A Picture of Doctor Faustus309

530 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a play’s star turns was by Harriet Roberts as the saucy and coquettish Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress. Her timing was excellent. Maybe the essence of this production’s tackling of the absurd contradic- tions in John Webster’s tragic revenge play was embodied in Mark Tilly’s Bosolo (‘a malcontent’) and his perversities. Tilly played Bosolo as both panto-villain and traumatized wrestler of split personality – a Jekyll and Hyde act that could have fallen flat on its face, but didn’t. In fact, insofar as he is the machine driving the plot and the ephemeral nature of ‘conscience’, I think he nailed Bosolo. A Picture of Doctor Faustus309 HE LEGENDARY STORY OF FAUST, the scholar and physician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and insight into T the workings of the universe, and later from a lust for earthly passions and goods, is a central Western cultural metaphor and symbol for moral equi- vocation, false gain and inevitable punishment. It also has equivalents in other cultural spaces around the world, and has been adapted to illuminate a uni- versal human quandary in numerous reformulations through many geogra- phies and languages. What is so appealing about this tale that in many way derives from a crisis of church and state and indeed Christianity, in the late-fifteenth and the sixteenth century, that reaches a peak with Luther and his followers, and the violent break away from the Catholic church in the sixteenth century, is that it applies to the grand and the obscure, to the famous and the anonymous person, in equal measure. If its origins are much earlier, and the story of the sixth-century cleric Theophilus of Adana in the Golden Legend is a strong exemplar, the Faustian soul-selling was always likely to prosper in an age of fear and oppression, when religion staked its ground against a mixture of science, mysticism, superstition, and continental politics so interconnected as to be often in- separable, and of which religion itself was a part. The old world of the absolute monarch was fighting to maintain its stranglehold on power and on people, in the face of challenges from a new and increasingly urban ‘middle- class’ garnering wealth and education. 309 “The Many Faces of Faust,” The Australian (27 May 2011): 17. a In the Wings 531 Whenever any of us goes against our conscience, against what we intrinsi- cally know to be right, in order to profit from wrong, we are in essence ‘selling our souls’, or creating a Faustian pact with the devil. Religion, or even spiritual belief, doesn’t have to have anything to do with it; rather, it’s a ques- tion of moral integrity. The religious subtexts need not be more than sym- bolic, and may operate as a moral scaffolding for making secular as much as spiritual points. In many of the Faust stories there is a strong fear of and prurience about sexuality. Such tales of moral turpitude are about control. Creating literature out of them is about scrutinizing the nature of this control. The Faust story has many origins, but its most literal and most concrete is the Faustbuch, or Historia von D. Johañ Fausten, published by Johann Spies and released at the September 1587 Frankfurt Book Fair. Spies, a Lutheran, wrote in his preface to the work, “I should publish it as a fearful example of the Devil’s deception and of his murder of body and soul, so that it might be a warning to all Christians.” This was also an age of witch-burnings. So there is little doubt about Spies’s purpose and angle – though, given that the work be- came a bestseller, he also cashed in on the word-of-mouth fame of the real Dr Faustus, a notorious scholar and astrologer, who was born in the late-fifteenth century and died in 1541. As John Henry Jones notes in his introduction to William Empson’s in- vestigative work Faustus and the Censor, since Dr Faustus left no writings himself we have to rely on word-of-mouth and second-hand accounts. Dr Faustus probably studied at Heidelberg, and was a physician and a boastful ‘showman’ constantly on the verge of arrest, moving from town to town, divining, conjuring, and performing feats of magic. He is supposed to have conjured the spirits of figures from the Iliad to illustrate a lecture on Homer. Jones also points out that the notion that Faust sold his soul to the devil was likely apocryphal, and he attributes it to a Protestant clergyman. Faust was accused of sex crimes and other ‘naughty’ forms of behaviour, and he probably died a violent death. Melanchthon, who succeeded Luther and, per- versely, possibly associated with Faust, had a particular hatred of Faust, and referred to him, according to Lercheimer (1597), as a “shithouse full of devils.” It should be added that Faust had his defenders and was seen by many as learned, even brilliant, if wicked. The Faust story, and indeed the real Faust’s life, must be read against the violent changing times of which it is part. The superstitious world of magic and alchemy was being superseded by an arguably equally superstitious world .

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