L

RENAISANCE DESIRE, AND DISOBEDIENCE:

EROTICiZlNG HUMAN CURlOSiTY AND LEARNING IN

by

Alexandre Da Silva Maia

Department of English Literature

MeCiIl University, Montreal

Septem ber, 1998

A THESIS SUBMiTTED TO l'IFE FACULTY OF GRADUATE

STUDIES AM) RESEARCH iN PARTiAL FULFiLMENT FOR

TECE REQ- OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

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cana!! ABSTRACT

Focusing on the A-text (1604) version ofMarlowe's Doctor Fmiu, this study further assesses biographical information on the poet and intellectual currents of the Co~ter

Reformation, so as to investigate the play's relation to emergent trends ofindividualism in the

Renaissance, recovery of the pgan pst, and intellectual aspirations that could readily col1ide with orthodoxy. Clearly reflecting of the pendabout individual deviance from social noms through intellectual overreaching, Doctor &wus powerfully testifies to the potential dangers of human aspiration and the scholarly spirit of unbounded leaming. While thus explonttg the exotic temptations of forbidden knowledge, the play resurrects and interrogates traditional taboos which related intellectual appetite to wrongful lust. Marlowe stages an explosive conflict between the conservative tradition of intellectual inquiry, whic h distnisted the unorthodox scholarship and Neoplatonic magic that some widely infl uential thidcers promoted in the Italian Renaissance, and Faunis's own creative desires, ambitions, and imagination The tension between proscnid and presmid knowledge climaxes in the invocation of Helen of

Troy. While Helen's signiticance is cornplex, we find that, in relation to the play's concem with dissent fiom orthodoxy, she focuses the power of intellecnial longing to seduce and ravish the min& Apart fiom being a superior play, Doctw FUWW encapsulates Marlowe's awareness of his pend's measy perception of unconventional thinking, and urges the importance of challenging restrictions on how much one is pennitted to know. 1 must acknowledge a deep and special debt to my supeMsor, Kenneth Boms. 1 should like to thank Ken for showing care and enthusiasm when suggesting materials, discussing problems, and editing rny work. 1 have benefited more than 1 can say fiom his kindness, respect, and stimulating conversations about the Renaissance. My wmthanks also p to Kendall Wallace for helping me work through problems in research. Kendail's personality kept me laughing during the most mistrating of tirnes. 1 am also grateful to sorne fn'ends who patiently supported me: Jacqui Brinhan, Angela Seferta, Dawn Penny, Nadya Chishty-Mujahid, and-through thick and thin-John Lewis. Above all, however, I must thank my parents for helping me in every possible way. Pottant principalement sur la version A (1604) de Dofror Faustus (Tragique Hisîoire du ff ) de Marlowe, la présente étude examine de rnanidre approfondie des renseignements biographiques conceniant le poète et Les courants intellectuels de la Contre-Rdfome, de m811ih

B analyser le rapport entre l'oeuvre et les teadaaces émergeant au cours de la Renaissance, telles que l'individualisme, ainsi que le rétabiissement d'un passé palen et les aspirations intellectuelles qui pouvant fiicilernent aller A I'enconîre de l'orthodoxie. Refldtant clairement les angoisses de l'époque concernant les écarts par rapport B la norme chez les personnes trop entrepienantes sur le plan inteiiectuel, Doctor Faustus Cvoque avec force les risques inhdrents aux aspirations humaines et B l'apprentissage sans limites. Tout en explorant les tentations exotiques du savoir interdit, i'oewre ressuscite et meten question des tabous traditionnels qui qualifiaient l'appétit intellectuel de &su répréhensible. Marlowe met en scène un confiit explosif entre la tradition cousewatrice de la curiositb intellectuelle, qui allait l'encontre du savoir peu orthodoxe et de la magie

&platonicienne dont fàisaient la promotion certains penseurs trés influents de la Renaissance, et des propres ambitions et dtsirs du Dr Faust L'opposition entre Ies connaissances prescrites et promites atteint son paroxysme au moment de l'invocation d'H6lhie & Troie. Bien que l'importance de ce personnage soit complexe, nous obwolls. en ce qui concerne le théme de l'écart par rapport

B la norme, qu'eue incarne la puissance que revêt l'appétit intellectuel dans la séduction et l'enchantement de l'esprit. Tout en &tantune oeuvre dramatique de qualité supérieure, Docior

F-hrs refléte bien B qud point Marlowe était conscient du malaise que suscitaient, il i'bpoque, les

de penser puc

Introduction Renaissance ïntellectual Aspiration and Faustian Dgire I

Chapter 1 Libido Sciendi and the Camdity of Forbidden Knowledge 16

Chapter 2 Heterodox Revelations in the Renaissance 47

Chapter 3 Pagan Ravishmeat and Faustus's lavocation of

Carnal Wisdom

Conclusions The Faustian Falk Casting a Shadow Over Renaissance 106

Optimism

Works Cited INTRODUCTION

RENAISSANCE INTELLECTUAL ASPIRATION AND FAUSTM DESLRE

The malleability and mobility of the Renaissance individual invariably complicates the task of the cntic who is attempting to trace the process of selfkiefinition, and this rnakcs it difficult to assess the degree to which an individual's autonomy affects societal structure as well. ' 's Ihctor ~iiusttr.~'surveys the Protean qualities of the "self- fashioning" individual, while also revealing the ideological concems of Renaissance society which are so Fundamrntally linked to the penod's regenenited thirst for knowledge. Boctor

Fùu~tuv is, to be sure, highly representative of the anxieties surrounding boundless intellectualism and belief in the infinite potential of man.

' By using the terms "individual* and %utonomy," I do not mean to imply an utter disensagement from the great institutional powers of Endish society in the sixteenth century. In "The Alleged Early Modem Origin of the Self and History: Teminate or Rgroup'?." in Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche- Jr.. eds., 3per1ser Stt~dies,X ((New York. 1989): 1-35, A. Kent Hieatt rightly notices that such ternis of reference are distressingiy vague, and do not adequately express the comptexity of the subject. However, this study does argue for the development of individudistic thouyht in the Renaissance, away tiom the scholastic system of the Middle Aga, and towiuds a yreater cornprehension of singdar inteilectud and mative power According to Stephen Greenblatt, Runc~iswrt~~eSerf-Fkshcvnirîg (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). p. 2, there was no single "history of the self" in the sixteenth century, but there was a transition in how Elizabethans defined their own identity partidy as the result of their "increased self-consciousness about the tàshioning of human ident ity as a manipulable, arthl process." 'Citations tiom Marlowe's play are tiom Dmm Fint.stt~.s+ed. Michael Keefer (Peterborough: Broadview Press. 1991). ûther recent editors who prefer the A-text include David Bevuigton and Rasmussen. I have chosen to refer to the more authentic 1604 A-tm version because it is shorter, more concise, yet disturbing in its presentation of the Faustian fa. Keefer notes t hat the A-text "is probably not fat removed tiom what audiences at the Rose would have seen pert'ormed during the mid- 1 590s" (p. ai;). The B-text of 1 6 16 is more substantially revised and censoreci, therefore reducing the force of Mariowe's transgressive achievement in the earlier version Certainly the notion of subverting orthodox 1-ng is more pronounceci in the 1604 text- Leah S. Marcus States in 'Textual tndetenninacy and tdeologicai Difference: The Case of Ductor FMIS~IIS,,"Rernisar~ce Drumu, 20 ( 1989): 17, that Faustus has become more pro-imperial in the B-te- and he focuses his transgressive attitude on the ^ditant nationabkt sentiment that dominated English audiences durhg the 1590s." The A-text is more nationalisf but its introspective focus on leamhg makes this version of the play more refevant to my treatment of intekmai ambition and forûidden knowledge. The development of the individual in the Renaissance ran parallel to the great excavation of ancient human accornplishments in art and literature. Nineteenth-century critic Jacob

Burckhardt discusses sirnilar developments arnong Italians of the fourteenth century. Although

Burckhardt's canonized study of individualism has been criticized for its uneven description of the transition fiom the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, he correctly argues that radical change resulted from the disintegration of feudaiism. Major changes in consciousness included the notion of the uomo unfiersde, who had mastered the power that comes from being unahid of singularity3 Agreeins with Burckhardt, Charles Taylor's ~mportantrecent study Sources »/Me

Seff cites Pico's Orutkm on the dignity of man as a famous landmark in Renaissance individualism because it attirms that human beings hold "an exceptionai position" in the univene, free from the ties of a determinate nature.'

