Study guide

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

by Christopher Marlowe

Overview

Author: Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), shoemaker's son from Canterbury, scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the leading dramatist of the London stage before Shakespeare
Genre: Tragedy in blank verse and prose, built on the frame of the medieval morality play
Written: Disputed: either about 1588–89 or about 1592, depending on when Marlowe could have read the English Faust Book
First recorded performance: 30 September 1594, by the Admiral's Men at the Rose, recorded in Philip Henslowe's diary; Edward Alleyn made the title role famous
Early texts: The A-text, printed in 1604, and the longer B-text, printed in 1616, which includes additions for which Henslowe paid William Birde and Samuel Rowley in 1602
Text on this site: The 1604 A-text as edited by Alexander Dyce, divided into Prologue, sixteen scenes, two choruses and Epilogue; references follow these sections
Source: The English Faust Book (The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, by 'P. F.'), a free translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Frankfurt, 1587)
Setting: Wittenberg ('Wertenberg'), with journeys to Rome, the Emperor's court and the court of Vanholt
Main characters: Faustus; Mephistopheles (spelt Mephistophilis in this text); Lucifer; the Good and Evil Angels; Wagner; the Old Man; Helen
Famous lines: 'Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it'; 'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships'; 'O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!'

Context

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, the son of a shoemaker, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship intended for students preparing for holy orders. He took his BA in 1584 and his MA in 1587. Instead of entering the Church he went to London and, with the two parts of Tamburlaine, transformed the popular stage with a new, sonorous blank verse. He was killed in a tavern quarrel at Deptford on 30 May 1593, while under investigation for heresy. Doctor Faustus, the story of a brilliant divinity scholar who turns from theology to magic, draws directly on the world of learning and religious controversy that Marlowe knew (Riggs 2004) (Cheney 2004).

The source was the English Faust Book, a translation by an unidentified 'P. F.' of the German Faustbuch printed at Frankfurt in 1587. The German book gathered legends about a real wandering magician and astrologer of the early sixteenth century and shaped them into a Lutheran warning about curiosity, pride and despair. The English version is not a literal translation; it expands the travels and adds descriptions of cities. Marlowe follows its outline closely, from the pact to the comic tricks and the last night, but gives Faustus a tragic intensity and a rhetoric the prose book lacks. The earliest surviving edition of the English book is dated 1592, and whether there was an earlier one is a key question for dating the play (Jones 1994) (Empson 1987).

The play survives in two versions. The A-text, printed in 1604, is shorter and contains the clown scenes in a simpler form. The B-text, printed in 1616, is roughly six hundred lines longer, expands the scenes at Rome and at the Emperor's court, adds new episodes, and changes many readings. Henslowe's diary records a payment in November 1602 to William Birde and Samuel Rowley for additions to Doctor Faustus, and much of the B-text's new material is thought to derive from that revision. For much of the twentieth century W. W. Greg's view prevailed that B was closer to Marlowe and A a corrupt, reported text; since the 1980s most editors have regarded A as closer to the play as first written, while treating B as a theatrical version of interest in its own right. The text on this site is the A-text (Greg 1950) (Foakes 2002) (Bevington 1993) (Rasmussen 1993).

Doctor Faustus stands at a crossing of dramatic traditions. Its frame comes from the morality play, with Good and Evil Angels, a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, an Old Man who urges repentance, and a Chorus who draws the moral. But its hero is no Everyman: he is a Renaissance scholar with an individual voice, whose soliloquies dramatise thought itself. Many critics have seen the play as a tragedy of aspiration in the line of Tamburlaine, others as a strictly orthodox warning, and the most influential readings since the 1980s have explored the tension between the two (Bevington 1962) (Levin 1952) (Kirschbaum 1943).

The play was written in a culture shaped by Reformed theology. At Cambridge in Marlowe's time the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which held that God had eternally chosen some for salvation and left others to damnation, was the dominant teaching, and despair of one's own salvation was a recognised spiritual crisis. Faustus's inability to repent can be read in the light of these doctrines, which is why the play remains central to discussions of religion and tragedy in the period (Sinfield 1983) (Stachniewski 1991).

Plot overview

Faustus, a celebrated doctor of divinity at Wittenberg, dismisses the university disciplines and turns to magic. With the help of Valdes and Cornelius he conjures up Mephistopheles, who tells him that the devils come to anyone who abjures God, and that he himself is never out of hell. Faustus offers his soul to Lucifer in exchange for twenty-four years in which Mephistopheles will serve him, and signs the deed in his own blood, despite warnings written on his arm.

Throughout the first part Faustus wavers between repentance and defiance, prompted by the Good and Evil Angels. He questions Mephistopheles about hell and the heavens, is refused an answer about who made the world, and is distracted by Lucifer with a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Meanwhile, in comic scenes, Wagner hires a clown, and two stable hands steal a conjuring book and are turned into animals.

In the middle of the play Faustus travels through the heavens and the earth. He plays tricks on the Pope at a banquet in Rome, raises the spirits of Alexander and his paramour for the Emperor Charles V, puts horns on a sceptical knight, cheats a horse-dealer, and fetches grapes in January for the Duchess of Vanholt.

As the twenty-four years end, Faustus conjures Helen of Troy for the scholars. An Old Man begs him to repent, and he nearly does, but Mephistopheles' threats drive him back; he renews his vow and takes Helen as his paramour. On his last night he confesses to the scholars, and in a final hour marked by the clock he pleads, bargains and despairs until the devils carry him away. The Chorus mourns the 'branch that might have grown full straight'.

Part by part

Part 1: Prologue: the Chorus introduces Faustus

Prologue (the whole speech)

Summary

The Chorus comes forward and tells the audience what kind of play this is not. It will not show wars like the battle of Lake Trasimene, nor the love affairs of kings, nor proud deeds of conquest; it will tell 'the form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad'. Faustus was born of humble parents in Germany, at a town the text calls Rhodes (Roda), and was brought up by kinsmen who sent him to Wittenberg ('Wertenberg').

He did so well in divinity that he soon became a doctor and outshone everyone in theological disputation. But, swollen with learning and self-conceit, he turned to necromancy, which he now prefers to his 'chiefest bliss'. The Chorus ends by drawing back a curtain, as it were, on the man sitting in his study.

Analysis

The Prologue tells the whole story in miniature before it begins: rise, overreaching, fall. The central image is Icarus, whose wax wings melted when he flew too near the sun, and the phrase 'heavens conspir'd his overthrow' already raises the question that runs through the play, whether Faustus falls by his own choice or by a heavenly design he cannot escape.

