Abstract
When Swinburne introduced Doctor Faustus to late Victorian audiences, he faced the formidable task of explaining why a play that had been all but forgotten for two hundred years had suddenly regained its relevance.1 Undaunted, he insisted that what seemed a moldy fable of demon-summoning was in fact an exploration of the human drive to transcend “incarnate” nature, an exploration that had only become more urgent in the wake of the many new medicines and machines that H.G. Wells had darkly referred to a year earlier as “the growing pile of civilization… a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”2 Swinburne’s instincts proved good. While the initial revival of Faustus was brief, it laid the groundwork for a more ambitious performance schedule,3 and the play has since become part of the standard repertoire of Elizabethan theater. In focusing attention on the vexed issue of our “fast bound” state, moreover, Swinburne helped set in motion a lively and ongoing discussion about the source of Faustus’ doom.4 Some interpreters have approached the play from a theological perspective, debating whether it illustrates the Catholic view that we are free to sin or paints Calvin’s grim vision of the reprobate.
Incarnate man, fast bound as earth and sea, Spake, when his pride would fain set Faustus free.
—A. C. Swinburne, Prologue to Doctor Faustus (1896)
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Notes
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© 2011 Angus Fletcher
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Fletcher, A. (2011). Faustus, Macbeth, and the Riddle of Tomorrow. In: Evolving Hamlet. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118386_2
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