and makes them appear comic. On one hand, Faustus is mocking everything that's sacred. His picture of Christianity is clearly biased and selective, not to mention impious. On the other hand, Faustus is being funny, and the audience is laughing along with him in his sacrilege. In his initial speech, for example, Faustus establishes a hierarchy of disciplines by showing which are nobler than others. He does not want merely to protect mens bodies through medicine, nor does he want to protect their property through law. He wants higher things, and so he proceeds on to religion. There, he quotes selectively from the New Testament, picking out only those passages that make Christianity appear in a negative light. He reads that [t]he reward of sin is death, and that [i]f we say that we have no sin, / We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us (1.4043). The second of these lines comes from the first book of John, but Faustus neglects to read the very next line, which states, If

we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Thus, through selective quoting, Faustus makes it seem as though religion promises only death and not forgiveness, and so he easily rejects religion with a fatalistic What will be, shall be! Divinity, adieu! Meanwhile, he uses religious language to describe the dark world of necromancy that he enters. Faustus goes through a list of the major fields of human knowledgelogic, medicine, law, and theologyand cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and Jeromes Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of these figures in favor of magic. This rejection symbolizes Faustuss break with the medieval world, which prized authority above all else, in favor of a more modern spirit of free inquiry, in which experimentation and innovation trump the assertions of Greek philosophers and the Bible. Doctor Faustus, a talented German scholar at Wittenburg, rails against the limits of human knowledge. He has learned everything he can learn, or so he thinks, from the conventional academic disciplines. All of these things have left him unsatisfied, so now he turns to magic. A Good Angle and an Evil Angel arrive, representing Faustus' choice between Christian conscience and the path to damnation. The former advises him to leave off this pursuit of magic, and the latter tempts him. The angels appear at Faustuss shoulder early on in the playthe good angel urging him to repent and serve God, the evil angel urging him to follow his lust for power and serve Lucifer. The two symbolize his divided will, part of which wants to do good and part of which is sunk in sin. From two fellow scholars, Valdes and Cornelius, Faustus learns the fundamentals of the black arts. He thrills at the power he will have, and the great feats he'll perform. He summons the devil Mephostophilis. Faustus stands in a magical circle marked with various signs and words, and he chants in Latin. Four devils and Lucifer, the ruler of hell, watch him from the shadows. Faustus renounces heaven and God, swears allegiance to hell, and demands that Mephastophilis rise to serve him. The devil Mephastophilis then appears before Faustus, who commands him to depart and return dressed as a Franciscan friar, since [t]hat holy shape becomes a devil best. Mephastophilis vanishes, and Faustus remarks on his obedience. Mephastophilis then reappears, dressed as a monk, and asks Faustus what he desires. Faustus demands his obedience, but Mephastophilis says that he is Lucifers servant and can obey only Lucifer. He adds that he came because he heard Faustus deny obedience to God and hoped to capture his soul. Faustus is all too eager to swear allegiance to Lucifer. He denies judgement after death, and he asks Mephostophilis a series of questions. The devil informs Faustus that Lucifer was once an angel, beloved of God, who by aspiring pride and insolence earned banishment from heaven. The devils with Lucifer in hell are those who conspired with him against God. When Faustus hears that they are banished to hell, he becomes curious: how can Mephostophilis be before him now, outside of hell? The devil informs him that he is always in hell, for true hell is separation from God. He begs Faustus to leave him alone with these questions, which "strike a terror to my [Mephostophilis's] fainting soul". Faustus chides the demon, telling him to take lessons from Faustus when it comes to manly fortitude. He bids Mephostopholis fly down to Lucifer to tell him that Faustus is ready to sell his soul. In exchange he wants twenty-four years of power and luxury, with Mephostophilis in complete obedience to his whims. Mephostophilis exits. Before the time comes to sign the contract, Faustus has misgivings, unable to decide whether he should sell or keep. The Good Angel and Evil Angel appear again, the Good Angel telling him to think of heaven, and the Evil Angel telling him to think of wealth. The thought of wealth makes up Faustus' mind.

