The Will to Forget: Ovidian Heroism and the Compulsion to Confess in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

Abstract

Ritual confusion defines much of Marlowe’s treatment of theology and religious practices in Doctor Faustus. At the conclusion of Faustus’s visit to the papal court, for instance, Mephistopheles and Faustus reference “bell, book, and candle” and the friars repeat “Maledicat Dominus” in their dirge, thereby transposing the rite of excommunication with exorcism (3.1.82–3, 3.1.91–7). This scene also functions as an extended parody of the sacrament of the Eucharist, with the Pope’s meat and drink representing despoiled sacramental elements. Marlowe’s handling of ritual in this scene reinforces the anti-Catholicism that pervades Faustus’s visit to Rome and parallels his conflation, reappropriation, inversion, and parody of sacraments and rituals elsewhere in the tragedy. Marlowe stages distinctly Roman Catholic rituals only to empty them of their significance, much in the same way that contemporary polemicists sought to reduce the Eucharist, Purgatory, and other Catholic sacraments to theatrical performances.¹ What these fraught religious scenes might affirm—if they affirm anything at all—remains ambiguous. Critics have discovered a variety of doctrinal parallels, ranging from the Puritan, moderate Calvinist, anti-Calvinist, and Catholic to a combination of several theologies, but this conspicuous imprecision makes it difficult if not impossible to establish a consistent theology operating within the play. And this problem is only intensified by Marlowe’s potential collaboration with other playwrights, subsequent posthumous additions, and substantial variations between the 1604 A-Text and 1616 B-Text.²