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.
Themes
The Arrogance of Knowledge
Lucifer, at one time a favorite angel of God, was expelled from heaven for becoming prideful. Faustus, a revered intellectual, grows conceited and pays a similar price. The overriding moral of the play is that great human achievement doesn’t entitle someone to break the laws of God and man, and that those who do will be punished everlastingly.
Faustus displays early intellectual talent, even genius, and he rises from the anonymity of commoner status to the heights of scholarly renown. At Wittenberg University, where he earns a doctorate in philosophy—at the time, philosophy covered scholarly activities in the humanities and the sciences—Faustus holds forth as a true Renaissance man with knowledge in many fields of study. His expertise covers religion, law, and medicine, and his skills as a debater and lecturer add to his fame. Faustus resides at the top of his profession, but his ambitions outgrow the limits of ordinary human activity. He wants more—“A sound magician is a mighty god” (5)—and the best way to fulfill this lofty dream is in the company of demons.
The Renaissance brought new ideas and new ways to deal with old problems. The thought that human knowledge could grant people more and more power might beguile persons of intellect, to the point that some would dream of limitless capabilities. No longer was power restricted to kings and emperors; it now lay open to anyone bright enough to grasp the deeper laws of nature newly uncovered by scientists. Already they had begun to figure out the clockwork motions of the planets; what lay ahead could only be imagined.
Marlowe understood this, and the great appeal of Doctor Faustus, from its first performance to today, shows that he read his audience well. Changes brought about by new discoveries can make people uneasy; given the beliefs common at the time, it was no great leap to imagine someone of high mental accomplishment delving too deeply into a field of knowledge, perhaps some form of magic, and producing new wonders that end in disaster.
Faustus’s spells and charms serve as placeholders for any technology that causes its practitioner’s head to swell with arrogant pride. Modern scientists rush headlong toward a future they believe will be limitless, but their creations also contain the power to undo the environment, worsen pandemics, and destroy humanity altogether through total war. The power of knowledge must be handled with humility; Faustus’s arrogance, and the price he pays for it, is a warning that remains as apt today as it was during Marlowe’s time.
The Agonies of Hell
Humans suffer and yearn throughout their lives; Doctor Faustus suggests that this is because Earth itself is part of hell. Faustus asks Mephistophilis how, if he is condemned to hell, he can leave it to visit Earth; the demon replies, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it” (13). The demon further explains that, at the end of time, all that is not heaven will be part of hell.
If Earth is already part of hell, yet humans live there in hopeful worship of God, then hell’s real torments—both for its demons and the human souls condemned to reside there forever—consist chiefly of the knowledge that they can never attain the perfect happiness of heaven. Faustus’s earthly adventures—and those of all people—take place on the portico of eternal damnation. Hell is much closer to humanity than is heaven.
Mephistophilis, who stood with Lucifer against God and was similarly exiled, admits that he suffers for his crimes:
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,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss? (13).
Lucifer himself feels constant agony from his eternal exile. Thus, the overlords of hell suffer alongside their prisoners.
Faustus, driven by his extreme desire for worldly success, downplays his fears of a hellacious afterlife to himself and others. He even dismisses Mephistophilis’s claim of demonic suffering: “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, / And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess” (13).
It is not until his artificially glorious life on Earth ends that Faustus realizes he has traded temporary pleasures for infinite agony. He doesn’t appreciate what he could have had until it’s gone. Now, his regret will torment him forever.
The Finality of Death
The subject of death hovers over the play like an avenging angel. Life is finite, but death is endless; thus, humans must consider whether their years on Earth might affect their chances in the afterlife. The predominant belief in Elizabethan England and most of the rest of Europe was that death was a crossroads beyond which human souls either made their way to heaven or fell into the pit of hell.
Early on, Faustus reckons with his mortality by trading it for worldly power; he knows he will die eventually and wants to spend the intervening years in as intensely gratifying a manner as possible. For this, he’s willing to do evil. He downplays the unpleasant possibilities that might accrue to his own afterlife: “What God can hurt thee, Faustus? Thou art safe; / Cast no more doubts” (19).
Entranced by his own greed for power, glory, and wealth, Faustus employs dark magic to conjure a prince of hell, Mephistophilis, who transmits Faustus’s offer of his eternal soul to the devil in exchange for extraordinary worldly success. Lucifer is only too glad to accept, since the years spent servicing Faustus’s every desire are a small price to pay to acquire his soul and plunge it into the flames of hell forever.
It’s trivial for a scholar of Faustus’s stature to recognize the difference between 24 years and infinity, but his avarice blinds him to the costs of his earthly binge. Faustus makes the classic mistake of favoring short-term pleasure for long-term pain. Lucifer is in no hurry to disabuse Faustus of his arithmetic error. Years mean little to the fallen angel; he can wait.
Had Faustus instead bargained for an eternity of power on Earth followed by an equally long eternity in hell, he might have tricked the devil into giving him a better deal. But nothing lasts forever, not even the Earth, while the afterlife continues without end, and the devil knows this.
Other forms of death receive their due. Faustus learns that he cannot bring the dead back to life; all he can do is simulate them, and he conjures up Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy. This amazes his audience, but it’s artificial, an elaborate parlor trick. No one has truly been brought back from their afterlife.
The pope tries to excommunicate Faustus for his insolence—excommunication is a kind of social death by shunning, which can lead to starvation and physical death—but Faustus interrupts the ceremony, heedless of churchly opprobrium, because he assumes his fate already is sealed.
Many times, Faustus receives the opportunity to repent and change his eternal future. His friends, the Good Angel, and even the mysterious Old Man try to help him, but Faustus hesitates, drawn relentlessly toward his ambition of earthly supremacy, until even repentance will do him no good. He must die and go to hell.
In the end, his 24-year obsession with power and glory constitute an elaborate distraction from the inevitability of death; kissing Helen of Troy serves only as his final evasion. Faustus’s solution to the puzzle of life and death is spectacular but ultimately disastrous. Midnight chimes on the clock of his life, as it does eventually for all people, and Faustus must meet his fate.
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By Christopher Marlowe