The opening lines seem to set this play against Marlowe's earlier work, the war of Tamburlaine and the love of Dido, though the exact allusions are disputed. Equally important is the stress on Faustus's low birth and academic success: like Marlowe himself, a shoemaker's son who became a Cambridge scholar, Faustus is a man whom learning has raised, and the play takes the ambitions of learning as its subject (Riggs 2004).

Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow;

DF, Prologue

The Icarus image. 'Cunning' here means knowledge; the grammar leaves it open whether the heavens punish Faustus or simply bring about what his pride deserved.

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Part 2: Scene 1: Faustus rejects the disciplines and chooses magic

Scene 1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Alone in his study, Faustus reviews the university disciplines one by one and dismisses each. Logic only teaches him to dispute well, which he can already do. Medicine has brought him fame, but he cannot make men live for ever. Law is fit for a 'mercenary drudge'. Divinity he tests by reading two verses from Jerome's Bible: 'the reward of sin is death' and 'if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves'. He concludes that all men must sin and therefore die everlastingly, says 'Divinity, adieu!', and turns to books of magic, which promise 'a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence'.

He sends his servant Wagner for his friends Valdes and Cornelius. The Good Angel urges him to lay the damned book aside and read the Scriptures; the Evil Angel tells him to be on earth as Jove is in the sky. Faustus imagines what his spirits will do for him: bring gold from India and pearl from the ocean, read him strange philosophy, wall Germany with brass, drive the Prince of Parma out of the Netherlands. Valdes and Cornelius arrive, promise him the service of spirits, and agree to teach him the rudiments of conjuring. 'This night I'll conjure, though I die therefore.'

Analysis

The opening soliloquy is a parody of a university education, in which each discipline is defined by its end (finis) and found wanting. Faustus quotes the textbooks accurately, but his reading of Scripture is a trap he sets for himself: each verse he reads is completed in the Bible by a promise of grace. Romans 6:23 continues 'but the gift of God is eternal life', and the verse after 1 John 1:8 promises forgiveness to those who confess. By stopping halfway Faustus produces the fatalist syllogism 'Che sera, sera'. The scene invites us to see damnation beginning in an act of misreading (Cole 1962) (Snyder 1966).

The dreams of power mix the grand and the trivial in a way that will define the rest of the play: the conquest of provinces sits beside silk clothes for students. They are also topical. The 'fiery keel at Antwerp's bridge' recalls the fireships sent against the Duke of Parma's bridge during the siege of Antwerp in 1585, and Parma's Spanish rule in the Netherlands was a live Protestant grievance.

The first appearance of the Good and Evil Angels sets up the morality-play structure. They speak in short, balanced lines like the Good and Bad Angels of the fifteenth-century Castle of Perseverance, and they externalise Faustus's divided will. Whether they are real spirits or projections of his conscience is never settled (Bevington 1962).

What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera, What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

DF, Scene 1

Faustus's fatalist conclusion from two half-quoted verses. The Italian proverb turns theology into resignation.

A sound magician is a mighty god: Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.

DF, Scene 1

The goal of magic is divinity itself: the ambition of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, told they would be 'as gods'.

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Part 3: Scene 2: Wagner and the scholars

Scene 2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Two scholars come looking for Faustus, who used to make the schools ring with his disputations. Wagner teases them with a burlesque of academic logic, refusing to answer directly and then answering in the voice of a Puritan preacher: his master is at dinner with Valdes and Cornelius.

The scholars fear that Faustus has fallen into the damned art for which those two are notorious, and go to tell the Rector in the hope that his grave counsel may reclaim him. The first scholar doubts that anything can.

Analysis

This short scene places Faustus in a community. Wagner's parody of syllogism ('that follows not') brings the scholastic method of the first scene down to the level of a servant's joke, and his imitation of a 'precisian', a strict Puritan, adds a satirical glance at religious enthusiasm.

The scholars are the first of the play's human witnesses. Their concern frames Faustus's choice as a matter for the whole university, and they will return at the end to hear his last confession.

Nay, then, I fear he is fallen into that damned art for which they two are infamous through the world.

DF, Scene 2

The scholars' judgement is plain and orthodox; it gives the audience a fixed moral point of reference.

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Part 4: Scene 3: The conjuring and 'Why this is hell'

Scene 3 (the whole scene)

Summary

At nightfall Faustus draws his circle, with Jehovah's name written forwards and backwards, and recites a Latin invocation to the gods of Acheron, to Beelzebub and to Demogorgon. A devil appears, so ugly that Faustus orders him to return as an old Franciscan friar, since 'that holy shape becomes a devil best'. Faustus congratulates himself on the power of his spells.

Mephistopheles corrects him. He serves Lucifer and cannot follow Faustus without leave; he came 'of mine own accord', because when anyone abjures the Scriptures and Christ the devils fly to him in hope of his soul. The conjuring was only the occasion, the cause 'per accidens'. Faustus asks about Lucifer and learns that he fell 'by aspiring pride and insolence'. When he asks how Mephistopheles can be out of hell, the devil answers that he is not: 'this is hell, nor am I out of it', since to have seen the face of God and lost it is ten thousand hells.

Faustus scorns his grief and sends him to Lucifer with an offer: his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of pleasure with Mephistopheles as his servant. Alone, he dreams of becoming emperor of the world.

Analysis

This is the theological centre of the opening. Mephistopheles' answer destroys the premise of Faustus's magic: the spells have no power in themselves, and the only thing that summons devils is the conjurer's own blasphemy. Faustus thinks he has gained command; in fact he has offered himself.

'Why this is hell' makes hell a state of loss, not only a place of fire. The idea had a long theological history as the 'pain of loss' (poena damni), but Marlowe gives it to the devil himself, in lines of real grief. Faustus misses the warning entirely and tells Mephistopheles to learn 'manly fortitude'. The irony is that the damned spirit understands heaven better than the scholar (Cole 1962) (Levin 1952).

The scene also displays the grammar of Faustus's ambition. 'Had I as many souls as there be stars' is extravagant and beautiful, and it shows how cheaply he values the one soul he has.

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: 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,

DF, Scene 3

Hell as deprivation of God. Mephistopheles' sorrow is genuine, and it is the strongest warning Faustus receives.

That was the cause, but yet per accidens;

DF, Scene 3

A scholastic distinction: the conjuring did not compel the devil; it only gave him an opportunity.

Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

DF, Scene 3

Marlowe's soaring line, used to express a disastrous bargain.

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Part 5: Scene 4: Wagner and the Clown

Scene 4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Wagner, now playing the master, offers to take a ragged, hungry Clown into service. He remarks that the man would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton; the Clown replies that at that price he would want it well roasted, with good sauce. Wagner presses some coins on him as earnest money and threatens to have him fetched by two devils, Baliol and Belcher, if he refuses to serve for seven years.

When the devils appear the Clown runs about in terror. He agrees to serve once Wagner promises to teach him to turn himself into anything; he would like to be a flea so that he can get into the girls' petticoats. Wagner's pedantic Latin leaves him convinced that his new master speaks 'Dutch fustian'.

Analysis

The comic scene repeats the main action as farce. Faustus has just offered his soul for twenty-four years of pleasure; the Clown is told he would sell his for a meal, and the contract with its earnest money and its term of years is a deliberate parody of Faustus's deed. The laughter lowers the bargain to its real value.

Like the other prose clown scenes, this one has often been attributed to a collaborator, and it may not be Marlowe's own writing. But its placing is purposeful. Comic subplots that mirror a serious main plot were a standard resource of the popular stage, and here the mirror makes Faustus's grandeur look thinner (Bevington 1962) (Rasmussen 1993).

I know he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood-raw.

DF, Scene 4

Wagner's joke states plainly what Faustus's bargain amounts to.

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Part 6: Scene 5: The bond signed in blood, the debates and the Seven Deadly Sins

Scene 5 (the whole scene)

Summary

Faustus wavers before midnight ('Abjure this magic, turn to God again!'), but the Angels return and the Evil Angel wins with talk of wealth. Mephistopheles brings Lucifer's answer: he will serve Faustus if Faustus writes a deed of gift in his own blood. Faustus stabs his arm, but the blood congeals; Mephistopheles fetches coals to melt it. Faustus completes the bill with the words 'Consummatum est' and then sees 'Homo, fuge' (man, fly) written on his arm. Devils bring him crowns and rich clothes, and he reads out the five articles of the contract.

His first questions are about hell, which Mephistopheles says has no limits: 'where we are is hell'. Faustus calls hell a fable. He asks for a wife and is given a devil dressed as a woman, then books of spells, of the heavens and of plants. Looking at the heavens, he begins to repent; the Good Angel says God will pity him, the Evil Angel says he is a spirit and God cannot. 'My heart's so harden'd, I cannot repent', he says, and only pleasure has kept him from suicide.

He disputes about astronomy, finds Mephistopheles' answers commonplace, and asks who made the world. Mephistopheles refuses to say. Faustus turns to Christ, and Lucifer and Beelzebub themselves appear to forbid it. Faustus vows never to name God again, and Lucifer entertains him with a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, each describing itself in grotesque prose. Lucifer gives him a book that will let him take any shape he likes.

Analysis

This long scene contains the whole spiritual action of the play. The signs that interrupt the signing, the congealing blood and the writing on the arm, can be read as the last warnings of grace or as the body's own revolt; in either case Faustus overrides them. His 'Consummatum est', the last words of Christ on the cross (John 19:30), turns the signing of the bond into a black parody of the Passion (Snyder 1966).

Faustus's repentance follows a pattern that recurs throughout: he is moved by the sight of the heavens or the thought of Christ, the Angels dispute, and he is frightened or distracted back. The question of whether he cannot or will not repent is posed directly. In this 1604 text the Good Angel says it is 'never too late, if Faustus can repent'; the 1616 text reads 'will repent', a small variant that has been read as a shift in theological emphasis (Marcus 1996).

The pageant of the Sins is pure morality-play material, presented as entertainment. Lucifer offers Faustus a show instead of the knowledge he asked for, and Faustus, who wanted to know who made the world, is content to watch it. The sequence shows how the play's promised omnipotence turns into spectacle (Bevington 1962) (Greenblatt 1980).

Consummatum est; this bill is ended, And Faustus hath bequeath'd his soul to Lucifer.

DF, Scene 5

Christ's words on the cross, used for the completion of a contract with hell.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be:

DF, Scene 5

Mephistopheles develops the idea of Scene 3: hell is wherever the damned are.

Never too late, if Faustus can repent.

DF, Scene 5

The Good Angel's line in the 1604 text. The conditional 'can' leaves it open whether repentance is in Faustus's power.

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Part 7: Chorus before Scene 6: the journey through the heavens

Chorus (the whole speech)

Summary

The Chorus reports that Faustus, to learn the secrets of astronomy, rose to the top of Olympus in a chariot drawn by dragons. He has now gone to survey the earth ('cosmography'), and is expected first at Rome, to see the Pope and his court on the feast of St Peter.

Analysis

The speech marks the change from the drama of the bargain to the episodic travels. Narration covers what the stage cannot show, and the dragon chariot comes from the Faust Book's account of his journeys. The ascent through the heavens is the nearest the play comes to fulfilling Faustus's desire for knowledge, and it happens offstage (Jones 1994).

Did mount himself to scale Olympus' top, Being seated in a chariot burning bright, Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons' necks.

DF, Chorus before Scene 6

A glimpse of the cosmic voyage, reported rather than staged.

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Part 8: Scene 6: Faustus at the Pope's banquet

Scene 6 (the whole scene)

Summary

Faustus describes his travels to Trier, Paris, Naples (where he saw Virgil's tomb) and Venice, and Mephistopheles describes Rome, its seven hills and its bridge-castle. Made invisible, Faustus joins the Pope and the Cardinal of Lorrain at their feast, snatches their dishes and cup, and finally boxes the Pope's ear when he crosses himself a third time. The friars sing a solemn curse with bell, book and candle, and Faustus and Mephistopheles beat them and throw fireworks among them.

Analysis

The anti-papal farce would have pleased a Protestant London audience, and the Faust Book gave Marlowe the episode. But it also shows the gap between Faustus's ambitions and what he does: the man who meant to wall Germany with brass now steals food from a table. The curse of bell, book and candle has no effect on a man already damned, which makes it both a joke about Catholic ritual and a grim reminder of his state (Jones 1994).

Mephistopheles' descriptive set piece on Rome, with its exact count of cannon, shows the play's taste for geography and wonders; the knowledge Faustus gains is mostly that of a tourist. The 1616 text greatly expands this episode with a rival pope, Bruno, and an imperial plot.

Where thou shalt see a troop of bald-pate friars, Whose summum bonum is in belly-cheer.

