Did Christopher Marlowe know Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, and did he have in mind the double ending of that play when he chose to dramatize the story of Doctor Faustus? Woodes’s play was published in 1581 as ‘An excellent new Commedie’ in two states. The first ends with an announcement by the Nuntius that the protagonist, Philologus, has hanged himself in desperation; in the second state, we learn from the Nuntius that Philologus, ‘that would have hanged himself with cord’, ‘Is now converted unto God’ with many penitential tears.1 By demonstrating how the conventional last-minute salvation of the mankind figure of
' Spelling and punctuation have here been modernized in the many instances where old spelling is not germane to the point being made, especially since Marlowe is also quoted in this present essay in modern spelling.
The morality play could be taken either way, Woodes seems to offer an alternative reading of salvation history with particular relevance to Calvinist theology. His play is also meaningfully poised between the generic portraiture of the morality play and the particularity of the life of the real-life Italian suicide Francesco Spera, who had converted to the reformed religion in Italy but then had recanted under the intense pressure of the Inquisition, in a way that Marlowe might well have found applicable to his dramatization of the life of John Faustus. The Faust figure was of course extensively mythologized in the German Faustbuch and its English translation, perhaps not published until 1592, but the name was still a proper name with some sort of claim to historicity (see Deats 1976; Jackson 1971; Kocher 1943; but cf. J. Jones 1994: 52-71).
Nathaniel Woodes, identified on the title page of The Conflict of Conscience as ‘Minister in Norwich’, plainly shows the influence of Calvinist thought, as indeed is true of so many of Woodes’s calling in the 1570s and 1580s. Marlowe went up to Cambridge during these same years, where the teaching of Calvinist doctrine was in full sway. The idea of Marlowe’s having known Woodes’s play is quite plausible, then, even if it cannot be proven. Whether or not the influence is direct, Woodes’s play does at least demonstrate the potential of the morality play for divergent endings in a way that Marlowe exploits to brilliant effect in Doctor Faustus.
One remarkable thing about the dual ending of The Conflict of Conscience is the verbal economy with which the transformation occurs. The revised materials consists solely of a substituted title page, the Prologue, and the last page of the text. The title page of the second state, though reset, is essentially identical in wording to the first state except that ‘the desperation of Francis Spera' is changed to ‘the doleful desperation of a miserable worldling, termed by the name of Philologus'. In other words, the biographical name is changed into the generic. A similar alteration is found in the second state of the Prologue, much of which retains the original wording, until ‘An history of late years done' is changed to ‘A strange example done of late’. ‘Francis Spera’s history’ is changed to ‘a history strange and true’. ‘But Spera’s name, for causes just, our author doth omit’ becomes ‘And here our author thought it meet the true name to omit'. Similarly, to defend the principle that a ‘comedy' should not concern itself with ‘the vices of one private man', the wording of the Prologue in state one explaining that ‘For if that Spera had been one, we would straight deem in mind | That all by Spera spoken were; ourselves we would not find' is changed in state two to ‘For if this worldling had been named, we would straight deem in mind | That all by him then spoken were; ourselves we would not find.'
Obviously the change from unhappy to happy ending also requires some further alteration of the Prologue. ‘He is clean overthrown’ becomes ‘was almost overthrown’. ‘So that he had no power at all in heart firm faith to have, | Being urged to pray until the Lord, His mercies for to crave’ is changed to ‘So that he had no power at all in heart firm faith to have | Till at the last God changed his mind His mercies for to crave’. One four-line passage captures the essence of this profound shift from damnation to salvation. The first state reads as follows:
Then, wretch accurst, no power hath repentance to begin; Far happier if that unborn and lifeless he had been,
As in discourse before your eyes shall plainly proved be,
If that with patience you abide, the end thereof to see.
(lines 60-3)
State two offers these lines instead:
Then, wretch accurst, small power hath repentance to begin;
This history here example shows of one fast wrapped therein,
As in discourse before your eyes shall plainly proved be,
Yet at the last God him restored, even of His mercy free.
(lines 60-3)
Otherwise, the changes are minor, and even in the passages quoted here most of the original wording is retained. We can imagine the author crossing out a few key phrases on the printed sheets and writing in the needed alterations. Perhaps one other change, from ‘But while the treatise we do play, I pray you with us bear’ to ‘And therefore humbly doth you pray to give attentive ear’, moves the emphasis away from performance to reading; even the phrase ‘As in discourse before your eyes’, found in both states, ambiguously posits either dramatic performance or reading. In general, the author seems hopeful that he will have an attentive audience, whether in a performance space or in the library.
