Wavering Faustus
Faustus’s signing of the contract, ironically, betrays his own failed addiction. The document that secures his damnation fails to—and could never—represent his devotion. Certainly, the play’s remaining scenes offer the fulfillment of Mephastophilis’s promise: viewers see the rewards of necromancy in Faustus’s adventures. But as critics have long noted, the fruits of magic are rather slim. If Faustus hopes to command nations, he finds himself playing parlor tricks, leaving the audience, if not Faustus himself, disappointed.79 He mocks the pope and the horse-courser, he brings grapes to a duchess and conjures historical figures for the emperor and scholar friends. Why Marlowe, who stages Tamberlaine’s march across Europe and Asia, would hesitate to stage more satisfying magical triumphs has rightly preoccupied critics and audiences. The most evident answer, provided by the Chorus and ostensibly in concert with Calvinist theology and Elizabethan authorities, finds Faustus to be an emblem for misguided ambition. The failure of magic supports readings of the play as a cautionary tale (why sell one’s soul for mediocre magic?) insofar as one finds the play’s middle section to be an extended lesson on Faustus’s bad choice.
This chapter offers another answer, one—as suggested above—that finds the drama of the play to lie not in its subject matter of magic but, in properly Aristotelian fashion, in its action. For the drama of the play’s middle acts lies in Faustus’s wavering: the scholar with heroic resolve, a man who signed a contract he refuses to challenge, nonetheless falters. Indeed, perhaps more surprisingly than critics have noted, having made such a dramatic deal with the devil and having offered up his blood in signing, Faustus must nonetheless continually remind himself of his pledge. Faustus reassures himself, “Fear not, Faustus” (1.3.14). This imperative presages a series of reminders that Faustus offers himself as he wavers. “No go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute. / Why waverest thou?” (2.1.6–7). This wavering, he claims, is because “something soundeth” in his ears, a voice that counsels, “Abjure this magic, turn to God again!” (2.1.7, 8). He keeps entertaining the possibility of repentance, or rather, the possibility of escape from his chosen commitment. In the first glimpse of the scholar after signing the contract, he cries, “When I behold the heavens then I repent” (2.3.1). Even though he might lament “my heart’s so harden’d I cannot repent,” he also actively embraces magic again on recalling the “ravishing sound” of the Ampion’s harp making “music with my Mephastophilis” (2.3.18, 29–30). He cries, “I am resolved: Faustus shall ne’er repent. / Come Mephastophilis, let us dispute again” (2.3.32–33). Wanting to dedicate himself entirely but pulling away, and wanting to repent but returning to magic, Faustus seems insecure in the very bargain he designed.
Faustus both picks the wrong field and can’t quite commit himself to it. For a man who begins the play wanting to be obliterated through integration into necromancy, he never achieves full surrender or release but instead wavers between professions and masters. He tells Charles V, “I am content to do whatever your Majesty shall command me” (4.1.15–16), and in doing so receives “a bounteous reward” (4.1.92–93); the Duke of Vanholt, too, tells him, “Follow us and receive your reward” (4.3.33). Even as he is bound to Mephastophilis and Lucifer, Faustus relates to earthly authorities as a pandering courtier seeking favor. He obsequiously calls Charles V “my gracious sovereign” while deeming himself “far inferior to the report men have published, and nothing answerable to the honor of your imperial Majesty” (4.1.12–14). Seeking favor and accepting rewards from earthly authorities, Faustus then relishes his power to humiliate his social equals or inferiors. The mocking knight and the horse-courser experience Faustus’s high jinx. These comic interludes strain against Faustus’s initial desire to be ravished, enveloped, and devoted: he seems preoccupied with his own status and reputation. Rather than dissolving his self, he seeks to protect and amplify it.
