October 25

Doctor Faustus, I

Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe (1564-93) is born the same year as Shakespeare. Both a poet and playwright, his plays include Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, and Edward II.

Marlowe the Innovator

Tamburlaine is a two-part play about the rise to power of a hero from humble origins, a shepherd who ends up conquering Asia Minor.

We see the "hero as over-reacher." Tambulaine claims a godlike power to enforce his will upon the world: "I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains." Indeed, he is limited only by his own mortality, the fact he cannot conquer death.
Tamburlaine was both popular and poetically ground breaking. Marlowe's use of flexible, unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse) in his drama set a fashion that prevailed for the next 50 years among English playwrights.

Doctor Faustus was composed c. 1592. It shows us another over-reacher: a brilliant individual of humble birth who this time challenges Christian orthodoxy.

In so far as this play is about the fate of a single individual's soul, it might well be associated with the morality drama. But Faustus is no Everymanhe's presented from the first as a special case.
Elements of older morality tradition do persist in characters like the good and bad angels. The play offers both allegorical representations of the conflicting forces within Faustus's psyche, their projection outward as dramatized separate voices or interlocutors, AND Renaissance soliloquies, in which a highly distinct self reflects upon its own desires and actions.

Again, the Problem of Ends, Limits, Boundaries

Faustus's opening soliloquy expresses his desire to reach beyond the constraints of ordinary fields of knowledge, but his attempt to transcend all limitations can only be articulated within the constraints of his own language & his own imagination.

his desire to cross metaphysical boundaries is expressed in familiar terms of earthly colonizing;
he declares that hell is a fable, or that it can be redefined as a pagan Elysium, but will later ask Mephastophilis where it is to be found.

Note this double dynamic in Renaissance writings--the expansiveness which celebrates the scope of human powers is often accompanied, or complicated, by a kind of retrenchment, an acknowledgment of boundaries.

Pico della Mirandola acknowledges a version of this duality when he has his God tell Adam that man may choose to rise to something like perfection, get closer to the angels, or sink to the level of a beast.
Philip Sidney offers his own version of the duality when he points out that the creating power of the poet is an example of man's "erected wit" (his elevated and aspiring intelligence) at its very best, but still concedes that humans are pulled in the opposite direction by their "infected will"--the corrupt and baser desires which are part of our fallen nature.

Indeed, Sidney praises the God-like creative powers of the poet--but comes back down to earth to concede that the Poet is not God; that the poet may be a creator but he is also a creation of a greater Maker; that the poet's powers ultimately derive from God.

The Temptation of Faustus

Does Mephastophilis tempt Faustus? Or does he damn himself? (Note his recasting of the very notion of transgression in terms of "manly" heroic action in 1.3.95ff.)

NB: F. even comes up with terms of the contract, the 24 year limit.