The Faustian Motif in the Tragedies
by Christopher Marlowe
The Faustian Motif in the Tragedies
by Christopher Marlowe
By
Milena Kostic
The Faustian Motif in the Tragedies by Christopher Marlowe,
by Milena Kostic
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Milena Kostic
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-4950-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4950-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ vi
Foreword ............................................................................................................... vii
Introduction: The Renaissance heritage............................................................... 1
Faustian Culture ................................................................................................. 1
Dr. Faustus .............................................................................................................18
Literary and Historical Background ..................................................................18
Crime and Punishment: The Meaning of Hell ...................................................24
The Nature of Faustus’s Sin or the Uses of Knowledge ....................................26
Tamburlaine the Great ...........................................................................................38
Historical and Literary Background ..................................................................38
From Shepherd to Emperor: Tamburlaine’s Defiance of Social Hierarchies ....47
Tamburlaine’s Crimes against Nature: The Destruction of the Female.............59
Tamburlaine and the Western Imperialism .......................................................70
Dido, Queen of Carthage .......................................................................................74
Historical and Literary Background ..................................................................74
Dido: Marlowe’s Venus and Adonis ..................................................................79
Marlowe’s Dido: Subversion of the Patriarchal Archetype ...............................80
The Jew of Malta ....................................................................................................92
Historical and Literary Background ..................................................................92
Marlowe’s Malta: ‘A Reasonable Market’ ........................................................96
The Revenge ...................................................................................................104
The Defeat: The Poor Rich Old Man ..............................................................109
Conclusion: Modern Versions of the Faustus Myth .........................................116
Bibliography ........................................................................................................125
Index .....................................................................................................................130
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Lena Petrović, my
research supervisor, for her valuable and constructive suggestions during
the writing of this thesis. Her willingness to share both her knowledge and
time so generously has been very much appreciated.
FOREWORD
My choice of the literary period to study for my master’s thesis was
conditioned by the fact that for several years now I have been assisting in
the English Renaissance Literature Course. The theme itself – The
Faustian Motif in the Tragedies by Christopher Marlowe – crystallized
after repeated readings of Marlowe’s works, as I realized that the pact with
demonic forces, and/or its consequences, was a motif explored not only in
Doctor Faustus, but in Marlowe’s other plays too (Tamburlaine the Great,
Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Jew of Malta). My intention then was to
trace the way Marlowe explained this process, from play to play, in
psychological and cultural terms, and to demonstrate its relevance for
modern man and his culture.
In my research I found certain ideas of Northrop Frye to be of
particular help. One of his insights, into dialectical nature of cultural
change, underlies the whole of my thesis: in his book The Critical Path
(1971), Northrop Frye distinguishes between two kinds of myth – the
myth of freedom, in which the freedom of the individual is the guiding
principle, and the myth of concern, in which the freedom of the individual
is sacrificed for the sake of social ‘cohesion’. The irony of the human
situation, Frye writes, consists in the fact that the myth of freedom
eventually collapses into fatality it tries to fight against, i.e., every
liberating myth tends to eventually end up as a totalitarian dogma, which
in its turn necessitates a new myth of freedom to be formulated. This idea
helped me to articulate the chief point of my thesis: the Renaissance
liberated Western man from the constraints of medieval Christian dogmas,
inspiring the will to finally realize his enormous creative potentials and
achieve his goals. But Marlowe’s protagonists use this long-awaited
freedom for destructive purposes: for the sake of obtaining military,
political and monetary power, each of them intimately bound up with the
power of the infinite and infinitely irresponsible knowledge embodied in
Dr. Faustus’s diabolic magic. Thus the hubristic aspirations of his
protagonists (Faustus’s hunger for ultimate knowledge, Tamburlaine’s
thirst for the military conquest, Aeneas’ decision to elevate imperialist
ambition over love, and, finally, Barabas’s desire to accumulate wealth
that overrides all other considerations) are a powerful illustration of Frye’s
paradox: their misuse of freedom anticipates “four forms of massive unfreedom that characterize modern society – military subjugation, racism,
economic oppression and psychological repression” (Petrovic 2000, 110).
viii
Foreword
They invite us to recognize in our theories and practices of progress a
philosophy which, as Burgess declared, quoting Eliot, “seems to raise man
to a heroic level never before seen…, but actually reduces him to a status
of a monster with great ingenuity but no soul” (Burgess 1970, 104)
The following text is divided into the Introduction and four main parts
dealing with each of these tragic aspirations, in the order indicated above.
It does not coincide with the actual chronological order in which these
plays are supposed to have been written. I have disregarded it, not because
it is uncertain, but for the obvious reason suggested by the nature of my
theme: I begin with Dr. Faustus because it is the only way to introduce
and discuss the possible symbolic meanings of the act of selling one’s soul
to the Devil. I end with The Jew of Malta because in the world of
Marlowe’s Malta – closest perhaps to our own in its mindless pursuit of
profit – the major protagonists no longer have any soul to lose or to
renounce.
The method used in the thesis is eclectic: besides Frye’s, I also made
use of certain permanently valid ideas of the New Critics, particularly their
requirement of close reading of the literary works chosen for examination.
But I combine their approach with that of the New Historicists, who
provided a corrective to the New Critic’s formalism by insisting on the
importance of taking into consideration the historical and cultural context
the work belongs to. The intention of the New Historicists was to closely
read not only literary texts, but all cultural documents, particularly those
reporting the atrocities committed in the course of Western colonial
expansion, and thus reach a better understanding of the Renaissance, as a
period already containing the germ of contemporary global crisis.
However, in my thesis I do not share all of the New Historicists’
assumptions. In the Introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980),
Greenblatt claims that artists, like all other subjects, are ideologically
determined: religion, education, law, the family are the institutions that
shape all individuals. Their subjectivities, including the artist’s, are
constructed in accord with the cultural codes that suppress and control
them. Thus, although the New Historicists criticize Western ideology of
power, they claim that neither the playwright nor his work can go beyond
it. The only way of escape from cultural omnipotence is, according to
Greenblatt, “the will to play” – to embrace what the culture finds
loathsome and frightening and, although aware of one’s own inevitable
fall, to glorify it for the sake of sheer anarchy which is in itself subversive.