DF, Scene 6

The 'highest good' of scholastic ethics, now reduced to eating: a satire on the friars that also touches Faustus's own appetites.

How! bell, book, and candle,--candle, book, and bell,-- Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

DF, Scene 6

The form of excommunication, mocked by a man who wrote God's name backwards in his circle.

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Part 9: Chorus before Scene 7: Faustus's fame

Chorus (the whole speech)

Summary

The Chorus tells how Faustus returned home, answered his friends' questions on astrology with admired skill, and became famous everywhere. Among those who heard of him is the Emperor Carolus the Fifth, at whose court Faustus is now a guest.

Analysis

Faustus's reputation now replaces his ambition. The Chorus speaks of fame and learned conversation, not of power over the elements, and the next episodes show a celebrated entertainer at court. The Emperor is the historical Charles V, who died in 1558, so the play quietly sets Faustus's career in the age of the Reformation.

Now is his fame spread forth in every land:

DF, Chorus before Scene 7

Fame is the reward that remains when the larger promises of magic have shrunk.

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Part 10: Scene 7: Robin steals a conjuring book

Scene 7 (the whole scene)

Summary

Robin the ostler has stolen one of Faustus's conjuring books and means to use it to make the parish girls dance naked before him. His fellow Ralph comes to call him back to work. Robin boasts of what the book can do: free drink at any tavern in Europe, and the kitchen-maid Nan Spit for Ralph whenever he wants her. They go off to clean the boots and then to conjure 'in the devil's name'.

Analysis

Robin and Ralph reduce magic to the desires of a stable yard: drink and sex. The scene repeats the pattern of the Wagner and Clown episode and comments on Faustus's own requests for a wife and for pleasure. In this quarto the scene stands after the Chorus about the Emperor, which interrupts the sequence of Faustus's travels; some modern editors move it earlier, to follow the signing of the bond, on the ground that the quarto's order is disturbed (Bevington 1993) (Greg 1950).

here I ha' stolen one of Doctor Faustus' conjuring-books, and, i'faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use.

DF, Scene 7

The book that was the instrument of Faustus's ambition becomes stolen property; 'circles' carries a bawdy double meaning.

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Part 11: Scene 8: The stolen goblet and the angry devil

Scene 8 (the whole scene)

Summary

Robin and Ralph have stolen a silver goblet from a tavern. The Vintner pursues them and searches them while they pass the cup between them. Robin reads gibberish from the book, and Mephistopheles appears and sets fireworks at their backs; they give up the goblet. Mephistopheles, angry at being summoned from Constantinople by such 'villains', turns Robin into an ape and Ralph into a dog, and they are delighted.

Analysis

The scene completes the parody of the conjuring in Scene 3. As there, the conjurer's words have no power of their own, and the devil comes because blasphemy gives him an opening; here he comes in irritation, and the clowns are punished without being damned. The joke at Mephistopheles' expense ('will you take sixpence in your purse to pay for your supper') deflates the grandeur of the 'Monarch of Hell'.

Mephistopheles' verse speech is the one moment of high style in the clown scenes, and its solemnity is ridiculed at once.

Good devil, forgive me now, and I'll never rob thy library more.

DF, Scene 8

Robin's panic parodies Faustus's oscillation between defiance and repentance.

From Constantinople am I hither come, Only for pleasure of these damned slaves.

DF, Scene 8

The devil's dignity offended by low-life conjurers.

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Part 12: Scene 9: At the court of the Emperor

Scene 9 (the whole scene)

Summary

The Emperor asks Faustus for a proof of his skill: to raise Alexander the Great and his paramour as they were in life. A sceptical Knight mutters asides, and Faustus admits that he cannot raise their true bodies, only spirits that resemble them. When the Knight jokes about Actaeon, Faustus sends Mephistopheles off and the spirits appear; the Emperor, checking for a mole on the lady's neck, believes them to be real.

Faustus has the Knight brought back wearing a pair of horns, mocks him as a cuckold and removes them at the Emperor's request. Then, alone with Mephistopheles, he reflects that time is running out and that he must hurry back to Wittenberg.

Analysis

Faustus's admission that he can produce only spirits, not substantial bodies, is important for the Helen scene later. Magic in this play deals in illusions; the Emperor's delighted 'these are no spirits' is the kind of mistake Faustus himself will make. The episode, from the Faust Book, shows the magician as a court entertainer whose revenge on a heckler is a schoolboy joke (Jones 1994).

The closing lines change the tone abruptly. 'The restless course / That time doth run with calm and silent foot' introduces the theme of time running out, which will govern the last act.

it is not in my ability to present before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes, which long since are consumed to dust.

DF, Scene 9

Faustus's own statement of the limits of his art: he shows shadows.

Now, Mephistophilis, the restless course That time doth run with calm and silent foot, Shortening my days and thread of vital life,

DF, Scene 9

The first clear sign of anxiety about the expiry of the bond.

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Part 13: Scene 10: The Horse-courser

Scene 10 (the whole scene)

Summary

A horse-dealer buys Faustus's horse for forty dollars and is warned never to ride it into water. Faustus, left alone, thinks of his approaching death and calms himself with the thought that Christ forgave the thief on the cross; he falls asleep in his chair. The Horse-courser returns soaking wet: he rode the horse into a pond, and it turned into a bundle of hay. Trying to wake Faustus, he pulls his leg and it comes off in his hands. Terrified, he promises forty dollars more and runs away, and Faustus, with his leg restored, laughs at the trick.

Analysis

The scene sets one of the play's most anxious soliloquies inside a slapstick episode. In five lines Faustus moves from 'a man condemn'd to die' to a comforting thought of the penitent thief (Luke 23:39–43), which he uses as a reason to sleep, not to repent. It is a precise picture of what theologians called presumption, the opposite of despair: trusting to a last-minute mercy while doing nothing.

The horse-courser's complaint mentions 'Doctor Lopus', almost certainly Roderigo Lopez, the Queen's physician, who was executed in 1594. The allusion is one of the details used in arguments about the dating and authorship of the comic scenes, since it may postdate Marlowe's death (Rasmussen 1993).

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemn'd to die? Thy fatal time doth draw to final end; Despair doth drive distrust into my thoughts:

DF, Scene 10

A moment of clear self-knowledge, immediately set aside.

Tush, Christ did call the thief upon the Cross;

DF, Scene 10

The thought of grace used as a sedative.

