In brief
Doctor Faustus, a brilliant scholar at Wittenberg (Marlowe’s “Wertenberg”), dismisses logic, medicine, law and divinity in one speech and turns to magic. He raises the devil Mephistophilis and signs away his soul in his own blood, for twenty-four years of service. Then he wastes them. He questions the devil about the planets, watches a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins, boxes the Pope’s ear, conjures Alexander for the Emperor, and sells a horse made of hay. An Old Man begs him to repent, and he nearly does; instead he takes the spirit of Helen of Troy as his lover. On the last night he has one hour to live, spends it in a speech that nothing in the English theatre had prepared for, and the devils carry him off at midnight.
The play survives in two printings, 1604 and 1616, and they disagree about what the story means.
The argument
Damnation is not what Faustus signs for. The contract is the least of his problems, and the play keeps showing that it could still be set aside. Long after the bond the Good Angel is still telling him “Never too late, if Faustus can repent” (the angels’ return). What actually destroys him is that he cannot believe it. That is the old theological sin of despair, and the first thing Marlowe shows us is a clever man arriving at it by bad reading. In his opening speech he picks up “Jerome’s Bible”, reads “The reward of sin is death: that’s hard”, reads “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves”, and concludes that God has rigged the game: “What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera” (the study). Any Elizabethan who knew the two verses knew how each continues, with the gift of eternal life and the forgiveness of those who confess. The doctor of divinity stopped reading too soon.
So the horror of the play lies in its open door. The one who tells the truth is the devil. Asked how he can be out of hell, Mephistophilis answers “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (the conjuring), and begs Faustus to leave off his “frivolous demands”. Faustus, who has seen the evidence in front of him, replies “Come, I think hell’s a fable” (the questions on hell). When he finally believes, he believes too much: “But Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned: the serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus” (the scholars’ farewell). That is pride turned inside out: too great for God has become too bad for God’s mercy.
Whether he could have done otherwise the play refuses to settle, and Elizabethan Calvinism made that a live question. “My heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent” (the heavens) may be an excuse or may be a fact. The play’s two editions read it differently.
The shape of the play
The 1604 text has thirteen scenes and a Chorus; Dyce numbers none, so links here go by what happens. The first third and the last are verse tragedy. The middle, where the twenty-four years pass, is slapstick, and readers have long wished it away. I think it is right even if Marlowe did not write all of it. The man who wanted to “make the moon drop from her sphere” (the conjuring) gets a dish snatched from the Pope (Rome), a pair of horns on a knight (the Emperor), and grapes in January for a pregnant duchess (Vanholt). That is what power without purpose comes to.
The clowns make the same point from below. Before Faustus has even signed, Wagner is offering a starving boy the same deal at a lower price: “he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton” (Wagner and the Clown). Robin steals one of Faustus’ books and does what the master does, only for a goblet (the Vintner). The structure is a morality play’s, with angels at each ear, but the hero of a morality play is rescued.
The voice
Ben Jonson called it “Marlowe’s mighty line”: blank verse that marches, drunk on place-names and classical syllables. Faustus’ first speech of desire sends spirits flying “to India for gold”. The Helen speech is that voice at its most beautiful and compromised: “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium—” (Helen). It is addressed to a spirit in a borrowed shape, and it goes on, “Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!” The audience knows that this is literal.
Faustus addresses himself by name from his first line, “Settle thy studies, Faustus”, as if he were his own audience, and he goes on doing so: “What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemn’d to die?” (the Horse-courser). That is why plain prose to his friends hits so hard: “Ah, my sweet chamber-fellow, had I lived with thee, then had I lived still!” (the scholars’ farewell).
A and B
The A-text is the quarto of 1604, printed by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Bushell, its title page giving the author as “Ch. Marl.”. It has about 1,485 lines, short for its time. The B-text is the quarto of 1616, published by John Wright: it omits 36 lines of A and adds 676, so it is about a third longer. The diary of the theatre owner Philip Henslowe records £4 paid on 22 November 1602 to William Bird and Samuel Rowley for additions to the play, and most of what B adds is probably theirs or later. W. W. Greg’s parallel edition of 1950 argued for B as closer to Marlowe. Scholarship has since swung back, and most now treat A, for all its corruption, as nearer to what was first acted.
The differences are not just bulk. B has a rival pope, Bruno (B, Bruno), a knight who cuts off Faustus’ false head (B, the false head), and a heaven and hell made of stage machinery (B, the throne). It brings Lucifer on to watch the last night, and it has Mephistophilis boast, “when thou took’st the book / To view the Scriptures, then I turn’d the leaves” (B, the turned leaves), which goes far to excuse the man. Most tellingly, the Good Angel’s “can repent” becomes “Never too late, if Faustus will repent” (B, the Good Angel). In A the question is whether he is able, and in B whether he is willing. And an Act of 1606 against profanity on stage seems to have left its mark on the wording: A’s “O, I’ll leap up to my God!” is B’s “O, I’ll leap up to heaven!” (B, the last hour), and A’s “My God, my god, look not so fierce on me!” is B’s “O, mercy, heaven! look not so fierce on me!”. B’s scholars also find “Faustus’ limbs, / All torn asunder” (B, the limbs), a detail from the source.
The free texts are both edited by Alexander Dyce, and both are mixed. Gutenberg’s #779, the one this page calls A and quotes, is “From The Quarto of 1604”, in modern spelling, and it is amended “by means of the later 4tos”. Dyce’s notes show how much it matters: “Too servile and illiberal for me” replaces 1604’s “The deuill”, and “universal body of the law” replaces 1604’s “Church”. Yet it keeps A’s distinctive “A sound magician is a mighty god” against the “demigod” of 1616. Gutenberg’s #811 is his B, from the quarto of 1616.