This is my point of disagreement with the New Historicists. I believe
that a more positive resistance than mere self-destructive anarchic play to
any kind of repressive ideology is not only possible, but necessary. This
The Faustian Motif in the Tragedies by Christopher Marlowe
ix
belief in personal and social transformation is the governing idea of
humanist thinkers, from the Renaissance humanists to 18th century utopian
thinkers and their 20th century counterparts, including a certain brand of
Marxists. Marlowe’s heroes do not exemplify this creative resistance to
culture; on the contrary, they belong to that kind of tragic heroes who
embody the worst tendencies of the place and the time. But, as Frye
observed, and Bertold Brecht demonstrated in his plays, the business of
the playwright is not to provide the solutions but to point to problems and
warn us about the consequences of our failure to attend to them properly.
Marlowe’s plays certainly do that.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: THE RENAISSANCE HERITAGE
Faustian Culture
It has been long customary to quote Pico della Mirandola, the author of
the Latin oration On the Dignity of Man, usually considered ‘the manifesto
of Renaissance humanism’, as one of the main spokesmen of the optimism
of the Renaissance. The fact that the Church suppressed Pico’s nine
hundred theses as heretical and refused to allow him to dispute them
publicly enhanced his glamour as a heroic pioneer of freethinking
modernity. Pico’s concise statement of unbounded faith in man’s creative
potentials is to be found in the first pages of his Oration in which the
Creator announces to the newly-formed Adam that he will stand apart
from the rest of creation by virtue of unique plasticity with which he has
been endowed. In the fable, Pico adds to the Biblical story that God shapes
all creatures drawing from his storehouse of archetypes. When he comes to
creating man he finds out that he ran out of all ready made models. Thus,
whereas all the other creatures are circumscribed by the natural disposition
conferred upon them, Man alone has the freedom to choose his own
nature. He addresses Adam thus:
Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function
peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end according to thy
longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what
abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature
of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws
prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine
own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself
the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s centre that thou
mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have
made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal or immortal, so
that with freedom of choice and honour, as thou the maker and moulderof
thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.”
(quoted in Davies 1997, 95-96)
Implicit in the last sentence of the quotation is the qualification that
Pico immediately proceeds to develop into an explicit warning: the
2
Chapter One
expectations of man are qualified by a sense of responsibility that this
long-awaited freedom entailed. In other words, the Oration contained
Pico’s warning that this unique freedom could be used in two ways: once
freed from the traditional constraints man could be reborn into higher
forms but also degenerate into lower forms of life. The influence of the
first part of the Oration has been detected in the writing of the following
century, which abounds in the themes of the dignity and freedom of man,
individualism, wide intellectual curiosity and a refusal to submit to the
constraints of clerical orthodoxy. However, the admonition – that man can
become like God, but can also descend to animals – was usually
disregarded by optimistic, liberal philosophies of history, although in
Shakespeare’s and, as I hope to demonstrate, in Marlowe’s tragedies it is
powerfully dramatized.
The Oration has been seen as a direct inspiration for one of the most
commonly quoted passages in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
I have of late, – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all
customs of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this
most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing
to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of
work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in
moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of
animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
(2, 1, 309-331)
The part echoing Pico’s celebration of man as a divine piece of work is
ironically contrasted with images of sterility and corruption which project
Hamlet’s profound disillusionment and disgust. He cannot, or will not,
account for his melancholy, but the play has already at this point made
clear what is rotten at the court of Elsinore. There are for sure many ways
of interpreting Hamlet but one legitimate reading is to see in it an indirect
reply to Baltazare Castiglione’s Courtier. For Castiglione the court
represented the new secular setting for the cultivation of genuinely
courteous or virtuous men. Unconscious of any irony he praised
sprezzatura – a manner that has the appearance of ease and spontaneity but
is in fact carefully calculated and studied – as the chief asset of the ideal
courtier. But Shakespeare was interested in truth behind the appearances.
In his Elsinore dominated by power games and murderous intrigues
sprezzatura conceals a cynical strategy of survival or tragic self-betrayal
leading to madness and death. Far from cultivating independent self-
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
3
fashioned individuals Renaissance courts produced ruthless tyrants and
cringy hypocrits. They belonged to the new institutions which, as Steven
Greenblatt writes, ensured that there should be less autonomy in selffashioning in 16th century than before. Discussing a change in the
intellectual, social, psychological structures that govern the generation of
identities, Greenblatt says the following:
If we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we
must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the
will; if we say that there is a new social mobility, we must say that there is
a new assertion of power by both state and family to determine all
movement within the society; if we say that there is a heightened
awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological and
psychological organization, we must say that there is a new dedication to
the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the
destruction of alternatives (Greenblatt 1980, 1-2).
Greenblat is of course not the first 20th century thinker to regard the
Renaissance as the threshold of human liberation but also of new forms of
control. The traumas of the last century (from the two wars, genocides, the
holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagassaki to current NATO interventions all
over the world) have finally convinced everybody, except the most
persistently self-deluded that the humanist project has failed and that the
initial promise of freedom, announced by Pico, has ended up,
paradoxically, in massive unfreedom for the enormous majority of people.
This paradox, which William Golding would call the fall out of
freedom, is the central preoccupation of Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the
Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (1989). In the section called “The
Terror of History”, Eliade distinguishes between two kinds of human
community – traditional and historical. In traditional societies all
significant events in the life of man are repetition of some primordial
archetypal event one that took place outside historical time, in illo
tempore. The beginning of historical societies, on the other hand,
coincides, very much as Pico’s birth of modern man with the rejection of
any predetermining archetypal model. History, that is to say, consists of
series of novelties by which man shapes himself and his society. In an
imaginary argument between traditional and historical man, however,
Eliade endorses the former’s point of view: if modern man, who accepts
history or claims to accept it , can reproach archaic man imprisoned within
the mythical horizon of archetypes and repetition, with his creative
impotence, or his inability to accept the risks entailed by every creative
act, the man of the traditional civilization could reply to this criticism by a
4
Chapter One
counter criticism that would at the same time be a defense of the type of
archaic existence:
It is becoming more and more doubtful if modern man can make history.
For history either makes itself or it tends to be made by an increasingly
small number of men who not only prohibit the mass of their
contemporaries from directly or indirectly intervening in the history they
are making (or which the small group is making), but in addition have at
their disposal means sufficient to force each individual to endure, for its
own part, the consequences of this history, that is, to live immediately and
continuously in dread of history. Modern man’s boasted freedom to make
history is illusory for nearly the whole of human race (Eliade 1989, xxiii).