The idea of individual power being attached to the achievement of intellectuai glory becarne regenerated in the English Renaissance. A greater understanding of this power cornes directly fiom the literature that promotes individualism. as well as fiom the artists who are bom of it. This has been the center of research for several groundbreaking specialists in Renaissance literature, and speci tically defines the work of Stephen Greenblatt and Thomas M. Greene. Yet the notion of king "individual," or of achieving "autonomy," is fa fiom clearly defined; these terms become more ambiguous as they are continuously used to refer to many different aspects of Renaissance culture. in fact, achieving a precise summation of the "self-fashioning" impulse, and its applicability to the study of Elizabethan culture, has becorne quite impossible, as

Jacob Burckhardt, Inr civiIizutrion of the Rcimixwnce in Itaiy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguïn, 1WO), pp. 9% 120. 'Charles Taylor, Sowcrs of ffw Sei$ fiehlnking of the hlderrt Ide~~tiy(Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 199. Greenblatt wams: "There is no such thing as a single 'history of the self in the sixteenth century, except as the product of our need to reduce the intricacies of complex and creative beings to safe and controllable order." Docfor Fairsluv is certainly a testament to the complex nature of the aspiring individual, and the sheer divenity of critical study on Faustus demonstrates how impossible it is to view this character as a simple caricature of an overreacher. Marlowe is commenting on human aspiration and its potential dangers, but he also uses the dramatic tension to reflect societal insecurities about conflicts which define the historical particuIarity of the

Elizabethan penod. One major such contlict, the focus of this study, involves the scholarly spirit of unbounded leaming that is so often attributed to the Renaissance, and its potentially dangerous association with heterodoxy, subveniveness, and the dissidence that can be identitied in most of Marlowe's writings.

In relation to Renaissance awareness of the power of the individual, Iexamine the nature and importance of the domains of knowledge and truth as treated by Christopher Marlowe in

Docm Fuzîstu:~~..The play testities to the mieties attached to individualism, and also poignantly ends Marlowe's distinct career of defining and redefining the "overreacher" in dramatic

Iiterature. Marlowe's notorious li fie as a defiant student, hostile writer, atheist and probable homosexual has been greatly romanticized; his conspicuous violent death has sparked similar interest as well. Though I am fundamentally concemed with the significance of such an extreme personality in the midst of the English Renaissance, my discussion does not center on literary biography alone. The daring language of Doctor Fuustm speaks volumes about Renaissance consciousness, particuiarly with regard to the pursuit of what Bertrand Russell has called

5 Greenblatt, p. 8. "power/knowledge," which grants the user an ability to gratify specific desires by activating change in the wor~d.~

Doctur Eilustzsluv is an ostensibly orthodox play. Marlowe insists on the danger of achieving intellectual autonorny and fnistrates optirnistic aspirations, while simultaneously affirming the Refortnation's obsession with authorized learning and the importance of biblical scholarship. To many readers, such as Frances A. Yates, Marlowe3 play has becorne the dramatic epitome of anti-intellectualism in the Elizabethan age.' The play thus upholds 1imits and can be linked to a tradition of scathing condemnations of forbidden knowiedge like those of

King James I and Jean ~.' However, one is immediately stmck by the obvious disparity between this interpretation and the details of Marlowe's life, such as his alleged "atheism,"' his involvement with Raleigh's School of Night, and the ûllegations of blasphemous behavior made against him in the days following his death or murder by men like Cholmeley and Baines.

' Russell. Icunt.s w lhe Fimire <)/S'~CIIC~(London: Kegan Paul. 1924). Marlowe critics includiny Cleanth Brooks and Michael Keefer, who is also referring to Michei Foucault in his discussion of power/knowledge, have refend to Russell in their nudies of Dxrrur Fc?lw'tt~sto clariFy the overall quality of Faustus's inteIlectual drive. 7 Frances A. Yates, 'Thu 0cCctlItPhiïosophy in thu Eli=abrth Age (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paut, 1979), p. 1 19. Yates points out Ductor Fuitstttcs is a symbolic representation of "the reaction against the Renaissance." Alt hough Yates's study prirnarily researches the signi ficance of the occult p hilosophy and the Hermetic-Cabalist core of Renaissance Neoplatonism, she does insinuate that MarIowe shared the "contemporary mood of rigidity and reaction which was sweeping Europe" (p. 124). in his introduction to Doctor Fmstus, Michael Keefer discusses ideologcal prejudices in Marlowe criticism. resulting fiom dics, Iike Leo Kirschbaum and W. W. Greg, who negiect "institutional and ideological contexts . . . what one miyht di the 'worldliness' of the play-text and its originators" (PAX).Propsive criticism on Marlowe's A-text version of Dmtur Futtstt~.s, llike Keefer's for instance* acknowkdges the neeâ to mdy Marlowe's complex meaning rather than accepting Yates's stridy IiteraI interpretation of the play. O James 1 of England's DaemonoIogie is representative of the king's deep superstition. James did not support magic, and he disiiked any art that reflected the Neoplatonic mysticism of the Italian Renaissance. Sean Bodin's works, including Du magomm &ernonommiuT contniuted to anti-occult sentiments and the end of the golden age of the magus. Bodin was also instrumental in the vilification of Agrippa in iater sixteenth-century literature. " The modern sense of the word uatheism," as the belief that God does not exi~differs greatly from what the word co~otedto Elizabethans. As Keefw notes in his introduction to ktorF011stu.s. Privy Councillors and men like Richard ChomleyTwho fired accusations of atheism at indbiduals such as Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriotand Madowq were probabIy more concemed with "disaffd~n fiom the state church, or of a criticai awareness of the manner in which religion servedn (p. XXVUi. The "demystification" of Church authority, and the questionhg of orthodox religious dogrnas, is what I mean to imply when using the term "atheism" in this study. See fùrther Nichotas Davidson, uChrist~pherMarlowe and Atheism," in hnyil Grantiey and Peter Roberts, eds., Chrislophrr MurIrne d EngIish Remisscmce Cuiture (Uants: Scholar Press, 1996), pp- 12948. Marlowe's sensational and controvenial Iife indicates that the playwright would likely have syrnpathized with the psychology of Faustus, the damned intellectual. Likewise, Faustus does not lack complexity, and the reader cannot entirely condemn or applaud this character who represents so many simultaneously admirable and conventionally damnable qualities.

A current of Renaissance skepticism heavily infiuences Marlowe's play, and cornplements ihc tension that accornpanies the rnobility of the individual in Elizabethan socicty.

To investigate this tension is particularly satisQing when iipplied to the behavioral patterns of an icarian overreacher: one whose disregard for authority inflames his ambition to reach beyond the limits of human potential. Marlowe's own blasphemies lend weight to the notion that disbelief colon his dramatic writing. For instance, the informer Richard Baines and playwright Thomas

Kyd incriminated Marlowe by describing several of his vocal challenges to orthodoxy. Among the rnost famous is Marlowe's alleged statement, "the tint beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe."" Considering what we know of Marlowe's life and behavior Rom biographers like John Bakeless, F. S. Boas, Mark Eccles, and Charles Nonan, and recalling the

Machiavellim prologue to The Jew of Mdtu, it is perfectly credible that Marlowe could have made such a dissenting comment.

Specifically relevant to Doctor Fmstus, although more directly stated in The Jew of

Muh, is the Machiavellian notion of the ideological function of religion to manipulote social consciousness. Within the dramatic ihmework of Ductur Faustus, religion is represented as an

10 This is point le in Baines's allegations, reproduced in their original order. Cited Eom Paul H. Kocber, ChristopkrMarIowe: A Sm& of his 'Ino~tght.Leanring, adC'haracter (Chape1 Hill: University of North Carolina Presq 1%6), p, 34. ideological c~nstruct.~' Faustus's skepticism removes the controlling awe that Marlowe associates with religion, according to the Baines note, and this liberates Faustus to challenge systems legitimated by religion, as well as to deliver a defiant challenge against God himself.

