Marlowe

Doctor Faustus
A CASEBOOK

EDITED BY

JOHN JUMP
*
Selection and editorial matter © john Jump 1969

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CONTENTS

Aclcnowledgements 7
General Editor's Preface 9
Introduction II

Part I: Extracts from Earlier Critics

WALTER SCOTT, P: 25 - HENRY MAITLAND, P: 2.5 -
FRANCIS JEFFREY, p. 26 - WILLIAM HAZLITT, p. 2.7 -
CHARLES LAMB, p. 29- J. W. VON GOETHE, p. 2.9 - JAMES
BROUGHTON, p. 2.9 - JOHN PAYNE COLLIER, p. 30 -
HENRY HALLAM, P: 30 - GEORGE HENRY LEWES, P: 31-
H. A. TAINE, P: 32 - A. W. WARD, P: 32 - WILHELM
WAGNER, p. 33 - JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, p. 35 -
A. H. BULLEN, P: 36 - HAVELOCK ELLIS, P: 3'A- A. C.
SWINBURNE, p. 38 - GEORGE SANTAYANA, p. 39 -
FELIX E. SCHELLING, p. 40 - WILLIAM EMPSON, P: 41 -
LEO KIRSCHBAUM, p. 42. - UNA ELLIS-FERM0R, p. 43 -
PAULH. KOCHER,p. 44.

Part 2: RecentStudies
JAMES SMITH: Marlowe's DoctorFaustus 49
w. W. GREG: The Damnation ofFaustus 71
J. C. MAXWELL: The Sin of Faustus 89
HELEN GARD NER: The Theme of Damnation in
DoctorFaustus 95
6 Contents
NICHOLAS BROOKE: The Moral Tragedy ofDoetor
Faustus 101
HARRY LEVIN: Science without Conscience 134
ROBERT ORNSTEIN: The ComicSynthesis in Doctor
Faustus 165
J. P. BROCKBANK: Damned Perpetually 173
J. B. STEANE: The Instabilityof Faustus 177
D. J. PALMER: Magic and Poetry in DoctorFaustus 188
L. C. KNIGHTS: The StrangeCaseof DoctorFaustus 2.04
CLEANTH BROOKS: The Unity of Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus 2.08
HAROLD HOBSON: All This and Helen,Too 2.2.2.

Select Bibliography 2.2.5

Notes on Contributors 2.2.8

Harry Levin
SCIENCE WITHOUT CONSCIENCE
(1952)

KNOWLEDGE is power. The realization was Bacon's: Nam et

ipsa scientia potestas est. But power corrupts, and Bacon - the
Cambridge alumnus taking all knowledge for his province, the
Lord Chancellor found guilty of corruption - demonstrated the
incompatibility of the serpent and the dove. Hence the parable of
Baldock in Edward 11, the prodigal scholarcorrupted by worldli-
ness, was not uniquely applicable to Marlowe; given full scope, it
could and did become an allegory for his century. Earlier in that
century, Rabelais had voiced its self-conscious expansiveness in
the famous letter purporting to have been written by the alle-
gorical giant, Gargantua, to his even more gigantic son, Panta-
gruel. More than a father's thoughtful advice to a student, this
was a medieval salute to the great instauration of humanism.
Hailing the revival of the classics and the investigations into
nature, it was charged with awareness of their potentialities for
good - and likewise for evil. If the late invention of printing was
an angelic inspiration, obviously gunpowder had been invented
by diabolical suggestion. And Gargantua's eulogy is tempered
with the warning that science sans conscience - science without
conscience, or perhaps we should say 'without consciousness' -
is but the ruin of the soul (II viii). There were lurking dangers,
as well as enriching adventures, in this brave new world which
was opening up before the European imagination. Yet we
justifiably stress the excitement, the exploration, the experience,
which no man has more fully personified than Leonardo da Vinci.
The secret of power, for that powerful genius, was a desire for
flight: La potenza esolo un desiderio di fuga. Along with his vision
of a flying machine, his paintings and anatomical researches and
projects of military engineering, his city planning and stage
 Science without Conscience 135
designing and endlessly fascinating notations, the artist-engineer
momentarily considered the possibility of necromancy. That
was a delusion, he duly noted; but if only it were possible, how
much it could so easily obtain! Riches, conquest, ability to fly,
everything, except escapefrom death.
Magic was originally the appurtenance of religion; and when
religion cast it off, it subsisted in the outer darkness, along with
appetites and curiosities which religion proscribed. Between
magic and science,as we have more recently come to know it, the
lines were not yet sharply drawn. Magicians, however, were
rigorously distinguished on the basis of whether they practised
white or black magic: whether they sought to control the ele-
ments through natural philosophy and supernatural wisdom, as
Prospero does in The Tempest, or whether they trafficked with
the devil and conjured up the dead, through witchcraft and
particularly necromancy, as does Marlowe's ultimate protagonist.
The legendary Faust was neither a creature of folklore, such as
Pantagruel, nor a figure from history, such as Leonardo. His
legend emerged from the flickering limbo between the admoni-
tions of the Middle Ages and the aspirations of the Renaissance.
More precisely, he was begotten by the Reformation out of the
Teutonic north, like his fellow-unbeliever, the Wandering Jew,
and quite unlike his Mediterranean contemporary, Don Juan,
whose destiny ran so strangely parallel. That Faustus meant
'well-omened' in Latin was a paradox which did not pass un-
observed. The disreputable name and vagabond career of an
actual Georg Faust can be traced from one German university
to another, sceptically pursued by accusations of charlatanism
and suspicions of pederasty. It is rumoured that he enlivened the
pedagogical technique of his classical lectures by the necromantic
practice of bringing Homeric shades to life. Marlowe, to whom
this feat had its perspicuous appeal, seems to class it with the so-
called shadows of Cornelius Agrippa, and glories in having
resurrected blind Homer to sing for his hero. More remotely
Simon Magus, a charlatan hovering on the fringes of early
Christianity, who was accompanied by a certain Helen and was
killed in a desperate effort to fly, seems to have some bearing
13 6 HARRY LEVIN

