The Complete Plays (90 page)

Scene
4

3–4  
culverin… kindled thus
: The Governor lights die taper (‘linstock') which will fire the signal cannon (‘culverin').

9        
adventure
: Risk.

Scene
5

3          
levelled… mind
: (i) Designed to achieve my purpose, (ii) smoothly finished to my specifications.

9    
die
: This may be a simple curse urging the carpenters to drink themselves to death; or Barabas may have poisoned the wine.

10        
so
: Provided that.

38        
blithely set
: Cheerfully seated.

39        
warning-piece
: A gun fired as a signal.

49        
Now tell me, worldlings
: Barabas adopts the guise of the medieval stage-villain and Morality Vice, directly addressing the audience and appealing to their own sense of mischief.

62        
charge
: Trumpet-call to signal an attack.

62.1–2   SD The Governor cuts the rope securing the trapdoor from the gallery and Barabas falls into the hot cauldron which is simultaneously revealed in the discovery-space.

77        
breathe forth… fate
: ‘Breathe out the last moments of life allotted to you by fate' (Bawcutt 1978).

90        
train
: Trap.

98        
all's one
: It would make no difference.

115      
meditate
: ‘to arrange by thought and discussion' (Bawcutt 1978).

118      
come all the world
: I.e., if you summon all the world.

EPILOGUE SPOKEN AT COURT

1          
dread sovereign
: Charles I.

4          
Thus low dejected
: I.e. bowing.

EPILOGUE

4          
outgo
: Surpass.

5          
prize was played
: Match was contested (a fencing term).

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Many of the questions we ask about
Doctor Faustus –
questions of date, text and interpretation – cannot be answered with certainty. The play can be variously dated 1588–9 and 1591–2. Two early versions of it (known as the A- and B-texts) survive, but there is general agreement that neither text represents exactly what was first performed. Both show signs of theatrical adaptation. Many have suspected that someone else (Thomas Nashe?) wrote at least some of the clowning scenes. So complex are the textual problems that they are discussed in a separate note below. The text of this edition is based on the A-text.

Nor is there agreement about the interpretation of the play, which seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive, barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete. The play's dramatic mode lurches from solemn terror to proverbial, folksy comedy from scene to scene, even from line to line, as when Lucifer tells Faustus, ‘Thou shouldst not think of God. Think of the devil, / And of his dame, too' (7.92–3). The disconcerting mixture of register is quintessentially Marlovian.

Quintessentially, but not exclusively. Legends of the magician Johann Faust who sold his soul to the devil developed in sixteenth-century Germany, and were collected and published by Johann Spies in the German Faustbook of 1587. Marlowe's play depends for its detail on an English translation (by one ‘P. F.'),
The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus.
The earliest extant edition of this book dates from 1592., which might seem to make the case for the later dating of the play, but there are grounds for thinking that Marlowe knew an earlier, now lost, printing: the arguments are intricately discussed in J. H. Jones's critical edition,
The English Faust Book
(1994). As well as supplying the incidents, the Faustbook also probably contributed its ‘solemnly edifying and crudely jocular' (Levin 1954) tone to the play – a tone also found in such influential sixteenth-century books on magic as Agrippa's
De Occulta Philosophia.
But there are differences. Despite its geographical expansiveness, the world of the Faustbook is domestic,
biirgerlich.
Faust is a trickster who shares a homely thieves' kitchen with Wagner his servant and a ‘familiar' Mephostophiles ‘that ever was diligent at Faustus' command, going about the house, clothed like a friar, with a little bell in his hand, seen of none but Faustus' (Jones 1994:100–101); Helen of Troy lives with him for a year and bears him a son. Marlowe sharpens the focus on Faustus' academic environment, and winnows out many of the more trivial everyday bits of sorcery. The play occupies the less naturalistically defined, more abstract world of the Morality play: in the Faustbook, the old man is simply a concerned neighbour who invites the magician in for dinner and edification; in the play, his appearances are as abrupt and unexplained as those of the Good Angel, whose role, indeed, he seems to take over. By the same token, Faustus himself is sometimes (especially in soliloquy) a distinctive, credible personality, at other times merely an exemplary figure. His habit of talking about himself in the third person may reflect an acute self-consciousness – or a Morality-actor's tendency to name himself for the convenience of his audience. His subjectivity fades in and out.

Marlowe's focus on learning is much sharper. The Faustbook deals cursorily with its protagonist's education in its first chapter:

But Doctor Faustus within short time after he had obtained his degree, fell into such fantasies and deep cogitations that he was marked of many, and of the most part of the students was called the Speculator; and sometimes he would throw the Scriptures from him as though he had no care of his former profession: so that he began a very ungodly life… (Jones 1994:92)

The author is suspicious of learning in general, and he can explain Faustus' interest in magic only as the product of ‘a naughty mind'. By contrast, the play's opening scene takes us inside Faustus' thoughts, and we sense the tedium of the study, the dissatisfaction of knowledge. And Marlowe's Faustus actually cites his texts. ‘The play itself is almost macaronic in its frequent scholarly lapses into Latinity' (Levin 1954:137). (Macaronic texts are learned games which mingle Latin with the vernacular – a nice parallel to the play.) But how good was the Latin of its first audiences? And if they understood the words, did they also spot Faustus' mistakes, his mis-citations and partial quotes? Or is the language of learning (standing out in italic type in the early black-letter quartos) a blind – verbal pyrotechnics to match the fireworks onstage? The Latin formula to summon the devil with which Marlowe furnishes Faustus sounds worryingly like the real thing; and Mephistopheles responds with scholastic precision: ‘That was the cause, but yet
per accidens'
(3.47). At a performance one feels that something dangerous is happening.

