I Love Thee, Master Marlowe.

            The themes of Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus continue to reverberate in modern times.  Marlowe hints at the limitless power of the individual; yet he also seems to be warning us through the play’s protagonist about the dangers of aspiring beyond our reach.  While one could argue that the play represents an accurate view of the Elizabethan way of thinking it is not constrained by Elizabethan ideals.  Marlowe’s play instead is an accurate, if uncomfortable, depiction of the ineffable and paradoxical nature of humanity—while we have the power to achieve greatness we also are yoked by our own petty desires and frailties. 

The character of Doctor Faustus is no exception: he has achieved knowledge and renown far beyond the scope of his birth, yet he still longs for more.  He realizes that he has astonishing mental faculties but he is dissatisfied with the scope of natural wisdom he has already achieved. He has ambitions and aspirations to improve himself; nevertheless he chooses the wrong method with which to affect these improvements. Therefore Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus is a hybrid—it represents a marked departure from restrictive Calvinist and medieval ethics while simultaneously sharing elements of the medieval morality play.  Marlowe’s beautiful and disturbing blank verse drama shows us the illimitable power of the human spirit while ultimately warning us about the dangers of blindly following any type of orthodox belief system.

            While a modern audience may not be aware of all of the religious implications of Marlowe’s play, an Elizabethan audience would have been.  However, the idea of a pact with the devil still has weight and symbolism in the modern era.  From the beginning, Marlowe warns us that Faustus’ fate will not be a good one.  In the prologue he tells us that Faustus is “swollen with cunning” and compares his fate to the Greek myth of Icarus, who died horribly when he flew too close to the sun on waxen wings.  Marlowe is setting the scene for the dramatic irony of Faustus’ character: Faust ignores all of the warnings set forth throughout the play, yet the audience is sensitive to the fact that Faust will ultimately meet a bad end. 

The reader can certainly empathize with Faust’s desire to improve himself.  This yearning for self-improvement holds even more weight with the modern reader as we are not set into the structured class system prevalent during the Elizabethan era.  Thus Marlowe builds a certain amount of empathy between the audience and the character of Doctor Faustus.  The human need to continually develop oneself through intellectual and spiritual pursuits is a universal one.  Even Faustus’ somewhat adolescent abuse of his powers through the form of practical jokes stirs up a certain amount of tragicomic pathos from the audience.  We have all gotten a mean-spirited giggle at someone else’s expense and this reaction is precisely what Marlowe is exploiting.  Despite all of this juvenile nastiness Faust manages to gain both wealth and fame.  He therefore achieves the earthly pleasures for which he made the ill-fated pact.

In contrast his relative youth, Marlowe had a sure knowledge of human nature.  Thus while at points the play may make us cringe it also speaks to us because we can still hope for Faustus’ repentance notwithstanding all of his faults.  He fails to notice any of the warnings set before him.  His blood congeals when he signs the pact, letting us know that his physical being is rebelling against such an act.  “Homo fuge” appears on his arm—a blatant warning as the words translate to “Flee, oh man!”  Even Mephistophilis attempts to caution Faustus against his actions to no avail.  Yet even this blind, stubborn ambition is part of human nature—we have all gone against our better judgment and done things which we later regretted. 

Marlowe does not seem to be warning us against a Christian hell, however; the message of the play ultimately is ambiguous.  Is the tragedy of Faustus that of one individual’s fall from grace, or is Marlowe trying to advise us against following a structured system of belief?  It is this very ambiguity that gives Marlowe’s play such a powerful message even for the modern reader.  Faust is a greedy, stubborn sensualist, yet he is also the Everyman with whom we can all identify.  Thus the moral symbols in the play—the angels, the demons—are not a straightforward message of Christian virtue but instead a challenge to defy the strictures of an orthodox belief system.  As Marlowe writes, “…to wonder at unlawful things/whose deepness doth entice such forward wits/To practice more than heavenly power permits.”