upon this story; and there was the Greek precedent of Empe-
docles, the philosopher who disappeared into Aetna. Doctor
Faust lost his original Christian name and got another by being
confounded with Johann Fust, one of the earliest printers and
therefore the practitioner of an art still held by many to be
ambiguous. The sinister repute of the prototype, thereby
enhanced with an aura of T itanism, projected the shadowy
image of a latter-day Prometheus, bearing gifts which were
dangerous for mankind.
It is not clear how Faust gained his reputation as a god-defier,
unless it be through his pretensions as a necromancer. He seems
to have ended by mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind him
a cloud of sensational rumours as to his 'damnable life, and de-
serued death', his 'Epicurish' habits and Atheistical blasphemies.
These were gathered together a generation later, in 1587, and
widely circulated by a pious printer, Johann Spies, through the
solemnly edifying and crudely jocular redaction known as his
F'austbuch. In 1592 it was published in the free English translation
that Marloweso closely depends upon for his play. The translator,
who seems to have been more ofa humanist than was the didactic
Lutheran author of the chapbook, takes advantage of Faust's
travels to expatiate upon Italian topography. Marlowe follows
his guidance through the ruins of Rome, and the guide is respon-
sible for such atmospheric details as the mention of Vergil's
tomb. Moreover, he contributed an epithet which, though Mar-
lowe makes no use of it, cannot have failed to affect his impres-
sion: at the University of Padua Faust registers as 'the vnsatiable
Speculator'. The English Faustbook: is at once a cautionary tale
and a book of marvels, a jest-book and a theological tract. Its
chapters, anecdotal and homiletic, are roughly grouped in three
sections. The first deals, extensively and systematically, with the
diabolical pact; the second, rather more discursively, with
Faust's speculations and journeys, and the third, after a series of
miscellaneous jests, with 'his fearfull and pitiful ende'. Here,
amid much that was not germane to his purpose, was a vehicle
for the highest and purest expression of Marlowe's lihido sciendi,
a speculative sublimation of Tamburlaine's or the Guise's
 Science withoutConscience 137
insatiable thirst - a hero who, 'taking to him the wings of an
Eagle, thought to flie ouer the whole world, and to know the
secrets of heauen and earth'.
This desire for flight transcended the pomp and dalliance of
those preceding plays which Marlowe all but repudiates at the
outset of The TragicallHistory ofDoctorFaustus. Yet, although
intellectual curiosity is now the activating force, it cannot finally
be detached from the secondary motives that entrammel it, the
will to power and the appetite for sensation. The interrelation-
ship of thought and action is the major problem for Doctor
Faustus, as it can become for Shakespeare's heroes. It is not just
a historical coincidence that Hamlet and Faustus were both
alumni of Martin Luther's university, Wittenberg; in other
words, their consciences had been disciplined within the [este
Burg of Protestantism. There, where Luther threw his inkstand
at the devil, Faustus comes to terms with the adversary; yet,
when Faustus laments his devil's bargain, he blames his alma
mater: '0 would I had neuer seene Wertenberge, neuer read
booke' (xix 45-6). When he appears at court and is scoffed at by
a courtier, he displays his professional pride by humbling the
scoffer and bidding him thereafter 'speake well of Scholers'
(xii 112). The cry of the triumphant scholastic disputant, sic
probo, must ring through a wider arena than the schools (ii 2);
the intellect must prove itself by mastering life at large. Scholar-
ship is rewarded by no greater satisfactions for Faustus than
sovereignty is for Edward and Tamburlaine, or conspiracy for
Barabas and the Guise. What is worse, the notorious alternative
to that straight and narrow path is the primrose path to the ever-
lasting bonfire. The formal pattern of Marlovian drama tends to
be increasingly traditional. Having created the tragedy of
ambition with Tamburlaine and put his stamp on the tragedy of
revenge with TheJew ofMalta and tried his hand at the chronicle
with Edward 11, Marlowe reverts to the morality play with
DoctorFaustus. But within the latter, the most general of forms,
he elaborates the most personal of themes - an Atheist's tragedy,
an Epicurean's testament, a mirror for University Wits.
The prologue, after its apology for not presenting matters of
138 HARRY LEVIN

love and war, presents character in biographical synopsis and

plot in ethical perspective. The universal hero of this morality
will not be Everyman; he will be a particular private individual;
and Marlowe highlights his attainment, as usual, by emphasizing
the lowness of his birth. Nevertheless, the Muse intends to 'vaunt
his heauenly verse' upon this theme (Prol, 6); and, passing over
the unexpected gender of the personal pronoun, our attention is
directed by the adjective to the vertical scale of the drama. Its co-
ordinates will be nothing less than heaven and hell; while on the
horizontal plane, at opposite sides of the stage, the conflict of
conscience will be externalized by the debate between Good and
Evil Angels; and even as the heroes of the moralities traverse a
circle of symbolic mansions, so Faustus will pay his respects to
personifications of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. As his
academic career proceeds, it is metaphorically described. Literally,
a scholar's name was registered in the Cambridge Grace-Book
when he took a degree, and the quibble on the word 'grace' serves
to bring out its non-theological overtones:
So soone hee profites in Diuinitie,
The fruitfull plot of Scholerisme grac't,
That shortly he was grac't with Doctors name,
Excelling all, whose sweete delight disputes
In heauenly matters of Theologie,
Till swolne with cunning, of a selfe conceit,
His waxen wings did mount aboue his reach,
And melting heauens conspirde his ouerthrow.
(Pro!. 15-22)
The last three words, a Marlovian idiom for the counteraction of
antagonistic forces, recur in Tamburlaine (ed. C. F. Tucker
Brooke, I. 1455). In Tamburlaine the emblem of tragic pride is
Phaethon, rashly attempting to drive the fiery chariot of the sun.
In DoctorFaustus it is Icarus, whose 'wings of waxe' had already
figured as an omen portending the tragedy of Dido (Dido,
Queen of Carthage, I. 1651). In each instance, it is a question of
flying too high, of falling from the loftiest height imaginable, of
seeking illumination and finding more heat than light. Faustus
prefers, like the Guise, to seek what flies beyond his reach; he is
 Sciencewithout Conscience 139
accused, in the augmented version, of trying 'to ouer-reach the
Diuell' (xix IS). After the prologue speaks of overreaching, the
emphasis shifts from the heavenly to the hellish - and the phrase
'diuelish exercise' is borrowed straight from the Faustbook. With
this shift, the rising verse subsides toward a dying fall, and the
ethereal image of flight gives way to grosser images of appetite.
These were anticipated by 'swolne with cunning' and will be
continued by allusions to hubris in terms of overeating. 'Negro-
maney' is given unwonted stress by its overhanging mono-
syllable, and 'blisse' reminds us that magic is to Faustus what a
crown was to Tamburlaine, gold to Barabas, or companionship
to Edward:

For falling to a diuelish exercise,

And glutted now with learnings golden gifts,
He surffets vpon cursed Negromancy.
Nothing so sweete as magicke is to him
Which he preferres before his chiefest blisse,
And this the man that in his study sits.
(Prot 23-8)
The speaker of these lines may well be Wagner, the famulus,
half-servant and half-disciple, since it is indicated that he re-
appears to speak the later choruses. It is a long way from his
moral earnestness to the cynical tone of Machiavel introducing
Barabas. But, as with The Jew of Malta, this introduction is
completed by drawing aside the curtain to the inner stage - which
in Elizabethan theatrical usage, was appropriately called 'the
study'. The protagonist is then discovered in his literal study, the
little room, the monkish cell that comprises his library and labo-
ratory. His profession is not usury but divinity, which subsumes
all the others, permitting him to 'leuell at the end of euery Art'
(i 4). Thus his introductory soliloquy is no mere reckoning of
accounts but an inventory of the Renaissance mind. Cornelius
Agrippa, that disillusioned experimentalist, whose namesake
plays an appropriate role in Marlowe's tragedy, had latterly
made such a survey in his treatise Ofthe Vanity and Uncertainty
of Arts and Sciences. Goethe's nineteenth-century Faust could
140 HARRY LEVIN

do no better than bring up to date those Falcultiitswissenschaften,

those categories of learning which Marlowe now passes in
review: Philosophie, }uristerei, Medi,/n, Theologie. Whatever
the contemplative life can teach, his Doctor Faustus has learned.
He has mastered the liberal arts, the learned professions, and the
experimental sciences of his day. To be or not to be, 'on cai me
on' (i 12) - the existential dilemma seems to him insoluble; con-
sequently, he is ready to take his leave of philosophy. Against
Aristotle he quotes the axiom of Ramus that the end of logic is
'to dispute well' (i 8); and, since rhetoric itself is a means toward
some further end, it does not gratify Faustus' libido sciendi. As for
jurisprudence and medicine, though they help man to exist, they
do not justify his existence. The 'bodies health' is scarcely a
fulfilment of libido sentiendi; whereas libido dominandi requires
more than a 'case of paltry legacies' (i 30). Yet the Roman statute
that Faustus cites at random does not seem to be wholly irrele-
vant; it has to do with the ways and means whereby a father may
disinherit a son.
Saying farewell to the other disciplines, he turns again for a
moment to theology, picks up Saint Jerome's Bible, reads from
the Vulgate, and comments upon two texts:

Stipendium peccatimorsest: ha, Stipendium, &c.

