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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
Doctor Faustus tends to come apart in paraphrase. It can be turned into a fable about a Modern Man who seeks to break out of Medieval limitations. On the other hand, when one retells the story in religious terms, it tends to come out as though it were Marlowe's source, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. The truth is that the play is irreducibly dramatic. Marlowe dramatizes blasphemy, but not with the single perspective of a religious point of view: he dramatizes blasphemy as heroic endeavor. The play is an expression of the Reformation; it is profoundly shaped by sixteenth-century religious thought and ritual. But in presenting a search for magical dominion, Marlowe makes blasphemy a Promethean enterprise, heroic and tragic, an expression of the Renaissance.
1 This essay is adapted from a study centering on Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, to be entitled Marlowe and the Creation of Elizabethan Tragedy.
2 Line references for Marlowe's, plays are to The Works of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Tucker Brooke, C. F., 1946 (first edition, 1910)Google Scholar. I have modernized the spelling. The punctuation has been modernized with one exception, the use of the colon to indicate a pause; this feature of Marlowe's punctuation is so effectively and consistently used that to substitute full stop or comma often involves losing part of the sense. Almost everything I find occasion to use is in the 1604 Quarto; and I find its readings almost always superior to those of 1616. This experience inclines me to regard most of the 1604 text (with some obvious interpolations) as Marlowe's, or close to Marlowe's, whereas most of the additional matter in the 1616 version seems to me to lack imaginative and stylistic relation to the core of the play. Thus my experience as a reader runs counter to the conclusions in favor of the 1616 Quarto which W. W. Greg arrives at from textual study and hypothesis.
3 “Doctor Faustus; a Case of Conscience,” PMLA, Vol. LXVII, No. 2 (March, 1952), pp. 219-39; for Spira, pp. 225-32.
4 Dix, Dom Gregory , The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster: 1945), p. 635.Google Scholar
5 The homily was issued in the Seconde Tome of Homilies, sanctioned by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1563 and “appointed to be read in all churches.” It is quoted by Dugmore, C. W. in The Mass and the English Reformers (London: 1958), p. 233Google Scholar. I am greatly indebted to Professor Dugmore's book, and to Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy, throughout this discussion. Professor Dugmore, in exploring in detail Tudor views of the real presence in the elements of the Lord's Supper, and their background, brings into focus exactly the tensions that are relevant to Doctor Faustus.
6 Bakeless, John, The Tragical History of Christopher Marlowe, Vol I, p. 77.Google Scholar
7 Bakeless, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 111.
8 Dugmore, , op. cit., p. 2342, from Selected Works, P. S., 197Google Scholar. An Order of Council under Warwick in 1549 characteristically refers to “their Latin service, their conjured bread and water, with such like vain and superstitious ceremonies.” Ibid., 142.
9 Dugmore, , op. cit., p. 229.Google Scholar
10 The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London: 1949 [Everyman's Library, No. 448]), p. 3.
11 Liturgical Services … in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Parker Society, Vol. XXX, ed. Clay, William K. (Cambridge: 1847), p. 189.Google Scholar
12 From a rubric of the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, where the danger of such theft is made an argument against allowing the communicants to take the bread in their own hands. (The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552: etc., Parker Society, Vol. XXIX, ed. Ketley, Joseph [Cambridge: 1844], p. 97.)Google Scholar The Second Prayer Book of Edward and the Prayer Book of Elizabeth provided that “to take away the superstition which any person hath, or might have in the bread and wine, it shall suffice that the bread be such, as is usual to be eaten at the table…” and that “if any of the bread or wine remain, the Curate shall have it to his own use.” (Ibid., pp. 282-3, and Clay, op. cit., p. 198.)
13 The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus (1592), ed. by Rose, William, London, n.d., p. 179 and pp. 193-4.Google Scholar
14 The echo was first pointed out to me by Professor James Alfred Martin, Jr. of Union Theological Seminary.
15 Clay, op. cit., p. 189.
16 In an essay on “Magical Hair” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, V. 88, Pt. II, pp. 147-169) the anthropologist Edmund Leach has made this point in a most telling way in evaluating the psychoanalytic assumptions of the late Dr. Charles Berg in his book The Unconscious Significance of Hair.
17 I first became aware of this pattern of gluttonous imagery in teaching a cooperative course at Amherst College in 1947—before I was conscious of the blasphemous complex of taste, face, etc. Professor R. A. Brower pointed to the prologue's talk of glut and surfeit as a key to the way Faustus’ career is presented by imagery of eating. His remark proved an Open Sesame to the exploration of an “imaginative design” comparable to those he exhibits so delicately and effectively in his book, The Fields of Light (Oxford: 1951). Tins pattern later fell into place for me in relation to the play's expression of the blasphemous motives which I am analyzing.
18 These notions, which are simimarized in most accounts of witch-craft, are spelled out at length in Murray, M. A., The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: 1921), pp. 86-96 and passimGoogle Scholar. One may have reservations as to how far what Miss Murray describes was acted out and how far it was fantasy; but the pattern is clear.
19 In a commentary on the Virgilian and Averroist precedents for this line, in English Studies, XLI, No. 6 (Dec. 1960), pp. 365-368, Bernard Fabian argues for a sense of it consistent with my reading here.
20 The Story of the Night (London: 1961); The Lion and the Fox (London: 1927).