There is a direct concordance between Faustus's religious skepticism and notions of unboundcd leaming in the Renaissance, because the erosion of the ideological structure of religion allowed for a more liberated attitude towards the pursuit uf knowledge, especially with regard to non- theological inquiry . Jonathan Dollimore confirms the reality of a growing skepticism in

Elizabethan culture: -This period's developing awareness of ideology in boih its cognitive and matenal foms can best be seen by looking further at the growing concem with religion itself as an ideological practice." "

The sheer abundance of' heterodox knowledge readily available to the searching scholar in the Renaissance inevitably resulted in a backlash against leaming, or what Hiram Haydn tems the Counter-Renaissance movernent, which presumed that pursuing knowledge and a higher form of rationality causes extreme doubt and the absence of faith.13 The renewed interest in

Augustinian anti-intellectualism. proverbial or mythical tales involving the dangers of forbidden

------1 t See James H. Kavanagh, "Shakespeare in ideoiogy," in John Drakakis, ed., AI~ernutiveShakespuures (London and New York: Methuen. 1985), p. 145, for an expianation of how ideology operates. Kavanagh, infïuenced by .LUthusserian Marxism. informs us that ideology is used -to designate a system of representations that offer the subject an imaginary, compelling, sense of reality in which crucial contradictions of self and order appear resolved. . . . Ideology is imaginary not because it is in slny sense unreal, but because it gives the subject an image that satisfies an unconscious need for coherence." In Jonathan DoIlimore, Rarlicuf Tragedy: Religion, Ideafogyand Powr in the Drtrmn of Shkespure adiris C'otitempururi~s(Chicago: Chicaso University Press; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984). p. 9, we are remindeci that our consciousness is "in-fonnedn by ideology, and so we can never be cornpfeteiy autonomous individuah apart 60m social order. There is, in fact, maîerial existence to ideology because order is within us, and materiafizes in our own socid practices. I2 DoUimore. p. 1 1. l3 Hiram Hayân's Ihe C*o~rnter-Renuissu~~:e(New York: Scnbner's, 1950), p. xiii, descrîbes how an intellmal protest against the abstract studies of the SchoIastics, and the "moralism" of the Christian humanists eventuaiiy grew in this period of rejuvenated lemhg In addition, the "religionists of the Counter-Renaissance (the leaders of the earfy Refodon) turrt with an exclusive enthusiasm to Eut4 repudiating reason as the devü's hadot." Vanity kame with intellecnialiCsmand the values of the Renaissance were questioned more tkquently, and with less optimism. knowledge, stricter readings of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, as well as cynicaI arguments put tonvard by Erasrnus and Agrippa al1 test@ unambiguously to the mounting contlict between consecvative intellectuals of the pet-iod and others, like Marlowe, whose writing shows signs of a preference for the adversarial traditions of the Italian and German Renaissance.'" Marlowe's creativity is exotic, luxurious and sensual; it is never ascetic. In such a manner, his writing stands out among the anti-intellrxtuai writings Haydn refers to in his study. It is difficult, if not impossible, to categorize Marlowe's writing as a sharp break kom the classical or humanistic revival, because the intellectual air of his work recal 1s the copious yet heterodox beauty of a

PatFPm-

Whereas Marlovians such as Leo Kinchbaum and W. W. Greg have ofien sought to situate Doctor F.ùu.stsru~strictly in the morality tradition, and thus interpret the play as an unequivocal contribution to anti-intellectualism. such an approach trivializes the unsettling tension of the play's dilemma, a dilemma that is hardly so intense in the original Knglish I'i1ust-

Book, and also neglects what we understand of Marlowe's unconventional intellectual affinities.

A simply moalistic appreciation of Faustus' fnll denies the substantial appeal of Doctor Faustus as a character to be marveled at for a variety of reasons. Lhctor kustm exposes the danprous appeal of subvenively pursuing knowledge for power. Fohidden knowledge attracts the individual who craftily wishes to nse in intellectual status. It is crucial to kcep in mind that

Marlowe, the overreacher himself, designed Faustus to have such a sensually cunning allure, though sacrificing him to an orthodox ending before the censors would have had a chance to do

'' Kodier's biographical study gives a comprehensive vinv of Marlowe's Idng Several critics offer insight into Marlowe's debt to the ttaüan Renaissance, and among these, J. P- Brockbank stands out as essentiai in his discussions of Pico and Ficino as sources for Marlowe's inteilectualisrn so themsel~es.'~ Such individudistic pursuits, now enhanced by the increased self- consciousness of new social rnobility in the Renaissance, caused great anxiety for the smictural powea of Elizabethan society. Specifically, religious orthodoxy had great reservations about the power of individual identity. Greenblatt cites sermon 169 of Augustine as a particularly telling account of this religious primitivism: "Hands off younelf. Try to build up yourself, and you build a niin.-'" Much of the dramatic tension in the play. which is çommonly rnoralized as battle between good and evil, may also be perceived as a textual reaction to the contlict sparked between orthodoxy and the unbounded pursuit of leaming.

Marlowe's own intellectually eclectic outlook is put to gooù use in his dramatic writing.

Christian, pagan and occult traditions form a cornplex tapestry, which is often dificult to disentangle in Doctor Fiiusnw., demonstrating Marlowe's extensive humanistic knowledge and taste for the paradox of sacramentaily secular imagery. However, the poet's intermingling of the holy and the profane, and the way in which he alters the meaning of the Scriptures, indicates to me that, for this wn-ter, nothing is utterly sacred. Marlowe rmphasizes the ease with which a scholar can deviate fiom a moral duty and a proscribed system of knowledge, and become lost in

"rapture" like a spiritually straying medieval knight. However, one of the most notable features of the play is that Marlowe eschews medieval playwrights' obsession with the wayward flesh as quintessential symbol for spiritual deviance," choosing instead to ernphasize the power of the wayward intellect Marlowe uncompromisingly represents intellectual aspiration as synonymous

' Wlliam Em pson's Fmsrus md rhr Crnwc 7he fig/Ïsh Fmsr-bmk unii Morlnvr 's DmFars~tts, ed. JO hn Henry Jones (OxTord: Blackweii, 1987), is a reveahg study of the tremendous power wielded by the Elimbethan censors. As Empson conjectures by pointing out several "cuts" in Marlowe's play, the modem reader is fortunate in being able to read certain parts that got through the censor. The censors had the power to affect publication and performance- Unfortunateiy, Empson is unable to prove that an accident on the censors' part prevented unorthodox portions of the play 6om behg exciseci. Greenbht, p. 2- " I. P. Brockbank, MmIowe: Dr. Fausfus(London: Arnold, l%Z), p. 20 with sensual longing, and thus, much like Augustine's notion of human lust for knowledge in

Book X of the Confessions. Faustus' search For truth is expressed in terms affiliated with cmal desire. The imagery recurs fiequently in Hebrew Scripture, especially throughout Genesis and

Exodus, and it is identified in the New Testament as grutificutrion oj'rhe eye (i John 2: 16).18

Augustine's similar use of such imagery represents the lust of the mind as the most dangerous bodily to master, and Si. Paui rrveals a matching dismist for human curiosity.

Various Renaissance writers, including Ficino, Pico, and Hobbes, also address the promiscuous mind, illustrating that it was a significant concen within the pnod. I intend to define the reptesentation of the problematic, iustful intellect in Doctor C.iiz~~~us,while relating its significance to the playwnght's life and work within Elizabethan England's environment of

Protean ambition and humanist curiosity.

Crucial to attaining an undentandinp of the lustful intellect is identification of what rnakes the rnind appetitivc and camal: mainly magic and heterodox writings according to

Marlowe's play. And yet the fom and content of Docm Fullvrus celebrate unorthodox perspectives as much as they condernn them. Critics often marvel at Marlowe as a type of linguistic magician, and indeed, the language he produces can be as passionate, dark, and wayward as Faustus's character. Marlowe resurrects old taboos conceming the opposition between religion and magic, which recalls the ancient dissension between and the

Apostles. The conflict exists in Marlowe's ambitious style as well: Pagan and occult sensuality is j~posedwith Christian moâels of sel f-regdation to the point where boundaries become

" In chapter 35 of Book X of Saint Augustine's Cc~~sions,trans. Henty Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford Univmity Press, 199 1), p. 2 1 1, he desthe comection beniveen the "vain inquisitiveness" ofknowledge and and lust of the khstating that intelleçtual inquhy is perceiveci througti the flesh. Augustine also cites Yhe lust of the eyes" @ John 3: 16), descnihg the eyes as rooted in the appetite for knowing, dificult to distinguish, and order and containment become comprornised. The blatant lustiness and ecstasy o€Marlowe7swriting climaxes in the second invocation of Helen of Troy; this scene is conducive to discussion of the lustful intellect because it produces the most vividly erotic display of libido .sciendi in the play. Through its three chapten, this study analyses the manifest

Faustian maniage between the desire for sexual fulfillment and the desire for intellectual satisfaction, which contributes to much of the tension in Docior firuiiw.

The fint chapter chronicles the literary tradition of "lust for knowledge." It also demonstrates how new anxieties about forbidden knowledge, and the moral intirmities that result fiom pursuing this, resurrect old taboos concerning the appetitive, lustful intellect.

Marlowe would have bcen very well aware of the scanda1 of heretical writings in the period.

