Doctor Faustus

¶ … Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlow, Faustus faces a terrible dilemma. Twenty-four years earlier, he has made a pact with the devil that Lucifer could take his soul at the end of 24 years in exchange for being put on the fast track to knowledge. Now the time is up, and Faustus awaits his eternal damnation. There are two uses of time in this scene -- one more obvious, and one more hidden.

Faustus seeks redemption in this scene, but God might well view it as a case of too little sorrow expressed much too late, for Faustus has had 24 years to change his time. Each time he has contemplated it, the immediate pleasures of being a true conjurer are so attractive that he rationalizes his worries away. In Scene 14, he can no longer pretend: he knows Lucifer is going to claim him.

However, even though he believes that he is about to be taken to Hell and has only one hour left of life on Earth, he doesn't focus on God's power to save his soul. Instead first he asks time to stop. He wants nature to stop time's movement, imagines time riding on horseback and asks that the horse be slowed. Interestingly, he reveals once more how he got himself into this situation. He thought he sought knowledge, but he opted for the power to dazzle and amaze those around him.

He squandered the twenty-four years. He seems to be a man who cannot really take a long view of time. He has spent 24 years living from moment to moment with no plan, and he doesn't change in the last hour of his life. He asks that the stars stop moving so that midnight will never come.

Using the stars as a metaphor for the inevitable march of time, he calls on the stars present many years ago at his birth -- if he could return to that time, then it would not yet be time for Lucifer to claim him. Faustus takes the audience through his agonizing last hour with him, noting when his last hour on Earth is half up, and then tries a new interpretation of time, redefining eternity to something more in his favor.

He wants to negotiate with God to shorten his sentence to a thousand, or a hundred thousands years. He realizes far to late the enormity of eternity. In this scene we see that Faustus has never really understood time. Living only for the moment, he seemed to think he could play with his powers today and get down to serious work tomorrow. Faustus wanted to be remembered for all time as a learned man, and does not seem to realize, even at the end, that he has squandered his 24 years.

He will be remembered for a short time as a source of amusement by people who are easily amused, not.