Abstract
These remarks might just have been made by Dante, whose Commedia was partly the product of a desire to fathom the furthest limits of reality, while at the same time being the expression of a scientific urge to know and to chart the unexplored. Dante, however, was both more and less ambitious, in that he was exploring a more than natural universe, one in which his imagination was to be directed and educated by realities beyond it. Tamburlaine’s universe has much less of the divine in it. His ruling principle is nature, not supernature; and nature gives us our aspiring minds, not God (ll. 18–20). The speech quoted ends rather strangely, for, instead of telling us that he seeks the final key to the mysteries of the world, as we might now expect, Tamburlaine says that his ‘perfect blisse and sole felicitie’ lies in ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne’. We come down to earth and vulgar reality with rather a jolt. But in this Tamburlaine becomes like all Marlowe’s other aspiring heroes. For, while their spirits lift them beyond the earth, they cannot put their ultimate desires in any other but earthly terms. This is to be seen most tellingly, and with most condemnation, in Dr Faustus, Marlowe’s scholar-magician, who, unlike Tamburlaine, lives in the world of intellectual conquests, and could have taken him beyond the limits of the earth; but chose instead to go in search of worldly pleasures.
Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world: And measure every wandring plannets course: Still climing after knowledge infinite, And alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares, Wils us to weare our selves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect blisse and sole felicitie ....
(Tamburlaine Part 1, II.vii.21–8)
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Notes
Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946) pp. 79–86, gives a thorough critique of this view.
References to Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus are to the texts in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
W. W. Greg, ‘The Damnation of Faustus’ (1946), repr. in Clifford Leech (ed.), Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) pp. 103–6, sees Faustus as committing ‘the sin of demoniality, that is, bodily intercourse with demons’ (p. 106).
Judith Weil, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) pp. 73–5, points out the blasphemies and corruptions of the speech in its perversions of biblical and other Christian language; and at p. 195 n. 39 argues the weakness of one case made against that of Greg — by
T. W. Craik, in ‘The Damnation of Faustus Reconsidered’, Renaissance Drama, 2 (1969) 192–6.
J. C. Maxwell, ‘The Plays of Christopher Marlowe’, in Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 2: The Age of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1963) p. 173.
On Faustus’s materialism see also Leo Kirschbaum, ‘Religious Values in Dr Faustus’ (1962), repr. in Willard Farnham (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Dr Faustus’: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969) pp. 77–87;
Michael Mangan, Christopher Marlowe, ‘Dr Faustus’: A Critical Study, Penguin Masterstudies (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1987) pp. 45–6.
For other aspects of confinement in Faustus see Frank Manley, ‘The Nature of Faustus’, MP, 66 (1968–9) 220–1;
Marjorie Garber, ‘“Infinite Riches in a Little Room”: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe’, in Alvin Kernan (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1975–6, n.s., 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) pp. 5, 17–21.
Roland M. Frye, ‘Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: The Repudiation of Humanity’ (1956), in Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations, pp. 56–7.
See also A. L. French, ‘The Philosophy of Dr Faustus’, E in C, 20 (1970) 137.
See also James Smith, ‘Marlowe’s Dr Faustus’, Scrutiny, 8 (1939) 39–40, 49.
See for example C. D. Baker, ‘Certain Religious Elements in the English Doctrine of the Inspired Poet during the Renaissance’, ELH, 6 (1939) 300–23.
J.B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) p. 165, finds this sense of shrinkage one of the dominant impressions conveyed by the play.
See also French, in E in C, 20, p. 128; and Roy T. Eriksen, ‘The forme of Faustus fortunes’: A Study of ‘The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus’ (1616) (Oslo: Sorlum; and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987) p. 36.
By C. S. Lewis, in his A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1942) p. 95.
Weil, Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet, p. 62, cites James H. Sims, Dramatic Uses of Allusion in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966) p. 25, referring Faustus’s reaction to the ‘Homo fuge’ (‘If unto God, hee’le throw me downe to hell’) to Psalm 139. 7–10 on the omnipresence of God, in hell as in heaven. Weil remarks, ‘For the joyful psalmist, God is everywhere. In order to express his hope of escape, Faustus has chosen words which point to an inevitable reunion with God.’ This further extends the idea of all in Faustus happening within the divine presence.
On such inversions see also, for example, Smith, in Scrutiny, 8, pp. 36–7; Helen Gardner, ‘The Damnation of Faustus’ (1946), in Farnham, Twentieth Century Interpretations, p. 39; J. P. Brockbank, Marlowe: ‘Dr Faustus’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1962) pp. 56–9;
Leonard H. Frey, ‘Antithetical Balance in the Opening and Close of Doctor Faustus’, MLQ, 24 (1963) 350–3.
C. L. Barber, ‘“The form of Faustus’ fortunes good or bad”’, Tulane Drama Review, 8 (1963–4) 106–12.
Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) pp. 175–6, remarks, ‘Mephostophilis’ answers disappoint Faustus.... The devil’s knowledge is drab.... All he [Faustus] draws from Mephostophilis is a denial of the crystalline sphere introduced to explain the phenomenon of planetary trepidation. Marlowe may have been indebted to Augustinus Ricius for this modification of orthodox Ptolemaic cosmography, but the dramatic point is that this sphere is invisible and that Faustus is unable to entertain any knowledge that is not empirical.’
Henry M. Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic into Science (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951) pp. 12–16.
Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) p. 225 (tr. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes). A similar view, of the poet as creator, is advanced by Sidney in An Apologie for Poetrie (quoted above, pp. 71–2).
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© 1992 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1992). Marlowe: Dr Faustus. In: Christian Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_6
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