Writers were frequently being impnsoned for their work, and the suppression of the 1597 play called TkIsle ofDugs dernonstrates how the crnsor couid cause a dramatic work to disappear entirely, rven &et a performance. '" The apprehension created by controvenial writing would,

for instance, result in such displays of censonhip as the institution in 1559 of the Roman

Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitonm. In England, the censon had Fat influence on what could be showcased by playhouses, as well as printed. In 1593, for instance, the collaborative play Sir Thornus More had to be revised, apparently with the help of a new playwright.

The resurrection of the "lust for knowledge" tradition within the Renaissance was a fom of propaganda against intellectualism wîthout lirnits. Marlowe emphatically drarnatizes the

theme in its most intense form in Doctor Fm~tw',although the sources for the notion of the cadintellect certainly precede Faust As Roger Shattuck points out in Forbidden Knowledge:

19 Empson, pp. 52-3. From Prometheus tu Pornogruphy, the tradition connecting knowledge of the mind to bodily lust stems fiorn proverbs in every language, and has patristic roots as well.

Certainly, the subject of forbidden knowledge is vital to any study of Christopher

Marlowe and Doctor Fuw~L\.. Marlowe's turbulent life and work centers on negating the prohibitions enforced by orthodoxy. Within the play, Marlowe displays his keen awareness of the traditions which mm of the dangers inherent in individual curiosity. Mrirlo~ve's fixation with the classical myths of Icarus, Acteon, Prometheus, and Paris, which al1 symbolically reflect

Renaissance concerns with forbidden knowledge, exemplifies his interest in disceming the ievel of power possible in individualist thought, as weli as in obseiving the supentitious fear associated with it. Furthemore, the play's text uncovers the only Iitenry rxamplc of Marlowe's interest in leamed magic lore and mysticism, which spnngs from a scholarly tradition both separated From and attached to Christian humanism. Of course, in addition to this, Marlowe exhibits his awareness of the conservative tradition of intellectual inquiry, which disûwsts the unorthodox scholarship and Neoplatonic magic that originated in the kalian Renaissance.

Although the Renaissance is frequently and popularly associated with a spirit of intellectual liberation from old superstitions and regulations, refiecting the period's romantic appeal as a supposed cultural escape fiom the Dark Ages, it is also characterized by increased interest in and apprehension about the dangers and amonlity of ascnbing infinite potential to humanity. Writea like Ficino, Pico and Raleigh enjoy and celebrate the divine potential in humans, while others like More and Erasmus prefer to ground the quest for the infinite upon the limitations of the human condition. Yet emergent individualism and academic aspiration become frequently and amorally associated with Machiavellianism, skepticism and dernonic ma&. St. Augustine's belief in the depraved nature of humankind conûiiutes to the condemnation of power/knowledge while declaring the potential deviance of individualistic thought. The first chapter articulates the mounting conflict between authorized sources of knowledge, and the disobedient tradition of heterodox learning. An understanding of Marlowe's scholarly world is crucial in order to observe how his intellectual afinities are implicitly connected with Faustus's own creative imagination.

In the second chapter, 1 explore the rise of skepticism in the Renaissance, and the notion that the excitement of knowledge, particularly secular knowledge, results in the loss of faith.

Marlowe's Faustus, as the prototype of the aspiring scholar, proves that Renaissance individualism cannot reaily co-exist with the ideologicai concems of ecclesiastical onhodo~y.

Lndeed, the Faust myth has an ideological tùnction, as Keefer has maintained throughout his studies on ~arlowe." This adrnonitory function is a product of the Protestant Reformation, as

[an Watt describes: "The Faust myth arose when the development of Christian thought had polarized the human and the-supematural worlds into conflict between good and evil, and had given their struggle a new intensity and rigor. This inevitably gave the devil and his hienrchy unprecedented theologicd and psychological importance."" The sources and origins of the

Faust myth, beginning with Simon Magus, can be traccd through mcdieval folklore and rnorality plays to the traditions of the Renaissance. The ideological fùnction of the legend appears to have been well understood by Marlowe even though his statements conceming the vanity and falsity of intellectual overreaching, exemplified by the warning of the final chorus of Doctor Fumtm, conflict with what we know of his spectacular Me. By connecting to a current of thought "which proposed to deconstruct and to transcend the orthodox categones of

U) Michael H. Keefier, "Right Eve and Lef€Heel: Ideologicd Origllis of the Legend of Faustus," IlIusaic, 22 ( 1989): 79-94. " Ian Watî, Mytk of MdmInrôvduafiisnt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12. knowledge, which appropriated Christian doctrine in the seMce of a kind of gnosis, a radically heterodox power/knowledge,'~" Marlowe's play cm be situated within the playwright's own transgressions against authority. Marlowe's reader, or spectator, is undeniably enraptured by the dissenting passions of Faustus, without feeling the burden of individual responsibility or the homfic end that is Faustus's final damnation. Essentially, the aesthetic pleasure and ironic humor of Faustus's sins, along with the climactic tension of his intellcctuai and spiritual TaIl, are fnr more dramatically appealing and celebratory than Marlowe's retention of an orthodox conclusion. So, though Marlowe must ultimately adhere to Christian doctrine and deflate the pagan pleasures of his drama, and Faustus must come down frorn the great heights of his ambition, the play nonetheless tends to undermine orthodoxy.

The final chapter examines the prospect of being "ravished" by intellectual curiosity,

which is the ultimate consequence of Faustim individualisrn within Marlowe-s play-world.'"

Doctur fimm confimis to its audience, despite Marlowe's indiscreet employment of pagan

npture and Iiberal thought, that intellectualism is not a safe haveen where the mind can become disengaged fiom the corruptible, bestial nature of the flesh; it is appetitive, sensual and camnl

down to its core. The most distinguishing moment of ecstasy in the play is the second invocation of Helen of Troy, and it is in her beautiful face that Marlowe fleshes out libido scirndi most of

al]. Although Helen is most often considered a dangerous temptress appealing to bodi[v desire,

which categorizes her as one of many misogynistic portrayais of "beautiful evil," Marlowe's

version of Faust's story adds to her liminal character by having her symbolize the perverse side

-73 Keefer, 'Wght Eve and L& Hed" 83. Gilian West states in The Ravishing of Faustus," hghhSNdieu. 75 ( 1994): 223-24. chat in the sixteenth centucy %wishedWcould mesut ^tom to pieces (by a ravening animai)." Mariowe's use of the Actaeon fable elaborates this waniiiig that iutellectual ravishrnent is not far removed fiom bodily ravishrnent. of the intellectuul. She is a silent, chaste whore like a figure of Augustinian wisdom."

Augustine *tes that Wisdorn "receives al1 her suitors (urnutore.s) without arousing jealousy in thern; she is shared by dl, and with each she is Similarly, Helen exudes universal sex appeal, but her momentous importance in the play is that she epitomizes what finally dams

Faustus: Promethean aspiration, and dissent from orthodoxy in the intellectual realms of knowledge and truth.

Doctor FUuvtw is a vecy special literary accomplishment. The play ostensibly upholds a proscnbed system of leaming and the inevitable damnation of Faustus would have been. for the tastes of church authorities, a most pleasing retnbution. However, Marlowe's engrossing presentation of the spectacle and wonder of Renaissance individualism purnits the sensual enjoyment of the forbidden side of knowledge. The language of Marlowe is meaningful here, because it is saturated with aesthetic rnjoyment of the wandenng, secular knowledge that is defined as potentially harmful. The complexity of the play, which includes Marlowe's syrnpathy and understanding for the universality of Faustus's desire to be more than he is permitted to be, cannot be packaged into any one particular category, especially that of the monlity tradition.

What Marlowe has created with Doctor Fuustzis is immeasurably more full and culturally significant than anything confined to that definition. Doctor Fuzntus represents the manifold consequences of the self-fashioning impulse. In addition, embedded within the te% Marlowe's

- -- " Roy T. Erilrsm explains in "ï7w Forme of Fûtatm Forttmes'*:A ~III& of the ïragedie of Das:tor Far~stus(1616) (Oslo: Solurn Fodag Atlantic Highiands, N. J.: Humanitics Press, t987), p. 46, that Augustine's Wdom passes fiom man to man, and yet she remallis pennanently chaste Eriksen cites Nicholas James Perella's 7k Ki's Sacred arad Profane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califamia Press, t969), which contains a translation of Augustine's Du iibero mbitrio. SimilariyTMephastophilis describes men as a courtesan comaining the chastity of Penelope and the wisdom of Saba zs De likro urbinio, IL xiv, 337; in Or*vres de Saint Augustin, W, ed. F. Thonnard (Park, 194 1). p. 286. play contains the dichotomy of the hurnanists' insistence upon the importance of recovering

Pagan genius, and simultaneous devotion to Christianity. LIBIDO SCIENDI AND THE C.4RNALITY OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Doctor I.'UUFI~LVis the most danng dramatic representation of the Renaissance obsession with ceaseless selbfashioning and intrIlectuaIism. Mariowe's achievemcnt in subvertiny orthodox boundaries of behavior, fervently expressing his aesthetic appetites, and defining the diiyerent inflections of the unrepentant "ovemacher," sets him apan from other dramatists of his time. Furthemore, Marlowe's populacization of the Faust legend would solidify the story within the litenry and theatrical tradition, allowing Goethe eventually to inhrrit this tradition.'