The final speech of the Nuntius, labelled as ‘Act six, scene last’ in both states, and thus appended to what is otherwise marked as a five-act play, proceeds in the same manner of offering minimal if crucial alterations. ‘Oh, doleful news’ becomes ‘Oh, joyful news’ (both states, line 2411). What a change was there! The rhyme scheme and stanzaic pattern (rhyme royal) is retained, with most of the actual rhyming words still in place. The account of the protagonist’s refusing sustenance for thirty weeks remains essentially the same, even when he is tied by the hands and force-fed. Yet what in state one is portrayed as a desperately successful suicide gives way in state two to a divine miracle: ‘And his own hand, now at the last, hath wrought his endless pain’ becomes ‘And now the Lord, in mercy great, hath eased him of his pain’. A man who ‘by deep despair hath hanged himself with cord’ is ‘now converted unto God, with many bitter tears’ (both states, lines 2423-4). Philologus, having learned to ‘profess the faith of Christ’, is now ‘constant to the end’.
Woodes offers his play for acting, in a scheme (identical on the two title pages) for six actors (Bevington 1962: 57-8, 245-51). The doubling of roles is functional even if inept (one actor is left idle for most of the play), and follows a model of earlier offered-for-acting schemes in such plays from the 1560s and 1570s as Cambises, Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Horestes, Impatient Poverty, The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene, Like Will to Like, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, Lusty Juventus, The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, Misogonus, New Custom, Trial of Treasure, Virtuous and Godly Susanna, and Wealth and Health. (Bale’s King John offers a similar plan in effect by stage directions ordering the characters to shift at various points into their alter egos.) The list for The Conflict of Conscience follows the norm by assigning one actor to the protagonist, Philologus, and one to the Vice, Hypocrisy, with only a minor doubling as Theologus (who appears only in Act 5, after Hypocrisy has disappeared from the scene). The other four actors distribute the remaining roles among themselves, with four or five apiece for three actors and two roles (the Cardinal and Caconos) for the sixth actor.
A lack of dramaturgical skill or experience on the part of the author manifests itself at several points. The phrasing on both title pages sounds a bit wistful in its hope that the play might be acted: ‘The actors’ names divided into six parts, most convenient for such as be disposed either to show this comedy in private houses or otherwise.' The venue is left meaningfully vague, in a locution found nowhere else in offered-for-acting lists. The Conflict of Conscience is from a later date than most offered-for-acting plays, and may be derivative and amateur in its effort to write a play of this sort.
In the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s professional companies demonstrated that the morality play genre could be readily adapted to the propagandistic purposes of the Reformation. Leicester’s Men and the Queen’s Men in particular seem to have been formed with such a purpose in mind. Leicester’s Men may have included in their itinerant repertory The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art and Enough Is as Good as a Feast, both by William Wager. If so, these plays were acted by a troupe that enjoyed powerful connections at court. Wager seems to have been a grammar school governor who had lectured at the hospital of St Mary Woolnoth and may have come in contact with that foundation’s singing children (P. White 1993; Craik 1958; Eccles 1981). We can perhaps catch a glimpse of how such a reforming clergyman could have written polemical plays for public performance on tour in the interests of furthering the Reformation.
The Conflict of Conscience, on the other hand, presents no evidence of powerful court connections or indeed of having been performed by any professional acting troupe. It is as though Woodes, a parochial minister in Norwich, modelled The Conflict ofConscience on plays he was able to read in print, with casting lists showing how the doubling was to be done if an acting troupe should perhaps be encouraged to adopt it for performance. Signs of amateurism are not hard to find. The doubling of Cardinal and Caconos (a foolish Scots papist who speaks in broad Scots brogue) for one actor inefficiently assigns two roles that are in close proximity and turn up nowhere else in the play: Caconos, in Act 3, scene 4, exits near the end of that scene with a scant seven lines of dialogue before the Cardinal must enter, for his only scene, at the beginning of Act 4, scene 1. The Vice figures, Avarice, Hypocrisy, and Tyranny, attempt to sing at one point, but beg off for lack of a treble (lines 760-3)—an omission that would seem to suggest lack of professional competence even while it acknowledges that Vice scenes of this sort regularly end in song in earlier morality plays. The text of The Conflict of Conscience contains a number of marginal notations, some of which read as stage directions (‘Step aside', line 354; ‘Push Avarice backward’, line 358; both seemingly intended for Hypocrisy), but others of which read more like glosses supplied by the clerical author: ‘hypocrisy:
Fig. 42.1 A Tudor conception of the pains of hell. Faustus is dragged to hell at the end of the play. J. D., The Most Wonderful! and True Storie (1597), title page, A1r.