Mephostophilis returns, exhorting Faustus to sign away his soul in a contract written in his own blood. Faustus asks Mephostophilis why the devils want his soul, and the heart of Mephostophilis' answer is this: "Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris" ("Comfort in misery is to have companions in woe"). When Faustus cuts his arm for the contract, the blood congeals too quickly to make good ink. While Mephostophilis is gone to fetch the fire to liquefy his blood again, Faustus wonders if his very blood is trying to stop him. But the devil returns, and Faustus signs. The deal is done. Even the writing on his arm ("Fly, oh man," presumably to God) is quickly forgotten, when Mephostophilis distracts Faustus with a dance of devils. The need for distraction suggests that Faustus can still repent, and save himself from hell; alternately, it might suggest that Mephostophilis feels an odd sympathy for Faustus, and wishes to distract him, just this moment, from anxiety. His body seems to rebel against the choices that he has madehis blood congeals, for example, preventing him from signing the compact, and a written warning telling him to fly away appears on his arm. Blood plays multiple symbolic roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he signs in blood, symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact. His blood congeals on the page, however, symbolizing, perhaps, his own bodys revolt against what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Christs blood, which Faustus says he sees running across the sky during his terrible last night, symbolizes the sacrifice that Jesus, according to Christian belief, made on the cross; this sacrifice opened the way for humankind to repent its sins and be saved. Faustus, of course, in his proud folly, fails to take this path to salvation. He demands that Mephostophilis bring him a wife. Mephostophilis brings him a devil dressed as a woman, and tells him that rather than bring him a wife, he'll bring him many different women, one for every moment of desire. Mephostophilis' presentation of the devil dressed in woman's garb is more than a moment of black humor. It also suggests that already, the devil is calling the shots even in the meager details. Faustus' wish for a wife isn't granted, and even now with the twenty-four year term just started, Mephostophilis is willing to deceive him. Faustus asks for knowledge: he demands books on all manner of incantations, astrology, and botany, and Mephostophilis provides all of this on demand. Faustus seems unable to understand the forces with which he deals. When he questions Mephostophilis about hell, he does not understand that hell is primarily a state of the spirit. Mephostophilis is always in hell, even when he appears on earth, because true hell is separation from God. The devil is actually hurt by Faustus' questions, and cannot bear to think of his state: "Oh Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, / Which strike a terror to my fainting soul". The "frivolous demands" are the curious questions about hell's nature. Like an amateur scholar who collects facts but cannot penetrate his subject deeply, Faustus seeks knowledge about hell; when the devil tells him about it, he doesn't understand it. He has knowledge, but no wisdom, and prizing the first over the latter is a grave mistake, and a theme of the play. For Mephostophilis, the experience of hell is painful and continuous, and not some scholar's trivia. Some time has passed. Faustus curses Mephostophilis for depriving him of heaven, although he has seen many wonders. Through shallow logic, Mephostophilis proves that heaven is inferior to man. Faustus begins to ask Mephastophilis questions about the planets and the heavens. Mephastophilis answers all his queries willingly, until Faustus asks who made the world. Mephastophilis refuses to reply because the answer is against our kingdom; when Faustus presses him, Mephastophilis departs angrily. Faustus then turns his mind to God, and again he wonders if it is too late for him to repent. The good and

evil angels enter once more, and the good angel says it is never too late for Faustus to repent. Faustus begins to appeal to Christ for mercy, but then Lucifer, Belzebub (another devil), and Mephastophilis enter. They tell Faustus to stop thinking of God and then present a show of the Seven Deadly Sins. Each sinPride, Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, and finally Lecheryappears before Faustus and makes a brief speech. Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, arguable the one that leads to all the others. Within the Christian framework, pride is a lethal motivation because it makes the sinner forget his fallen state. For Christians, men are fallen since birth, because they carry with them the taint of original sin. A men made haughty with pride forgets that he shares Eve's sin, and must therefore be saved by the gift of grace. Only God, through Christ, can dispense this grace, and the man who forgets that fact deprives himself of the path to salvation. Faustus' first great sin is pride. He does not stop there. Reflecting the Christian view, pride gives rise to all of the other sins, and ends ironically with the proud man's abasement. Faustus goes quickly from pride to all of the other sins, becoming increasingly petty and low. The sight of the sins delights Faustuss soul and he treats them as sources of entertainment rather than of moral warning. Then he asks to see hell. Lucifer promises to take him there that night. For the meantime he gives Faustus a book that teaches him how to change his shape. Faustus is torn by the fear that even if he did repent, it would do no good. For the second time in the play, his Evil Angel warns him that he is too far gone. Lucifer arrives and gives Faustus the same advice: "Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just" and orders Faustus to cease thinking about God and think only of the devil. But this advice comes from Evil. Both the Evil Angel and Lucifer are interested in bringing Faustus into damnation; if it really were too late, they would be less concerned with Faustus' prayers. Faustus believes that God does not love him and that if he were to fly away to God, as the inscription on his arm seems to advise him to do, God would cast him down to hell. The pact he has made completely detaches him from God. With access to higher things thus closed off, Faustus has nowhere to go but down. Sometimes Faustus seems to understand the gravity of what he is doing: when Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephastophilis appear to him, for example, he becomes suddenly afraid and exclaims, O Faustus, they are come to fetch thy soul!. Despite this awareness, however, Faustus is unable to commit to good. Faustus is damned because he does not understand the nature of Christian redemption, a central theme of the play. If Faustus repents, and asks forgiveness, then he can still be saved; the Good Angel promises as much. The Good Angel may be interpreted as a dramatic representation of Faustus' better judgement, or it may be a literal character, Faustus' "guardian angel." Faustus, though a great scholar, continues to prize knowledge without acquiring wisdom. He distracts himself with questions about the heavens, but does not understand the nature of God's heaven. He understands the forms of the heavens, but not the force behind them. Because he is human, and flawed, he fails to understand the divine mystery of God's forgiving nature. He believes himself damned, and so he finally gives in to the devil's pageantry of sin, and tries to enjoy being damned. Faustuss real mistake is to misinterpret what Mephastophilis tells him about hell. Faustus takes Mephastophiliss statement that hell is everywhere for him because he is separated eternally from God to mean that hell will be merely a continuation of his earthly existence. He thinks that he is already separated from God permanently and reasons that hell cannot be any worse.

Faustus has explored the heavens and the earth from a chariot drawn by dragons, and is now flying to Rome, where the feast honoring St. Peter is about to be celebrated. Mephostophilis and Faustus wait for the Pope, depicted as an arrogant, decidedly unholy man. They play a series of tricks, by using magic to disguise themselves and make themselves invisible, before leaving. Faustus returns home, where his vast knowledge of astronomy and his abilities earn him wide renown. Meanwhile, Robin the Clown has also learned magic, and uses it to impress his friend Rafe and summon Mephostophilis, who doesn't seem too happy to be called. At the court of Charles V, Faustus performs illusions that delight the Emperor. He also humiliates a knight named Benvolio. When Benvolio and his friends try to avenge the humiliation, Faustus has his devils hurt them and cruelly transform them, so that horns grow on their heads. Faustus' twenty-four years are running out. Wagner, Faustus servent, tells the audience that he thinks Faustus prepares for death. He has made his will, leaving all to Wagner. But even as death approaches, Faustus spends his days feasting and drinking with the other students. For the delight of his fellow scholars, Faustus summons a spirit to take the shape of Helen of Troy. Later, an Old Man enters, warning Faustus to repent. The old man persuades him to appeal to God for mercy. Faustus becomes distraught. Once the old man leaves, Mephastophilis threatens to shred Faustus to pieces if he does not reconfirm his vow to Lucifer. Faustus complies, sealing his vow by once again stabbing his arm and inscribing it in blood. He asks Mephastophilis to punish the old man for trying to dissuade him from continuing in Lucifers service; Mephastophilis says that he cannot touch the old mans soul but that he will scourge his body. Faustus then asks Mephastophilis to let him see Helen again. Helen enters, and Faustus makes a great speech about her beauty and kisses her. The final night of Faustuss life has come, and he tells the scholars of the deal he has made with Lucifer. They are horrified and ask what they can do to save him, but he tells them that there is nothing to be done. Reluctantly, they leave to pray for Faustus. A vision of hell opens before Faustuss