Marlowe's sipificance as a playwright is uRen overluoked by literary anthologists who refer to hirn reductiwly as the anist who prepared the path for Shakespeare. Although this is mie of Marlowe, and demonstrates his historical specificity as a structural innovator who revoiutionized blank verse for the Elizabethan stage, it does not Fully express his unique and sizable contribution to the creative reaîms of literature. Critics like Paul H. Kocher, who remedially asserts that each dnrnatist is a separate case,' have thankfully revitalized studies of

Marlowe in this century. lndeed, Marlowe's most salient quaiities, a defiant persondity and cunning irony, incorponte themselves into his refinernent of rebeilious drarnatic charaeters, as

Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges: "Marlowe's heroes fashion themselves not in loving submission to an absolute authority but in self conscious opposition: TamburIaine against hierarchy, Barabas against Chridanity, Faustus against God, Edward against the sanctified rites

1 Watt, p. 27. 'Kocher, p. 3. and responsibilities of kingship, marriage, and manhood.'"' Similarly subversive in attitude,

Marlowe had a problematic relationship with the religious and intellectual authonties of his age.

The granting of his univenity ciegree ficm Cambridge came only after the intervention of the

Privy Council, and the doubt surrounding the accidental nature of Marlowe's death is a direct result of his blasphemous behavior in the events leading up to that scuf'Ele in the Deptford lodging-house in 1593. Many biographical details of Marlowe's lire, including his inconsistent attendance at Cambridge during his final yean at the univeeity, express the impact of his outspoken dislike for the authorities upon his own search for intellectual fulfillrnent. Marlowe appean to have preferred the notion of an intellectual appetite which is infinite in its potential, rather than one that must be rrgulatcd and censored. Taking a11 of these factors into consideration, Marlowe's informed perspective on themes concerning lust for knowledge and

Renaissance individualism can hardly be regarded as a stnking contrat to his public persona.

Nowhere in Marlowe's work is epistemological concupiscence expressed so thoroughly as in the

Proteon character of Doctor Faustus, whose limitless aspiration and capacity to shape the self lead hirn to an undeniably tragic end.

Although Douglas Cole conectly argues that Faustus contains the universal spirit of the

Elizabethan age and the cornmon goals of the Renaissance individual, he is marked by superhuman behavior. Marlowe emphasizes the exceptional nature of Faustus by concrntrating on his "uncornmon intellectual attainments, his extraordinary reach of imagination and ambition, his arcane pursuits of forbidden magic, his bold and conscious arrogance in the face of divinely established order."' And yet, despite the universality of his desire to Rse above human

3 Greenblatt, p. 203- 4 Douglas Cole, S@ering adEvil in the Plays of Christophr Marlowe (New York: Grdian, 1WZ), p. 232. limitations, Faustus is not an . His zest for study and scholarly accomplishment press the ambition of the Renaissance hurnanist to an extremr. Certainly, even though Faustus suffea from a notorious degree of ignorance,' he enjoys human experience and intellect superior to most. And so he should, considering the fit that the historical Faust was considered a skilled lecturer of Greek literature, as well as a necromancer raising the spirits of Greek herne~.~The mode1 Cor MarloweosFaustus was, indeed, an excepiional charactrr.

Faustus is a "man-of-dl-trades," and his opening soliloquy develops the dichotomy that is embedded in the periods wanness of unbounded learning. Throughout the soliloquy, Faustus's rigorous skepticism resonates with the anti-intellectual tradition most authoritatively promoted by Augustine, and subsequently adopted by Erasmus and Heinnch Cornelius Agippa. Faustus's skepticism also demonstrates Marlowe's personal disillusionment with the scholastic learning offered to hirn during his six and a half yean at Corpus Christi:

Senle thy studies Faustus, and begin

Tu sound the depth of thar thou wilt profess.

Having commenc'd, be a divine in show,

Yet level at the end of every art,

And live and die in Aristotle's works.

Sweet Analytics, 'tis thou hast ravish't me. . . . (1. i. 16)

However, Faustus goes on to reject the utility of his acquired knowledge, including

divinity, which he abjures in favor of necromantic books and Agrippan "Lines, circles, seals,

Max Bluestone, &LibidoSpc11~imi": Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Contemporary Interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor FQ~ISRIS~"in Nom Rabkin, ed., Rehtctpretatiom oJEIi=4bt!thankwna (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 58. 6 Empson, p. 34. lettea and characters." His preference for the secret powen of a non-prescribed system of leaming evinces iust for knowledge, or what Roger Shamick terms "the Wife of Bath Efféct."

Sirnilar to John Milton's notion of the "instinct of waywardness," this effecf a powerhil human trait in Shaîtuck's view, is epitomized in Wife of Bath's dictum, "Forbede us thyng, 1 and that desiren we." Shattuck relates her comment to the human need to covet othemess: "the Wife of

Bath rffect emphasizes the ' forbid' side rather than the 'know ' side of torbidden knowledge and recognizes the perverse pull exerted on ouf frai1 moral faculties by any prohibition."7 Marlowe's eclectic intellectualism also illustrates the reality of the Renaissance conflict between onhodox and secular leaming. With regard to a prescribed system of philosophical knowledge that was taught by the universities of the Renaissance, Faustus believes he has "attain'd that end," but hr still lacks fulfillment. In response to his ambition, and what Watt relates to his conception of

Faustus as exemplihing -'an absolutid view of the pnmacy of the individual ego,"' Faustus allows his conventional knowledge to "senle," as if it is only valuable to him as a precwsor for a heightened, subversive wisdom which is ready to be explored.

Marlowe's play explicitly reveals the cornplexity of the epistemological ethos of the

Renaissance, including the scholarly ambitions contained in irrel igious intellectualism and the subsequent apprehension which resulted because of this. Marlowe explores the potentially destructive purpose of knowledge, emphasizing its individual and societal influences.

Knowledge is primarily classified as a personal insrniment of power, fike powerhowledge, rather than as a means of promoting public utility in the Sidneian sense used in A Defenve of

Poetry, where poetry is claimed to be a civilking and elevating force. Faustus wishes to be "a

7 Roger S hattuck, Forbi&'n K~mwkJge:fiam Promethurrs to Poniograpiy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1W6), p. 71, citing Chaucer's text. 8 Watt, p. 35. mighty goâ," and the occasional Frivolity of his goals is al1 power-related in a child-like desire to exhibit "manly fortitude" (1. iii. 8~)~'The immoral movement of Faustus in directions away

From public, utilihan concems and towards egocentricity not only conveys a sense of disobedience, but also of charming immaturity; and the unavoidable cornparison to Marlowe's own dissenting behavior results from Faustus's imprudent maneuvering. Interestingly, T. S.

Eliot. who identifies Marlowe as the most philosophical and intellectually basrd mind among the

Elizabethan dramatists, adds that he was also quite œ'immature."'o The cause of this behavior, reminiscent of Icarus's defiant immaturity, is clenr: to be ravished by knowledge is to be taken in by its potential, with little regard for moral responsibility or, in Faustus's case, damning consequenees. Power/ knowledge is so intoxicating and drfortning that Faustus quickly Ioses the characteristics of a disciplincd intellectual. He defers ail moral responsibility and sornehow, the half-truths. pageantry, dumb-shows, and insubstantial spirits of ~e~hastophilis'' are satisfactory to an individual who daims he seeks to be resolved "of a11 arnbiguities" (1. i. 8 1). Rather than gaining perspective through magie, Faustus becomes confused and his ntionality is distorted.

Faustus's search for detinite answers leads him into highly liminal and metarnorphic realms which only add to his ambiguities.

