[First published in the Revue de l'Universit Sainte-Anne (1981): 12-15.

[Index: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus]

[Date: 1981]

Formal Closure and Catharsis

in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Michael H. Keefer

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a play about boundless aspirations and the enclosing
spiritual and theological structure that renders them tragically absurd. As Edward A.
Snow has remarked, Faustus's desires are endless in the dual sense of being without limit
and of lacking purpose.1 And there is a heavy irony to the final inversion of these desires.
The rhetorician who has poured contempt upon all disciplines which promise anything
short of deification, and has anticipated the possession of power stretching as farre as
doth the minde of man (A: 91),2 cries at last:
O no end is limited to damned soules,
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soule?
Or, why is this immortall that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras metem su cossis were that true,
This soule should flie from me, and I be changde
Unto some brutish beast.... (A: 1488-93)
It would appear, then, that the prologue and epilogue of Doctor Faustus constitute
a kind of formal correlative to its most basic pattern of meaning. They enclose the action
of the play in a manner analogous to that in which the action encloses Faustus, though of
1 Edward A. Snow, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire, in Alvin Kernan, ed., Two
Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Selected Papers from the English
Institute, 1975-76 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hokins University Press, 1977), pp. 70-110.
2 All quotations from the play are from W W. Greg, ed., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616 (1950; rpt.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); u/v and i/j have been silently normalized. Quotations are identified by
Greg's line numbers; the letters A and B refer respectively to the 1604 and 1616 texts.

course with a quite different effect. For while Faustus's enclosure is disturbing, the formal
closure of the play is, in contrast, reassuring to the audience or to the reader. The prologue
offers us a man who has already fallen to a divelish exercise (A: 24), and the epilogue
moralizes his final hellish fall as an example which may exhort the wise, / Onely to
wonder at unlawful things... (A: 1513-15). We have been guided into a dramatization of
the deepest fears of sixteenth-century Protestants, and out of it again intactor even
wise, if we attend properly to the moralizing voice of the epilogue. But how secure is
this formal closure? I would propose that the closure of the play is subverted by a
characteristically Marlovian ambiguity in the epilogue itself.
This ambiguity can best be approached through a consideration of the kind of
tragic experience that Doctor Faustus offers to its audience. The forme of Faustus
fortunes (A: 9)that is, of the play as a wholeis such as might suggest that the
dramatic action can be safely isolated as fiction, or stage illusion. And yet immediately
within the enclosure provided by the prologue and the epilogue we find, at either end of
the play, an extended and powerful soliloquy: our intimacy with Faustus is instant and
unavoidable. In his last soliloquy, Faustus is addressing not only himself and the audience
in the theatre, but also God. And in a sense he mediates between his two audiences, the
visible and the invisible, as a kind of antichrist: this is the man, we remember, who signed
away his soul with the words Consummatum est (A: 515). Faustus is carried off to hell,
and we are left alone in the theatre with that other auditor, the God who has damned him.3
I would suggest that the tragic emotions we feel are only barely compatible with
an attitude of faith in that Godwho is, until we step outside our experience of the play,
the only God available. For the moment at least, Marlowe has constructed in us an
attitude to the God who reigns over this play which may, in some respects, be comparable
to that with which Faustus began.
The pity and fear of which Aristotle spoke in his Poetics assume in this context a
quite definite meaningperhaps, in fact, too definite a meaning. For there is bound to be
an uncomfortable degree of self-absorption in the anxiety of any audience faced with a
mysterious necessity that operates not through the fulfilment in an individual destiny of a
pattern that is also at once social and divine, but rather through the simple, repeated
inability of an isolated will to assent to its own salvation. There, but for the grace of
3 Although it is also correct to say that Faustus damns himself, there are hints throughout the play
(especially in the 1604 quarto or A text) that his wilfulness is subsumed by a larger controlling will.