Richard Rubenstein is another contemporary thinker engaged in the
critique of Western history and its repeated betrayals of dreams of
freedom. In his Cunning of History Rubenstein detects in Western history
a perennial impulse to total domination. He forces us to reinterpret the
meaning of Auschwitz, not as an aberration but part of the continuum of
slavery that has been engrafted for centuries onto the very body of
Western civilization. He is making us understand that the etiology of
Auschwitz is embedded deeply in a cultural tradition that goes back to the
Middle Passage from the coast of Africa and beyond, to the ancient Greece
and Rome. But although Rubenstein attributes the terror of history to the
sleeping virus in the circulation of the Western blood, he claims, like
Eliade, that the insection has become especially virulent since the
beginning of modernity. The explanations they offer are similar and,
without actually mentioning Marlowe, provide a useful context for the
analyses of the motif common to his plays – modern man’s renunciation of
the soul. They both relate the post-Renaissance history to the new
inadequate concepts of the self and its relation to the Other, which they see
as even more destructive on man’s moral being or his soul than traditional
religious constrains.
Thus according to Eliade, traditional or archaic man experiences
himself as real only in so far as he felt that he belonged to a pattern larger
than himself, only as long as he felt his life to be attuned to larger cosmic
rhythms. Thus he was restrained from within against any violation of the
natural order, since that would result in the diminishment of his own
being. On the other hand, modern or historical man inhabits a time-space
defined by assumptions fatal to that sense of the individual soul partaking
of the transpersonal soul of the world which was the core of archaic myth
of eternal recurrence and has remained the source of all morality: these
assumptions are that human existence does not unfold within cosmic space
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
5
time but is wholly contained within history; that history is a linear
progressive series of novelties and, since these novelties are intellectually
conceived, that rational knowledge is an exclusive path to wisdom and
happiness. The comparable processes which, according to Rubenstein,
were initiated by the Renaissance revolution and culminated in the 20th
century bureaucratic totalitarianism are secularization, disenchantment
with the world and rationalization. Rubenstein defines these processes in
the following manner:
The secularization process involves the liberation of ever wider areas of
human activity from religious domination. Disenchantment of the world
occurs when there are no mysterious forces that come into play, but rather
that one can, in principle master all things by calculation. Rationalization
involves the methodical attainment of a definitely given and practical end
by means of an increasingly precise calculation of adequate means
(Rubenstein 1975, 28).
Combined together, the secularized disenchanted consciousness and
calculating rationality bar man from his deepest self or the soul and so
prevent any spontaneous moral response to the needs of one’s fellow man
or to the natural or political order. Instead, one regards people, nature and
other human beings with dispassionate objectivity and political order with
unquestioning obedience. The organizational expression of this moral
neutrality is bureaucracy. The main characteristics of bureaucracy, writes
Rubenstein, is its dehumanized attitude in which love, hatred or any other
purely personal emotional elements are eliminated in one’s dealings with
fellow men.
Thus, according to Rubenstein, it required only the modern techniques
of bureaucratization for the ultimate slavery and total domination that
found its apotheosis in Auschwitz to achieve itself.1
1
According to Rubenstein, no century in human history can match the twentieth in
sheer number of people slaughtered as a direct consequence of the political activity
of the great states. One estimate of the humanly inflicted deaths of the twentieth
century places the total at about one hundred million. It all began with the First
World War in which about 6,000 people were killed every day for over 1,500 days.
The total was around ten million. He sees the Holocaust as a thoroughly modern
exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced
political community with a highly trained, disciplined police and civil service
bureaucracy. The Holocaust is placed here within the context of the phenomenon
of twentieth century mass death. Never before have human beings been so
expendable. Perhaps the best illustration of the spirit of the twentieth century is the
example of Hungarian Jews’ treatment by the British. In 1944 the Nazis were
6
Chapter One
Another thinker pointing to Marlowe’s contemporary relevance, and
supplying moreover a direct confirmation of my reading of all Marlowe’s
plays is Tzvetan Todorov. “Ours is a Faustian culture”, reads the first
sentence of his book The Imperfect Garden (2003). The moral bankruptcy
of our civilization according to Todorov is due to certain pacts with ‘the
devil signed in ignorance’ (Todorov 2003, 3). The first pact was offered to
Christ by Lucifer himself. Unlike Christ, says Todorov, who refused the
bargain with the devil in the name of God, his followers mostly end up by
accepting it.
The second pact was offered to a proud and ambitious magician and
necromancer, Faustus, in 15th century, by Mephistophilis, the Devil’s
legislate. Faustus was eager to penetrate the secrets of life and death and
desired the infinite knowledge of the world. What he had to sacrifice in
exchange for the knowledge and power was his soul. Faustus indulged in
infinite knowledge for twenty-four years and was admired by many;
however, there were rumours that during the last years of the bargain he
was not interested in any secrets, did not leave his house and prayed to be
forgotten by the devil. When the time came for Faustus to renounce his
soul, the devil appeared to collect his due and Faustus, screaming with
horror, could not save himself.
The third pact dates from the same period as Faustus’s pact but with a
difference, claims Todorov, that the existence of the pact was not revealed
at the moment it became valid. Lucifer was quite cunning about it – he hid
the contract from the other party, modern man. Modern man was to
believe that his achievements were the result of his own effort and that
there was no price to be paid for it. Lucifer did not offer knowledge, but
free will this time.
The third pact signed unconsciously provided modern man with the
opportunity to think for himself and to live the way he wanted. People
could now create their personal lives – instead of following their parents’
or priests’ instructions. They wanted to choose for themselves where and
how they would live. Will and not coincidence was to be the most
important factor in their lives. Soon, they discovered that it was not
sending over 750,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Chaim Weizmann, who was
to become Israel’s first president, sent two messages to Anthony Eden, the British
foreign secretary, requesting that the gassing installations and railroad lines at
Auschwitz be subjected to aerial bombardment. Two months passed before
Weizmann received a reply (and several hundred thousand Jews were killed in the
meantime) in which it was stated that due to certain technical difficulties involved,
the British had no option but to refrain from pursuing the proposal. At the time of
the British refusal, the Allies had air supremacy over Europe.
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
7
enough only for emotions to be free, but wanted reason to be free, as well.
Tradition might prevail in the state affairs, but reason should be free to
detect truth or lie, that is, it became the only medium of knowledge one
could rely on. This is how purely secular science was born.