Critics frequently argue that Doctor Fuustus upholds the langage of attaining ends, and yet Faustus does not perceive knowledge as an end in itself Marlowe's depiction of the forbidden arts and the invoking of spirits, suggest that this type of knowledge contains "nature's

Y Frédéric Peyre argues in "Lines, Circles, Letters. and Characters: The Conjuration of Tragedy in Marfowe's Ducfor F~ISIIIS.,"C'crhiers E~isubJ~haitw',47 ( 19%): 1-8, t hat desire is the "dynamic counterpart of t he character's initial rejdon oftraditional fomof howledge," and the idea of power is inherent in Faustus's new position. 'O T. S. Eliof "Chrisiopher Wow+' in his Siec~ed~s(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). p. 104. t t Keefer, ed. bctor Fmm,p. 'k, notes that the name of Faustus's attendant spirit occun most t'requently as "Mephastophillsn in the A-texî version of the play. I have used tfiis form throughout, except in cases where t refer to the Engtish FofwlBook, where the spirit is calleci "Mephostophiles." treasury" (I. i. 76)- and it is consistently and disobediently equated with achieving levels of divine power, aesthetic pleasure, and even world conquest:

I'll have them to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl

And search a11 comers of the new found world

For pleasant hits and princely delicates. . . . (I. i. 83-86)

Essentially, Faustus's power/knowledge incorporates a radical, subvenive attitude that overreaches the realms of the established social codes regulating Renaissance intellectualism.

The bravura of Marlowe's own subversion of conventional values echoes artistically in the ambitious language of iloc~orI.uzi.vtl~v, and his authoritative perspective resembles Faustus's negation of moral principles and unscrupulous awareness of society's ideological operations.

Greenblatt identifies the dominant principle in Marlowe's heroes: "if the heart of Renaissance orthodoxy is a vast system of repetitions in which disciplinary paradigms are established and men gradually learn what to desire and what to fear, the Marlovian rebels and skeptics remain embedded within this orthodoxy: they simply reverse the paradigms and embrace what society brands as evil."" Perhaps reversing orthodox value systems is not such a simple process; but pursuing forbidden knowledge is Faustus's way of embracing values construed as evil, while empowering and aggrandizing his own identity as a successful and autonomous intellectual.

While Doctor Fuustus emphasizes the power of hidden mysteries, it also suggests a subversive power in language connected to the drive for powerknowledge, and linguistic subversion ultimately belong to Marlowe. The sensual delight of Marlowe's writing, and specifically his use of pomp and pageantry, blun the artistry of the plaWght with typical qualities associated with Iiterary magi. Barbara Traister's study of necromancers sounds like a review of Marlowe's writing of the procession of the seven deadly sins, when she identifies the

rnagician ''as director or as creative artist. Merlin and his counterparts 'create' illusion; their

rnagic produces temporary changes that affect man's senses but eventually dissolve back to

eaJudith Weil's audy of Mariowe-s prophetic style and "oblique irony." appropriately titled hIerilin's Prophet, characterizes Marlowe as a type of linguistic magus or "conjurer

laureate" (1. iii. 32);''' Robert Greene, Marlowe's artistic rival in London, suggested this exactly

in his famous blasting of Marlowe's use of English blank verse:

for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every

word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven

with that atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad pnat of the Sun. But

let me rather pocket up the ass at Diogenes's hand than wantonly set out such

impious instances of intolerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets that have

prophetical spirits as bred of Merlin's race. If there be any in England that set the

end of scholarism in an Engiish blank verse, 1 think either it is the humour of a

novice that tickles them with self-love, or so much frequenting the hothouse. l5

13 Barbara Traider's description of the rnagus in Heuve~~lyNrcromancrrs: Magcian in figliuh R~!II~IWIC*P Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 19%4), p. 24, is quite simiiar to Aigemon Charles Swinburne's assessment of Marlowe's command over puetic exprm-on in "Christopher Mariowe in relation to Greene, Peele, and Lodge," in Edmund Gosse, C. B., and Thomas James Wise. eds.. CVor~ttimporariesof Shkespeartc (London: Wiliiam Heinemann, 1919), p. 10. Swinburne States that Marlowe was, arnong dl Enylish poets 'rhe fint îùll-grown man . . . Rutes and lutes and harps and harpsichords we had heard before the organ-music of his verse astonished and entrancced ail ears not natudly seaieci against the higher suains of harmony, al1 hearts not digiously closed ayainst the nobkr tones of thought." IIJudith Weii, CïrrisropherM&ve: Merfin S Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 1s This attack on Marlowe appeared in the preface of Robert Greene's pamphlet, Pmmedes the BIachmith, which was registered at Stationers' Hall on 3 1 March 1588. Quoted hmRobert Greene, Thu Life anr/Compf"teWorb in Pr= and Verse of Robert Greene*ed. Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 7 (New York: Russell & Russell, 19641, pp- 7-9. Words are the supreme device of power in Lloctor Fuu~ruvas well. Faustus cm wield letters and words like a weapon, although Robin the clown fails in his attempt to control this power with his own deficient use of these mystical words. Magical words are a creative force, and creation in this sense is a sinister imitation of God. The power of words and letters appears elsewhere in Renaissance cirama, especially in plays dealing with elements of the occult. Ben

Jonson uses the physical presentation of letters on the printed page to convey the hidden power of written symbols: his repeated use of the acrostic fonn, imitated from Plautus, reflects the

Cabalistic notion that a manipulation of language can have transitive effects. Attnbuting such power to words is not onIy an aspect of the Cabalist tradition, associated with white rnagic,'%ut has demonic roots as well. According to Bnan Vicken, -7he crucial act in witchcraft is located in the word and . . . the spoken word constitutes power."17 The ;ut of poetry assips a similar power to words, tir words are able to shape disparate and heterogeneous things into a unified whole; Marlowe's creative powen are homologous to those of the literary magi because of his skillful employment and eclectic rningling of allusion and image. The Protean potential of the magus is mimicked by the ever-changing quality of the artist's ability to create. In addition, this creative wielding of power can spell doom for the literary magus when, for instance, the dismembering of language reflects the punishment reserved for Faustus's body at the end of the play.

16 Brian Vickers, "Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejdon of OccuIt Symbohsm, 15804680," in Bnan Vickers, ed.. Occuit andScieniij7c Mcntalities in rk Remisame (Cambridge: Cambridge Ciniversity Press, l984), p. 106. Vickers's essay "Analogy Versus Identity" interprets Agrippa's work as a discussion of how "to rearrange language is to reamge reality." 17 In his introduction to Occd arJ Scie~ttc@cicfer~taIities, p. 25, Vickers cites an unpublished paper by Richard Gordon, who drew upon Jeanne Favret Saada, Les Mors, la mort, les mr~s:kr sorceIIerie rkats Ie Bucage (Park, 1977), to discuss the verbal power of witchraft Coupled with the view that knowledge is synonymous with power and autonomy, the new Protestant focus on individual experience causes friction that is observable in Doctor

E'az~stm,and represents an important concem of the Elizabethan age. The combative impulses of good and evil, or between God and Other, culminate in Marlowe's presentation of books:

Faustus, lay that damned book aside

And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy sou1

And heap God's heavy wrath upon thy head!

Read, read the Scriptures; that is blasphemy. (1. i. 7 1-74)

A. Bartlett Giamatti identifies the core of the play as a battle between the language of and the language of Scripture: "the play is a battle of books."" Of course, even aside from the occult tradition, the overwhelming arnount of critical writing which deals with the play's theological doctrine, or doctrines, implies a further unsettling religious confiict between books. For instance, Roy T. Eriksen relates the dilemma of Faustus to "the academic conflict in

Cambridge University between ultra-Calvinist divines and more liberal, Augustine-inspired theologians on the issue of man's free wi11."'~ And yet Faustus's dilemma cannot be limited to the category of theological indecision or doubt. Doctor fiusnis can be better defined more broadly as a banle between the language of liberation, expressed by pagan sensibilities and magical conjurations, and the language of limits, represented by the divine authority of the

Scriptures. It is fascinating, and certahly an example of Marlowe's ironic humor, that Faustus's exploration of the language of liberation ultimately binds him to his damnation in the most

'' A Banlett Giamaîti, "nie Ans of Illusio~"in Harold Bloom ed., ChrisluphUr M4.riwe (New York: Chelsea House, 1986)- p. 1 C 2- 19 Etiksen, p. 19. unchangeable fonn of text represented in the play: the signature of congealed blood in the hellish

pact (II. i. 64-74).

