The Unity of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1966)

Abstract

In his Poetics, Aristotle observed that a tragedy should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The statement makes a point that seems obvious, and many a reader of our time must have dismissed it as one of the more tedious remarks of the Stagirite, or indeed put it down to one of the duller notes taken by the student whom some suppose to have heard Aristotle’s lectures and preserved the substance of them for us. Yet the play without a middle does occur, and in at least three signal instances that I can think of in English literature, we have a play that lacks a proper middle or at least a play that seems to lack a middle. Milton’s Samson Agonistes is one of them; Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, another; and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the third. Milton presents us with Samson, in the hands of his enemies, blind, grinding at the mill with other slaves, yet in only a little while he has Samson pull down the temple roof upon his enemies. There is a beginning and there is an end, but in the interval between them has anything of real consequence happened? Murder in the Cathedral may seem an even more flagrant instance of an end jammed on to a beginning quite directly and without any intervening dramatic substance.