Having once tasted freedom – to love and to think – modern man was
tempted to expand it. The sole remaining domain to be liberated was that
of public affairs. The only moral being was a being that acted according to
his own free will (later this would be called responsibility) and the only
legitimate political society, that chosen by the will of its subjects, was
democracy.
In the following two centuries the conquest of freedom was the job of
contemplative men who poured their thoughts onto the pages of their
books. The change occurred in the second half of 18th century when some
men of action, dissatisfied with the state of the world around them,
decided to practice the ideas to be found in books rather than merely
discuss them. The outcome was the American and French revolution,
followed by the Declaration of Independence and another declaration
never quite openly proclaimed – that no one is above the free will of the
individual.
It was at that very moment, claims Todorov, that the devil announced
the existence of the pact because it was a point of no return for modern
man. He cherished his long-awaited freedom and now the time came for
the devil to collect his debt. From the beginning of 18th century various
dark prophets, the devil’s emissaries, have repeatedly announced that the
price of freedom had to be paid and that it was alienation – from God,
from one’s fellow man and from oneself.
When the pact with the devil was finally proclaimed modern men
could not agree on the attitude to take towards it. They saw it as a warning,
threat or even curse. Scientists, writers, philosophers, politicians divided
into different spiritual families depending on the point of view and
answers they agreed on.
The family of conservatives is of the opinion that the devil is right –
that the price of freedom includes God, society and oneself and that this
price is too high, so that it is better to renounce freedom. They lament and
long for the way things were before and fight against the demands for a
more radical modernity. They would like to live in the new world by
cherishing the old values.
When the believers in science became acquainted with the devil’s
intentions they shrugged them off easily: there is nothing to pay for,
because freedom never existed. Or rather, the only freedom that there is, is
the freedom of knowledge. Thanks to man’s perception and judgment it is
8
Chapter One
possible to reach all the secrets of nature and history. Science leads to
technology – if we master nature’s laws, we can transform it. As far as the
freedom of the will is concerned, it is rather limited. Man is determined by
biological and historical laws, and what is usually seen as free will is
actually man’s ignorance. If God, society or oneself represent the part of
man’s identity, nothing can remove them from it; if not, there is nothing to
grieve about. In both cases, the devil must leave empty-handed.
For the family of individualists the loss of God, community or the self
was not the loss of freedom, but on the contrary an additional liberation.
Man could assert himself in his alienation and serve his own interests more
efficiently, which is the only thing that matters. So instead of despairing,
the individualists claim, we should cheer: the pact signed in ignorance is
the beginning of celebration.
Thus according to the champions of science there is no need to pay any
price for freedom because there is no freedom in the sense in which we
usually understand it, but only a new mastery of nature and history, based
on knowledge. For individualists there is nothing to pay for, for what we
have lost is not worth of the regret. And we can do very well without
common values, without frustrating social bonds, without a stable and
coherent self.
The last great family, the humanists, thinks on the contrary that
freedom exists and that it is precious. At the same time, they care a lot
about common values, a life spent in the harmony with other people and
the self that is found responsible for its own actions. They take the devil’s
threats seriously, but reject the bargain and themselves challenge him.
Todorov’s conclusion is of special significance and is worth quoting in
full:
In our part of the world, nowadays we still live under the pressure of
devil’s threats. We like our freedom, but, on the other hand, we are anxious
about living in the world without ideals and common values, in the mass
society inhabited by loners who cannot grasp the meaning of love any
more; secretly, not always consciously, we lament the loss of identity.
These threats and questions are still our peculiar traits. In order to face
them, I decided to invoke the authors of that remote epoch when the pact is
believed to have been signed in ignorance. I believe more precisely that
one of the modern spiritual families, the family of humanists, might help us
better than any other to understand our present plight and overcome the
difficulties (Todorov 2003, 16).
Todorov also points to the way the word humanist as used in every day
parlance to describe modern democratic states has lost its initial meaning.
That is why unlike most postmodern philosophers who reject humanism
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
9
wholesale Todorov believes that “the original humanist learning is still
capable of surprising and enlightening us” (Todorov 2003, 17). The
classical humanist authors according to Todorov “had replied to the dark
prophets even before the prophecy was formulated” (Todorov 2003, 18). I
would like therefore to return for a moment to these thinkers especially the
early Italian humanists such as Pico, Ficino and Giordano Bruno, who
constitute the tradition to which Christopher Marlowe, though not his
protagonists, also belongs. I would particularly like to examine the role of
magic and hermetic philosophy which, as Frances Yates amply
demonstrated in her study Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, is
the chief inspiration in Pico’s, Ficino’s, Bruno’s teaching.
***
The classical humanist philosophy of man, the so-called New
Learning, in fact derives its vigour from looking backwards. For the XV
century Italian thinkers, progress meant primarily a revival, rebirth, a
return to the source. They recovered classical literature with a sense of
return to the pure gold of a civilization better than their own. While the
religious reformers returned to the study of the original Greek New
Testament with the sense of recovery of the genuine Christianity obscured
in the Latin Vulgate, and all but lost under layers of dogma, the humanist
philosophers looked back to the pagan antiquity, Latin and Greek. Thus, as
Frances Yates points out, the Renaissance Humanism is actually based on
two traditions, appealing to entirely different interests. In the Latin
humanist tradition, rhetoric and good literary style are cherished, while in
the Greek humanist tradition, philosophy, theology, magic and science are
the main fields of interest. Again, in the Latin humanist tradition, the
recovery of man’s dignity consists in casting off bad medieval, monastic
ways of life and attempting to emulate the sophisticated grandeur of a
noble Roman, whereas in the Greek humanist tradition, man recovers his
dignity by redefining his relation to nature and God. Briefly, the Latin
humanists saw man in a political or historical context, while their
opponents sought for a path back to man’s original home, which, as in the
archaic ontology described by Eliade, is the cosmic totality. They found it
in the pagan background of the early Christianity, in, according to Frances
Yates, “that religion of the world, strongly tinged with magic and oriental
influences, which was the Gnostic version of Greek philosophy, and the
refuge of the weary pagans seeking an answer to life’s problems other than
that offered by their contemporaries, the early Christians” (Yates 1964, 2).