A popish policy’ (lines 396-7); ‘Utilitas facit esse Deos’ (‘Usefulness makes us gods’, lines 412-13); ‘Hypocrisy: Antichristian charity’ (lines 400-1); ‘hypocrisy. This is sharp arguments [sic]’ (lines 426-7); ‘hypocrisy: friendship for gain’ (lines 684-5), and so on.271 Practical stage directions are sparse, when compared with those of other moralities. Physical horseplay is scarce. Some speeches are excessively long, as when Satan delivers a lecture of some 114 lines in the play’s opening. Interplay between the actors and the presumed audience, so common and so lively in moralities generally, is minimal in The Conflict of Conscience. Latin is sometimes untranslated (e. g. lines 1224-8). The play as a whole reads like the work of a zealous Protestant minister who is out of touch with the world of professional theatre.
What interests us at present is the way in which Woodes’s play offers a model for Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in its post-Reformation story of a lapsed convert confronting the terrors of damnation (such as those illustrated in Figure 42.1).
Marlowe could have known Woodes’s source, the autobiographical account of Francesco Spera. The play dramatizes at some length the trial proceedings in which Philologus is brought forward as an accused heretic to face the questions of Tyranny, the Cardinal, and Avarice, all of them egged on by the Vice Hypocrisy. Philologus answers his accusers with humble submission to their authority but with a firm defence of his faith. He refuses to acknowledge the Pope as supreme head of the Church because the Pope ‘leaveth Christ, and himself to glory takes’ (line 1167). Philologus bolsters his argument with learned citations. His view of the Holy Sacrament is that ‘it is a sign of union’ binding Christians to peaceful harmony, and is an ‘analogy’ signifying ‘That Christ feeds our souls as the bread doth our body’ (lines 1191-1214). The bread remains bread; Christ’s ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ (‘This is my body’) is to be read in the same metaphoric sense as his ‘Vos estis sal terrae, vos estis Lux mundi,
| Ego sum ostium, and a hundreth such more’ (‘You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world, I am the host’, lines 1224-8; cf. Vulgate Matt. 5: 13-14). Philologus resolves like Susanna to suffer the fate of martyrs. He appeals above all to his conscience (line 1382) as the basis of his principled stand. Yet at last he breaks down under the enticements offered him by Sensual Suggestion of ‘worldly wealth' and ‘palaces gorgeous’, ‘fair children’, ‘wife most amiable’, ‘pomp so glorious’, ‘delicate diet’, ‘life lascivious’, and the rest (lines 1593-8). The Vice Hypocrisy exults in his success and bids a comic farewell to the audience.
The long passage in The Conflict of Conscience that perhaps most anticipates Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is the debate between Spirit and Suggestion that follows Philologus’ lapse into recusancy. ‘Philologus, Philologus, Philologus!’, says Spirit, as he enters. ‘I say, | In time take heed, go not too far, look well thy steps unto’ (lines 1673-4). Philologus’ answer—‘Alas, what voice is this I hear, so dolefully to sound | Into mine ears, and warneth me in time yet to beware?’ (lines 1681-2)—sounds especially Marlovian; compare Faustus’ ‘O, something soundeth in mine ears: “| Abjure this magic, turn to God again!” ’ (2.1.7-8).3 What Philologus hears is the voice of his good angel, debating with Suggestion, who counters with ‘Look in this glass, Philologus; for nought else do thou care.’ Suggestion’s glass presents ‘Naught else but pleasure, pomp, and wealth’ (lines 1686-9). The two counsellors offer rival propositions, in alternating speeches, as in Marlowe’s play.
Spirit’s advice is holy and grounded in the promise of the Gospels, stressing that Philologus has free will to choose the good:
Thou art yet free, Philologus; all torments thou mayst scape,
Only the pleasures of the world thou shalt awhile forbear.
Renounce thy crime, and sue for grace, and do not captivate Thy conscience unto mortal sin. The yoke of Christ do bear.