The reward ofsinne is death: thats hard.
Si peccasse negamus,fallimur, & nullaest in nobis veritas.
If we say that we haue no sinne,
We deceiue our selues, and theres no truth in vs,
(i 3?-43)

This latter text, quoted from the very epistle of Saint John (I i 8)
that goes on to warn against worldly lust and vainglory, gives
Faustus an ominous pause. Tentatively he balances it against the
stem quotation from Saint Paul's epistle to the Romans (VI 23).
All men are sinners, ergo all men are mortal, he syllogizes with a
sophistical shrug: 'Chesera,sera' (i 46). Such was Edward's senti-
ment, spoken in English rather than Italian, when he accepted his
fate: 'That shalbe, shalbe' (line 1962). Faustus, whether in
Calvinistic or Epicurean fatalism, is anxious to say 'Diuinitie,
 Science without Conscience
adieu', to embrace the 'Metaphisickes of Magicians', and to
replace the Scriptures with 'Negromantike bookes' (i 47--9)
which, by the subversion of an adjective heretofore consecrated
to religious objects, now seem 'heauenly'. Faustus' references to
his magical art, like Prospero's, sustain the additional ambiguity
of referring us back to the author's literary artistry, to the 'lines'
and 'sceanes', the 'letters and characters' in which Marlowe him-
self set the end of scholarism. As a scholar-poet, Marlowe had
been taught that the aim of poetry was profit and delight. Is it the
scholar, the conjurer, or the artist who can make good this boast?

o what a world of profit and delight,

Ofpower, ofhonor, of omnipotence
Is promised to the studious Artizan?
All things that mooue berweene the quiet poles
Shalbe at my commaund, Emperours and Kings
Are but obeyd in their seuerall prouinces:
Nor can they raise the winde, or rend the cloudes:
But his dominion that exceedes in this,
Stretcheth as farre as doth the minde of man.
A sound Magician is a mighty god.
(i 52-61)
The last line improves with the variant ending, more meaningful
in the context, 'Demi-god'. Marlowe's protagonists do not
simply out-Herod their fellow mortals; they act out their
invidious self-comparisons with the gods; and, from Aeneas to
Faustus, they see themselves deified in one manner or another.
Faustus' Evil Angel holds out the hope that he will be 'on earth
as laue is in the skie' (i 75)' Ignoring his Good Angel and the
threat of 'Gods heauy wrath' (i 71), Faustus readily amplifies
the enticement, which far outdoes all other Marlovian seductions.
He envisages a hierarchy of spirits, answering his queries and
serving his whims:
Ile haue them flye to India for gold,
Ransacke the Ocean for orient pearle,
And search all corners of the new found world
For pleasant fruites and princely delicates. (i 81-4)
142 HARRY LEVIN

The panorama extends across the western hemisphere, where

they are subsequently pictured as Indians, obeying their Spanish
masters and conveying
from America the golden fleece,
That yearely stuffes olde Philips treasury. (i 130-1)

But Marlowe's wandering fantasy comes home with an anti-

climactic suggestion, which incidentally reveals the Canterbury
boy who was sent to Corpus Christi on a scholarship:
Ile haue them fill thepublike schooles with silk,
Wherewith the students shalbe brauely clad. (i 8Ho)

Faustus has his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstem in the two

adepts of the black art, Valdes and Cornelius. Abetted by their
instructions, he repairs at midnight to a solitary grove, where he
draws a magic circle and abjures the Trinity. Just as Sir Walter
Ralegh's friends were alleged to have spelled the name of God
backwards, so here the name ofJehovah is
Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd. (iii 9)
Blasphemy has its irreligious observances, and this is the dread
ceremonial of the Black Mass. The play itself is almost macar onic
in its frequent scholarly lapses into Latinity, and the incantation
is deliberately heightened by what Faustus calls 'heauenly words'
(iii 29) and the Clown will call 'Dutch fustian' (A iv 74). Though
the demon makes his due appearance, first as a dragon and then
in the garb of a friar, he does not appear as the devil's pleni-
potentiary; he has responded to the conjuration, so he explains
in scholastic terminology, because Faustus has jeopardized his
soul. It is the first ofFaustus' disappointments, and is immediately
solaced by the delight that he takes in his personal relation with
Mephostophilis. Again, even more emphatically than with
Gaveston, the name itself is something to conjure with, all the
more potent because it accounts for half a line of blank verse:
Had I as many soules as there be starres,
Ide giue them a1 for Mephastophilis. (iii 104-5)
 Science without Conscience 143
Marlowe's protagonists tend to isolate themselves; yet they
also tend . . . to ally themselves with some deuteragonist.
Edward had his evil genius in Gaveston, Barabas his demonic
familiar in Ithamore; and Faustus has in Mephostophilis an alter
ego who is both a demon and a Damon. The man has an extra-
ordinary affection for the spirit, the spirit a mysterious attraction
to the man. Mephostophilis should not be confused with Goethe's
sardonic nay-sayer; neither is he an operatic villain nor a Satanic
tempter. He proffers no tempting speeches and dangles no entice-
ments; Faustus tempts himself, and succumbs to temptations
which he alone has conjured up. What Mephostophilis really
approximates, with his subtle insight and his profound sympathy,
is the characterization of Porfiry, the examining magistrate in
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
The dialogues between Faustus and MephostophiIis resemble
those cat-and-mouse interrogations, in which Porfiry teaches the
would-be criminal, Raskolnikov, to accuse and convict himself.
Faustus is especially curious about the prince of darkness, whose
name once proclaimed him the bearer of light; who was once an
angel 'most dearely lou'd of God', as Mephostophilis points out,
but was thrown from heaven for his 'aspiring pride', the prim-
ordial tragic fault.

And what are you that Huewith Lw;ifer? (iii 72)

Faustus asks. And Mephostophilis answers:

Vnhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,

Conspir'd against our God with Lucifer,
And are for euer damnd with Lucifer. (iii 73-5)

The reiteration reminds us that Faustus' plight, or any other

human predicament, is the outcome of that Miltonic struggle,
that fall of the angels, that tragedy of tragedies which brought
original sin and consequent suffering into the world. It is ironic,
of course, that Faustus should be asking to be admitted into the
company of the damned. But misery loves company, and Mephos-
tophilis will warrant his own role by quoting the proverb in
144 HARRY LEVIN

Latin. The special poignance of the relationship lies in IUs fore-

knowledge, and his foresuffering, Once the sin is committed, he
cannot but hold the sinner to his unholy covenant. Faustus, with
a blithe humanistic pantheism, 'confounds hell in E1kJum' (iii
62). He has no ear for Mephostophilis' heart-cry,

Why this is hel, nor am lout of it, (iii 7.8)

nor for his painfully explicit amplification,

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd

In one selfe place, for where we are is hell .••
All places shall be hell that is not heauen. (v 122-7)