10
Chapter One
Weary of Greek logic and dialectics, yet dissatisfied with what was
soon to become the official version of Christianity, these second century
pagans sought the answers to their problems in what was intuitive,
magical, mystical. Thus a large literature developed in Greece at that time,
heavily influenced by Egyptian religion, and later attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus, an imaginary figure, whom the Greeks identified with the
Egyptian God, Thot, and gave him the epithet of “Thrice Great”. Hermes
was usually associated with astrology and occult sciences, with the secret
virtues of plants and stones, with the sympathetic magic based on the
knowledge of such virtues, with the making of talismans, which the
Egyptians used to draw the powers of the cosmos into the statues of their
gods. The magic was an inseparable, practical aspect of a philosophy
which represented, according to Yates, a mixture of Platonism and
Stoicism, combined with some Jewish and probably some Persian
influences. Both the magic and the philosophy are recorded in, among
other texts, Corpus Hermeticum, dating from A.D. 100-300, but believed
by Ficino and other Italian humanists who discovered and enthusiastically
translated it, to originate in the period of Moses. The purpose of the magic
rites and the supporting philosophy described in the fifteen dialogues of
Corpus Hermeticus was to discover the meaning of the world, as a gnosis,
and not just as a dialectical exercise, that is, to achieve the intuitive
knowledge of and participation in the divine. Since reason had failed, the
new teaching sought to cultivate Nous, the intuitive faculty in man:
The hermetic treatises, which often take the form of dialogues between
master and disciple, usually culminate in a kind of ecstasy in which the
adept is satisfied that he has received the illumination and breaks out into
hymns of praise. He seems to reach this illumination through
contemplation of the world or the cosmos, or rather through contemplation
of the cosmos as reflected in his own Nous or mens which separates out for
him its divine meaning and gives him a spiritual mastery over it, as in the
familiar gnostic revelation or experience of the ascent of the soul through
the spheres of the planets to become immersed in the divine. Thus that
religion of the world which runs as an undercurrent in much of Greek
thought, particularly in Platonism and Stoicism, becomes in Hermetism
actually a religion, a cult without temples or liturgy, followed in the mind
alone, a religious philosophy or philosophical religion containing a gnosis
(Yates 1964, 4).
In fact, the most valuable and, for the understanding of the early
Renaissance humanists, crucial trend in the hermetic philosophy is
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
11
Pythagorean, rather than Platonic.2 Although they are referred to as
NeoPlatonists, the tradition Pico, Ficino and Bruno seek to revive precedes
Plato and best exemplified in Pythagoras’s teaching. Pythagoras, writes
Bela Hamvas in his essay On Orphism (1994), was the last Greek
philosopher to use theory in the original sense of the word: as a single
unified system, ethical, poetic and scientific at once, inspired by a
sympathetic imaginative contemplation of life and inseparable from actual
conduct. Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of the soul, which after
death of a person moves into other bodies, animal or human. This, we find
out in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was one reason why he was a vegetarian.
But he also felt that it was sinful to kill an animal in order to survive when
nature offered such an abundance of fruit and vegetable. He loved all
living things and is said to have preached to animals. He perceived a
common assumption – that of cosmic justice, beneath the seemingly
opposed traditions in the earliest Greek thought, the mystic and empirical,
and brought these traditions together in his teaching. As a musician he
remained faithful to the Dionysian and original Orphic practice of music
as ecstatic celebration of all life (Plato approved only of the music that
encouraged civic and martial virtues), and combined it with his scientific
insights. He was a mathematician, and discovered that number was the
foundation, the essence, of all phenomena, including music. But number,
for him, could not be abstracted from things; it was not a pure
disembodied Platonic idea transcending the earthly existence. It was
always inherent, in music and dance as rhythm, in sculpture as proportion,
in geometry as ratio, and in ethics as a sense of inner harmony, perfectly
attuned, with the singing cosmos (Hamvas 1994, 254).
Pythagoras’s teaching is an instance of that primordial conception of
being which Bela Hamvas describes as an awareness that there is only one
universal system of rules, one order, which, however strict, never harms
life, because it is not a matter of compulsion but of freedom. It had been
corrupted by the time of Pythagoras. Originating in the world view of the
pre-Hellenic, peaceful, egalitarian tribes, it was eventually suppressed or
warped by the Greek invaders, whose imperialist slave-owning democracy
required a split between morality and politics to justify and maintain itself.
Revived in the second century and then again in the early Renaissance it
was finally lost in the post-Renaissance disenchantment, secularisation and
rationality, the processes that Rubenstein points out as indispensable to
modern, capitalist forms of domination and slavery. But it remains the
2
For the views on the Platonic tradition in the Renaissance philosophical thought I
am very much indebted to Lena Petrovic’s detailed account in Plato’s Legacy: A
Revision (Petrovic 2009, 1-17).
12
Chapter One
only kind of knowledge that, according to Pythagoras and his latter day
followers, the soul can and must remember if it is to recover its wholeness
and sanity.
It was this Pythagorean paradigm that the Italian humanists, from Pico
to Giordano Bruno sought to recover by their memory maps. The Egyptian
hieroglyphs and Cabalistic signs were but symbols of correspondences
interlocking the inner psychological and outer planetary spaces into a
single spiritual system, and the magic invocation of the spirits nothing but
the ritual of meditation leading to the epiphany of Divine love, which, for
Ficino and Bruno was the prima materia of all creation.
But besides the magic founded on pantheistic gnosis, which was a true
remedy for the disintegrating western spirituality, there was also a kind of
Renaissance magic springing from a dualistic worldview, and merely
perpetuating Platonic and Christian dichotomies. For Yates, it is actually a
distinction between optimist and pessimist gnosis:
For the pessimist (or dualist) gnosis, the material world heavily
impregnated with the fatal influence of the stars is in itself evil; it must be
escaped from by an ascetic way of life which avoids as much as possible
all contact with matter, until the lightened soul rises up through the spheres
of the planets, casting off their evil influences as it ascends, to its true
home in the immaterial divine world. For the optimist gnosis, matter is
impregnated with the divine, the earth lives, moves, with a divine life, the
stars are living divine animals, the sun burns with a divine power, there is
no part of Nature which is not good for all are parts of God (Yates 1964,
22).
