The Complete Plays Read Online Free Page B

his fatal decision, or is the speech a symbolic condensation of a longer process? Is this the speech of a presenter in a Morality play, or of a character in a tragedy? The soliloquy bespeaks a character with an acute inner subjectivity (Faustus names himself obsessively throughout the play), but one who still receives the ministrations of good and evilangels. The action here, like the play as a whole, is fascinatingly poised between older and still evolving dramatic forms.
    There are comparable – fearful – uncertainties in Faustus’ encounters with the devil. Mephistopheles is a new kind of devil, quiet, melancholy, menacing in the very honesty with which he explains his coming ‘to get [Faustus’] glorious soul’. And he brings a new, spatially disquieting Hell with him in his own ‘fainting soul’: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ At first he comes as a familiar ‘Devil’; later, he always accompanies Faustus in the guise of ‘an old Franciscan friar’ (3.50, 84,78, 23SD, 26). Since Faustus wears the robes and cross of a Doctor of Divinity (‘a divine in show’, 1.3), the stage is occupied – apparently – by two religious figures, both of whom (since Faustus bargains to ‘be a spirit in form and substance’, 5.97) are in fact evil spirits. Wagner’s mock-academic question about his master – ‘is not he
corpus naturale
?’ (2.20–21) – thus has disturbing ironic force. What we see onstage may not be all that is there. Hence the stories of early performances of the play being disrupted by real devils: there is always the danger that a real spirit might answer the actor’s summons.
Doctor Faustus
is a spiritual tragedy, a play centred on what cannot be staged, the invisible, immortal soul. Part of what is so disturbing about the pact that consigns in his own blood Faustus’ soul to the devil is the ontological uncertainty over how exactly such material, corporeal forms, can bind the immaterial soul. Is it, in fact, the pact that damns Faustus? What does it mean to sell one’s soul? Faustus gains no new knowledge: Mephistopheles’s answers to his cosmological questions are freshman truisms, and Faustus is stupidly blind to the evidence of his own senses:
    FAUSTUS Come, I think hell’s a fable.
    â€¦
    MEPHISTOPHELES
    But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,
For I am damnèd and am now in hell. (5.129, 138–9)
    Faustus lives for twenty-four years after he signs the pact, but in some sense he is already damned.
    A witty student once remarked that the play has ‘a beginning, a muddle, and an end’, 18 and Marlowe may not have written all its middle scenes. But there is a terrible bathos in Faustus’ adventures. His journeys seem aimless; time is uncertain (the chronology shifts uneasily to the reign of Charles V) and empty, structured only by episodes of trickery. Elizabethan audiences probably enjoyed Faustus’ pope-baiting as a liberating defiance of an exploded religious solemnity. Yet there is something troubling here. Magic, in sixteenth-century eyes, was an inverted religion, and, when Faustus and Mephistopheles are anathematized, though they ‘
beat the
FRIARS ,
and fling fireworks among them
’ (8.99 SD ), they do also leave. It is not quite clear how much spiritual power the old religion still commands.
    The clowning scenes too seem confused and irrelevant. One of their functions is parodic. Wagner is a sorcerer’s apprentice whose taking Robin the Clown into his service reflects ironically on Faustus’ ambiguous master-servant relationship with Mephistopheles. Faustus experiences his longings as appetites to be glutted, and thinks the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins ‘feeds [his] soul’ (7.163): Hazlitt called it ‘a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness’. 19 The Clown’s hunger is comparable (‘he would