God, go I: the proverb is literally applicable to the effect of this play. But does this effect
permit catharsis in the proper Aristotelian sense?
Doctor Faustus is a tragedy of vertigo. The basic identity of its protagonist is
constituted by his recognition, in his recurrent self-definitions, of the inevitability of his
damnation: what art thou Faustus but a man condemnd to die? (A: 1169); Damned art
thou Faustus, damnd, dispaire and die (A: 1315). These self-definitions are selfauthenticating: they could only cease to be true if Faustus were able to cease from making
them. And conversely, according to the dominant theology in Elizabethan England,
Faustus could only cease from making them if they were not true. The reprobate's lack of
faith, as much as the elect man's faith, is a sort of gnosisfor it amounts to an intuitive
knowledge of an objective state of affairs, a knowledge that constitutes not only the
knower's relation to the eternal realities of heaven or hell, but also his very nature, as one
who is bound for one or the other place. This knowledge presses towards fulfilment. The
man of faith says (in the penultimate verse of the apocalypse), Even so, come, Lord
Jesus. Faustus cries, in words in which William Empson was the first to recognize the
undertone of surrender, if not of consent, Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer... (A:
1507).
The pressure of this knowledge can be felt with increasing force throughout the
play: I, we must die an everlasting death (A: 76); Seeing Faustus hath incurrd eternall
death, / By desprate thoughts against Joves deitie... (A: 333-34); hel, ah hel for ever,
sweete friends, what shall become of Faustus, being in hel for ever? (A: 1412-13).
Faustus's eschatological knowledge takes on power in the reflecting mirror of his
imagination; but the imagination is also his means of escaping or avoiding this
knowledge.4 The resulting vertigo moves Faustus with loathing toward the pit of hell.
Faustus, in this, seems to transcend St. Augustine's psychology; he is pulled by terror and
disgust, as well as by delightby the seven deadly sins, as well as by Helen. 5 He is
4 The duality of Faustus's imagination is best illustrated by the words he addresses to Helen. He wants
her, he tells Mephastophilis, in order that her sweete imbracings may extinguish cleane / These
thoughts that do disswade me from my vow... (A: 1352-53). And he comes to her stained with his own
blood, shed in the renewal of his pact with Lucifer (cf. A: 1340-41). Both this blood and the penitent
thoughts inspired by the Old Man are quickly forgotten in the playful fantasy of his involvement as
Paris in the Trojan War. But the fiery awareness of his predicament burns up through his imaginative
attempt to escape from this knowledge: Brighter art thou then flaming Jupiter, / When he appeared to
haplesse Semele... (A: 1372-73).
5 In Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus, Augustine came to the view that (in Peter Brown's
words), 'Delight' is the only possible source of action, nothing else can move the will. Therefore a man
can act only if he can mobilize his feelings, only if he is 'affected' by an object of delight (Brown,
Augustine of Hippo [1967; 2nd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 2000], p. 148, paraphrasing Ad

summoned, in each case, in the direction he was already going. His cry, Earth gape, O
no, it wil not harbour me (A: 1473), undermines the resistance to his final shriek: Ugly
hell gape not... (A: 1507).
To the degree that an audience shares in this vertigo, it is excluded from what S.H.
Butcher (correctly, I believe) understood as the essential experience of catharsis:
What is purely personal and self-regarding drops away. The
spectator who is brought face to face with grander sufferings than
his own experiences a sympathetic ecstasy, or lifting out of
himself. It is precisely in this transport of feeling, which carries a
man beyond his individual self, that the distinctive tragic pleasure
resides. Pity and fear are purged of the impure element which
clings to them in life. In the glow of tragic excitement these
feelings are so transformed that the net result is a noble emotional
satisfaction.6
In Doctor Faustus there is no significant relation between the protagonist and his
social context which might assist the audience in making that movement from an
individually focussed pity and fear to a nobly impersonal contemplation which is implicit
in catharsis (and which is characteristic of audience response to Shakespearean tragedy).
If the example of the scholars in the last scene of the play is any indication, what little
social context there is in Doctor Faustus tends rather to reinforce a self-absorbed fear:
Faustus Talke not of me, but save your selves, and depart.
3. Sch. God wil strengthen me, I wil stay with Faustus.
1. Sch. Tempt not God, sweete friend, but let us into the next roome,
and there pray for him. (A: 1436-41)
And that Marlowe's contemporaries felt a certain pressure to withdraw from a dangerous
empathy to the safety of judgment is suggested by the editorial alteration of the line Oh
God, if thou wilt not have mercy on my soule (A: 1483) to Oh, if my soule must suffer
for my sin (B: 2067) in the quarto of 1616.
The epilogue quite obviously assists this drift to judgment. Catching our feelings
Simplicianum I, qu. ii,13). But the fixations of delight can be erratic: Who can embrace wholeheartedly
what gives him no delight? But who can determine for himself that what will delight him should come
his way, and, when it comes, that it should, in fact, delight him (Ad Simplicianum, I, qu. Ii, 21; Brown's
translation in Augustine of Hippo, p. 149).
6 S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (4th ed., 1911; rpt. New York: Dover, 1951), p.
267.