Depending on the goal that is to be achieved Yates also distinguishes
between black and white magic: one is demonic – illicit and wicked, used
for personal, selfish, and destructive ends; the other is natural – necessary
and useful, used for unegotistical and creative purposes. In fact, the two
distinctions are one or at least they overlap. An immoral or destructive act,
one that harms another, simply cannot be conceived by a person who feels,
as John Donne insisted, that “no man is an island”; or who possesses that
“amazing, even mysterious” capacity to suspend or annul the distinction
between oneself and another and to will another’s good as it if were one’s
own which Schopenhauer discovers in his essay On the Foundation of
Morality. There he comes to treat love as “the great transforming power
that converts the will to live into its opposite and reveals thereby a
dimension of truth beyond the world domination of King Death,...beyond
the turbulent ocean of our life’s conflicting centers of self-interest”
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
13
(quoted in Campbell 1976, 73-74). This truth, he writes further, is
embedded in the doctrine
that plurality is merely illusory, and that in all the individuals of this world
– no matter how great their number, as they appear beside each other in
space and after each other in time – there is made manifest only one,
single, truly existent Being, present and ever the same in all. [It] was
known to the world, even ages before Kant... [It] is the chief and
fundamental teaching of the oldest books in the world, the sacred Vedas,
...tirelessly restated in endless variation on practically every page, as well
as allegorised in multitudes of similes and figures. That it was basic, also,
to the wisdom of Pythagoras, there can be no doubt....The Neoplatonists
were literally soaked in it: “Through the unity of all”, they wrote, “all souls
are one”. Then in Europe, unexpectedly, we see it emerge in the ninth
century in the works of Scotus Erigena, whom it so excited that he strove
to clothe it in the forms and language of Christian faith. Among
Mohammedans it is found in the inspired mysticism of the Sufis. And yet
in the more recent Occident, Bruno had to pay with a shameful and painful
death for his inability to suppress an urge to proclaim its general truth. (see
Campbell 1976, 73-74)
It was not only the traditional dualisms that the humanists, from Pico
to Bruno, sought to overcome. They were equally wary of the trap of new
dichotomies and divisions in human thought and social practices. If Pico,
known as “the prince of philosophic reconciliation”, offered an alternative
to Medieval Christianity by fusing it with other, non-European religions
back into the original single faith in divinely creative nature of man, he
thereby also forged “the third force” that might have solved all subsequent
theological disputes and controversies and thus prevented the bloodshed in
which the Reformation schism eventually ended. More importantly for my
present argument, the renaissance magus was capable of holding together,
without any sense of incompatibility, the mythical and empirical
knowledge of nature, magic and science. Like Pythagoras, Bruno was at
once a mystic visionary and a scientist, because to him imagination and
reason were inseparable aspects of human creativity. (His greatest enemy
were men who denied their own creativity, and among them, in particular,
the “grammarian pedant”, the representative of the Latin humanist
tradition. His narrow mindedness and futility comes out in his contempt
for magic and indifference to philosophy and science, “which he has
abandoned for minute attention to Latin style, dictionaries of words and
phrases, with which he is so absorbed that he has lost all sense of using
language to express a meaning” (Yates 1964, 252). Thus when Bruno,
following Copernicus, put the sun into the center of the known cosmos, it
14
Chapter One
was in a single mental image, at once corresponding to the objective truth
and to the imaginative vision of a living spiritual totality of the world: the
sun was the divine flame of life burning in the worshipper, too, as the
nous, or capacity for illumination, not a mechanical ball of hot gases that it
was to become once it was perceived in the cold secular light of the
intellect’s disenchanted gaze.
The premonition that this might happen, and that Prometheus, the
restorer of the fire of creative imagination to its rightful owner, man, was
soon to be celebrated as a hero of exclusively rational enlightenment, was
probably the reason why Ficino warned that the image of man as
Prometheus is dangerously one-sided and must be completed by that of
Orpheus. God indeed raised man above all animals by giving him reason,
but man, according to Pico, is more unfortunate precisely because of this:
reason gives man a specially autonomous, superior position in relation to
nature, but cannot in itself lead to spiritual fulfilment. In so far as it is a
symbol of the separating, self-sufficient reason, the Prometheus in man
bars him from his deepest desire which is not to master but reconnect
himself to nature. If man was a Prometheus, therefore, he should not forget
that he was also, and primarily, an Orpheus, the artist and the lover, who
subdued wild animals not by any coercive power but by the power of his
song, whose inspiration was the love of Euridyce (Suhodolski 1972, 205).
Thus, what for a time and for the philosophers like Ficino and Bruno,
ensured that man would not misuse his newly obtained freedom for the
irresponsible exercise of Promethean power was a sense of sacred
obligations to nature and other human beings fostered by Gnostic
pantheism and particularly the Orphic tradition.3 In Todorov’s terms, this
was their answer to the devil, even before his threats were formulated. But
this original Humanism was terminated when Francis Bacon announced
that the end of the Institute for the Pursuit of Knowledge in his New
Atlantis is “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the
enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things
possible” (Bacon 1973, 1456).
Bacon agreed that man was a particle of nature, its microcosm, but,
unlike the Humanists, he was convinced that the greatest and worthiest of
all man’s ambitions was to oppose, conquer and master the macrocosm to
which he belonged. An uncompromising opponent of all mystic or
3
In order to fulfil the proper function of the Magus, which is to “marry earth and
heaven”, Pico, like Ficino, invokes the Orphic tradition, recommending Orphic
incantations, because, for the effecting of this marriage, nothing is more
efficacious than the Hymns of Orpheus, if there be applied to them a suitable
music and disposition of the soul (Yates 1964, 89).
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
15
pantheistic syntheses, he saw man’s glory in the self-sufficiency of his
reason, that is, in power/knowledge. In the words of Tony Davis, Bacon
thinks of knowledge “not, like Pico, as contemplative wisdom, but as
empire, active conquest for practical ends” (Davies 1997, 107). To learn
from nature in order to dominate it and other men, Davis writes further,
the Beconian philosopher “must expose the humanist anthropology, with
its elaborate correspondences of human and cosmic, as a tribal folie de
grandeur” (Davies 1997, 107). The folly refers to Bacon’s Idols of the
tribe, the first of the four errors that obscure man’s judgement. It springs
from human nature’s “innate tendency to attribute human significance to
natural phenomena, populating the universe with human intelligence and
desire, from the anthropoid totems of traditional religion to the casual
poetry of raging tempests” (Davies 1997, 105). But this mythopeic, poetic
habit is what man must be cured of: his reason must be cleansed of all
elements alien to it – feelings, dreams and visions, and metaphors they
spawn – before he can “place nature on the rack” and “torture her secrets
out of her” (quoted in Petrovic 1999, 39). The result would be the
tremendous acceleration in the production of mechanical devices and
tools, which, according to Bacon, would build man’s earthly paradise, the
New Atlantis.
