42 pages • 1 hour read
Christopher MarloweDoctor Faustus
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1589A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Elizabethan Drama
Playwriting flourished during the Elizabethan era. Marlowe and Shakespeare are the most famous of the late-1500s playwrights. In a tradition going back hundreds of years, characters—especially the high-born—often spoke in verse rather than prose. Lines typically contained 8, 10, or 12 syllables bunched together in twos or threes, with stresses on the first, second, or third syllable of every bunch. However, Marlowe employed a then-innovative approach: blank verse iambic pentameter, or lines with five two-syllable beats and no rhyme scheme.
Iambs contain two syllables, with stress placed on the second syllable, as in tah-DUM. Pentameter, meaning five measures, contains five sets of iambs per line. For example, early in the play, Faustus says:
Wouldst thou make men to live eternally,
Or, being dead, raise them to life again? (3).
The first line would be stressed: “Wouldst THOU make MEN to LIVE e-TERN-al-LY.” (Note that actors don’t push hard on the stressed syllables but instead let the rhythm form naturally as they speak.) The lines don’t rhyme; hence, the verse is “blank.” This format proved popular; Shakespeare quickly adopted it and made further innovations, and today iambic pentameter is best known from his works.
However, some sections of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays are written in plain prose, usually dialogue for commoners. Class rankings were important in the Elizabethan era, and this device helped audiences understand a given character’s social status, which helped them better comprehend the relationships between characters. It also enabled Marlowe to include scenes that were inelegantly comedic or downright bawdy.
Audiences of the time demanded action, romance, and comedy, and Marlowe made sure there was plenty of each in Doctor Faustus. The doctor slashes his arm and uses his own blood to write the deed to his soul; he soars across Europe, visiting cities at will; he makes famous dead people reappear; and he enjoys an intimate evening with Helen of Troy. Faustus also engages in slapstick comedy in an encounter with the pope.
Meanwhile, Faustus’s servant Wagner makes humorous fun of scholars and engages in his own slapstick, conjuring demons to humiliate a street busker. Stable boys Robin and Ralph try their hand at magic and get their comeuppance from Mephistophilis, who puts fireworks in their pants and turns them into an ape and a dog. Doctor Faustus’s moral philosophy is thus presented not in a solemn sermon but in an adventure filled with entertainment.
Historical Context: The Renaissance
The Renaissance began in the 1400s and spread to the rest of Europe. By the mid-1500s it had arrived in England, bringing with it rediscovered texts of ancient Greece and Rome. Antiquity seemed like a golden age, and scholars pored over the old manuscripts seeking inspiration. Ideas that had been tucked away for a thousand years, deep within musty medieval monastic libraries, once again saw the light of day, and the possibilities for human improvement—or at least a rebirth of the greatness of classical culture—made it a time of optimism. The old texts brought with them dreams of powers long lost that might solve age-old problems.
Into this ferment comes Marlowe’s play about a scholar whose ambitions exceed his grasp and who dares to defy old Christian rules to attain his desires. Doctor Faustus is loosely based on a 1587 book by Johann Spies that tells stories of a German magician, alchemist, and astrologer named Johann Georg Fausten, who lived an itinerant, controversial life and died sometime after 1541. Many of these stories are likely made up; some are old folk tales tacked on to his biography. Marlowe’s play presents Faust as a brilliant scholar tempted to sell his soul for wealth and power. Audiences were thrilled by onstage demons that some viewers swore were real. (Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Clarendon Press, 1923.)
All the classic tomes rediscovered during the Renaissance go to Faustus’s head, and he believes he can outsmart God and the devil. The play warns its public that those who grow arrogant with the improvements taking place in Europe, and who believe they can flout the laws of God and nature to achieve their ends, will come to a bad conclusion.
Religious Context: The Challenge to Catholicism
The Renaissance put tremendous pressure on the power of the Catholic Church. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, the capital of the last vestiges of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453, Greek scholars escaped from the city and migrated to Italy, bringing with them texts that revitalized European understanding of ancient beliefs. At the same time, scholars recovered ancient texts preserved in European monasteries. Some of the ancients’ ideas cast doubt on church teachings.
Meanwhile, Gutenberg’s new printing press made knowledge much more widely available. In 1517 a renowned priest, Martin Luther, publicly broke with the Catholic Church; his tracts and German translation of the Bible, widely distributed by printing, gave new freedom to worshipers, who began to protest the Vatican’s overweening authority. Wars broke out between Catholic and Protestant regions.
Such battles also plagued England, but during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in the second half of the 1500s, the Protestants held sway. Marlowe’s story about a man who defies the Christian God had to entertain but not offend. His audience was mostly Protestant; Marlowe therefore chose to have Faustus commit his worst religious offenses against the Catholic pope. This takes place in an extended scene in which Faustus, magically invisible, strikes the pope on the head and beats up his monks. The scenes are intended to amuse the Protestant audience, as Faustus steals banquet food, mocks the pope and his retinue, and, with Mephistophilis’s assistance, tosses fireworks at them.
In yet another dig at Catholicism, Faustus orders Mephistophilis not to appear in his grotesque demonic form, but instead to “Go, and return an old Franciscan friar; / That holy shape becomes a devil best” (12). In this scene and the scene with the pope, Marlowe blasphemes not Protestant beliefs but Catholic traditions.
Related Titles
By Christopher Marlowe