(lines 1699-1702)
Yet Philologus is unable to resist the blandishments of Sensual Suggestion. This stubbornness prompts a swift rebuke from Conscience:
Citations are from the A-text unless otherwise specified.
Alas, alas, thou woeful wight, what fury doth thee move So willingly to cast thyself into consuming fire?
What Circes hath bewitched thee, thy worldly wealth to love More than the blessed state of soul?
(lines 1728-31)
When Philologus refuses to listen to godly counsel, Conscience exits with a terrifying denunciation:
O cursed creature! O frail flesh! O meat for worms! O dust! O bladder puffed full of wind! O vainer than these all!
The upshot is that ‘the Lord him to correct in furious wrath is bent’ (lines 1909-16). Philologus is to be sent to hell because of his stubborn refusal to heed the counsel of his good angel.
This long debate is identical in the two printed states of The Conflict of Conscience, and yet radically opposite endings are possible to the dramatist. The first version would seem to have been the product of the Calvinist minister from Norwich who saw, in Spera’s autobiographical story, an account of unregenerate evil in the protagonist. The surest explanation for Philologus’ hardness of heart, when confronted with the spiritual arguments of Spirit and Conscience, is that he is one of those reprobates whom God, in his infinite wisdom, has perceived to be innately evil. At the last, the godly ministers of Woodes’s play consign Philologus to his fate. They offer to pray with Philologus, but when he repeatedly insists to them that ‘I cannot pray, my spirit is dead, no faith in me remain’ (line 2349), and assures them, ‘Tush, sirs, you do your labours lose; see where Beelzebub doth come | And doth invite me to a feast; you therefore speak in vain’ (lines 1362-3), they sadly conclude that the time has come for them to depart. Yet they are not disillusioned by Philologus’ terrible ending. Quite to the contrary, Theologus exults, ‘O glorious God, how wonderful those judgement are of thine! | Thou dost behold the secret heart; naught doth thy eyes beguile.’ The story of Philologus, as of Spera, is an object lesson. ‘Here may the worldlings have a glass, their states for to behold, | And learn in time for to escape the judgements of the Lord’ (lines 2384-93). Philologus has failed, but others may learn from his example to turn to God. His tragic story is thoroughly Calvinist in its theology and in its explanation of the paradox of determinism and free will.
Down to this point, the narrative is the same in both states of The Conflict of Conscience. Only in an unexpected ‘Act six’ does the alternative ending appear. It is as though Woodes saw reason to reconsider the implications of his first reprobate ending. It tells of the historical Spera, even if under the name of Philologus, and as such it can accept the tragic necessity of spiritual failure of an individual man. But the morality play genre pulls Woodes towards an opposite consideration: as an Everyman figure, Philologus’ generic ending needs finally to be more hopeful. The morality play as a genre promotes the doctrine that as sinners we can be saved by God’s grace in spite of our manifest failings. Grace is all in all.
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is poised on this same productive uncertainty as to whether salvation is possible for one who would seem to be an unregenerate sinner. The Good Angel and the Evil Angel make their appearances repeatedly in the play, like Woodes’s Conscience and Suggestion, and always as a pair. Marlowe generally gives them equal lines of speech, beginning with the Good Angel. They first come to Faustus after he has indicated his determination to practise necromancy with the help of Valdes and Cornelius, but before he has actually sold his soul to the devil.
GOOD ANGEL O Faustus, lay that damned book aside And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head!
Read, read the Scriptures. That is blasphemy.
EVIL ANGEL Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art Wherein all nature's treasury is contained.
Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements. (i. i. 72-9)
By ‘That’ in line 75 the Good Angel means that damned book of magic that Faustus holds in his hands, having cast aside the Holy Scriptures as a waste of time. The Good Angel gets to speak first, but then the Evil Angel is in a position to have the last word of refutation. Such is the situation again at their next encounter, after Faustus has sold his soul:
GOOD ANGEL Sweet Faustus, leave that execrable art.
FAusTus Contrition, prayer, repentance—what of them?
