Doctor Faustus: Marlowe's Tragic Hero and Eternal Damnation

Introduction to the Faust Legend and Marlowe's Context

Many traditions and legends have been created throughout the long history of western culture. Among the most outstanding, well-known, and enduring is the Faust legend, in which a man called Faust or Faustus sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years in exchange for worldly power. This makes it a very prominent story that has been retold many times by writers such as Goethe, Lessing, and Mann. However, the most famous telling is almost certainly Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

The social upheaval of the time period is the most prominent influence on Marlowe's version of Doctor Faustus. The play is believed to have been first performed in 1594, a time of great change in Europe. The Medieval period had ended and Europe was entering its Renaissance stage; however, influences from both periods can be found in the story. Thus, Doctor Faustus can be called a midway play in which beliefs from both eras combine, sometimes with disastrous results.

Christopher Marlowe: Life and Literary Career

Christopher Marlowe was an Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and William Shakespeare's predecessor in English drama. The great author was killed by Ingram Frizer at the age of 29 in a tavern brawl and was buried at St. Nicholas's Church. His dramatic career thus spanned only six years. The English-born mystery writer Raymond Chandler later lent Marlowe's name to his own hero, Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe was born in Canterbury as the son of a shoemaker. He received his early education at the King's School and was awarded a scholarship from the foundation of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. He studied the Bible, Reformation theologians, philosophy, and history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, taking his A.B. degree in 1584. He later left his studies, rather than continuing at Cambridge, to carry out a secret mission for the government.

In 1587 he took his M.A. degree, but the University authorities, believing he had been converted to Catholicism, were initially reluctant to grant it — a matter not helped by his frequent absences from his studies. The dispute was ultimately settled when the Queen's Privy Council intervened on Marlowe's behalf.

Rather than taking holy orders, Marlowe went to London and became a dramatist, making important friends including Sir Walter Raleigh, who founded the first English colony in Virginia. Marlowe most probably began his writing career shortly after leaving Cambridge. His first dramas were composed in blank verse; the first part of Tamburlaine the Great is believed to have been performed in London in 1587, a drama in which Tamburlaine burns the Koran and aspires to conquer the heavens after conquering the world.

In 1589 Marlowe was sent to Newgate Prison after being charged with the murder of William Bradley, but was released after two weeks. It was not the last time the short-tempered author was arrested and jailed. He was associated with numerous plays, but unfortunately neglected to publish authoritative texts, and his works consisted largely of incomplete pieces. Nevertheless, his blank verse — written with great intensity and featuring villain-heroes of a new type on the English stage — deeply influenced the theatre of his time.

Both Shakespeare and Marlowe influenced each other's work while writing plays for Lord Strange's acting company. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) observed of Marlowe that he was "the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse… therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare." Marlowe's major plays were written between 1585 and 1593 and include Parts I and II of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. As T.S. Eliot wrote:

"If one takes The Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or as a 'tragedy of blood,' but as a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful and mature tone." (Selected Essays, new edition, 1960)

His most famous work, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, was based on the medieval legend of the bargain with the Devil, and Edward II was a historical tragedy in blank verse. He also wrote poetry, including Hero and Leander (based on the Greek of Musaeus), The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and translations of Ovid's Amores. Jorge Luis Borges wrote of Marlowe:

"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, like Goethe's Faust, finds himself before the specter of Helen… and says to her, 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.' And then, 'O thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.' He does not say 'evening sky,' but 'evening air.' All of Copernican space is present in that word air, the infinite space that was one of the revelations of the Renaissance, the space in which we still believe, despite Einstein, that space that came to supplant the Ptolemaic system which presides over Dante's triple comedy." (The Total Library, 1999)

Marlowe's mysterious death in the tavern may have had a political motivation. His public image was burdened by accusations of atheism, blasphemy, subversion, and homosexuality. After his death, charges of atheism based on testimony from his former roommate and fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd further shadowed his reputation. According to Anthony Burgess, Marlowe also worked as a government secret agent, most probably becoming an agent of Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1530–90) while still at university. Research has suggested that an agent of Francis Walsingham murdered him for reasons unknown. According to Charles Nicholl (The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 1994), followers of the Earl of Essex may have been behind his death, though scholars are still attempting to reconstruct the precise events.

Overview of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is a classic by Christopher Marlowe — a quintessential tale of a man, his soul, and the devil. Faustus seeks greater answers to life after exhausting the fields of physics, mathematics, philosophy, and divinity. He courts the Prince of Hell and the vile Mephistopheles, trading his soul for twenty-four years on earth as the greatest magician in the world. This bargain leads in turn to both solemn dilemmas of faith and morality and to comic exploits.

By casting his hero Doctor John Faustus in this role, Marlowe puts a twist on the Everyman plays of medieval times: Faustus is shown as a figure who pushes the boundaries of human experience too far and is therefore forced to choose between eternal damnation and repentance. The play deteriorates into tiresome farce after a grand start in which Faustus thrillingly sells his soul to the devil, and it is only in the great final scene — as the hell-bound hero counts down the minutes to eternal damnation — that tragic seriousness fully resumes.

The play deals with themes at the heart of Christianity's understanding of the world, and in this sense Doctor Faustus can be categorized as a Christian play. First, there is the concept of sin, which Christianity describes as deeds contrary to the will of God. Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin by making a pact with Lucifer: he not only consciously and eagerly renounces obedience to God, but actively swears allegiance to the devil.

Doctor Faustus as Tragic Hero and Christian Figure

Even so, within a Christian framework, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humanity's sins. The possibility of redemption is therefore always open to Faustus, no matter how terrible his pact with Lucifer may be. Theoretically, all he needs to do is ask God for forgiveness.

Urged by the good angel at his shoulder or by the Old Man in Scene 12, the play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers seeking forgiveness from God. Both the Good Angel and the Old Man can be seen as personifications of Faustus's conscience, as emissaries of God, or as both simultaneously.

Nonetheless, instead of seeking heaven, Faustus chooses to remain loyal to hell. This turning away from God condemns him to an eternity in hell within the Christian framework. Only in the final scene does Faustus cry out to Christ to redeem him, showing — at the very end of his life — a genuine desire to repent. In the world of the play, however, it is too late.

Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene, thereby creating a moment in which Faustus is still alive but is incapable of being redeemed. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe — one where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.

Faustus is the protagonist, the tragic hero, and the title character of Marlowe's play. Capable of tremendous eloquence and possessed of awesome ambition, he is also a contradictory character — prone to an odd, nearly willful blindness and an eagerness to throw away the power he has achieved at such great cost. In the very beginning, as he prepares to embark on his career as a magician, there is a magnificence to Faustus as he contemplates all the wonders his magical powers will create.

He pictures reshaping the map of Europe both politically and physically, amassing wealth from the four corners of the globe, and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is self-aggrandizing and arrogant, but his aims are so impressive that we cannot help feeling a measure of sympathy and even admiration. Faustus, at least in his early stage of magical acquisition, is the personification of possibility — he represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe and its embrace of human potential.