horrified eyes as the clock strikes eleven. Faustus gives a final, frenzied monologue, regretting his choices. The last hour passes by quickly, and Faustus exhorts the clocks to slow and time to stop, so that he might live a little longer and have a chance to repent. He then begs God to reduce his time in hell to a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, so long as he is eventually saved. He wishes that he were a beast and would simply cease to exist when he dies instead of face damnation. He curses his parents and himself, and the clock strikes midnight. Later, the Scholar friends find Faustus' body, torn to pieces. Faustuss final speech is the most emotionally powerful scene in the play, as his despairing mind rushes from idea to idea. One moment he is begging time to slow down, the next he is imploring Christ for mercy. One moment he is crying out in fear and trying to hide from the wrath of God, the next he is begging to have the eternity of hell lessened somehow. He curses his parents for giving birth to him but then owns up to his responsibility and curses himself. His minds various attempts to escape his doom, then, lead inexorably to an understanding of his own guilt. The passion of the final speech points to the central question in Doctor Faustus of why Faustus does not repent. Early in the play, he deceives himself into believing either that hell is not so bad or that it does not exist. But, by the close, with the gates of hell literally opening before him, he still ignores the warnings of his own conscience and of the old man, a physical embodiment of the conscience that plagues him. Faustuss loyalty to Lucifer could be explained by the fact that he is afraid of having his body torn apart by Mephastophilis. But he seems almost eager, even in the next-to-last scene, to reseal his vows in blood, and he even goes a step further when he demands that Mephastophilis punish the old man who

urges him to repent. Marlowe suggests that Faustuss self-delusion persists even at the end. Having served Lucifer for so long, he has reached a point at which he cannot imagine breaking free. In his final speech, Faustus is clearly wracked with remorse, yet he no longer seems to be able to repent. Christian doctrine holds that one can repent for any sin, however grave, up until the moment of death and be saved. Yet this principle does not seem to hold for Marlowes protagonist. Doctor Faustus is a Christian tragedy, but the logic of the final scene is not Christian. Some critics have tried to deal with this problem by claiming that Faustus does not actually repent in the final speech but that he only speaks wistfully about the possibility of repentance. Ultimately, the ending of Doctor Faustus represents a clash between Christianity, which holds that repentance and salvation are always possible, and the dictates of tragedy, in which some character flaw cannot be corrected, even by appealing to God. The idea of Christian tragedy, then, is paradoxical, as Christianity is ultimately uplifting. People may sufferas Christ himself didbut for those who repent, salvation eventually awaits. To make Doctor Faustus a true tragedy, then, Marlowe had to set down a moment beyond which Faustus could no longer repent, so that in the final scene, while still alive, he can be damned and conscious of his damnation. Doctor Faustus has elements of both Christian morality and classical tragedy. On the one hand, it takes place in an explicitly Christian cosmos: God sits on high, as the judge of the world, and every soul goes either to hell or to heaven. There are devils and angels, with the devils tempting people into sin and the angels urging them to remain true to God. Faustuss story is a tragedy in Christian terms, because he gives into temptation and is damned to hell. Faustuss principal sin is his great pride and ambition, which can be contrasted with the Christian virtue of humility; by letting these traits rule his life, Faustus allows his soul to be claimed by Lucifer, Christian cosmologys prince of devils. Yet while the play seems to offer a very basic Christian messagethat one should avoid temptation and sin, and repent if one cannot avoid temptation and sinits conclusion can be interpreted as straying from orthodox Christianity in order to conform to the structure of tragedy. In a traditional tragic play, as pioneered by the Greeks and imitated by William Shakespeare, a hero is brought low by an error or series of errors and realizes his or her mistake only when it is too late. In Christianity, though, as long as a person is alive, there is always the possibility of repentanceso if a tragic hero realizes his or her mistake, he or she may still be saved even at the last moment. But though Faustus, in the final, wrenching scene, comes to his senses and begs for a chance to repent, it is too late, and he is carried off to hell. Marlowe rejects the Christian idea that it is never too late to repent in order to increase the dramatic power of his finale, in which Faustus is conscious of his damnation and yet, tragically, can do nothing about it. Damnation is eternal. While the Jewish view of the