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Part 14: Scene 11: Wagner brings the Duke's invitation

Scene 11 (the whole scene)

Summary

Wagner announces that the Duke of Vanholt (Anhalt) earnestly asks for Faustus's company. Faustus agrees to go and to be generous with his skill.

Analysis

This link scene of a few lines moves Faustus from one aristocratic patron to the next. It shows how fully he has become a professional performer of wonders, eager for invitations from the great.

an honourable gentleman, to whom I must be no niggard of my cunning.

DF, Scene 11

'Cunning' (knowledge, skill) is now something to be displayed for patrons.

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Part 15: Scene 12: Grapes for the Duchess of Vanholt

Scene 12 (the whole scene)

Summary

At the court of Vanholt, after an entertainment that has pleased the Duke, Faustus offers the pregnant Duchess whatever she desires. She asks for ripe grapes, though it is January. Mephistopheles fetches them, and Faustus explains that when it is winter here it is summer in the other half of the world, in India and the East, from which a swift spirit has brought them. The Duke and Duchess thank and reward him.

Analysis

The grapes are the gentlest of Faustus's wonders, and the most modest: a courtly favour explained by geography. Faustus, who once hoped to rule the world, now gratifies a pregnant woman's craving. The scene's courtesy and the reference to the two 'circles' of the year show the interest of the period in navigation and the new geography, but they also mark how far the magician's power has narrowed (Levin 1952).

and by means of a swift spirit that I have, I had them brought hither, as you see.

DF, Scene 12

Faustus's explanation makes the marvel almost natural.

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Part 16: Scene 13: Wagner on his master's last days

Scene 13 (the whole scene)

Summary

Wagner tells the audience that his master must mean to die soon, since he has given Wagner all his goods. Yet Faustus is feasting and carousing with the students more lavishly than Wagner has ever seen. The feast is ending as the scholars come in.

Analysis

Wagner's speech works as a chorus to the last movement of the play. The will and the banquet together show Faustus's two responses to the end: he settles his worldly affairs, and he distracts himself with pleasure. The contrast prepares for the Helen scene that follows.

I think my master means to die shortly, For he hath given to me all his goods:

DF, Scene 13

A plain domestic sign that the twenty-four years are nearly over.

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Part 17: Scene 14: Helen and the Old Man

Scene 14 (the whole scene)

Summary

The scholars ask to see Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. To music, Helen passes over the stage, and the scholars leave praising Faustus. An Old Man enters and begs Faustus to repent and trust in Christ's mercy. Faustus, overwhelmed, cries 'despair and die', and Mephistopheles hands him a dagger. The Old Man says he sees an angel with a vial of grace ready to pour into his soul; Faustus feels comforted and asks to be left to think.

Alone, he says 'I do repent; and yet I do despair'. Mephistopheles threatens to tear him to pieces for disobedience, and Faustus at once asks pardon, offers to confirm his vow in blood again, and begs that the Old Man be tormented. Then, to drive out the thoughts that dissuade him, he asks for Helen as his paramour. She returns, and he addresses her in the most famous speech in the play: 'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships'. He kisses her and they go out together.

Analysis

The scene sets the two possible endings of Faustus's story side by side. The Old Man, a figure from the Faust Book, speaks the language of evangelical repentance, and his vision of the angel with grace is the nearest the play comes to an offer of salvation. Faustus's response is a perfect picture of divided will: repentance and despair, grace and hell, 'strive' in him, and fear of physical pain decides the contest (Warren 1981).

The Helen speech is magnificent and suspect. Its opening echoes a passage in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead in which Menippus looks at Helen's skull. Its images are of burning and sacking, and its mythology (Semele consumed by Jupiter's fire) is ominous. 'Her lips suck forth my soul' is literally true if Helen is a spirit, and the stage direction says she is a spirit. W. W. Greg argued that Faustus here commits demoniality, sexual union with a devil, the sin that puts him finally beyond grace (Greg 1946).

Faustus also identifies with Paris and imagines wounding Akhilleus in the heel; the scholar has become a hero of romance, but Troy was burnt for this beauty, and so, he imagines, will Wittenberg be.

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium-- Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--

DF, Scene 14

The kiss promises immortality, but the only immortality left to Faustus is damnation.

I do repent; and yet I do despair: Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast:

DF, Scene 14

The psychomachia, the battle for the soul, now spoken in Faustus's own voice.

His faith is great; I cannot touch his soul;

DF, Scene 14

Mephistopheles on the Old Man: a clear statement that faith limits the devil's power.

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Part 18: Scene 15: The Old Man's faith

Scene 15 (the whole scene)

Summary

The Old Man returns, grieves over Faustus who has shut out the grace of heaven, and is set upon by devils. He tells them that God is trying his faith as in a furnace, that his faith will triumph over hell, and that the heavens laugh at their repulse. He flies to God.

Analysis

The Old Man's brief scene is the play's counter-example. He suffers bodily torment, which Faustus feared, and endures it with faith; the devils, as Mephistopheles admitted, cannot touch his soul. 'Satan begins to sift me' echoes Christ's words to Peter (Luke 22:31). The contrast suggests that Faustus's damnation is not inevitable: another man, under similar pressure, is saved. This short episode has played a large part in arguments about the differences between the two early texts (Warren 1981) (Marcus 1996).

Satan begins to sift me with his pride: As in this furnace God shall try my faith, My faith, vile hell, shall triumph over thee.

DF, Scene 15

Faith tested by fire, in contrast with Faustus's surrender to fear.

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Part 19: Scene 16: The last hour

Scene 16 (the whole scene)

Summary

Faustus tells the scholars that he must die eternally. They urge him to remember God's infinite mercy, but he says his offence can never be pardoned: 'the serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus'. He wants to weep, but the devil draws in his tears; he wants to lift his hands, but they are held. He confesses the bargain, and the scholars go to the next room to pray for him.

The clock strikes eleven. In the final soliloquy Faustus begs the spheres to stand still and time to stop, quotes Ovid ('run slowly, slowly, horses of the night'), and sees Christ's blood streaming in the firmament, then feels his heart torn for naming Christ. He calls on the mountains to fall on him and the earth to swallow him, wishes he could be drawn up into a cloud, begs God to limit his pain to a hundred thousand years, envies the beasts whose souls dissolve, and curses his parents and then himself. The clock strikes twelve. He cries 'I'll burn my books!' and the devils carry him away.