Orcanes, the noble infidel-in the second part of Tamburlaine,

used a similar expression to affirm a belief in a god who is not
circumscriptible. Nothing like this Marlovian conception is
hinted among the fundamentalist tenets of the Faustbook,
although Marlowe might have learned from Lucretius that during
out lifetime we undergo what is fabled to happen afterward in
Acheron (III Faustus is quite as unconcerned with
'heauen, and heauenly things' (v 21), when his Good Angel
commends them to him; and when his Evil Angel bids him
'thinke of honor and wealth' (v 22), he has no compunction in
to choosing the pomps of Satan. On condition that he be enabled
'liue in al voluptuousnesse' for twenty-four years (iii 94), and that
Mephostophilis obey his commands and reply to his inquiries,
Fau stus is willing to sign a legal deed empowering Mephosto-
philis and Lucifer 'to fetch or carry the said Iohn Faustus body
and soule, flesh, bloud, or good s, into their habitation where-
soeuer' (v 109-1 I). When his blood congeal s, after he has stabbed
his arm, he ignores the portent; and when it streams again, having
been heated with coals, it warns him to escape while there is time:
'Homo fuge' (v 77). Instead, he affixes his bloody signature with
a blasphemous mockery of the last words of Jesus, according to
the gospel of Saint John (XIX 30): 'Consummatum est.'
Mephostophilis does nothing to lure Faustus on; he suffers for
him, he sympathizes with him, above all he understands him; and,
 Science without Conscience 145
through this understanding, we participate in the dramatic irony.
Faustus persists in regarding his fiendish attendant as a sort of
oriental slave of the lamp, and Mephostophilis ironically promises
more than his temporary master has wit to ask. Some day, after
one fashion or another, Faustus will be 'as great as Lucifer' (v
)2) - he will arrive at the kind of ambiguous greatness that
Fielding would attribute to Jonathan Wild. In the interim he
shrugs:
Come, I thinke hell's a fable. (v 128)
To which the suffering spirit replies with the bitterest of all his
ironies:
I, thinke so still, till experience change thy minde.
(v 129)
For Faustus, even more than for Edward or Barabas, the fruit of
experience is disillusionment. As soon as the contract is signed
and sealed, he is eager to resolve ambiguities, to satisfy the cosmic
questions that teem in his brain. He is keenly aware that there
are more things in heaven and earth than the trivium and the
quadrivium; but his discussions with Mephostophilis scarcely
proceed beyond the elementary data of natural history and the
unquestioned assumptions of Ptolemaic astronomy. 'Tush,'
Faustus cries impatiently, 'these are fresh mens suppositions'
(vi 55-6). To the more searching inquiry, 'Who made the world?'
(vi 69) his interlocutor must perforce be silent, since fiends are
interdicted from naming God. When various books of occult and
pseudo-scientific lore are provided, Faustus nervously thumbs
through the black-letter pages, only to realize that he has ex-
changed his soul for little more than the quiddities of Wittenberg:
'0 thou art deceiued' (v 178). In his undeception he listens to the
conflicting angels again, and again the Evil Angel outargues the
Good. Faustus, at all events, is beginning to respect the grim
silences of Mephostophilis. Now it becomes the latter's task to
divert him, but each diversion turns out to be a snare and a
delusion. Faustus, being 'wanton and lasciuious, ... can not liue
without a wife' (v 142-3). This demand is frustrated, as the
Faustbook emphasizes, because marriage is a sacrament; whereas,
146 HARRY LEVIN

for Mephostophilis, it is 'a ceremoniall toy' (v 15I). The best

that Mephostophilis can provide is equivocally diverting: 'a diuell
drestlikea woman, withfier workes';
There are more and more of these ghoulish antics, which
always seem to end by intensifying the actual harshness of the
situation. Faustus, prompted by the Good Angel for the nonce,
inevitably breaks down and calls upon Christ. Thereupon - most
terrifying shock of all - it is Lucifer who rises with Beelzebub,
presumably through the trap from below the stage, to hold
Faustus to the letter of their agreement. As a pastime and a con-
firmation of his unregenerate state, they witness together Luci-
fer's pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Walpurgisnacht
interlude at the midpoint of the play, a sight as pleasing to
Faustus as Paradise was to Adam before the fall (vi 108-9).
Marlowe, interpolating this quaint procession of gargoyles,
harked back to a more deeply rooted medieval tradition than the
'hellish pastimes' of the Faustbook - to the earliest subject of the
moralities, as well as the homilies of Chaucer and Langland.
Marlowe's treatment, curiously enough, bears a closer resem-
blance to theirs than it does to the Renaissance triumph of
Lucifera in The Faerie Queene. Pride is the inevitable leader, and
the others follow as the night the day, parading the principal
weaknesses of the flesh, brandishing their respective perquisites,
and speaking their pieces in highly seasoned prose. Faustus must
indeed be a hardened sinner to contemplate their grossness
without revulsion. Though he has a greeting for each of them,
it seems to be Gluttony that inspires his reaction: '0 this feedes
my soule' (vi 170). This has been heralded when the prologue
touched upon the theme of satiety, is resumed when Faustus is
'glutted' with a foretaste of what lies ahead (i 77), and will be
rounded out in the final scene where he diagnoses his illness as
'a surffett of deadly sinne that hath damnd both body and soule'
(xix 37-8). Perdition is the more awful for Mephostophilis
because he has 'tasted the eternal ioyes of heauen' (iii 80). As for
Faustus, he has candidly dedicated himself to carnal egoism:

The god thou seruest is thine owne appetite. (v II)

 Sciencewithout Conscience 147
His quest for knowledge leads him to taste the fruit of the tree
that shaded Adam and Eve, to savour the distinction between
good and evil. From that point he abandons his disinterested
pursuit - or, rather, he abandons himself to the distractions that
Mephostophilis scatters along his ever more far-flung itinerary.
His further adventures are calculated less to fulfil his boundless
ambition than to palliate his disappointment, to make the most of
a bad bargain.
The rest is hedonism. It is conveniently preluded by Wagner,
as expository chorus, describing how Faustus, like Phaethon and
other reckless adventurers,
Did mount himselfe to scale Olympus top,
Being seated in a chariot burning bright.
(Cho. 1,4-5)
A characteristic accomplishment of the legendary Faust was
aeromancy, the magical power of flight. Unlike his resurrections
and pyrotechnics, this does not lend itself very effectively to
theatrical presentation. Wagner narrates his aerial voyages 'to
prooue Cosmography' (Ch. 1,20), and Faustus himself discusses
geography with Mephostophilis, pausing significantly over that
Venetian temple which 'threats the starres with her aspiring
toppe' (viii 18), and ultimately alighting at papal Rome. There
the slapstick banquet at the Vatican, where they snatch food and
drink away from the Pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine, is at
best a satirical comment upon the blind mouths of the clergy, and
at worst a callow manifestation of Elizabethan Catholic-baiting.
But the pith of the episode is the ceremony of anathema, which
definitively places Faustus under the most solemn ban of the
Church. The dirge of malediction, the curse with bell, book, and
candle, 'forward and backward' (ix 99), is the religious counter-
part of the sacrilegious rite he performed by anagrammatizing
the name of God. He and Mephostophilis retort by beating the
Friars and scattering firecrackers. The episode has been con-
siderablyaugmented along these lines by Marlowe's presumptive
collaborator, who introduces an antipope named Bruno - possibly
in honour of Giordano Bruno - condemned to the stake and
148 HARRY LEVIN

rescued by Faustus and Mephostophilis in the guise of cardinals.

