‘What Doctrine Call You This?’

Abstract

Critical opinion has rarely been united as to the appropriate response to Doctor Faustus. In the same year (1817) that Henry Maitland, arguing that Faustus harmed no one but himself, could pronounce his fate undeserved, Francis Jeffrey endorsed the fall of ‘a vulgar sorcerer, tempted to sell his soul to the Devil for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure, and earthly power and glory’. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, general opinion strengthened that the quality of the scholar’s passionate desires and of the language in which they found expression easily counteracted his impious temerity in sealing a bond with the Devil. For Francis Cunningham in 1870 the last hour of the doctor’s life filled the soul ‘with love and admiration for a departed hero’; for J. A. Symonds, Faustus, ‘the medieval rebel’, was animated by Marlowe’s ‘own audacious spirit’, and in 1887 Havelock Ellis exalted Faustus as ‘a living man thirsting for the infinite’. Such eulogies continued into the present century, Una Ellis-Fermor discovering in him ‘dignity, patience, tenacity and a certain profundity of thought’ while by 1932 F. S. Boas was applying to a Faustus cast in his creator’s image Horatio’s tribute to the dead Hamlet: ‘Now cracks a noble heart’.