Analysis

The final soliloquy is one of the great achievements of Elizabethan blank verse. It is set in something close to real time, an hour compressed into about sixty lines and marked by the clock, so that the audience feels time running out with him. The rhythm breaks repeatedly into exclamation and dialogue with unseen presences.

The Ovid line is a lover's plea that the night might last longer (Amores 1.13); its new context turns erotic delay into a desperate wish to postpone judgement. The cry to the mountains comes from Luke 23:30 and Revelation 6:16. The vision of Christ's blood is the play's supreme image of grace, and Faustus sees it and cannot reach it. Whether the obstacle is God's decree, Lucifer's power or Faustus's own despair is the central question of interpretation (Sinfield 1983) (Stachniewski 1991).

The last words, 'I'll burn my books', recall the converted magicians of Ephesus, who burnt their books in Acts 19:19. Faustus offers the gesture of repentance only when it is too late, and the words that end his life are addressed not to God but to 'Mephistophilis'.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come;

DF, Scene 16

Faustus asks the cosmos he once studied to stop for him.

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

DF, Scene 16

Ovid's lover's line, followed by a monosyllabic verse that moves with the inevitability of the clock.

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!--

DF, Scene 16

Grace is visible and apparently sufficient, but out of reach.

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Part 20: Epilogue: 'Cut is the branch'

Epilogue (the whole speech)

Summary

The Chorus speaks the epitaph. The branch that might have grown straight is cut, and Apollo's laurel, the emblem of learning and poetry, is burnt. The audience should regard Faustus's fall and learn only to wonder at unlawful things, not to practise more than heavenly power permits. The quarto ends with a Latin tag: 'the hour ends the day; the author ends his work'.

Analysis

The Epilogue offers the conventional moral of a cautionary tale, and some readers take it at face value. Others notice that it mourns as much as it condemns: the images of the cut branch and the burnt laurel lament wasted promise, and the warning against 'unlawful things' admits their power to 'entice such forward wits'. The play's ending thus repeats the double perspective of the whole, orthodox in its verdict, sympathetic in its poetry (Dollimore 1984) (Levin 1952).

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough, That sometime grew within this learned man.

DF, Epilogue

An elegy for learning as well as a warning.

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Characters

Protagonist

Doctor Faustus: A doctor of divinity at Wittenberg, of humble birth, who masters every discipline and finds none sufficient. He sells his soul for twenty-four years of knowledge, power and pleasure, but uses his power mostly for tricks and entertainments. He repeatedly comes close to repentance and always turns back, through fear, distraction or despair. Critics have seen him as an aspiring Renaissance overreacher, a sinner in a morality play, a victim of a harsh theology, or a man whose tragedy lies in self-deception.

Hell

Mephistopheles: The devil who serves Faustus, spelt Mephistophilis in this text. He first appears in the shape of a Franciscan friar. He is honest about hell ('Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it') and grieves for the heaven he has lost, yet works steadily to secure Faustus's soul, refusing forbidden knowledge, offering distractions and threatening torment when Faustus wavers.
Lucifer: The prince of devils, fallen from heaven 'by aspiring pride and insolence'. He appears with Beelzebub when Faustus calls on Christ, forbids him to think of God, and entertains him with the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Beelzebub: Lucifer's 'companion-prince in hell', whom Faustus invokes in his conjuration and to whom he dedicates himself.

Morality figures

The Good Angel and the Evil Angel: Spirits from the tradition of the morality play who appear at moments of decision and argue for and against repentance. The Good Angel insists that it is never too late; the Evil Angel appeals to wealth and honour and, later, to fear and despair. They may be read as real spirits or as the two sides of Faustus's mind.

Faustus's household

Wagner: Faustus's servant, a student who parodies scholastic logic, hires the Clown with a mock contract, and in the end inherits his master's goods. He speaks the short choric scene before the last act.

Magicians

Valdes and Cornelius: Faustus's friends, already notorious for magic, who encourage him with visions of wealth and power and teach him the rudiments of conjuring. They disappear from the play once he has begun.

Christian counsel

The Old Man: A devout figure from the Faust Book who urges Faustus to repent, sees an angel offering him grace, and is then attacked by devils. His faith protects his soul, and he provides the play's clearest contrast to Faustus.

Wittenberg

The Scholars: Faustus's colleagues and friends. They fear for him early in the play, ask to see Helen, and hear his last confession before withdrawing to pray for him.

Spirit

Helen of Troy: A spirit in the shape of the most beautiful woman of antiquity. She appears silently, first for the scholars and then as Faustus's paramour, and is the subject of his most famous speech. Many critics regard her as a demon, which would make his union with her a final act of damnation.

Comic subplot

The Clown, Robin and Ralph: Lower-class characters whose scenes parody Faustus's bargain. The Clown would sell his soul for mutton; Robin the ostler and his friend Ralph steal a conjuring book and a goblet, summon Mephistopheles by accident and are turned into an ape and a dog.
The Horse-courser: A horse-dealer who buys an enchanted horse that turns to hay in water and then pulls off Faustus's false leg.

Rome

The Pope and the Cardinal of Lorrain: The victims of Faustus's invisible pranks at the banquet on St Peter's feast, satirised for their appetite and their rituals of cursing.

The Emperor's court

The Emperor Carolus the Fifth and the Knight: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who asks Faustus to raise Alexander the Great, and a sceptical courtier whom Faustus punishes with a pair of horns.

Vanholt

The Duke and Duchess of Vanholt: Courtly patrons for whom Faustus provides an entertainment and a dish of grapes in January.

Frame

The Chorus: The narrator who speaks the Prologue, the two choruses between scenes and the Epilogue, framing the story as a warning and an elegy.

Themes

Knowledge, aspiration and its limits

Faustus begins as a man for whom ordinary learning is too small. His desire is for a knowledge that is also power, 'a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence'. The play takes this desire seriously, and its verse gives it splendour. Yet what Faustus gains is narrow: Mephistopheles gives him textbook astronomy, refuses the one question that matters, and offers spectacles instead of truth.

Critics have seen this as a critique of Renaissance ambition, or as Marlowe's sympathy with the overreacher whose reach exceeds what his world allows. The two readings are not exclusive: the play honours the aspiration and shows how easily it is betrayed into triviality (Levin 1952) (Greenblatt 1980).

Damnation, grace and free will

Again and again Faustus is told that repentance is possible, and again and again he does not repent. The play leaves open whether he cannot or will not, and it gives evidence on both sides. Grace is offered by the Good Angel, by the Old Man, by the vision of Christ's blood; it is resisted by Faustus's fear, by his pride and by the devils' threats.