But it is a peculiarly Marlovian twist, an antireligious fascination
with ceremonial, which animates Tamburlaine's burning of the
Koran as well as Faustus' celebration of the Black Mass, and
culminates in the ritual of excommunication. Faustus is pledged,
as was Barabas, to pull down Christian churches. From the
negative commitment of his Atheism he moves on to the positive
exploit of his Epicureanism, when we next see him at the court
of the Holy Roman Emperor. There we first behold him
exercising his distinctive gift of sciomancy, and raising - in a
more or less elaborated dumb show - the shades of Alexander
and his paramour, evidently the fabulous Thais.
It must be admitted that Faustus is more impressive as an
Atheist than as an Epicurean. We might have expected more for
the price he is paying, after his terrible renunciation, than the
jaunty hocus-pocus that produces grapes out of season for a
pregnant duchess or defrauds a horse dealer and fobs him off
with a leg-pulling practical joke. Such conjuring tricks may be
mildly amusing, but are they worthy of the inspiration or worth
the sacrifice? Certainly not; and we ought to feel some incon-
gruity between the monologues and the gestures, between the
seemingly unlimited possibilities envisioned by Faustus' speeches
and their all too concretely vulgar realization in the stage
business. Putting ourselves in his position, we protest with
Browning's Paracelsus, 'Had we means/Answering to our mind!'
We probably feel the incongruity more than the Elizabethans
did, for a number of reasons; and first of all, because we have lost
their habit of accepting the limitations of the stage as the con-
ventions of the theatre, of taking the word for the deed and the
part for the whole. Suspending disbelief, in short, we ought to
be more impressed than we usually are. Still, if we remain sceptical,
we may remember that so was Marlowe; he is on record asserting
that the prophets and saints of the Bible were so many jugglers.
His refusal to believe in miracles may well have hindered him
from making sorcery altogether credible in his plays - wherein,
contrary to the custom of Shakespeare and his other contempo-
raries, there are no ghosts; except in Doctor Faustus, there are
 Science without Conscience 149
naturalistic explanations for seemingly supernatural interventions.
This second consideration is neutralized by a third: whatever
our doubts or Marlowe's, his audiences were convinced. His
talent for lurid spectacle, supported by Henslowe's most elabo-
rate properties, and by the intermittent discharge of squibs and
crackers, undoubtedly gravelled the groundlings. A supernatural
atmosphere was devised and sustained with such effectiveness
that a veritable body of legends grew up around the performance
of the play, most of them involving a personal appearance of the
devil himself, who is temporarily mistaken for one of the caper-
ing devils of the tiring house.
Large allowances should be made for the mangled and
encrusted form in which Doctor Faustus has survived. Its very
popularity seems to have subjected it to an inordinate amount of
cutting and gagging and all the other indignities that dramatic
texts are heir to. It was not published until 16°4, more than a
decade after Marlowe's death; this first quarto and later editions
based on it seem to represent an unauthorized abridgment. The
quarto of 1616 and others deriving from it seem to stem in-
dependently from a fuller and more authoritative manuscript,
upon which editors are inclined to place increasing weight.
Unfortunately, neither one - nor the combination of both - is
satisfactory. The 1616 text contains about half again as much
material, and preserves the play in clearer and firmer structure;
yet much of that construction is filled in by an inferior hand, and
several important passages are omitted. These we know from
the 1604 text, which is the one most frequently reprinted; and
since it is so terse a condensation, it can be very handily per-
formed; yet it is not devoid of extraneous matter, while some of
its scenes are misplaced or unduly telescoped. The recent parallel
edition of Sir Walter Greg does justice, at least, to the complexity
of the problem. Moreover Sir Walter confirms, with his con-
siderable authority, the tendency to push the dating ahead to the
latest period in Marlowe's career. The argument for 1592, after
the publication of the Faustbook, seems cogent - though it carries
the surprising consequence of making Doctor Faustus the
follower rather than the forerunner of Greene's Friar Bacon and
150 HARRY LEVIN

Friar Bungay. Even more perplexing is the enigma of Marlowe's

collaboration. Not that there seems to be much disagreement
about the identity of his collaborator, Samuel Rowley. But why
should Rowley's clumsy journeywork eke out the greatest
masterwork the English theatre had thus far seen? It seems un-
likely, from what Kyd tells us, that Marlowe could have worked
in harness with Rowley. Was his Doctor Faustus, then, a frag-
ment like Hero and Leander? If so, was it left unfinished at his
death, or had he dropped it somewhere along the wayside? All
too understandably, he might have found his task an uncom-
fortable one. Was he inhibited from finishing it by some psycho-
logical complication, or by some more instrumental reason
equally inscrutable at this date?
In spite of its uneven texture, we must view the playas a
whole, since its total design is not less meaningful than its purple
passages, and textual disintegration will not improve its frag-
mentary condition. Critics have questioned the authenticity of
the comic scenes, on the grounds that Marlowe lacked a sense of
humour- a premise which they support by begging the question,
and denying his authorship whenever they are confronted with
a humorous speech. Marlowe's laughter, to be sure, is not
Shakespeare's; yet, as The Jew ofMalta must have shown us, his
wit has a salt of its own. Furthermore, Elizabethan tragedy
delegates a conventional function to comedy, and Doctor Faustus
need be no exception to that rule. Thus Wagner, the clever ser-
vant, mimics his master in chopping logic with the other students.
He remarks, immediately after the scene in which Faustus has
bargained with MephostophiIis, that the Clown 'would giue his
soule to the Diuel for a shoulder of mutton' (iv 9-10). Similarly,
the hostlers, Rafe and Robin, burlesque the conjuration of
Doctor Faustus; their scene, which is out of place in the 1604
text, should come after the scene in which Mephostophilis
provides Faustus with conjuring books; for Robin, it appears,
has just stolen one of those potent volumes; and Rafe, with its
help, expects to seduce Nan Spit the kitchen maid, even as
Faustus' necromancy will capture the love of Helen of Troy.
Before this comedy team joined Marlowe's dramatis personae,
 Science without Conscience 151
Rafe and Robin had parts in Lyly's Galatea, where they played
their pranks with alchemist's equipment; but there they had little
connection with the main plot, while their roles are intrinsic - if
not essential- to Doctor Faustus. And while the comic underplot
reduces the main plot of Marlowe's drama to absurdity, the
overplot is luminously adumbrated - sketched, as it were, in
lightning against a black sky. It is the adumbration of Faustus'
downfall, glimpsed in the aboriginal tragedy of the fallen
archangel. Victor Hugo's formulation for western art, the inter-
mixture of grotesque and sublime, could not adduce a more
pertinent example.
How grandly all is planned! (Wie gross ist alles angelegtI)
Goethe's appreciation of Doctor Faustus, as recorded by Crabb
Robinson, must refer primarily to its conception . In its execution,
it adheres somewhat too faithfully to the undramatic sequence of
the Faustbook, The opening scenes are necessarily explicit in
underlining the conditions of the pact; but, as a result, the play
is half over before the document is ratified and Faustus can start
out upon his adventures. Out of the 1,485 lines in the 1604
Quarto, 791 have gone by before he leaves Wittenberg for
Rome. The 1616 Quarto augments the ensuing scenes and links
them loosely together with allusions to the papal-imperial
struggle, which Rowley apparently gathered from Foxe's Book
of Martyrs. But both versions move anticlimactically from the
Pope and the Emperor to the Duchess of Vanholt and the trivial
incident of the grapes. This, in the text of 1604, concludes a
scene which commences at the Emperor's court and includes
midway the buffooneries of the Horse-Courser. Faustus is well
advised to pause for an instant and meditate on the restless course
of time. Such drastic telescoping seems to indicate an acting
version constrained by the narrow resources of a touring com-
pany. It is divided into fourteen continuous scenes, whereas the
text of 1616 is subdivided into twenty scenes which editors
distribute among five Acts. Viewed in outline, the plot is per-
fectly classicalin its climactic ascent: the conjuration of Mephos-
tophilis, the compact with Lucifer, the travels to Rome and else-
where, the necromantic evocations, and the catastrophe. Faustus'
152 HARRY LEVIN