of empathy and of a not wholly disinterested fear at their fullest flow, its first three lines
appear to initiate an ennobling clarification of these emotions:
Cut is the branch that might have growne ful straight,
And burned is Apolloes Laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.... (A: 1510-12)
But the succeeding five lines which conclude the play prevent, I think, any properly
cathartic tempering and reduction of these emotions to just measure. 7 Instead, by
prompting a prudential contraction of the audience's experience into moral categories,
these lines seem to be encouraging a sub-cathartic expulsion of pity and fear:
Faustus is gone, regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Onely to wonder at unlawful things,
whose deepenesse doth intise such forward wits,
To practise more than heavenly power permits. (A: 1513-17)
We are invited to identify ourselves as wise, and thus to dissociate ourselves completely
from the fate of this forward wit. I would suggest, however, that these lines are boobytrapped.
It is clear enough to any reader of the play that the second adjectival clause in
these lines is subordinate to the first, that the antecedent of the second whose is
unlawful things. But this play, one must remember, was written to be heard and seen,
not read; and while a reader can verify an understanding of the grammatical relations of a
word or phrase by an anticipatory scan of what is yet to come, an auditor can only fix the
meaning of a passage once it has formed an intelligible whole, echoing within the mind.
This distinction is important, and leads me to ask by what means, and at what
point precisely, a listener who had no previous knowledge of the play could determine
whether the second of the two syntactically parallel clauses which make up the last four
lines of the epilogue is subordinate to the first, or whether both attach themselves to the
same antecedent. It is, surely, possible to hear whose deepenesse... as referring, like
whose fiendful fortune..., to Faustus; the syntactical parallelism of the sentence
encourages this error. The expression forward wits does not in itself provide a clue to
the proper subordination of the second clause, since forward could have favourable as
7 John Milton, preface to Samson Agonistes, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London:
Longman, 1971), p. 341.

well as condemnatory connotations in this period: the sixteenth-century examples cited

by the Oxford English Dictionary include a forward will to folowe (God's word) (1568)
as well as forward pride (1561). The wrong fork of this temporary ambiguity of course
leads quickly to an impasse. For should a listener attach both subordinate clauses to
Faustus, then such forward wits would be understood as amplifying the wise
with the interesting result that the two clauses become almost antithetical: Faustus's
fiendful fortune restrains the wise from a dangerous curiosity, while his deepenesse
leads them on. This an embarrassing consequence, especially for any listener who, like
the First Scholar, would not want to 'tempt God' by too close an association with Faustus;
and it is clear that the misinterpretation which the grammatical parallelism of these lines
invites could be no more than momentary.
However, this ambiguity, though quickly resolved, is not therefore trivial. It is true
that the correct meaning of the passage is quite clear on the printed page, and some
editors, notably Paul H. Kocher and Leo Kirschbaum, have removed even the possibility
of ambiguity by printing line A: 1515 without punctuation.8 But when the passage is
spoken aloud, with (or perhaps even without) the slight pause after A: 1515 that the
punctuation of both quartos implies, a firm determination of the antecedent of whose
deepenesse becomes possible for the audience only once it has assimilated the contrasts
between exhortation and enticement, and between forward wits and the wise, and has
recognized, in the silence which follows the last line of the play, that such forward wits
refers to Faustus and to those like him.
The attribution of deepenesse to Faustus is not an unnatural response to his last
agonies; this character does embody a psychological depth which was unprecedented on
the Elizabethan stage, and which even now will fail to impress only those critics whose
responses have been distorted by the inferior 1616 form of the play.9 And if, as I suspect,
8 Paul H. Kocher, ed., The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1950), p. 61; Leo Kirschbaum, ed., The Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1962; rpt. Cleveland and New
York: Meridian Books, 1968), p. 393. Most modern editors (Dyce, Ward, Tucker Brooke, Boas, Jump,
Steane, and Gill [1971]) have accepted the A-text punctuation of this line. The fact that editor of the
1616 quarto (the B text) changed the A text's comma to a colonwhich shows clearly to the reader that
whose deepenesse refers to unlawful thingsmight be taken to indicate that he recognized a
possible ambiguity and wished to eliminate it.
9 Although the precise textual history of the 1604 and 1616 quartos remains a matter for conjecture, it
seems clear that the 1604 quarto, while textually corrupt, is much closer to the original form of the play
than is the 1616 quarto. See Fredson Bowers, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The 1602 Additions,
Studies in Bibliography 26 (1973): 1-18; Bowers, ed., The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (2
vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 123-55; Constance Brown Kuriyama,
Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text, English Literary
Renaissance 5 (1975): 171-97; and my own article Verbal Magic and the A and B Texts of Doctor