For an Elizabethan audience this was not an abstract puzzle. Reformed theology taught that repentance was itself a gift of God, so that the inability to repent could look like a sign of reprobation. The play dramatises that anxiety without resolving it (Sinfield 1983) (Cole 1962).

Despair

Despair, the conviction that one's sins are too great to be forgiven, was in Christian tradition a sin in itself, and the worst, because it refuses mercy. Faustus begins in a kind of theological despair ('we must sin, and so consequently die') and ends in personal despair ('Faustus' offence can ne'er be pardoned'). At several points Mephistopheles offers him a dagger or he thinks of suicide.

The play's understanding of despair draws on a culture in which many people feared that they were among the reprobate. Faustus's final hour, with its alternation of hope and terror, is an extreme version of an experience familiar from Protestant spiritual writing (Stachniewski 1991).

Time

The bargain gives Faustus a fixed term, twenty-four years, and the play becomes increasingly conscious of time running out. The reflections on 'the restless course / That time doth run', Wagner's report of the will, and the clock that strikes eleven, the half-hour and twelve in the last scene make time itself an antagonist.

The final soliloquy turns this into dramatic form. Faustus begs time to stop, then to stretch into a year, a month, a day, and the clock answers him.

Illusion and spectacle

Much of what magic produces in the play is show: the devils' dance with crowns, the Sins, the spirits of Alexander and his paramour, Helen herself. Faustus admits to the Emperor that he cannot raise true bodies, only spirits that resemble them. The theatre, which also deals in shows, is implicated in the critique; the play entertains its audience with the same kinds of spectacle by which Lucifer distracts Faustus.

Comedy and the parody of the main plot

The comic scenes repeat Faustus's bargain at a lower level: a soul for a shoulder of mutton, a stolen book used to get drink and girls, a devil summoned by gibberish. They show that the magic of the main plot is a matter of appetite. At the same time, Faustus's own tricks on the Pope, the Knight and the Horse-courser are as low as anything the clowns do, so the comedy measures his decline.

Motifs

Books and reading

The play begins with Faustus reading and ends with his promise to burn his books. In between, books are passed from hand to hand: necromantic books, Mephistopheles' book of spells and planets, Lucifer's book of shapes, the conjuring book Robin steals. Reading is the instrument of both ambition and damnation, and the half-read Bible verses of the first scene show how a reader can choose his own ruin.

Repentance attempted and abandoned

The pattern of almost-repentance recurs at the signing, at the sight of the heavens, after the question about the creation, in the Horse-courser scene, with the Old Man and in the final hour. Each repetition makes the next attempt harder, and the structure gives the play its sense of a will hardening.

The Angels' debates

The paired speeches of the Good and Evil Angels recur at each crisis in the first half. They are formal, almost liturgical, and their disappearance after the middle of the play leaves Faustus alone with his own voice and with the Old Man.

Inverted sacred language

Faustus repeatedly turns the language of Christianity to devilish uses: 'Consummatum est', the altar he will build to Beelzebub, the invocation with God's name written backwards. Critics have described the play as a saint's life turned upside down (Snyder 1966).

Shapes and transformations

Mephistopheles changes from an ugly devil into a friar; Faustus is given a book to take any shape; Robin and Ralph become an ape and a dog; the horse becomes hay. In his last hour Faustus longs to be turned into mist, water-drops or a beast, a final wish for a transformation that would let him escape.

Symbols

The blood and the bond

Faustus's blood, which congeals as he writes, seals the contract and makes the soul a piece of property. In the final hour it is answered by the image of Christ's blood streaming in the firmament, the blood that might redeem him.

The magic circle

The circle with Jehovah's name forwards and backwards stands for the attempt to command spiritual powers by technique. Mephistopheles' explanation shows it to be powerless in itself.

Helen

Helen embodies classical beauty and the glamour of the ancient world, and she stands for the human desire for a heaven on earth ('heaven is in these lips'). She is also a spirit and very possibly a devil, so that the most beautiful image in the play is also the emblem of Faustus's final self-deception.

The clock

The striking clock of the last scene is the visible sign of the bond's expiry, turning an abstract term of years into an hour the audience lives through.

Icarus and the laurel

The Prologue's waxen wings and the Epilogue's burnt laurel frame the play with emblems of aspiring learning: one of a fall, the other of poetic and scholarly promise destroyed.

Critical debates

The A-text and the B-text

Which version represents Marlowe's play? W. W. Greg's parallel-text edition of 1950 argued that the 1616 B-text was based on a better manuscript and that the 1604 A-text was a reported, memorially reconstructed version. For decades editors followed him in preferring B. Fredson Bowers then examined which passages of B belong to the 1602 additions paid for by Henslowe, and the case for B began to weaken (Greg 1950) (Bowers 1973).

In 1981 Michael Warren argued that the two texts should be treated as distinct plays, each with its own theological emphasis. The Revels edition of David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (1993), with Rasmussen's textual study, concluded that A was printed from a manuscript close to Marlowe's own, written with a collaborator, and that B represents a later theatrical revision. Most recent editions follow this view while printing or discussing both texts (Warren 1981) (Bevington 1993) (Rasmussen 1993) (Keefer 1991).

The date of composition

The play cannot be earlier than Marlowe's knowledge of the English Faust Book, whose earliest surviving edition is dated 1592; its title page describes it as 'newly imprinted' and amended, which may imply an earlier, lost edition. Scholars who believe Marlowe used the book as soon as it appeared date the play to about 1592, shortly before his death. Others argue from style, from stage history and from the topical allusions to Parma and Antwerp for about 1588–89, soon after Tamburlaine.

The question matters for how we see Marlowe's career: whether Faustus is an early work written in the excitement of Tamburlaine or a late one written in the years of his trouble with the authorities. The Revels editors incline to the earlier date, but neither case has been proved (Bevington 1993) (Jones 1994).

Who wrote the comic scenes?

The prose clown scenes have often been thought unworthy of Marlowe and attributed to a collaborator. Textual study of the A-text suggests that the manuscript behind it was the work of two writers, Marlowe and a partner, and that the partner wrote most of the comic material; the identity of that collaborator remains unknown (Rasmussen 1993) (Bevington 1993).

Critical opinion of the comedy has changed. Older critics regretted it; later ones have stressed how carefully the comic scenes parody the main plot, in the manner of the popular dramatic tradition, so that the question of authorship need not decide the question of design (Bevington 1962).

Orthodox morality or subversive tragedy?