rise is harder to triangulate than the careers of Marlowe's other

heroes, because each worldly step is a spiritual lapse. Examined
more technically, the play has a strong beginning and an even
stronger end; but its middle section, whether we abridge it or
bombast it out with Rowley's hackwork, is unquestionably
weak. The structural weakness, however, corresponds to the
anticlimax of the parable; it lays bare the gap between promise and
fruition, between the bright hopes of the initial scene and the
abysmal consequences of the last. 'As the outline of the character
is grand and daring,' William Hazlitt has said, 'the execution is
abrupt and fearful.'
At the request of the Emperor, Faustus has evoked no less a
shade than Alexander the Great, archetype of libido dominandi. For
the edification and pleasure of the scholars, when he returns to
the university, he evokes the archetype of libido sentiendi. Among
all the beautiful women who ever lived, they have agreed that
Helen of Troy is peerless, 'the pride of natures workes', the
'onely Paragon of excellence' (xviii 33-4). Disputation is silenced
when she makes her fugitive appearance in their incongruous
quarters. Since the days when Marlowe studied the classics at
Cambridge, Helen had been his cynosure of comparison - com-
parison with Zenocrate in Tamburlaine and even with Gaveston
in Edward I I. But metaphor is never enough for Marlowe; he
must have the real thing, beauty in person; in The Jew of Malta
policy was personified by Machiavelli himself; and the con-
summation of Faustus' desire - or the consolation, at any rate,
for his regret - is to have Helen as his paramour. Mephostophilis
produces her 'in twinckling of an eie' (xviii 98); and the glamour
of the subsequent lines has obscured this interesting verbal
coinage of Marlowe's, an apt phrase for a magician's assistant
engaged in bringing off his employer's most spectacular trick.
This, of all occasions, is the one to which language must rise; and,
in so doing, it brilliantly redeems the shortcomings of previous
episodes. The apostrophe to Helen stands out from its context,
not because anthologists excerpt it, but because Marlowe care-
fully designed it to be a set piece, a purple passage, a supreme
invitation to love. Its lyrical formality, its practised handling of
 Science withoutConscience
stylistic and prosodic devices from his established repertory, set
it off from the pithy prose, the sharp dialectic, the nervous
colloquies and rhythmic variations ofhis maturing style. Charac-
teristically, it does not offer any physical description of the
heroine. It estimates, as Homer did, her impact. How should
Faustus react to the sight that had stirred the elders of Troy to
forget their arguments in admiration? Chapman would render
their winged words in his Iliad:

What man can blame

The Greekes and Trojans to endure, for so Admir'd a Dame,
So many miseries, and so long? In her sweet countenance shine
Lookes like the Goddesses. (III
That could be a marginal gloss for Marlowe's twenty lines,
which constitute three fairly symmetrical strophes. The starting
point for the first, the invocation, is the most rhetorical of ques-
tions. Though it is Marlowe's culminating hyperbole, it may not
strike us with the fullest impact, precisely because it has struck
so often before, because it has been echoed and re-echoed as one
of the striking exaggerations of poetry - like the tower of ivory
in the Song of Songs. The thousand ships are not exaggerated;
they are specified by Ovid's matter-of-fact account of the Trojan
War in the Metamorphoses (XII 7); but here poetic audacity
intervenes to transpose a lover's emotion into a large-scale naval
operation. The topless towers are recurrent symbols for illimitable
aspiration, and Marlowe habitually juxtaposes them to the all-
consuming element af fire. Cavalierly he poses a moral issue,
and the alternative is absolute: the destruction of a city, the
calamities of war, the world well lost, all for love.

Was this the face that lancht a thousand shippes?

And burnt the toplesse Towres of Ilium?
Sweete Helen, make me immortall with a kissee
(xviii 99-101)
The third line is an implicit stage direction, leading on to the
enactment of a metaphysical conceit; whereupon Faustus claims
that Helen's lips suck forth his soul, and then reclaims it with
154 HARRY LEVIN

another kiss. Underneath their amorous byplay runs the dis-

turbing hint that she may be a succuba; this may not be the only
world that is at stake for him. When Dido wooed Aeneas and
spoke of becoming 'immortall with a kisse' (line 1329), it seemed
to be little more than a figure of speech. For Faustus immortality
means vastly more than that, in one way if not in another, al-
though he may actually get no closer to heaven than Helen's
embrace. No wonder he changes his evaluation from other-
worldly to mercenary terms:
Here wil I dwel, for heauen be in these lips,
And all is drosse that is not Helena. (xviii 104-5)
The second strophe is in the active mode of Tamhurlaine, and the
phrase 'I wil' resounds through it. Since Helen is notoriously a
casus belli, Faustus proposes to re-enact the Trojan War through
the sack of Wittenberg. He will be Paris as, in parody, Ithamore
would be Jason, with Bellamira for his golden fleece. Faustus
challenges the Greek heroes to a tournament, imagined as a
medieval tapestry rather than a classical frieze, a colourful but
two-dimensional representation of the basic conflict between
pagan and Christian values. In the third strophe the knight, re-
turning to the lady he has championed, salutes her with a gallant
array of invidious comparisons and mythological superlatives.
He modulates from the threat to the persuasion, the more passive
mode of Edward II. If he cannot visualize Helen distinctly, it is
because she bedazzles him. Her fairness, outshining the starlight,
surpasses the goddesses - or is it the gods?
Brighter art thou then flaming Iupiter,
When he appeard to haplesse Semele,
More louely then the monarke of the skie
In wanton Arethusaes azurde armes. (xviii II4-17)
It is not to these nymphs, but to Jupiter himself, that Helen is
being compared. Strange as this may seem, it is not inconsistent
with the prologue's allusion to a masculine muse. It throws some
light back on the offer of Mephostophilis to procure the fairest
of women for Faustus, be they as chaste as Penelope, as wise as
the Queen ofSheba,
 Science withoutConscience
or as beautiful
As was bright Lucifer before his fall. (v 157-8)
Helen, whatever she is, whoever she was, says nothing. Her
part is purely visual, entirely mute. Faustus might almost be
talking to himself, and when we notice how many ofhis speeches
are addressed to himself, the play becomes a kind of interior
monologue. Whatever satisfaction he obtains from Helen is
bound to be illusory; as a necromancer he knows in advance
that the shadow is not substantial, that the apparition he has
materialized will vanish sooner or later. The Faustbook reports
that she bore him a child, which disappeared - along with its
mother- on the day of Faustus' death. Was it a vision orawaking
dream, or does the fair exterior disguise some hideous monster
like Keats's Lamia? Lucian, in his Dialogues oftheDead, pictures
Menippus descending into the underworld, inquiring after
Helen, and being shown a skeleton. Yes, Hermes assures him,
this was the skull that caused the Greeks to launch a thousand
ships. And the refrain is the timeless Ubi sunti Where are they
now - Helen, Thais, Dido, Zenocrate? Marlowe cannot have
been insensitive to the traditional mood so poignantly expressed
by his sometime collaborator, Thomas Nashe:
Brightnesse falls from the ayre,
Queenes have died yong and faire,
Dust hath closde Helens eye....
It is not for nothing that Faustus characterizes Helen by her face,
with the connotation of skin-deep beauty as opposed to harsh
truth. His rhetoric is an ornate facade, an aesthetic surface mask-
ing an ethical reality. A third dimension is given to the speech by
the entrance - after the first strophe - of a third character, who is
indubitably real. This is the Old Man, whom the Faustbook:
identifies as a neighbour, the exemplary figure whom Marlowe
employs as a spokesman for Christianity and a counterweight
for the ideal of paganism. It is he who penetrates Faustus'
conscience:
Breake heart, drop bloud, and mingle it with teares,
(xviii 42.)
1;6 HARRY LEVIN

