Doctor Faustus

First performed in England in 1594 after the playwright’s death the year before, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus remained unpublished until the seventeenth century, the first known edition appearing in 1604. By this time Elizabeth I was deceased, succeeded by James VI of Scotland, under whose reign the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan literature continued to thrive. Political and religious turmoil was also afoot as the hostilities between Catholics and Protestants continued to rage across Europe. The drama of the time reflected this internal, spiritual struggle, and Doctor Faustus was no exception. Based on a German scholar and magician, Marlowe’s Faustus is the personification of renaissance ambition: religiously dissatisfied and determined to seek out knowledge. He sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of knowledge, giving him “whatsoever [he] shall ask” (scene 3, line 95). Implored on more than one occasion by more than one character to renounce the devil and repent, Faustus can not do it; his desire for firm and tangible wisdom supersedes the belief in what he can not readily see. It is this resolute renaissance attitude that is ultimately his downfall.

In the first chorus, along with a taste of the tragedy that is to beset our protagonist, we get a brief history of Dr. Faustus’ life: The son of peasants, Faustus, like Marlowe, was most likely educated on scholarship at Wittenberg. This puts into perspective the process by which Faustus reasons as his desire for knowledge is indicative of the period in which Marlowe is writing. In the late sixteenth century man is standing on the edge of reason, with a quizzical mind, with a desire for information so voracious it clouds ones ability to believe even the most basic truths. This is inability in Faustus is evident early in the play when he makes no distinction between the Biblical idea of hell and that of the Grecian afterlife in Elysium, boldly stating “This word damnation terrifies him not” (Scene 3, line 59) and when he is then unwilling to believe Mephastophilis proof of hell:

Think’st thou that I, who 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!

(Scene 3, Lines 78-81)

Faustus fancies himself a great thinker- a pragmatist- on par with the “old