GOOD angel O, they are means to bring thee unto heaven. evil angel Rather illusions, fruits of lunacy,
That makes men foolish that do trust them most. good angel Sweet Faustus, think of heaven and heavenly things. evil ANGEL No, Faustus, think of honour and wealth. (2.1.15-21)
An important resemblance between these passages in Doctor Faustus and the similar debate in The Conflict of Conscience is that the positions of both the Good and Evil Angel are tenable, and are even, in a dramatic sense, true. That is, we as audience are aware of two irreconcilable but equally valid readings of the Holy Scriptures and of theology (especially Calvinist theology): first, that salvation is offered by God to all who truly turn to him, even the most desperate of sinners, and secondly, that some hardened souls are beyond redemption. In theatrical terms, the contradiction is absolute: Faustus can be saved, and Faustus cannot be saved. This paradox may strike us as profoundly and theatrically true throughout the play. As such, the paradox offers unparalleled excitement and uncertainty. Can both be true? At every moment in this extraordinary play, and especially when the two angels appear, it would seem that two contradictory truths both maintain their force (Snyder 1965; Honderich 1973; Sachs 1964; Campbell 1952).
The paradox is vividly theatrical in the angels’ next appearance, seemingly in response to Faustus’ determination to repent. If heaven ‘was made for man’, he insists to Mephistopheles, ‘’twas made for me. | I will renounce this magic and repent’.
Enter Good Angel and Evil Angel GOOD ANGEL Faustus, repent yet, God will pity thee.
EVIL ANGEL Thou art a spirit. God cannot pity thee.
FAusTus Who buzzeth in mine ears I am a spirit?
Be I a devil, yet God may pity me;
Ay, God will pity me if I repent.
EVIL ANGEL Ay, but Faustus never shall repent.
Exeunt angels
FAusTus My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent. (2.3. 9-18)
The Good Angel continues to insist that God will pity Faustus, but the Evil Angel is given the concluding argument. He maintains that Faustus is a ‘spirit’, implying thereby that Faustus is no longer a ‘man’ in the fullest sense and therefore cannot hope to come under the promise that heaven ‘was made for man’. What does it mean to be a spirit? Does the Evil Angel mean that, having sold his soul to the devil, Faustus is already irrevocably damned, having in that sense passed already out of the mortal human sphere? What are we to make of Faustus’ counter-argument that God may pity Faustus even if Faustus is a devil? Is that possible? Hovering over this argument is the question of God’s agency. When the Evil Angel says, ‘God cannot pity thee,’ does he mean simply that Faustus is incorrigible, or does he mean that God could not pardon Faustus even if God were so inclined? Does the Evil Angel imply the heresy of denying freedom of choice to God? In any event, the matter of free will is fearfully pertinent to Faustus’ case. ‘Ay, but Faustus never shall repent,’ the Evil Angel avers, placing a menacing emphasis on the word ‘shall’, by way of reply to Faustus’ ‘Ay, God will pity me if I repent.’ Much virtue in ‘If!’ to quote Touchstone in As You Like It out of context here. Perhaps, argues the Evil Angel, repentance might be efficacious if Faustus could repent, but Faustus never shall repent. Determinism operates at the level of Faustus’ presumed will. To the Evil Angel, the question is academic as to whether Faustus could be saved if he were to repent, because Faustus never shall repent.
Even the punctuation in this key passage operates ambiguously. The Good Angel’s ‘Faustus, repent yet, God will pity thee’ in the A-text reading seems to mean, ‘Faustus, repent while there is time; God is there and can pity you,’ whereas the B-text reading, ‘Faustus, repent, yet God will pity thee,’ suggests ‘Faustus, repent! Even now, God will pity thee.’ The B-text reading perhaps captures better a sense of dramatic excitement, but both feed our anxiety as audience members as to whether salvation is possible still (the Good Angel’s position) or inherently and absolutely impossible, given Faustus’ status as a ‘spirit’ (the Evil Angel’s position).
The repeated dual responses of the two angels thus operate in Doctor Faustus like the dual ending of The Conflict of Conscience. Throughout both plays, salvation or damnation remains dramatically and theologically possible at any given moment.
FAusTus. Is’t not too late?
Enter Good and Evil [Angel]
EVIL ANGEL Too late.
GOOD ANGEL Never too late, if Faustus can repent.
EVIL ANGEL If thou repent, devils shall tear thee in pieces.
GOOD ANGEL Repent, and they shall never raze thy skin. (2.3. 77-81)
The word ‘can’ again captures the insistent paradox of determinism and free will: it is not too late if Faustus ‘can’ repent. But can he? The Evil Angel appears to know his man.