Both the doctor and the devil are more precisely defined than in the Faustbook. There, Faustus is reluctant to give the devil the soul he demands; here, he offers it in exchange for twenty-four years of life. He seems driven by a terrible curiosity, yet he learns nothing new. Mephistopheles hides nothing, but he is playing a cat-and-mouse game: in the Faustbook, Faustus melts for himself the congealed blood which Mephistopheles here brings fire from hell to unclot, and his asides (‘O, what will not I do to obtain his soul?', 5.73) are a glimpse into that unseen abyss. Somewhat later in the Faustbook, the devil torments the already damned Faustus with the thought of hell. Marlowe's Mephistopheles is himself tormented by his own knowledge of hell, the only knowledge he has to offer. Faustus hopes that forbidden knowledge will bring him power (‘All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command', 1.58–9), and imagines that power in terms of unlimited spatial extension (‘his dominion that exceeds in this / Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man', 1.62–3). Instead he finds himself on the brink of an unthinkable infinity: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it'
(3.78). ‘Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In one self place, for where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be' (5.123–5). In these scenes, the small space of the stage seems to open onto the depths. They are the most darkly compelling in Elizabethan drama.

The play's middle scenes are disappointing, a loose concatenation of episodes. Hell, significantly, is much less frequently mentioned. At one level, this structural weakness is thoroughly appropriate: Faustus' adventures are crude and demeaning because he is wasting the powers, and the time, he has secured. The Knight's insulting observation rings true: ‘I'faith, he looks much like a conjurer' (10.11). The comedy of the clowns' scenes, too, though their authenticity is doubtful, may also be functional, parodying the mindlessness of Faustus' own actions. Still, it seems unlikely that Marlowe was wholly responsible for their execution, and what relevance and coherence they have is thematic rather than theatrical. They treat as comic the very fears that haunt the main plot.

Those fears return in the closing scenes, and with them the intensity of the writing. No other play so deftly exploits the audience's consciousness of the approaching end. Faustus' end (the word pervades the play) is predictable, inevitable; he has bargained for it; yet the mind reels trying to comprehend exactly what is happening: ‘no end is limited to damned souls' (14.101). Faustus' pleasures become more extreme, more sensual and more desperate as he attempts to ‘extinguish' (13.85) the thought of damnation. But he cannot escape the knowledge that he is literally a
lost
soul: ‘Where art thou, Faustus? Wretch, what hast thou done? / Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die!' (13.47–8). We are acutely aware at this point of the overdetermination of the play's theology and its action. Faustus' despair is both a psychological condition and a divine punishment, at once the cause and the consequence of his damnation, and in the play's closing sequence supernatural intervention is indistinguishable from the working of his own mind. ‘Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast' (13.64): space bends in the line, as does time in the running hour of his final soliloquy. (The Faustbook provided the merest hint: ‘Time ran away with Faustus as the hour-glass', Jones 1994:174.) Watching his ‘hellish fall', we are enjoined ‘[o]nly to wonder' (Epilogue, 4, 6).

Doctor Faustus
was highly successful, mutating but remaining in the repertoire even after the Restoration. A persistent early tradition associated performances of the play with the appearance of real devils. It is a testimony to its black theatrical magic.

The A- and B-Texts

The A-text first appeared in print in a black-letter quarto of 1604 (having been entered in the Stationers' Register in 1601), with subsequent editions in 1609 and 1611. This is not a perfect text: it is short for a Renaissance play; the comic scenes in particular seem sketchy; and scene 6 is apparently misplaced. Scholars once thought that it was a memorial reconstruction, but modern opinion tends to the view that the text was set from the authorial ‘foul papers' of Marlowe and the collaborator to whom the central scenes of the play were entrusted.

The B-text was first printed in a quarto of 1616, and reprinted six times between 1619 and 1663. This lacks some 36 lines of the A-text, but adds 676 lines of new material, and makes in addition thousands of smaller verbal changes (a few of these offer better readings than the A-text, and have been adopted in this edition). The additional scenes are probably those for which Philip Henslowe paid William Birde and Samuel Rowley £4 in 1602. They augment the action of the A-text with new incidents, and amplify the supernatural spectacle and anti-Catholic sentiment. In Rome, Faustus becomes involved with an anti-pope whom he spirits away to the imperial court. Here he comes into conflict with Benvolio (based on the A-text's anonymous Knight) and eventually tricks him with a false head (apparently drawing on the use of the false leg in A). The plot against the Horse-Courser is expanded to provide further comic action for the A-text's Clowns. It is apparent that the new scenes develop and interweave materials from the A-text. Possibly the most significant changes come at the end of the play, where now the action occurs under the gaze of the devils who remain above in the gallery (a stage space not used in the A-text); and Faustus is dismembered in view of the audience. The B-text thus tends to display literally what is only menacingly suggested in A.

Ultimately a preference for one text over the other cannot be based solely on bibliographical evidence, but rests on an understanding of what the two versions of the play are. Older scholarship viewed the A-text as a mangled version of the fuller B-text. Like most modern editors, we regard the B-text as an interesting theatrical adaptation and the A-text as the more authentic version of the play.

PROLOGUE

0.1   
SD
The Chorus, apparently for the first time on the English stage, is a single speaker.

1–2  The Carthaginians defeated the Romans near Lake Trasimeno in
217
BC
; but since ‘mate' must mean ‘overcome', Marlowe seems to attribute the victory to the Romans and their god of war. Some gloss ‘mate' as ‘side with, ally himself with' (
OED
4); but since its primary sense refers to sexual coupling, it could also be the equivalent to ‘screw'. Such ambiguities are frequent in this speech.

6          
muse
: Poet.