Leo Kirschbaum called Doctor Faustus one of the most obviously Christian documents of Elizabethan drama: a play in which a sinner chooses damnation and receives it, and which asks the audience to judge him. Douglas Cole and others developed this reading, showing how closely the play follows traditional teaching on sin, despair and repentance (Kirschbaum 1943) (Cole 1962).

Against this, Harry Levin saw Faustus as the supreme 'overreacher' of a dramatist who sympathised with aspiration, and materialist critics such as Jonathan Dollimore argued that the play exposes the contradictions of the theology it seems to endorse, presenting a God whose justice looks like tyranny. Much recent criticism holds that the play's power comes from its refusal to settle the question (Levin 1952) (Dollimore 1984) (Greenblatt 1980).

Calvinism and predestination

Is Faustus damned because he chooses, or chosen to be damned? Alan Sinfield argued that the play is built so that both explanations fit: every refusal of grace can be read as free choice or as evidence of reprobation, which reproduces the strains of the Calvinist theology taught in Marlowe's Cambridge. John Stachniewski placed the play within a wider literature of religious despair produced by that theology (Sinfield 1983) (Stachniewski 1991).

Leah Marcus showed that the two early texts lean different ways: the A-text's 'if Faustus can repent' implies that repentance may not be in his power, while the B-text's 'will repent' places responsibility on his will, and B adds Mephistopheles' boast that he blocked Faustus's way to heaven. She read the differences as ideological as well as textual (Marcus 1996).

Helen: beauty or demon?

W. W. Greg argued in 1946 that Helen is a devil, a succubus, and that Faustus's union with her is the sin of demoniality, which puts him finally beyond hope; the Old Man's later lines and Faustus's own 'Her lips suck forth my soul' support the reading. Others find the speech too beautiful to be simply condemned and see in it the play's last tribute to the humanist love of classical antiquity (Greg 1946).

Readers who follow Greg see the speech as the moment of damnation; those who resist him stress the irony that is present throughout, the burning towers and the fatal loves of Jupiter, which make the speech both a celebration and a warning (Levin 1952).

Censorship and the original play

William Empson's posthumous book, edited by John Henry Jones, argued provocatively that the play as printed had been altered under pressure from the censor, and that Marlowe's original conception was more sceptical about damnation than either surviving text. Few scholars have accepted the reconstruction, but the book drew attention to the play's heterodox possibilities and to its close relation with the English Faust Book (Empson 1987) (Jones 1994).

Key passages

'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravish'd me.

Faustus · DF, Scene 1

Faustus's declaration to Valdes and Cornelius. 'Ravish'd' means carried away by delight, but also seized by force; the line is both an expression of passion and a hint that he is not entirely in control of his choice.

What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera, What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

Faustus · DF, Scene 1

Faustus's rejection of theology after reading only the first halves of two Bible verses, each of which is followed in Scripture by a promise of grace. The fatalism he concludes from them shapes the rest of the play.

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: 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,

Mephistopheles · DF, Scene 3

Hell defined as the loss of God. It is remarkable that a devil gives Faustus this warning, and that Faustus ignores it; the speech is often cited as the play's most profound theological moment.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be:

Mephistopheles · DF, Scene 5

A development of 'this is hell': hell is not a location but the condition of the damned. Faustus answers 'I think hell's a fable', which shows how little he has understood.

My heart's so harden'd, I cannot repent:

Faustus · DF, Scene 5

The phrase recalls Pharaoh's hardened heart in Exodus and the idea that the reprobate are hardened by God. Whether Faustus's 'cannot' is a fact or an excuse is the central question of the play.

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium-- Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--

Faustus · DF, Scene 14

The most famous lines in the play. The beauty of the verse is shadowed by images of destruction, and the immortality Faustus asks of a spirit is the opposite of the eternal life he has rejected.

I do repent; and yet I do despair: Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast:

Faustus · DF, Scene 14

The morality play's battle for the soul is now internal. A moment later Mephistopheles' threats decide the battle for hell.

Ah, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears.

Faustus · DF, Scene 16

Tears were a traditional sign of true repentance. Faustus wants them and cannot shed them, a vivid image of a will that has become powerless.

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

Faustus · DF, Scene 16

A line from Ovid's love poetry, where a lover wishes the night to last, used by a man who wishes the night would never end for a different reason. The following lines move with the steady beat of the clock.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough, That sometime grew within this learned man.

The Chorus · DF, Epilogue

The play's epitaph for Faustus, mourning wasted promise as much as it condemns sin. Apollo's laurel is the emblem of learning and poetry.

Questions for study

Why does Faustus reject each of the university disciplines in the first scene, and what is wrong with his reading of the Bible?
Look at how he defines each subject by its 'end', and check the verses that follow Romans 6:23 and 1 John 1:8.
What does Mephistopheles mean by 'this is hell, nor am I out of it'? Why does Faustus fail to understand him?
Consider the idea of hell as loss of God, and Faustus's reply about 'manly fortitude'.
Are the Good and Evil Angels real spirits or parts of Faustus's mind? Does it matter?
Think about the morality-play tradition, about who can hear them, and about what happens when they stop appearing.
Can Faustus repent? Collect the moments when he nearly does and explain what stops him each time.
Scenes 5, 10, 14 and 16; consider fear, distraction, despair and the 'can' / 'will' variant.
What is the function of the comic scenes? Do they weaken or strengthen the tragedy?
Compare the Clown's bargain and Robin's conjuring with Faustus's, and think about the question of authorship.
What does Faustus actually do with his power? How does the play present the gap between his ambitions and his achievements?
Compare his plans in Scene 1 with the scenes at Rome, the Emperor's court and Vanholt.
Is Helen a symbol of beauty, a demon, or both? How do the images of the Helen speech shape your answer?
Look at the stage directions, at 'Her lips suck forth my soul', at Troy and Semele, and at Greg's argument.
Why is the Old Man in the play? What does his fate suggest about Faustus's?
Compare his response to the devils' threats with Faustus's, and note Mephistopheles' 'I cannot touch his soul'.
How does the final soliloquy use time, imagery and verse rhythm to create its effect?
Follow the clock, the Ovid quotation, the vision of Christ's blood and the wishes for transformation.
Does the Epilogue state the meaning of the play? Is Doctor Faustus an orthodox warning or a tragedy that questions its own theology?
Weigh the moral of the Chorus against the sympathy of its images, and consider the views of Kirschbaum, Levin, Sinfield and Dollimore.