It is significant that Bacon supports this vision using both the myth of
Orpheus and the myth of Prometheus. In a coolly revisionary reading of
the former he transforms Orpheus, an image of amorous identity of the
natural and the human for Ficino, into an image of their total separation.
For Bacon, the most important part of the story is that following Orpheus’s
loss of Euridyce. Having renounced her, Orpheus, according to Bacon,
also renounces nature as the domain of anarchy and death. Instead he sees
it now as an object of empirical study. His music, which tames wild
animals, is curiously identified with natural philosophy, that is, with
science. Science has no power over death, but it can “found cities, raise
buildings, plant trees” (see Suhodolski 1972, 604). But when the vengeful
and envious women of Thrace, urged by Dionysus, dismember Orpheus,
everything he has built is destroyed. Thus, according to Bacon, civilization
is always threatened by blind, anarchic forces of nature presided by
Dionysus, who is “capable of destroying, cities and states, sciences and
economy; on their ruins, ignorance and barbarism spread” (see Suhodolski
1972, 604)4. Feeling probably dissatisfied with his analogy between music
4
Bacon’s reading of Orpheus should be contrasted to Bruno’s interpretation of the
myth of Acteon. Orpheus and Acteon represent versions of the same mythic figure,
since both were dismembered. But the dismemberment signifies quite different
things for Bacon and Bruno. Bruno’s Acteon was a metaphysical hunter, a quester
16
Chapter One
and science as he understood it, Bacon abandoned the Orpheus image and
turned to the Prometheus myth for his interpretation of man. The fire of
the sun, Prometheus’s gift to man, is now identified, just as Ficino
anticipated, with “the fire in which mechanical science and human
industry are forged” (see Suhodolski 1972, 605). But the true hero of the
myth is Hercules, as much as Prometheus. Bacon praises Prometheus for
his capacity to look ahead and plan, and spurns his stupid, backwardlooking brother, Epimetheus, who married Pandora, the all-giver, and
accepted her gift, a box containing all evils and one single good – hope.
But man’s hope, according to Bacon, should not depend on gifts of gods or
nature, but on his own foresight and invention. Prometheus is not human,
he is a Titan and himself a gift-giver, and men were right not to be too
grateful to him. Instead of passive gratitude they should develop heroic
self-reliance, epitomised in Hercules, who sailed the ocean in a fragile
shell and liberated Prometheus (see Suhodolski 1972, 606-607).
Thus “the Promethean myth became the Faustian myth”, writes
Bogdan Suhodolski (Suhodolski 1972, 607), not with a complete
disapproval. Certainly, this was not what the optimistic Bacon would have
consciously wanted to happen. But it is ironic that he, who set such store
by human foresight, could not foresee this mutation and its fatal
implications. They are fully exposed in Edward Bond’s Notes on PostModernism. In a single condensed passage, Bond telescopes the changes in
man’s self image, as they were reflected and interrogated in the theatre,
from the defiant Orpheus, descending to hell to reclaim his love, through
the Orpheus finally deprived of his utopia, to the devil, brought out of hell,
to become incarnated in the “white mechanic” – a composite figure
including the Machiavellian Jago, who teaches Othello the mechanism of
spying, Richard III, who seeks salvation in the symbolic horsepower, to
for truth and beauty, and found them symbolised in the bathing Artemis. In the
myth, Artemis turns Acteon’s dogs against their master, and they tear him to
pieces. For Bruno, this dismemberment symbolises the necessary and creative
transformation of the hunter into his own pray: the quester’s mind, hitherto marked
by a deficiency or a lack, is finally deconstructed, and then restored to wholeness
when it merges with the object of his quest. (see Suhodolski 1972, 476) It can be
argued that Orpheus’s dismemberment by Thracian women is also healing: for,
after losing Euridyce, Orpheus abandoned Dionysus, the god of love and ecstasy,
and began to sing hymns to Apollo, the God of reason and science, and even
expressed contempt of women and their love. His dismemberment was thus a
correction of an error of the mind, which does not stem, as Bacon thinks, from
emotional and imaginative excess, but emotional and imaginative deficiency.
Introduction: The Renaissance Heritage
17
Prometheus/Faust, who, in Marlowe’s play sells his soul for “stranger
machines of war”. The passage is worth quoting in full:
Jacobean theatre’s one chief study is the devil. The first operas dealt with
Orpheus’s descent into hell; but, after the classical model of loss and
defiance, Orpheus loses utopia. The new theatre reversed the story. The
devil was brought out of hell. Oedipus knowingly offends but gains selfknowledge; Iago is the unconscious agent of evil but never knows himself
(the name is like the squashed fly). Iago is the true soldier, the doer.
Othello is a toy soldier. He murders Eurydice not after looking back – as
all men desire utopia – but after spying on her. Othello is black and should
(in the iconography of that time be the devil (and in Shakespeare’s first
play the devil is black). Iago had to be the white devil (though
conventionally with dark hair and eyebrows, as if too authenticate him his
own shadow flitted for a moment across his face) because the new
machines are owned and worked by whites. People had looked upon the
iron guts of god and seen the devil – and it was good: the devil is a white
mechanic. Shakespeare’s history plays try to establish a Reformation
without industrialism. They offer a patriotic political theology for modern
feudalism, as if people could build great factories in which to carry on
cottage industries. In the end of the history cycle, when the new feudal
sovereign appears, he is accompanied by the new reality: Richard the Third
is the devil. Theology fails in the presence of the new god. Richard’s death
cry for a horse is the complete strategy for the new world: I throw away the
old kingdom if I may have the energy of the new – the symbolic
horsepower, in which machines are still measured. All Shakespeare’s next
plays examine the new individuals: the creatures of machines and the devil.
Evil is in all these plays and they are all studies of Faust. Shakespeare
would certainly have written Faust if Marlowe had not already written it so
well that there was no excuse to rewrite it (Bond 1996, 16).
CHAPTER TWO
DR. FAUSTUS
Historical and Literary Background
Edward Bond’s humanist interpretation of Dr. Faustus is far from
being universally accepted among the 20th century critics. In fact,
Marlowe’s play has been the subject of almost as many controversial
interpretations as the Faustian legend itself. Embellished and retold in
many ways, the legend appears to have its origin in a historical person, a
man who called himself Dr. Johann Faust (1480? – 1540?), living in
Heidelberg and employed as a calendar-maker. The contemporary
response to this person and the legend that began to surround him was
mostly unfavourable.