Fluctuating between authorities and erratic in his devotion, Faustus then begins to reproach others for his choices. As Poole writes, “Faustus has the unattractive habit of blaming others for his actions, often positioning himself as a passive entity.”80 He blames his own fall on reading: “Oh would / I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book” (5.2.19). Or, alternatively, he blames his fall on Mephastophilis, claiming he was tricked: “go accursed spirit to ugly hell: / ’Tis thou hast damn’d distressed Faustus’ soul” (2.3.77–78). Finally, Faustus claims that his relationship to Lucifer and Mephastophilis is incomplete, since he has not experienced magical power but only indulged his appetites. He, like the Chorus, condemns himself as a glutton, surfeiting on his desires: “The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite, / Wherein is fix’d the love of Belzebub” (2.1.11–12).81 He revels, he claims, in “a surfeit of deadly sin, that hath damned both body and soul” (5.2.10). He doesn’t even have the satisfaction of full, spiritual devotion to necromancy—it is his appetite that governed him, he claims, nothing else.
Finally Faustus calls out to God, in direct defiance of his contract: “Ah Christ, my Saviour, / Seek to save distressed Faustus’ soul!” (2.3.83–84). Having questioned faith but yearning for God, Faustus here proves a more complex and sympathetic character than the static scholars who fail him. Here he is not merely wavering—he wavers toward the divine, and in doing so admits the challenge of true faith. His prick of conscience, like the potential intervention of God in the form of the Good Angel or Old Man, teases the audience with hope for Faustus’s salvation. Indeed, for a Christian audience Faustus’s wavering toward repentance, while unrealized, is admirable, even heroic. The audience’s strong desire for Faustus’s conversion is modeled both by characters internal to the play and by the Chorus. Scholars cry, “God forbid!” (5.2.35) on learning of the contract, asking, “O what shall we do to save Faustus?” (5.2.46) and lamenting that the doctor had not turned to them earlier: “Why did not Faustus tell us of this before, that divines might have prayed for thee?” (5.2.40–41). The Good Angel, the Old Man, and the Scholars unite in attempting to sway Faustus back to salvation and devotion to God. They counsel Faustus, “Call on God” (5.2.26) even as the scholar understands it is too late.
Such wavering might demonstrate Faustus’s residual faith. Indeed, his necromantic addiction will always, one might argue, be compromised by his awareness—from his studies of theology and his emersion in Christian Wittenberg—of God’s divinity. Yet, at least to the extent Marlowe engages with Calvin’s theology, such mixing and mingling of Faustus’s devotions is as much troubling as hopeful. “No man shal ever go forward constantly in this office,” Calvin writes, “save he, in whose heart the love of Christ shal so reigne, that forgetting himself, and addicting himself wholy unto him, he may ouercome al impediments.”82 Calvin’s emphasis on exclusivity—the believer is constant, overcome, and subjected, while his love of Christ is entire, whole, and unfailing—precludes wavering. The faithful might be tempted, certainly: “The faythfull them selves are never so wholly addicted to obey God, but that they are ofte withdrawn with sinfull lustes of the flesh.”83 But Calvin clarifies that “ofte withdrawn” signifies not recantation but instead mere temptation, as the faithful remain steady in their dedicated service to God. For Calvin, all humans struggle with addiction: “By reason of the grossenes of nature, we are always addicted unto earthly thinges.” Nevertheless divine intervention might “correct that disease which is ingendered in us,” turning earthly into godly addiction.84 Marlowe, by contrast, depicts not conversion from one addiction to another but the incompleteness of attachment itself, whether to necromancy or to God.
If Calvin’s writings affirm the power of addiction to overcome the believer entirely, Marlowe instead stages—in his gnarled, questioning universe—a believer with an incomplete addiction. The play’s central conflict thus concerns Faustus’s attempt but ultimate inability to addict himself to supernatural forces. As he claims, “I do repent, and yet I do despair” (5.1.63). For even as Marlowe depicts the potential heroism of striving toward Christian conversion, he equally challenges it, by making repentance on Faustus’s part a form of spiritual and legal betrayal. For Faustus to reject the very path he surrenders to, by taking alternate advice and rejecting magic when its outcomes are insecure, would be to signal his infidelity to faith more generally, be it to the