Faustus admits his sinfulness and might be moved to repent, were

it not for the threatening Mephostophilis and the enticing Helen.
When Faustus sweeps her off the stage, it is the Old Man who
stays to pronounce the moral; and while Faustus enjoys her
elusive favours, the Old Man is 'sifted' and tried by devils; but
his faith triumphs over Satan's pride, and he ascends to heaven
while the fiends sink back into hell. The absence of this crucial
speech is a reason for continuing to distrust the 1616 Quarto.
With every scene the pace of the drama accelerates, reaching a
climax with the final monologue, which syncopates an hour into
fifty-nine lines. This is much too fast, and we share the suspense
with Faustus, whose contract expires at midnight; and yet, in a
sense, it is slow enough to fathom - as it were - the thoughts of a
drowning man. It is a soliloquy in the profoundest sense, since it
isolates the speaker; at the end, as at the beginning, we find him
alone in his study. Tragedy is an isolating experience. To each of
us, as to Proust on the death of his grandmother, it conveys the
realization that we are truly alone. When the time comes, each
tragic protagonist must say, with Shakespeare's Juliet:
My dismaIISceane, I needs must act alone.
(IV iii 19)
So with Faustus, whose fellow scholars rally him for becoming
'ouer solitary' (xix 33). They must leave him to his solitude, just
as the friends ofEveryman desert him on his way to the grave. In
contradistinction to the specious grandeur of Faustus' apostrophe
to Helen, his last words are an inner revelation, the excruciated
agony of a lost soul. It is now too late for vauntin g or pleading;
it is Marlowe's occasion to develop the less characteristic mode of
lamentation; and he does so with the utmost resourcefulness,
timing and complicating his flexible rhythms to catch the
agitations of Faustus' tortured mind. It is hard to think of anoth er
single speech, even in Shakespeare, which demands more from
the actor or offers him more. Edward Alleyn, in a surplice with a
cross upon it, was famed for his portra yal of the part and may
well have left some marks upon these lines. They begin, with a
portentous sound effect, at the stroke ofeleven:
 Science without Conscience 157
AhFaustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hower to liue,
And then thou must be damnd perpetually.
(xix 133-5)
Time is the essence, and also the substance of the soliloquy. Its
underlying contrast between eternity and transience is heavily
enforced, in this distich, by a slow succession of monosyllables
leading up to the rapid adverb, with the hypermetrical syllable,
'perpetually'. Words of comparable significance - 'ever', 'still',
'forever', 'everlasting' - abound throughout. Where Edward im-
plored the sun to gallop apace and hasten events, Faustus now
bids the planetary system stand still. A humanist to the last, he
recalls a line from O vid's Elegies:
o lente, lente curitenoctisequi. (xix 142)
The utterance falls ironically, but not inappropriately, from the
lips of the scholar turned sensualist, the erstwhile lover of Helen
of Troy. The difference is vast between his motive for wanting
the dawn to be postponed and the classical lover's plea to Aurora.
As Marlowe himselfhad rendered it:
Now in her tender armes I sweetly bide,
If euer, now well lies she by my side.
The aire is cold, and slecpe is sweetest now
And birdes send forth shrill notes from euery bough:
Whither runst thou, that men, and women loue not?
Hold in thy rosy horses that they moue not •••
But heldst thou in thine armes some Cephalus,
Then wouldst thou cry, stay night and runne not thus.
(I xiii 5-40)
Such a miracle might be accomplished at the behest ofthe gods,
as Jupiter boasted in Dido; but for Faustus, all too human, the
spheres go on revolving. Soon it will be his tum to be tormented;
and he is not armed, as the Old Man was, with faith. Suddenly he
seems to witness an epiphany. 'See see: he exclaims, 'where
Christs blood streames in the firmament' (xix 146). The line
echoes and answers Tamburlaine's final challenge, when he
threatened to march against the powers of heaven and 'set black.e
 HARRY LEVIN

streamers in the firmament'. The change ofcolours is emblematic

of two opposing attitudes towards death: massacre for the man of
war, sacrifice for the man of peace. When Faustus excommuni-
cated himself by signing the deed, his own blood was ominously
reluctant to flow. He asked, 'Why streames it not?' (v 66) and
coals were brought to warm it - more omens. Blood, for the
Guise, was the only fluid that could extinguish the flames of
lawless ambition; but Faustus is denied the blood of Christ, the
only thing that could save him, because of his own denial. 'The
heauy wrath of God' (xix 153), as the good Angel admonished,
is now on his head; and his diction grows scriptural, echoing the
Prophets and the Apocalypse, as he vainly thinks of hiding from
the 'irefull browes' of Jehovah. The striking of the half-hour
alerts him again to temporal considerations, both relative and
absolute.
o no end is limited to damned soules. (xix 171)
Damnation is an unlooked-for way of transcending limits and
approaching infinity; it is immortality with a vengeance; and
Faustus would rather be a soulless beast and look forward to
oblivion. Marlowe elsewhere uses the trope of "water drops'
when he reckons innumerable quantities. Here, with fire in the
offing, they are a welcome mirage of dissolution; now, from the
combining elements, a vapour ascends. If time oscillates between
swiftness and slowness, space is measured by the span between
heaven and hell. Although those two words are paired off
against each other in this speech and through the play, somehow
'hell' and its cognates occur fifty-eight times to forty-nine
occurrences for 'heaven' - the proportion is forty-five to twenty-
seven in the shorter edition. Faustus is accorded a glimpse of
paradise in the Faustbook; the 1616 Quarto directs the 'throne',
the Elizabethan god-in-the-machine, briefly to descend from the
'heavens', the roof of the stage; while hell, which is also con-
veniently adjacent to the localities of the play, yawns in a
discovery scene. The denouement is a foregone conclusion: 'for
vaine pleasure of 24 yeares hath Faustus lost eternall ioy and
felicitie' (xix 64- 6).
 Science without Conscience 159
As the clock strikes twelve, with thunder and lightning, the
leaping demons enter to carry him off; in terror he makes his last
offer to bum his books, and his very last word is the shriek,
'Mephostophilis'. He makes his definitive exit through the
monstrous jaws of the hell-mouth. That popular but obsolete
property, which Marlowe resurrected from the mysteries,
symbolizes pain and punishment more terribly than the sordid
details of Edward's murder and more pitifully than the crude
melodrama of Barabas' caldron. There is one more scene in the
1616 version, where the scholars interchange proper moral
sentiments; like the sextet at the end of Don Giovanni, it seems
unduly sententious after what has just happened; and, with some
justification, it is not printed in the Quarto of 1604. The Chorus,
or Wagner, draws the arras across the inner stage, and the black
curtain prevails over the smoking red grotesquerie. If the classical
imagery of the epilogue is at odds with its medieval purport, this
reflects the tension of the play. If the branch is cut, if Apollo's
laurel is burnt, let it be an object lesson for those 'forward wits'
who are so enticed by 'deepnesse'. The celestial-infernal anti-
thesis is conclusively asserted, and the workings of 'heauenly
power' are discerned in the 'hellish fall' of Doctor Faustus. Thus
the tragedy is framed by the fundamental dogmas of Christian
morality. How far, then, should they be taken literally? How far
do they merely furnish Marlowe with expressionistic scenery?
How far was he utilizing theology as a modem playwright might
utilize psychology? Faustus has maintained that hell is a fable,
and Mephostophilis has declared - in an unexpected burst of
humanistic fervour - that man is more excellent than heaven.
Doctor Faustus' worst mistake has been to confound hell with
Elysium. Between the classic shades and the quenchless flames,
even in Tamhurlaine, Marlowe had discriminated. If heaven was
placed in hell, or hell in heaven, the inversion had to be reversed;
and the reversal is all the more decisive in DoctorFaustus because
it comes as a recognition, and because the movement ofMarlowe's
imagination - at its uppermost - turns and takes a plunge into
the abyss.
Unless, with the credulous members ofhis audience, we regard
160 HARRY LEVIN

his fireworks as sparks ofhellfire, we must assume that Marlowe's

Inferno is a genuine but un localized phenomenon. In the same
spirit, Paracelsus repeatedly averred that there is a heaven in each
of us, and Milton's Satan announces: 'My self am Hell' (IV 75).
There is a god infused through the universe, so it was affirmed in
Tamhurlaine; and there is a hell which has no limits, Faustus is in-
formed by Mephostophilis. Every man, according to his lights
and through his own endeavours, has a chance to know both; and
Milton is not being paradoxical when Satan announces in Paradise
Lost:
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n,
( 1 2 54- 5)

The Seven Deadly Sins, the Good and Evil An gels, Mephosto-
philis himself, upon this level, may be regarded as materializa-
tions like Helen of Troy. 'Hell striues with grace' in a psycho-
machia, a spiritual battle within the breast of Faustus (xviii 72).
Pointedly. the Old Man rebukes him for excluding 'the grace of
heauen' from his soul (xviii 120). It is plainly lacking, but has he
excluded it? Before his blood was dry on the parchment, he was
thoroughly remorseful; and his remorse, increasing over his
pleasure, gradually deepens into the hopeless despair of his con-
cluding soliloquy.