the temporary confusion which the epilogue may cause was intended by the author, then
it is a characteristically Marlovian effect.
This, one remembers, is the playwright who in 1 and 2 Tamburlaine offers a
convincingly naturalistic explanation of his hero's invincibility and eventual physical
burn-out, and who yet (apparently as a sop to religious play-goers) has the onset of
Tamburlaine's fatal illness follow by a mere sixteen lines his burning of the Koran and his
challenge to its Prophetso that those who would insist on a swift punishment for
blasphemy are thrown into the arms of Mohammed. Equally to the point is the pious
resolution provided by the last two lines of The Jew of Maltawhich is, in context, the
most blatant piece of Machiavellian hypocrisy in the whole play.
Because our primary familiarity is with the printed text of Doctor Faustus rather
than with the play in performance, it is difficult to assess the possible impact in the
theatre of the ambiguity to which I have drawn attention. If, however, we can concede
that, as part of an audience which lacked previous knowledge of the play, we might
ourselves have been momentarily led astray, then we will have to revise somewhat our
previous assessment of the play's formal closure. For when a cross-over from the wrong
meaning to the correct one occurs, the reassigning of the relative pronoun references
catches one in mid-stride between a fearful empathy and moral judgment, and interrupts
what I have called a sub-catharticpseudo-cathartic might be betterexpulsion of pity
and fear. We may have made only a momentary conflation of the wise with forward
wits. Nonetheless, we must ask ourselves whether it is with confident assurance, or with
a degree of presumption, that we accept the epilogue's flattering invitation to identify
ourselves as wise, and to concur in the dreadful judgment which the play has passed upon
one forward wit.
In this context, the stories which circulated in the 1590s and after about the
visible apparition of an extra devil on stage during performances of Doctor Faustus
acquire an added significance. Whatever polemical intentions there may have been
behind the publication of these stories, their bland assumption of plausibility suggests that
audiences of this play felt any distinction between dramatic illusion and the realities
being represented to be in this case somewhat precarious.10 For if Marlowe's incantatory
Faustus, forthcoming in the Journal of English and American Philology.
10 For the stories in question see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1923), vol. 3, p. 424; and Millar Maclure, ed., Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588-1896
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 48.

rhetoric has raised a real devil, then the ambiguity which subverts the comforting moral
of the epilogue permits that spirit to escape from the play into the audience.
In the third scene of Goethe's Faust, one remembers, a small break in Faust's
magic pentangle was all that Mephistopheles needed in order to escape from the scholar's
study.11 In the last scene of Doctor Faustus, the stage is also, for all the cosmic
dimensions that it acquires in Faustus's last soliloquy, still the scholar's study. And the last
five lines of that scene provide less insulation from the terrors of that scene than might
appear to be the case.

11 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Ein Tragdie, ed. Hanns W. Eppelsheimer (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1962), lines 1403 ff., pp. 45-47.