Significantly, the Elizabethan period showcases an acute self-consciousness of the tension surrounding heretical practices and writings. Clearly, there are several important issues conceming the authenticity, censonhip, and alterations of the two published venions of Doctor buusrus. Marlowe was closely linked with Raleigh's notorious School of Night, which attracted

many gossipy and legal accusations of atheism that exalated considerably after Marlowe's scandalous death. As an associate of Raleigh, Marlowe would have been very closely aware of

the persecution, imprisonment, and frequent execution of those rebellious enough to support

publicly the advancement of heretical beliefs and the study of proscribed knowledge. The

artist's insecurity over the possibility of censonhip, speci fically of books, becornes actualized in

his play as well. Faced with 's threats, Faustus swean he w.11 "bum his Scriptures" (II.

iii. 98), and later he promises to bum his books (V. ii. 115), which was the typical way of

renouncing black magie." The reality of Marlowe's writing is that it existed within an

environment of book buming and such censorship displays as the Index Lihr~~nmPr~~hihitonim.

In June of 1599, Marlowe's translations of Ovid's E1cigie.v were publicly bumeci, as ordered by

the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. Perhaps, as Empson conjectures,

Doctor Fauîrus suMved only because "censors were not theatregoers, and might well take time

to realize what was happening-77''

Despite celebration of the English Renaissance for intellectually Iiberal rebirth of lost

knowledge, conflict can be detected between severai reciprocal attitudes toward leaming that existed in Marlowe's tirne. Not only were there pressures to Christianize the pagan discoveries of antiquity, and meet the artistic standards of the ancients but there was also the added difficulty of assimilating Neoplatonic and mystical traditions of the Italian and German

"modems" or contemporanes. The bounty of knowledge available to the Renaissance SC holar made compartmentalization extremely difficult to sanction, and therefore the individual could easily, and perhaps diabolically, move from one intellectual discipline to the next, motivated by curiosity rather than guided by religious orthodoxy. And funher dangers resulted from such liberal pursuits of knowledge, as Nicholas Davidson explains: O'pagan writings fiom the ancient world pmvided many powerful arguments againa orthodox Christian teaching, quite independent of, and much carlier than, seventeenthîentury science. The Renaissance interest in the classics could thus have provided the starting point for a number of potentially dangerous religious ~~ecuiations.""Indeed, Marlowe is a supreme example of the dangerous intellectual, influenced by a deep love for pagan classics and aestheticism, and seduced by the appeal of stringently forbidden knowledge.

The ideo that the progress of knowledge is a persistent shiR from the centers of academic jurisdiction developed in the Renaissance with the resurgence of Neoplatonism. The result of this was "a prophetic nile of leaming: that it is more profitable to explore the hidden bypaths of knowledge than to tread the cornmon highways.'" Marlowe adheres to this scholarly principle, and deeply understands the confiict between fixed virtues and relatively new foms of knowledge. In the opening Chorus of the play, we are told that Faustus's appetite drives him fonvard, beyond the realms of prescribed knowledge towards "concealed arts" (1. i. 103).

"DaGdson, p. 134. Edgar Wuâ, PuganA@stertes of fkReraaiwrtce, 2nd, rev. ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1%8), pp. 203- 04. Marlowe's imagery of consumption is highly evident here, as is al1 the digestively oral imagery that colors the desire to achieve ends in the play. Faustus's intellectual appetite for a new type of leaming is a fusion of how mind and body operates:"

And glutted now with leaming's golden @fis,

He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;

Nothing so sweet as magc is to him,

Which he prefen before his chiefest bliss:

And this the man that in bis study sits. (Prologzrr, 74-18)

There is a danger inherent in the notion of Renaissance leaming because it could be conceived so boundlessly, and frequently showcawd options that hd heterodox implications.

Intellectual autonomy requires a certain levet of social defiance in order for the scholar to achieve movrrnent bqond the limits detïncd by the ruling orthodoxy. From some viewpoints then, such pesons may appear to have a gluttonous appetite for intellectual transformation, so that autonomy of mind may thus assume negative connotations. Lily B. Campbell discusses

Faustus's psychological dilemma whilr categorizing the play as a demonstmtion of "the

Elizabethan expenence of humanism's sel f-destructive nature."" Several cntics, and most notably Thomas M. Greene, have been intrigued by humanism's effect on Renaissance identity;

Greene explores the imitative relationship between Renaissance writen and those of classical antiquity? However, it is important to understand that a certain level of disobedience and

'' William M. Hamiin, 5wohe with Cumins of a Sdfe Conceit," E~glishLmguugu Nms,34 ( 1996): 8. notices that Marlowe draws upon "the vocabuIary ofsexuality" in Iris exrrggerated depictian of Faustus's appetitive desire for know ledge. Lily B. Campbell, *Ducfor F~tl~~ls:A Case of Collscience," PMU, 67 ( 1952): 222. '' Thomas M. Greene, lk Lighf in Troy: Imitatirion d Discowry in Remisso~lcr!Poeny (New Haven: Yale University Press, I982). inwacdness is directly involved with humanist discovery, or seeking out any fonn of knowledge that is unconventional or new. Rabelais voices his own conservative concems in Gargantua's letter to Pantagniel on the positive and negative potentialities of humanist discovety." A rebirth in knowledge can readily be perceived as threatening: inevitably, then, traditional modes of learning need to be verified by the searching scholar, rather than questioned or challenged, or at least sustainrxl against rationai inquiry." Intellectuai discovq inevitably bz@s rmction fimm the established system of knowledge, and this rivalry places the collective orthodoxy in a potentially compromised position. The second chapter of this study elaborates on this issue by explorhg how the intellectualism of the Renaissance contributed to a greater understanding of the contradictions inherent in the structural and ideological foundations of Elizabethan society.

Perhaps the most evident intellectual conflict in the play, aside from Marlowe's ambiguous theological web which has spurred countless debates over whether or not Faustus's damnation is pre-determined, is the dispute between pleasure and virtue. This is, of course, a version of the struggle between the language of libenttion and the language of limits, and

Marlowe vividly explores it by jwtaposing pagan aestketicism and Christian ascetic impulses.

As in Jonson's Plrusure Rrccmctled to Clr~zre,where the two opposites are intenvoven into a maze, Marlowe combines demonic and magical imagery with traditional Christian influences.

Necromantic books are descnied as "heavenly," and Faustus's appreciation of demonic magic conveys littie distinction between the language of goodness and the abuse of conjuring spells, so that he proclaims: "1 see there's virtue in my heavenly words" (1. iii. 27). Marlowe's reworking and censoring of Scripttue is further indicative of Cabalistic mysticism, which has

Francois Rabelais, Gmgmtrm and Pantapie., wns. I. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1955). pp. 192-96. Shattuck p. 6. never before appeared so ominously secular; it is also representative of the relatively liberal

nature of magic and Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonic, Cabalistic world view had its share of detracton in the Renaissance, most notably those who saw it as incompatible with church doctrine. "Magic is Neoplatonic," they could object, and such philosophy "emphasizes man's freedom, too readily attributes events to angels or demons, and mixes in too much religious

ianguage and terminology without a religious purposz.'*'9 King James 1, who wrote cxtensivsly on the dangers of both white and black magic, shared this feu of the occult's ability to tamper

with the authoritative voice of Scripture, and he would have been horrified by Faustus's suggestive mixing of the pagan with the Christian afterlife. Pledging devotion to Belzebub,

Faustus States of himself: 'This word "damnation terrifies not him, / For he confounds hell in

Elysium: / His ghost be with the old philosophen!" (1. iii. 59-61 ). Unlike Faustus, Marlowe is

not confounded by the relationship between pagan and Christian realms. Marlowe clearly

prefers and would like to recover the pagan past by ihnisting it upon traditional Christian

imagery.

Likewise, in keeping with his reputation for eclectic sensuality, Marlowe superimposes

exotic, secular influences on a traditionally moral play. Faustus's fortunes combine pagan

aestheticism with Christian piety, and his language of magic borrows heavily fiom the language

of Scripture. Pico della Mirandola, of course, used a similar technique in an attempt to restore

the respectability of Cabala as a Iegitimate study. This is not to irnply that Marlowe achieves, or

even attempts to achieve, harmony between Christianity and other modes of thinking, as was the

goal of humanists like Pico, who sought philosophical and theological unity white attempting to

" William L. Hine, "Marin Menmm: Renaissance Natdism and RmPhance Magic," in Brian Vckers, d.,Occuit adScientrfTc MentaIities in the RY~-P (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 174. reconcile unlimited leamihg to the Augustinian limitations of man. The Marlovian effect is one of ambiguous proverb and allusion, or a -*kindof palimpsest covering" as Weil identifies it.30

Marlowe's strategic mWng of orthodox religious material with dazzling, worldly imagery is purposefblly disobedient. Faustus frequently misrepresents staternents fiorn the

Scnptutes by failing to quote them in their entirety, and his request for a devil in the holy shape of a Franciscan friar is a comic dismissal of monasticism and ascaticism that purposefully avoids the confinements of subtlety. Twice within the opening prologue, Faustus satisfies himself with half a scriptural statement, and this emphasizes his desire to perceive the Scriptures as a "mere oid wives' tale" (II. i. 136). The climax of Marlowe's technique occurs when the end of the demonic pact with Mephastophilis is signaled by Christ's final words in the gospel of John,

