Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth Century Yorkshire Book

The history of Dr. Faustus, its composition and its performances, is obscured by legend and shrouded in surmise. We know the play was wildly popular, but not when it was written or first performed: perhaps as early as 1588, when Marlowe was twenty-four, or perhaps as late in 1593, the year Marlowe died. At any rate, it so captured the public imagination that people told stories about it. The most vivid of the legends tells us that real devils were once conjured during a performance, that actors were confounded, spectators driven mad, and that the Faustus who spoke the summoning words, Edward Alleyn, renounced his profession from that day forward and spent his remaining days performing works of charity.

Even the play itself is a bit of a puzzle, for it has come down to us in two different texts; the brief quarto of 1604 and the longer quarto of 1616. Early critics tended to prefer the earlier quarto, seeing it as a “purer” version, purged of “low” comic scenes, but later critics like the 1616 Faustus better. Its “low” scenes—although probably not written by Marlowe—serve an artistic purpose: they show us how Faustus, a self-immolating hero who once desired to plumb the depths of knowledge, soon degenerates into a shabby conjurer, a practical joker who amuses himself by cheating a peasant out of a horse. Was his immortal soul bartered away for this? (Personally—being something of a “low” type myself—I enjoy a lot of this buffonery, particularly the scene in which an invisible Faust and Mephistophilis steal all the fine dishes from the pope’s banquet and drive him and his cardinals from the hall.)

For my taste, Marlowe’s play is the best version of the legend—better than Goethe, better than Thomas Mann. He wrote it at the very moment when the adjective before “humanist” was changing from “Christian” to “secular,” when his hero--at one and the same time—could be both admired as an icon of human daring and also pitied as a sinner irrevocably damned. His Faust is not so much self-contradiction as paradox, as gestalt: faces-and-cup--filling the foreground, fading out--forever.

There are many memorable passages in this play, including Faustus' opening and closing soliloquys, Mephistophilis on Hell, Faustus on Helen of Troy, and the parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. But I prefer to quote Faustus describing with delight a journey he took through the air:
Sweet Mephistophilis, thou pleasest me.
Whilst I am here on earth, let me be cloy'd
With all things that delight the heart of man:
My four-and-twenty years of liberty
I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance,
That Faustus' name, whilst this bright frame doth stand,
May be admir'd thorough the furthest land....
Thou know'st, within the compass of eight days
We view'd the face of heaven, of earth, and hell;
So high our dragons soar'd into the air,
That, looking down, the earth appear'd to me
No bigger than my hand in quantity;
There did we view the kingdoms of the world,
And what might please mine eye I there beheld.