For us as audience, anticipation of the tragic outcome depends to a significant extent on the opening chorus speaking as prologue. Faustus' grim fate is not left in doubt:
Chorus Till, swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted more with learning's golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy. (Prologue, lines 20-5)
Faustus’ overthrow is assured by this chorus. The overthrow is inevitable because the ‘melting heavens' have ‘conspired his overthrow'. That is, the heavens are operative in melting Faustus' Icarus-like wings and thus have determined to punish him for his presumption in mounting ‘above his reach’. The heavens have evidently conspired thus before the process began. The A-text reading, ‘melting heavens', thus attributes direct agency to Providence. The B-text reading, ‘And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow', is perhaps more intelligible as implicitly attributing the melting to the warmth of the sun, but the result is the same. The idea is arguably heretical: it pushes Calvinist insistence on the absolute omnipotence and omniscience of God in a dangerous direction by hinting that the heavens have made Faustus what he is, a dangerous aspirer, and are in that sense the author of evil. In any event, Faustus is declared to be a reprobate and beyond hope of redemption from the start of the play. Woodes’s first-state Prologue in The Conflict of Conscience has the same effect, but Woodes then changes the prediction in state two to one of hope. Marlowe chooses not to follow that redemptive path.
As a result, dramatic tension in Doctor Faustus is essentially unlike that of a play like Othello in which, if we imagine ourselves as seeing the play for the first time, we do not know the outcome. Doctor Faustus is more like Romeo and Juliet, where the opening chorus assures us that nothing can resolve the ‘fearful passage’ of the young couple’s ‘death-marked love’ except their deaths. We experience dramatic tension in the form of wishing that Friar Laurence’s letter will somehow reach Romeo in time in Padua or that Juliet will awaken in time to prevent Romeo’s suicide, even if we know that these things cannot happen. Dramatic tension of this sort is every bit as effective in the theatre as the tension of not knowing, and it is the kind of tension Marlowe exploits so effectively in Doctor Faustus.
Marlowe’s play is filled with such galvanizing moments of dramatic uncertainty, and not just when the Good and Evil Angels are on hand to provide alternative counsels.
FAusTus Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned,
And canst thou not be saved.
What boots it then to think of God or heaven?
Away with such vain fancies and despair!
Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub.
Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute.
Why waverest thou? O, something soundeth in mine ears:
‘Abjure this magic, turn to God again!’
Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again.
To God? He loves thee not. (2.1.1-10)
Even as Faustus concedes the inevitability of his damnation, we see him struggling with a longing to turn to God again. The theatrical presentation of this soul-struggle is so vivid because it posits the possibility of choice, even if the internal debate ends in self-defeat.
Again, when Faustus is about to sign his contract with the devil, the sudden appearance on his arm of ‘Homo, fuge drives him into a frantic consideration of his alternatives. The moment is indeed so fraught with the seeming possibility of repentance that Mephistopheles brings on a show of rich apparel and dancing to distract his victim. Still once again, at his next appearance in 2.3, Faustus seems ready once more to repent:
When I behold the heavens, then I repent And curse thee, wicked Mephistopheles,
Because thou hast deprived me of those joys.
(2. 3.1-3)
Such moments of soul-struggle invite the Good and Evil Angels to give substance to the divided sensibility of Faustus’ choice.
Perhaps not coincidentally, when Faustus experiences disappointment in his desire to know the movement of the heavens, and most of all to know why we have not ‘conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses all at one time, but in some years we have more, in some less’ (2. 3. 62-4), and has been fobbed off with the vacuous explanation that these mysteries are the result of unequal motion with respect to the whole, Faustus makes his most intense effort to extricate himself from impending damnation: ‘Ah, Christ, my Saviour, | Seek to save distressed Faustus’ soul!’ (lines 82-3). The plea takes the form of a prayer, and is posited on the bedrock Protestant position that only through sincere penitence and a direct appeal to God can the miserable sinner hope for the gift of heavenly grace. Is this not what Faustus’ Christian learning has taught him? He has been, after all, a leading theologian, renowned throughout Europe. Yet his plea is not answered. Instead, Lucifer and Beelzebub join forces with Mephistopheles in confronting Faustus with their power over him. The very fact that such mighty reinforcements are called for would seem to establish beyond doubt that Faustus' spiritual destiny hangs in the balance. Why would they come if his damnation is assured? At the same time, we know, as audience, from the opening chorus, that salvation is for him impossible. We are confronted with an absolute paradox, one that gathers intensity in dramatic excitement.