afterlife was somewhat vague, Christians developed the idea of judgment after death. Moslems adapted a similar conception of hell and heaven, and to this day eternal hell and eternal heaven remain an important feature of Christianity and Islam. While Buddhists and Hindus have hell in their belief systems, for the most part in neither religion is hell considered eternal. For example, an eternal hell in Mahayana Buddhism would contradict Buddhist beliefs about transience and the saving power of Buddha's compassion. Not so in Christianity. If Faustus dies without repenting and accepting God, he will be damned forever. As we learn from Mephostophilis, hell is not merely a place, but separation from God's love. Hell is eternal, but so is heaven. For a Christian, all that is necessary to be saved from eternal damnation is acceptance of Jesus Christ's grace. Even after signing away his soul to the devil, Faustus has

the option of repentance that will save him from hell. But once he has committed himself to his own damnation, Faustus seems unable to change his course. While Christianity seems to accept even a deathbed repentance as acceptable for the attainment of salvation, Marlowe plays with that idea, possibly rejecting it for his own thematic purposes. Faustus has a thirst for knowledge, but he seems unable to acquire wisdom. Faustus' thirst for knowledge is impressive, but it is overshadowed by his complete inability to understand certain truths. Because of this weakness, Faustus cannot use his knowledge to better himself or his world. He ends life with a head full of facts, and vital understanding gained too late to save him. In so far as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianitys understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, Gods son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankinds sins. Thus, however terrible Faustuss pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustuss conscience, or both. Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven. Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustuss shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustuss divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually. The supernatural pervades Doctor Faustus, appearing everywhere in the story. Angels and devils flit about, magic spells are cast, dragons pull chariots and even fools like the two ostlers, Robin and Rafe, can learn enough magic to summon demons. Still, it is worth noting that nothing terribly significant is accomplished through magic. Faustus plays tricks on people, conjures up grapes, and explores the cosmos on a dragon, but he does not fundamentally reshape the world. The magic power that Mephastophilis grants him is more like a toy than an awesome, earth-shaking ability. Furthermore, the real drama of the play, despite all the supernatural frills and pyrotechnics, takes place within Faustuss vacillating mind and soul, as he first sells his soul to Lucifer and then considers repenting. In this sense, the magic is almost incidental to the real story of Faustuss struggle with himself, which Marlowe intended not as a fantastical battle but rather as a realistic portrait of a human being with a will divided between good and evil.

Faustus is the protagonist and tragic hero of Marlowes play. He is a contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn out badly (the Choruss introduction, if nothing else, prepares us), there is nonetheless a grandeur to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping the map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility. But Faustus also possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his bargaining sessions with Mephastophilis. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the only way to fulfill his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what such a pact actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad and that one needs only fortitude; at other times, even while conversing with Mephastophilis, he remarks to the disbelieving demon that he does not actually believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about the prospect of eternal damnation, -Faustus is also beset with doubts from the beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly approaches repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he fails to repent is unclear: -sometimes it seems a matter of pride and continuing ambition, sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea. Other times, it seems that Mephastophilis simply bullies him away from repenting. Bullying Faustus is less difficult than it might seem, because Marlowe, after setting his protagonist up as a grandly tragic figure of sweeping visions and immense ambitions, spends the middle scenes revealing Faustuss true, petty nature. Once Faustus gains his long-desired powers, he does not know what to do with them. Marlowe suggests that this uncertainty stems, in part, from the fact that desire for knowledge leads inexorably toward God, whom Faustus has renounced. But, more generally, absolute power corrupts Faustus: once he can do everything, he no longer wants to