Contrition, prayer, repentance: what of them? (v 17)

he has wondered; he has resolved to renounce his magic, and

been distracted by his Evil Angel. Later, when his Good An gel
all but persuades him to repent, he tries; but his heart is so
hardened that he can scarcely utter such words as 'saluation,
faith, or heauen' (vi 19). Yet he does so, with no little eloquence;
and, by uttering the name of God, he prays - albeit no more
effectually than Claudius in Hamlet. As between the 'Neuer too
late' of the Good Angel and the 'Too late' of the Evil Angel, the
latter prevails with a Manichsean fatality (vi 81-2). Christian
doctrine vouchsafes mercy to repentant sinners:

Tush, Christ did call the thiefe vpon the Crosse. (xv 25)
 Science without Conscience 161

Even 'the Serpent that tempted Eue may be sau'd (xix 41-2).
Then why not Faustus? Having become a spirit in form and
substance, has he ceased to be a man? Why, when the Old Man all
but converts him, should Faustus accept the dagger of Mephos-
tophilis? Why, when he calls upon Christ, is it Lucifer who
emerges? George Santayana, acting as devil's advocate, and
felicitously stating the case for Faustus as a martyr to the ideals
of the Renaissance, would argue that he 'is damned by accident
or by predestination; he is brow-beaten by the devil and forbid-
den to repent when he has really repented'. The pedestrian
counter-argument would be based on the Faustbook's account of
Faustus, 'neuer falling to repentance truly' but 'in all his opinions
doubtfull, without faith or hope'. Luther, followed by such Eng-
lish theologians as Richard Hooker, in his revolt against Catho-
licism had made contr ition so difficult that at times it seemed
virtually unattainable. What was worse for Faustus, he was no
ordinary sinner; he was, like Marlowe himself, that impenitent
and wilful miscreant whom Elizabethan preachers termed a
scorner. Far from denying sin or its wages, death, his course of
action was premised on their inevitability: Che sera, sera. This
led him, not to fatalism, but to an extreme act of the will- namely,
the commission of an unpardonable sin, a sin against the Holy
Ghost. Casuistry could have found theological loopholes, had a
penitent Faustus been conceivable. But that would have pre-
supposed an orthodox Marlowe.
As a measure of his heterodoxy, it has proved suggestive to
compare Doctor Faustus with El Mdgico Prodigioso, the sacra-
mental drama of Calderon, grounded upon the analogous legend
of Saint Cyprian. There the magician repents, forswears his
magic, is converted to Christianity and undergoes martyrdom-
to be reunited in heaven with his lady, who also dies a Christian
martyr. Death is a happy ending in the next world, after the
uncertainties and horrors of life here below. Tragedy is inter-
cepted by eschatology. Extremes meet, when we glance away
from that simple and reassuring cosmos toward the chaos of
modernity, and to the magistral exploration of it that Goethe
achieved in his Faust. Goethe's Faust is a man of affirmations,
 HARRY LEVIN

bedeviled by a spirit of denial, whom he overreaches in the end

by what - to sterner moralists - might well seem a legalistic ruse.
He is free to stray so long as he strives; the forfeit need only be
paid when he is satisfied with the passing moment. Though he is
momentarily tempted to express such satisfaction, it is not
occasioned by the present but by the prospect of a better world
in the future. Hence his soul remains his own, on condition that
he persist in his strivings toward the infinite, aided and comforted
by eternal womanhood. Tragedy is here defeated by optimism.
Enlightenment and humanitarianism absolve and regenerate
Faust, just as salvation cancels out sin in that unworldly world
of the Middle Ages which is still reflected by Calder6n. Balancing
precariously between those two worlds, Marlowe achieves his
tragic equilibrium: the conviction of sin without the belief in
salvation. That is sheer damnation; but damnation is man's
unmitigated lot; this is hell, nor are we out of it. Such a pessi-
mistic view is woefully incomplete; but tragedy is an intensive
rather than a comprehensive inquiry, which concentrates upon
the problem of evil and the nature of suffering. When Marlowe
swerved from his predilection for the good things of life, he
concentrated upon the evils with unflinching - not to say un-
bearable- intensity.
Do ctor Faustus does not have the coherence of Calder6n's
ethos or the stature of Goethe's protagonist; yet, contrasted with
the English play, the Spanish seems naive and the German senti-
mental. We need not push these contrasts invidiously, given the
differences in time and place, in poetic language and dramatic
convention. Given the unchallengeable greatness of Goethe's
achievement, it is noteworthy that certain readers have pre-
ferred Marlowe's treatment of the legend - notably Scott and
Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, all of them conceivably biased by
their cultural leanings, and by their unfamiliarity with the second
part of Faust. The first part, the romantic and domestic drama of
Gretchen, admittedly belongs to Goethe's little world; it may
have been in emulation of Marlowe that Goethe went on to
investigate the macrocosm. It may well be that Faustus has less
in common with Faust than with Euphorion, the hybrid offspring
 Science without Conscience
of Faust and Goethe's Helena, who meets a premature death by
attempting to fly. It may well be, in spite of Marlowe's narrower
range and less philosophical outlook, that he grasped the core of
his subject more objectively and with a keener awareness of its
implications; that, because his background was nearer to
obscurantism than to enlightenment, he appreciated the hazards
and pangs of free-thinking. A later epoch than Goethe's with less
faith in progress or hope for individualism, may feel itself in
closer accord with the earlier poet. It cannot dream about flying,
with Leonardo, since the dream has not only come true but
turned into a nightmare. It can add very little, except for amen,
to the admonition of Rabelais that science is ruinous without
conscience. It cannot but discern its culture-hero in the ancient
myth of Icarus, in Cervantes' twice-told tale of the curious
impertinent, above all in Marlowe's tragedy of the scientific
libertine who gained control over nature while losing control of
himself.
'The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
& God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a
true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Blake's
problematic note to The Marriage ofHeaven andHeO, like most
paradoxes, stresses a neglected facet of a complicated truth, at the
expense ofwhat is more obvious. Marlowe, much more obviously
than Milton, is committed to this kind of poetic diabolism; and,
conversely, Marlowe can write with genuine yearning of paradise
lost. No doubt he yeams all the more avidly with Faustus, but
with Faustus he condemns himself; the Good Angel and the Old
Man are at liberty, while Mephostophilis is in perpetual fetters.
Yet, it is just at this point that Marlowe abandons his preoccu-
pation with unfettered soaring, and seems to submit himself to
ideas of durance, torment, and constraint. If he is imaginatively
identified with any character, it is no longer Faustus; it is
Mephostophilis, who suffers with Faustus like a second self yet
also plays the cosmic ironist, wise in his guilty knowledge and
powerful in his defeated rebellion. Through his agency Marlowe
succeeds in setting the parable of intelligence and experience
within a Christian framework, even while hinting that the
164 HARRY LEVIN

framework is arb itrary and occasionally glancing beyond it.

Such is the attitude of ambivalent supplication that Hart Crane
rephrases in his poem 'For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen';
Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
The imagination spans beyond despair,
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
Such is the way in which Goethe's Faust eluded his devil's
bargain, and it applies to Marlowe if not to Faustus. If hell is
destruction, it follows that heaven is creation; and perhaps the
highest form of creation is that engendered out of the very forces
of destruction, the imagination spanning beyond despair. Perhaps
we may say of Marlowe what the Florentines said of Dante: this
man has been in hell. As we broadly interpret that concept, many
men have been there; but few have mastered their terrors and
returned to communicate that mastery.

SOURCE: Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (1954). Origin-

ally published in the United States as The Overreacher: A Study
ofChristopher Marlowe (1952).