Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (?1593/1604 [A-text]/1616s [B-text])

Genre: Tragic drama.   Click here for some basic advice about how to read plays.

Form: Blank verse (for main plot), unrhymed iambic pentameter, set in 13 scenes with a prologue, three internal choruses, and an epilogue (the "A text" published in 1604) or five acts, composed of 4, 3, 3, 7, and 3 scenes, and all but the last scene begins with a "Chorus" delivering a transitional epilogue (the significantly longer "B text" published in 1616, and probably contributed to by later poets).  Subplot passages involving Wagner, the Clown, the Horse Courser etc. usually are in prose and use colloquial diction to comic effect, though Faustus becomes involved with the subplot in the end.  

Characters: Major characters include Faustus, a German professor at Wittenberg who has turned magician, his servant Wagner, Mephistopholis the tempting demon and Lucifer, his lord, and a host of minor characters (three scholars who hope to learn from Faustus, a troop of "clowns" or country bumpkins whose quests for silly powers parodies Faustus' own desires, a set of high status characters including the pope and the emperor, and a set of allegorical characters including Faustus' good and bad angels, and the Seven Deadly Sins (a stock favorite of medieval moralities--Everyman transformed them into social types).

1. Is this a comedy or is this a tragedy (or is it a history)? The title claims it's a "tragical history," but that may mean no more than "tragic story" in Early Modern English. However, as the genre of tragedy begins to take on more pronounced formal characteristics, it becomes possible to say Faustus was transformed into something very like a tragedy (five acts, ascending and descending dramatic structure, high-status hero with poignant flaw which dooms him by means of his deeds, etc.). Notice especially the difference in structure between the 1604 and 1616 versions. More troubling, perhaps, is the intrusion of comedy into the doctor's downfall. The comic subplots are separated from the doctor's behavior until the deceived Horse Courser appears to pull off Faustus' leg in Scene 10.
   • What does the separation do to our sense of the relationship between plot and subplot, and what does the fusion of the two do to the main plot?
   • Do you have any sense of whether Marlowe feels Faustus was morally wrong in seeking the knowledge and power he praises in the first scene?
   • Or is Faustus tragic, for Marlowe, because he seeks it and finds it and loses it?
2. English literature owes a great debt to Marlowe for identifying a certain type of classical tragic hero in the works of Sophocles and making him intelligible in English cultural terms. Harry Levin called this type "the over-reacher" after rhetorician George Puttenham's attempt to find a close English synonym for the Greek word "hyperbole" (in The Arte of English Poesie, 1589). Marlowe characters have an exaggerated appetite for achievement, whether it's world conquest (Tamburlaine), knowledge as power (Faustus) or revenge and the acquisition of riches (Barabus). Marlowe's heroes were popular then, and remain fascinating now, as portraits of English imperial ambitions dressed in the appearances of an Asian warlord, a German scholar, and a wealthy Maltese Jew. Their exotic (to C16 English audiences) appearances and settings gave Marlowe an opportunity to dazzle us with some of the most elaborate and extended set speeches in English drama. His use of the new Elizabethan vocabulary drew upon the language of the exploring nations (Spain, France, Holland) as well as the Latin and Greek learning that had filtered down to the street-English of his time from the most exotic experiments of the humanists and sonneteers.
   • Is Marlowe, perhaps, something of a "Faustus" in language?  That is, has he made a kind of bargain with imperialism in order to make his theater, a bargain that costs him something precious?
   • Is writing, itself, and literacy as a social force, something "demonic" in the sense that it transforms its possessors?  Look closely at Faustus' first description of his book of necromancy, "Lines circles, schemes, letters and characters" (1:51).  Isn't this just a specialized sort of writing and reading, one that gives its user access to power?
   • In a related scene, note that writing the "deed" or instrument of his damnation is a crucial event in Scene 5 (Norton 1002-3).  What interrupts the writing of it, what aid is brought by Faustus' "Writing Center tutor" to break his "writer's block"?  Is this in any sense an analogue of Marlowe's own writer's psychology?
