The Theme of Damnation in Doctor Faustus (1948)

Abstract

We are unfortunate in possessing Marlowe’s greatest play only in an obviously mutilated form; but in spite of possible distortion and some interpolation in the centre, the grandeur of the complete reversal stands out clearly. Apart from its opening and concluding choruses, which provide an archaic framework, and the short closing scene in the 1616 text, where the scholars find the mangled body of Faustus, the play begins and ends with the hero in his study. In the first scene Faustus runs through all the branches of human knowledge and finds them inadequate to his desires. Logic can only teach argument; medicine stops short where human desire is most thwarted, since it cannot defeat death; law is a mercenary pursuit; and divinity, which he comes to last, holds the greatest disappointment: it is grounded in the recognition of man’s mortality and his fallibility. The two texts from Jerome’s Bible insult his aspiration: Stipendium peccati mors est, and Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis Veritas.* He turns instead to magic because it is:

a world of profit and delight, of power, of honour, and omnipotence.