A theological explanation offers itself in Calvin’s teaching, to be sure, namely, that Faustus does indeed have free choice and is responsible for his own spiritual welfare or failure, and yet his fate is predestinately sealed from the beginning of time in the infinite but unknowable wisdom of the Almighty (Sellin 1974). At the same time, the dramatic presentation in the theatre flirts with a more heretical alternative, that the heavens have conspired, and that God, having consigned Faustus to his damnable fate, leaves him to the cruelties of Lucifer and Beelzebub. Certainly God makes no appearance in the play, though he is appealed to once again in Faustus' last desperate moments:
O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
(5. 2. 77-9)
The Good and Evil Angels disappear from the play after 2. 3, leaving Faustus to his soul-destroying pleasures and occasional lapses into terror in Acts 3 and 4. In its final moments, Doctor Faustus returns once more to soul-struggle and to the question of possible choice, albeit at a terrifyingly late hour when the chance of spiritual success seems virtually to have vanished. Yet even at this point the option is presented theatrically as viable. The Old Man is Faustus' opposite number and nemesis, but he also offers his counsel of repentance and renunciation of suicide as the best hope of salvation:
OLD MAN Ah, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps! I see an angel hovers o’er thy head,
And with a vial full of precious grace Offers to pour the same into thy soul.
Then call for mercy and avoid despair.
FAusTus Ah, my sweet friend, I feel thy words To comfort my distressed soul.
Leave me a while to ponder on my sins. (5.1. 53-60)
The Old Man is quite explicit about Christ’s offer of mercy as potentially applicable even to Faustus at this late hour. Faustus responds in the same spirit, even if we know that his resolution to meditate on his sinful state cannot prevail. When he bids the Old Man to leave him to his meditations, and is alone, he appears to be in a panic of uncertainty.
FAusTus Accursed Faustus, where is mercy now?
I do repent, and yet I do despair.
Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast.
What shall I do to shun the snares of death? (5.1. 63-6)
Even this late in the play, salvation for Faustus is both possible and impossible.
Faustus’ scholarly friends offer him the same hope, the same theological assurance that one must never account it too late to turn to God. To his insistence that ‘Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned’ (5. 2. 15), their reply is ‘Yet, Faustus, call on God’ (line 28). One scholar asks, even now, ‘O, what shall we do to save Faustus?’ (line 51). The Third Scholar declares, ‘God will strengthen me. I will stay with Faustus’ (lines 53-4). The Second Scholar urges, ‘Pray thou, and we will pray that God may have mercy upon thee’ (lines 60-1). Prayer still can be efficacious. In his final reply to the scholars’ implorings, Faustus indicates that he has not entirely given up hope, even if that hope is desperately uncertain: ‘Gentlemen, farewell. If I live till morning, I’ll visit you; if not, Faustus is gone to hell’ (lines 62-3). Even in his last hour alive, Faustus’ impulses are hopelessly divided: ‘O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?’ (line 77).
My argument, then, is that the dramatic excitement of Doctor Faustus as a play is intensely real even while we understand intellectually that only one outcome is possible. The dramatic excitement is indeed like that of The Conflict of Conscience, even if Woodes’s play is poorly written by comparison. What both plays represent is the way in which English drama offered to Marlowe and to other late Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare (especially in Macbeth), a potential for tragic greatness founded in the wrenching paradoxes of Calvinist theology. Calvin of course did not mean these paradoxes to be discomforting; for those who entertained hope of being part of the Elect, the promise of salvation was intensely beautiful. Yet one can well imagine that Marlowe, for all his exposure to Calvinist thought at Cambridge, saw instead a formula for a tragedy of spiritual failure. Woodes may well have helped him formulate this response to the spiritual battles of the age. But Marlowe was able to go much further as a dramatist, not only because he was a gifted poet but also because he seems to have understood in a deeply personal way how one’s faith in spiritual truths could be shaken by doubt. Doctor Faustus confirms, for purposes of the play, that hell is real, but it also dramatizes the spiritual dilemma of one who has encountered sceptical uncertainty. A mere willingness to believe, even a fear of the consequences of loss of faith, is not enough in itself to restore faith. One cannot will oneself to believe in divine mysteries. Hence the dramatic power of contradictory forces in this remarkable play.
PRIMARY WORKS
Marlowe, Christopher (1993), Doctor Faustus, A - and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bev-ington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
WooDES, Nathaniel (1952), The Conflict of Conscience, ed. H. Davis and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
World History