3. What is the function of the "Chorus" in Faustus?
   • What kinds of information does the Chorus deliver, and what does that tell you about the state of Marlowe's dramatic skill and the sophistication of the theatrical audience?
   • How does a modern film producer introduce the same information, and what would be the effect of having a "Chorus" do it in a modern movie?
4. Marlowe's dramas broke new ground in their ambitiously exotic settings (Asia, Germany, Rome, Malta) and their extravagantly developed heroes' characters, but they also preserve curious elements of Medieval English drama, like the "Chorus" (above), archaic which indicate Marlowe believed his audiences needed some help to experience the full illusion of his dramas.  Allegorical characters, like those we encountered in Everyman, also make appearances in Dr. Faustus, but Marlowe appears to be of two minds regarding their usefulness.  When allegory  first appears, in the "Seven Deadly Sins" play (Scene 5), the "author" is Lucifer, and Faustus, as the inscribed audience for their performance, openly mocks them and fails to listen to the message they communicate about sin.  What might Marlowe be saying in this scene about the older English theatrical tradition and, perhaps, its linkage to a theology now identified with the Roman Church?  Also in Scene 5, Marlowe introduces "Good Angel" and "Evil Angel," two allegorical characters who appear to represent aspects of Faustus' own mind or soul.  They do not reappear, but in Scene 13, an enigmatic "Old Man" materializes in Faustus' study to deliver a message similar to that which the "Good Angel" offered.  How do you explain what Marlowe was doing with those three allegorical characters, and how might that be compared with those Lucifer causes to appear to Faustus?  How do they relate to Alexander and His Paramour, and "Helen of Greece," herself perhaps the most well-known Elizabethan character who never spoke a line, due to Faustus' famous apostrophe to her (13: 81-100)?  Are those characters somewhere between allegory and "round" characters?  How would you explain their function in the play?
5. Marlowe was a secret agent of Queen Elizabeth's government, and probably was killed by another agent, perhaps assassinated. Secrecy plays a strong role in both Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta, Marlowe's last plays.
   • How does he treat the secret realm, whether of knowledge or of politics?
   • What things are hidden there, and what is the effect of penetrating that secrecy?
   • For instance, how do Faustus' trips to the Vatican and the Emperor's palace affect him and his audience?
   • Is it what you expected, based on what he said he'd do with magic in scene 1?
   • What might Marlowe be signaling here about the effects of his sojourns among the secret realms of Elizabethan government, and how might it relate to the views we get of Tudor secrecy in Wyatt ("They Flee From Me," "Lucks My Falcons," and "Mine Own John Poins") and Surrey ("Th' Assyrian King, in peace with foul desire" and "Imprisoned in Windsor")?
   • Is there, in these poets, also a satire on the state as well as upon human frailty, and if so, what would be the dangers that would attend writing such a satire?
6. We will return frequently (if we can remember) to the question of when tragic and comic drama take on their current structural shapes (e.g., five acts?  protagonist has a flaw?).  For now, compare this play's structure and characterization with the classical Greek (C5 B.C.E.) model for how tragedy ought to operate.
7. The play makes use of a metadramatic morality of the Seven Deadly Sins, enacted for Faustus by demons from a script apparently created by Lucifer, Hell's playwright.  If you are not sure what a "sin" is or whether it's a "deadly sin," click here.  Marlowe is writing in a Protestant country, but many Catholics live in England, and the poet's theology is by no means certain.  He may even have been an atheist, according to charges leveled against him by a contemporary.  What is this play's theological doctrine?  Don't assume that, just because Faustus and Mephistophilis make fun of the Pope and his retinue, the play is pro-Protestant.  It could also be telling us something about the peculiar anxieties of Protestants in a post-Catholic nation where Everyman's "Confession" and "Good Deeds" no longer guarantee salvation.
8. For some more specific ways to approach particular passages in Scenes 1 through 5 at a level that might support analytical papers, click here.  For a similar set of analytical angles on Scenes 6 through 13, click here.