do anything. Instead, he traipses around Europe, playing tricks on yokels and performing conjuring acts to impress various heads of state. He uses his incredible gifts for what is essentially trifling entertainment. The fields of possibility narrow gradually, as he visits ever more minor nobles and performs ever more unimportant magic tricks, until the Faustus of the first few scenes is entirely swallowed up in mediocrity. Only in the final scene is Faustus rescued from mediocrity, as the knowledge of his impending doom restores his earlier gift of powerful rhetoric, and he regains his sweeping sense of vision. Now, however, the vision that he sees is of hell looming up to swallow him. Marlowe uses much of his finest poetry to describe Faustuss final hours, during which Faustuss desire for repentance finally wins out, although too late. Still, Faustus is restored to his earlier grandeur in his closing speech, with its hurried rush from idea to idea and its despairing, Renaissance-renouncing last line, Ill burn my books! He becomes once again a tragic hero, a great man undone because his ambitions have butted up against the law of God. Dr. Faustus is a difficult play to classify into one single category, whether it be a tragedy or morality play, because it contains elements of both. For one, it could be classified as a tragedy since one characteristic of a tragedy is that the protagonist does not triumph. On the other hand, it conveys a warning to the reader of the dangers of pride and the quest for infinite knowledge. Dr. Faustus is an extreme case of this in that he signs over his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of Mephastophilis servitude. The good angel and bad angel, as well as the old man that advises Faustus to seek repentance, play an important role in placing Dr. Faustus in the morality category. Even Mephastophilis shows

concern for Faustus possible actions when he tells him that the greatest pain is being unable to experience everlasting bliss that is found in Heaven. In spite of all these warnings and pleadings for repentance, Faustus doubts that God will ever forgive him. The use of Homo Fuge as the inscription in Faustus arm is one indication of the plays classification as a morality play. The saying is Latin for Fly, man, which can be interpreted as a warning for Faustus to escape the evil that he is surrendering himself to before it is too late. Faustus is always able to choose between good and bad, which indicates that this is a morality play. He is always met with the option of good or evil, within himself, with the good and bad angels, his friends in the black arts and the scholars. These choices acknowledge the free will that humans have, and the abuses that can become of it, whether they be questioned or downright ignored by Faustus. The fact that Faustus is constantly questioning the rightfulness of his actions classifies the work as a morality play. Throughout the 24 years, he wavers between good and evil, to the point that he is forced to sign his contract once again. A prominent theme of this play is Faustus battle within himself in which he must decide who to give his soul to. There was the chance for redemption that he never accepted due to his desire for power and his fear of failing both God, who could cast him into Hell, and Satan, who would hold him to his contract or have him destroyed. Even the Seven Deadly Sins play a part in influencing Faustus desire to turn to the devil. His final speech especially implies the possibility that he did not truly surrender his soul to the devil. He cries, O Ill leap up to my God! and ah, my Christ Regrettably, he passed up the chances he was given before to repent, saying that his heart was hardened to the point that he could no longer do so. This internal conflict reflects his outward battle of good and evil. He has his good angel and bad angel, as well as his friends Valdes and Cornelius encouraging his necromancy, the scholars who fear that nothing can reclaim his soul, and the old man who tells him it is not too late to redeem himself. In many tragedies, the protagonist does not have the foresight of the devastation that is about to consume them; in fact, so many catastrophic events ensue that not even the reader can foresee the end. For example, King Lears mistake of disowning Cordelia in Shakespeares tragedy brings on a string of disastrous occurrences that take the reader far from where they started. On the other hand, in a morality play, there is typically a force that attempts to persuade the protagonist to follow a moral course of action, but on the other side lies temptation, which makes for the backbone of the story, balancing out the plot. Dr. Faustus is a good example of a morality play, as he is constantly faced with the warnings of the consequences of his actions. He is well aware from the beginning what he is getting himself into, and the reader can tell from the start the general direction that the story will take.

Webography: www.gradesaver.com/dr. faustus www.sparknotes.com/lit/doctorfaustus

www.wepapers.com/papers/10816/The_Tragical_History_of_Doctor_Faustus_Christopher Marlowe