Marlowe's restless Doctor Faustus - I’ll burn my books!

In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the great scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of power and knowledge.  After learning and doing everything he wants he spends Acts III and IV playing an increasingly stupid series of pranks on anyone and everyone, including himself.  In Act V, in one of the great scenes of the English stage, the bill comes due and we all go home having learned an edifying moral lesson.

This is Marlowe’s richest play, really packed with ideas and conceits.  Stephen Greenblatt, in Dark Renaissance (2025), pushes a strong autobiographical reading onto this play more than any other.  He likes the idea that Marlowe sold his soul to Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, and has lightly shifted his own dilemma onto Faust.

My reading is also pretty autobiographical.  Marlowe’s great subject is power, pure power in the Tamburlaine plays, wealth as power in The Jew of Malta, knowledge as power here.  In Doctor Faustus, though, he is more explicit about a subtext of the earlier plays, that the characters love the pursuit of power but have little idea of what to do with it.  The great motivation of Faustus (and Barabas, and Tamburlaine) is restlessness.  He, and they, and I suspect Marlowe, are easily bored.

We first see him with his books, leafing through Aristotle:

Sweet analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me.  (I.1, p. 7)

But he is now bored with philosophy, law, medicine,, theology.  Magic is just the next subject for the restless scholar to master, and then, presumably, although somehow he cannot see this, to abandon.  Mephistopheles gives him a set of books containing all the secrets of the universe, and that is that, everything he wanted to know with no effort.  What’s next?

Thus the strange middle of Doctor Faustus, where after learning grows stale Faustus resorts to pranks and tricks to keep himself entertained, foreshadowed by an earlier clown scene:

ROBIN  O, this is admirable!  Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and I’faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use.  Now I will make all the maidens in our parish dance naked  before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet.  (II.2, 26)

The brilliant Faustus has trouble coming up with uses of his endless power much more interesting than making the girls dance naked.

The prank scenes are pretty silly, and could easily be replaced by other, similar scenes, and perhaps sometimes were, but I think they carry Marlowe’s themes.

I wonder to what extent the audience for Doctor Faustus was genuinely shocked by what Marlowe put on stage.

FAUSTUS  [Cuts his arm.] Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee

I cut my arm, and with my proper blood

Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s.  (II.1, 22)

I imagine there was a shiver of real danger here.  The English at one point had plenty of devils hopping around the stage in the old miracle plays, all banned at this point as too dangerously Catholic, but were there, in scenes like this, any sense that maybe we should not be seeing such a thing, even in a play?  A number of good theater stories about Doctor Faustus have survived. The actors realizing that there is an extra devil on the stage, that sort of thing.

My shivers are more modern, but they are right there in the text.

FAUSTUS  Where are you damned?

MEPHISTOPHELES  In hell.

FAUSTUS  How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.  (I.3, 17)

Mephistopheles is an existentialist.  Faustus is a materialist, but then so in Mephistopheles.

FAUSTUS  Come, I think hell’s a fable.

MEPHISTOPHELES  Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.  (II.1, 24)

An amusing conceit of Marlowe’s is that the devil is always honest with Faustus.

I wonder, almost, if I overrate Doctor Faustus because of the superb last scene – the last two pages – where we watch Faustus in his last hour along with a ticking clock.  It is a great piece of dramatic psychology.  I wonder how fast various actors have taken it.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!  Who pulls me down?  (V.2, 52)

Until the last minute:

Ugly hell, gape not!  Come not, Lucifer!

I’ll burn my books!  Ah, Mephistopheles!  (V.2, 53)

Only in his last breath will he give up those books.

Doctor Faustus appeared in or near 1593, and survived in two texts, A (1604) and B (1616), with B substantially longer, and with both showing evidence of post-Marlowe tinkering.  I read them both in the 2005 Norton Critical Edition, source of the page references above.  All of my quotes are, arbitrarily, from the A text.