Thus on August, 20, 1507, the learned physicist Johannes Tritheim
(who was himself reputed to be a magician in league with Satan) wrote to
his colleague Johannes Virdung, a professor of astrology at the University
of Heidelberg, about this dr. Johann Faust: “The man of whom you wrote
me, who has presumed to call himself the prince of necromancers, is a
vagabond, a babbler and a rogue.” Philipp Begardi, another contemporary,
in his Index Sanitatis (published in Worms, 1539), talks about Faustus as a
“wicked, cheating, unlearned” doctor: “Since several years he has gone
through several regions, provinces and kingdoms, made his name known
to everybody, and is highly renowned for his great skill, not alone in
medicine, but also in chiromancy, necromancy, physiognomy, visions in
crystal, and the like other arts. And also not only renowned, but written
down and known as an experienced master. Himself admitted, nor denied
that it was so, and that his name was Faustus, and called himself
philosophum philosophorum. But how many have complained to me that
they were deceived by him – verily a great number!” (see Campbell 1976,
597)
Rogue he may have been, but it is not clear how Faustus came to be
feared as a necromancer or black magician5. Later accounts offer some
5
Since Faustus was usually referred to as a ‘necromancer’ or ‘conjurer’ in the
popular legend surrounding him, these terms need an additional explanation here.
Ian Watt offers an exhaustive definition of all the skills that these terms cover: a
Dr. Faustus
19
explanation. There is a story attributed to Faustus wherein he threatened a
clergyman by vowing that he could cause all the pots in the kitchen to fly
up through the chimney. Another account retells how Faustus was able to
treat all his friends in a tavern to endless rounds of drinks by drilling holes
in a table and causing fine wines to bubble up through them. With such
tales preceding him, it is hardly surprising that many believed that Faustus
had gained his powers through a pact with the Devil. Johann Gast (d.
1572), a Protestant pastor in Basel, is thought to be the first to accuse
Faustus of being possessed with supernatural gifts derived from the Devil,
by whom he was ultimately carried off.
The legend set going by Pastor Gast soon gained in all Protestant lands
almost infinite popularity. Pacts with the Devil were all too common
knowledge in magical folklore of the mid 16th to mid 17th century. During
this period, several infamous tomes that gave detailed accounts of how to
summon the devil and how to sell your soul to him were published.
Apparently even Martin Luther, the contemporary of Faustus, believed
that Faustus derived his power from a diabolical pact. And Faustus did not
deny it, although it is more likely that Faustus circulated the tale himself
for some personal gain.
More importantly, the hostile response to Faustus, on the part of the
Renaissance philosophers such as Ficino and Mirandola, who had magic in
common with Faustus, points to the crucial difference in the motives
behind their use of magic, of which I will have to say more later.6 For the
time being, it is sufficient to quote Ian Watt’s observation that “the early
history of magic (as practiced by Ficino) is very relevant to a fuller
understanding of the Faust myth…but Faust does not belong to the same
tradition” (Watt 1996, 4).
Infamous as he Johan Faust was, his life soon inspired ballads, dramas,
and puppet plays, as well as a proliferation of Faust books. They were
‘necromancer’ is a practitioner of black magic who foretells the future by
communing with the spirits of the dead; a ‘conjurer’ is an alleged sorcerer whose
skills extend from producing rabbits out of hats to summoning devils out of Hell. It
is not surprising then that the contemporary response to Faustus was so negative –
Faustus himself never denied that he belonged to a rather “dangerous and heretical
tradition” (Watt 1996, 4).
6
Despite the difference in intention, the practitioners of the so called ‘white magic’
were also frowned upon by the Church because they too, like necromancers and
conjurers, sought to control the spiritual realm, hitherto the exclusive right of the
Church. Hence people like Ficino and Mirandola fought to detach themselves from
Faustus and other practitioners of black magic: their position was precarious
enough without being further compromised through association with necromancers
and conjurers.
20
Chapter Two
assembled after his death into a biography which was put forth by Johann
Spies and published in Frankfurt in 1587. The book was translated into
English and became an immediate success under the following descriptive
title: History of Dr. Johann Faust, the notorious sorcerer and black artist:
How he bound himself to the Devil for a certain time: What singular
adventures befell him therein: What he did and carried on until finally he
received his well-deserved pay. Mostly from his own posthumous writings;
for all presumptuous, rash and godless men, as a terrible example,
abominable instance and well-meant warning, collected and put in print.
“Submit yourselves therefore to God: resist the Devil and he will flee from
you.”
The action of Marlowe’s play, divided into XIX scenes (Kermode,
Hollander eds., 1973), closely follows the incidents of this first Faust
book. Marlowe's Faustus is a scholar in the fifteenth century Germany.
Bored with the studies of philosophy, medicine, law and theology
(Aristotle is tossed outside on the grounds that he is only capable of
teaching the techniques of dispute; the medical writings of Galen are
worthless if one cannot raise the dead or grant the gift of eternal life; the
legal writings of Justinian also conjure up what is seen to be a world of
petty drudgery in the service of others and the Bible only offers the
prospect of “everlasting death” for sinners), he turns to necromancy, which
only promises to satisfy his ambition: it will provide him with the kind of
ultimate knowledge which his legitimate pursuits have failed to yield.
Faustus summons Valdes and Cornelius, two accomplished magicians, to
instruct him in the art of conjuring. One night, in the midst of a crashing
thunderstorm, Faustus raises up the demon spirit, Mephistophilis, and
proposes a bargain. He will give his immortal soul to the Devil in
exchange for twenty-four years of the latter’s unconditional service:
during this period the Devil agrees to let Faustus “live in all
voluptuousness, ever attend on him, give him whatsoever he shall ask, tell
him whatsoever he demands, slay his enemies, aid his friends and always
be obedient to his will”. Mephistophilis himself is appalled by the
inevitable consequences of Faustus’s sin and advises Faustus to reconsider
his decision, but Faustus seems to be resolute. Damnation does not terrify
him, for he does not believe in Hell – it is a fable, or at best “he confounds
Hell in Elysium”: for Faustus to be damned merely means that his ghost
will be with the pagan philosophers. Thus the soul and its impending loss
are “vain trifles”, that is, superstition to the enlightened Faustus. Finally,
Mephistophilis summons Lucifer who accepts the bargain and in scene V
– the climax of the first part of the play – the contract is signed in
Faustus’s blood. In the second part of the play (scenes VI-XVI) we