The last hour
At the clock’s eleven Faustus has about sixty lines left (the last hour). “Now hast thou but one bare hour to live” is a speech about the time it takes to say it, and the clock strikes again halfway. His first idea is to stop the universe: “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven”. His second is Ovid’s line from a lover begging the night to last, “O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!” (run slowly, slowly, horses of the night): a scholar’s reflex at the point where scholarship has ceased to matter. “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike”. The monosyllables come like pulses.
Then the vision: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!” Everything he has denied is there in the sky, out of reach. He tries everything else in turn: mountains, earth, clouds, a thousand years in hell, “A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d!”, the transmigration of souls, being an animal. His bids get lower as the minutes run out. The last words are the ones he could have said in the first scene: “I’ll burn my books!—Ah, Mephistophilis!” And the Chorus closes it with “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight”, which sounds like an epitaph for the author, and then with Latin he may not have written: “Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus” (the hour ends the day, the author ends the work).
How it was made
Marlowe’s source was the English translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten, printed by Johann Spies at Frankfurt in 1587. The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, by one “P. F.”, survives in no edition earlier than 1592, which is why the play is now usually dated to that year or the next, though some have argued for 1588–89 and a lost earlier printing. The Faust Book gave him almost all the events, including the Old Man and Helen, and the torn limbs. It did not give him the despair as a drama.
Marlowe was killed on 30 May 1593 at Deptford, in the house of the widow Eleanor Bull, by Ingram Frizer, after a day spent with Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. He was twenty-nine. All three men had worked for the Walsinghams. Twelve days earlier a warrant had gone out for his arrest, and the Baines note, a report of his atheism, reached the authorities. The coroner’s inquest, found only in 1925 by Leslie Hotson, says that they quarrelled over the bill, that Marlowe drew Frizer’s dagger and that he was stabbed above the right eye, with Frizer pardoned for self-defence within a month. Few have believed it entirely, and nobody has proved anything else. The first performance on record is by the Admiral’s Men in September 1594, sixteen months after his death; they gave it more than twenty times by October 1597, with Edward Alleyn in the part.
Devils on stage
William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1633) reports the “visible apparition of the Devil on the stage” during a performance, “to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators”, and he claims to have the story from people then alive. A later account places the same thing at Exeter: during the conjuring the players counted their devils, found “one devil too many amongst them”, broke off, and left town next morning. John Aubrey recorded that Alleyn, surprised by an apparition while playing a demon, made a vow that led to the founding of Dulwich College.
None of this is evidence of anything but the effect. The conjuring was done with Latin, a circle and names of God, in an age that took such things seriously, and Marlowe has Mephistophilis explain the mechanism: “when we hear one rack the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ, / We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul” (the conjuring). Anyone in that theatre could work out what that implied about the actor saying the words.
The people
Faustus
Faustus is a low-born prodigy who has outrun his education. Much of what he wants is a scholar’s fantasy, and it is touching: silk for the students and walls of brass for Germany.
Mephistophilis
Mephistophilis is the great invention. Faustus sends him back to return as “an old Franciscan friar”, as a joke against Catholics, and that suits him; he has a priest’s sadness. He will not answer “Tell me who made the world” (the angels’ return). He suffers, says so, and does his work anyway. The Faust Book hints at that grief; Marlowe makes it the play’s best writing.
The angels and the Old Man
The Good and Evil Angels are a morality-play survival, and the Evil Angel has the better offer: “think of honour and of wealth”. The Old Man is the only saint on view, and the devils cannot harm what matters: “His faith is great; I cannot touch his soul”, says Mephistophilis (the Old Man). Faustus’ response is to ask for him to be tortured.
Wagner, Robin and Ralph
Wagner, Robin and Ralph keep the theology honest: anyone can do this, and the devils come for a goblet.
Readers and critics
Greg’s essay “The Damnation of Faustus” (1946) gave the sharpest single point: Helen is a spirit, so a devil, and when Faustus kisses her he commits the sin that puts him beyond help, which is why the Old Man’s tone changes after it. Harry Levin’s The Overreacher (1952) reads Marlowe through a hero’s appetite. William Empson’s posthumous Faustus and the Censor (1987) argues, with more verve than evidence, that the play we have has been cut to save it from the authorities, and that the original Faustus might have got away. When Henry Crabb Robinson mentioned the play to the old Goethe, Goethe burst out in admiration.
Afterlives
English travelling players took the play to Germany, where it decayed into farce and puppet shows, and there the young Goethe met the story. His Faust is the great reply, the same bargain with the verdict reversed, and that page makes the comparison. Nevill Coghill staged it at Oxford with Richard Burton, and the two filmed it in 1967 with Elizabeth Taylor as a silent Helen.
How to read it
- Get an edition with both texts. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen’s Revels edition and David Scott Kastan’s Norton Critical both print A and B. Read A first.
- Read the Latin in a modern edition. Dyce leaves the conjuration untranslated, and good notes show the trap in the Bible verses.
- Read the last hour aloud, and time it. It takes a few minutes, while the stage clock claims sixty.
Read next
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808, 1832). The same man, saved, with a long argument about why.
- Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (about 1587). The mighty line at full volume, with the same appetite and no bill.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). “Myself am hell” is the same thought as Mephistophilis’s, given an epic to live in.
- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947). The damned Faust again, in modern Germany.