"Consummatwn est" (11. i. 74). However, Marlowe not only tarnpers with Scripture. In the opening soliloquy, he modifies Aristotle's argument frorn Ethics on the -'end of physic,"" and he also misrepresents Ovid: the intrusion of "O lente lente curite noctis equi" in the final soliloquy alters Ovid's original "lente cumte, noctis equi" in clmures 1. xiii. Ovid's context, the lover's plea for an extension of erotic pleasure, becomes Faustus's cry of spiritual desperation in his

final hour. Edward A. Snow senses Marlowe's mixture of pagan and Christian impulses which creates a provocatively sensual and imaginative expression of piety: "pagan (or epicurean) sensibility is distorted when it is appropnated by a Christian (or Faustian) one. . . . Beneath its apparent inappropriateness, it is ptofoundly expressive of the obscure erotic energy involved in

his religious passion. "' However, Marlowe's technique of sacramentalizing worldly ful fil lment

30 Weil, p. 22. 3 1 Keefer, ed. ~IOTFaustust p. 6. '' Edward A Snow, "Mariowe's DOCW Fardsius and the Ends of Desire," in Alvin Keman, ed., Two Renuisxwzc~ Mythmukrs: C'hnsopkrbIarfowe and Ben Jmison (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 197'7)' p. n. is also representative of a popular Renaissance taste for mixed metaphor, as Edgar Wind explains: "The notorious ease with which the Renaissance transferred a Christian figure of speech to a pagan subject, or gave pagan features to a Christian theme, has pnerally been interpreted as a sign of the profound secularization of Renaissance culture . . . Christian piety had patently given way to a taste for the pagan and profme."3harlowe's masterful utilization of myth, proverb, and allusion testifies to his uwn dense intellectualism, and yet his techniques for wielding this information indicate a liberal attitude conceming the authority of traditional rnesning. Marlowe's willingness to denigrate Christian imagery with profane references shows a considerable level of disobedience in the artistic creation of literature.

Marlowe's own restive. aesthetic tastes reveal themselves in Faustus's enjoyment of power, wealth, beauty and exceptional knowledge: "passion is the chief hallmark of [Marlowe's] genius."" Highly signiticant to this study, although yet more crucial to an understanding of

Marlowe's Hero und Leunder, is his deep love of Ovid and the flagrant passion in the Ekgttis.

Marlowe's first literary notoriety came with his translation of the E1qie.s. We cm understand the appeal of Ovid's erotic love poetry to the impressionable Marlowe when we read his work.

Undoubtedly, the 1ines of Elegy XV, "Let bisetoncei ted wits admire vile things, ! Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muse's springs," sum up Marlowe's creative impulse very well. In Doctor

Fuuïrw, and pnmdy in the second invocation of Helen of Troy, to be analyzed in my third chapter, Marlowe's poetry is an "instrument of sensual pa~sion."~ Such erotic aestheticism no doubt partly derives From Ovid's stories of love, as several Marlowe critics assume. As a

33 Win& p. 24. Y Koch, p. 330. '' Fredenck S. Boas, Chnjopkr Mmknver A Biographical d Criticai Stuc& (Oxford: Clarendon Press, LWO). p. 3 1. disinterested divinity student at univenity, the pet in Marlowe would have found a release hm his bland audies in Ovid's verse. Charles Norman pictures Marlowe ai Corpus Christi as

"steeped in Ovid wearing out the hours in rhymed measures."" Marlowe's sensuousness is a popular subject for st~d~:~since the idea of gatifLing pleasures corresponds with the romantic appeal of the overreaching intellectual: to reach in the direction of Pagan aestheticism is a detiant tum fiom Christian orthodoxy, and an ornnipresent anxiety for Christian humanists who sought to reconcile human freedom with divine order. It is worth noticing that Faustus's detiance of strictly enforced univenity dress codes is combined with a luvurious taste in his fiivolous wish to "fil1 the public schools with silk / Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad" (1. i. 91). Marlowe's clear attraction to evoking sensations and rich pageantty. or

"transmutation of spectacle into ~ord,"~~can be linked to his passionate style; the opulent procession of the seven deadly sins, and Faustus's amusement by it, sustains this argument.

The thematic importance of sensual release, exhibited in what Michael Goldman ternis

"Marlovian bliss," can hardl y be emphasized rnough, and it corresponds with Marlowe's subversively free attitude towards intellectualism and power/knowledge.39 Marlowe's sensuousness can also be attributed to the influences of the Ctalian Renaissance. As Jacob

Burkhardt describes the Italian humanists, we can readily understand this challenging pet's amaction to their writing: The ltalians of the fourteenth century knew Meof false modesty or

36 Charles Norman, C'hristopkr MQTIWY:-fie kfuse 5- Dnriitig (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Medi, 1946), 189. Kocher notices the aitical signiticance ofMarloweTrpassianate sensuaiity when he states that it imprcrses him [Mariowd %th an invinaile sense ofthe reality ofthe physical world and thus prepares him to understand the reaiity of the existence of othw men who inhabit it" (p. 3 19). Bmckbpnls p. 24. " Michel Goldman, "Mariowe and the Monics of Ravishment: in Alvin Kernan, ed., Two Renaissc~r)ce MythmaRurs: Chnstopkr Markad Bt?n Jomn (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). p. 36. of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was ;ifraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighboun . . . They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face today and another tomorrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it was fully recognized by their tirne, that they formed a wholly new eiement in so~iety'*'~Boctor Fuu~i.~also nods in the direction of Marlowe's ltalian conternporaries, like the ill-fated magus Giordano Bruno, who actually visited Engiand in 1583 to preach a Hrrmetic-Cabalist philosophy. Bruno, who was once a

Dominican monk, became acquainted with Elizabethan England's greatest thinkers and highest society, and Yates notices that Bruno's "Egyptian" Hermetic refom included a "Messianic role for ~lizabeth.'~'Bruno's investigative attitude was greatly admired by members of the School of Night, as was his influential cosrnology. Bruno met his end when, upon retuming to Italy, he was bumed at the stake for upholding Neoplatonic philosophies and refusing to retract the basic tenets of his theories, which the Venetian inquisitors judged to be hrretical. Bruno's death in

1600 is symbolic of the authoritarian suppression of heterodox learning that took place during the Counter-Renaissance movernerit.

Many questions that appear in Buctor FUZL~LF,and specifically those dealing with man's lirnitless potential, are specific in thought "and audacity" to Renaissance [taly." There is an added significance here: it is from the traditions of Renaissance Italy, including the

Neoplatonim derived from Ficino and Picc that Elizabethan England inherited its nnewed interest in magical arts. Indeed, it would seem as though Marlowe shared Pico's miom that deep ideas must be obscure and hidden? Faustus is a prototype for the searching scholar, and his

-- - M Burckhardt, pp. 99, [36. II Yates, p. 105. Brockbank, p. 28. 43 Wnd on Pico, p. [ 6. necromantic invocations of classical figures demonstrate the will to recover history so characteristic of Renaissance scholan. It would have been in chnracter for Marlowe's Faustus to have shown interest in Pico's planned but unfortunately abortive book on the secret nature of pagan mystenes to be titled Poeticu theologiu." The conventional sciences, lacking in the rniscellaneous freedom Marlowe craved as an artist, exist as barren wastelands to Faustus, whereas the imaginative yet hidden realms of magic offer an assortment of splendor and fniitful options:

These metaphysics of magicians

And necromantic books are heavenly!

Lines, circles, seals, letters and characters:

Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.

O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honor, or omnipotence,

Is promised to the studious Artizan!

AH things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command. Emperon and kngs

Are but obey'd in their several provinces,

Nor can they mise the wind or rend the clouds;

But his dominion that exceeds in this

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man!

A sound magician is a mighty god:

Here tire, my brains, to get a deity! (1. i. 50-64)

44 On Pico's abortive project, dT Wind, p. 17. Faustus's twn fiom orthodoxy can not simply be categorized as a defiant act against the authority of the church. Clearly, Faustus is searching, not just rebelling. He seeks heightened intellectual stimulation that will break dom circumscribed barriers and resaaints. Faustus requires fulfillment from a new and ungovemed type of knowledge, or at least one that he cm rule over as a "mighty goci" (1. i. 63). Specitically, Faustus craves intellectual closure, and by mastering the work of Italian Renaissance scholan and mystics who sought esoteric wisdom, he believes he can extend hirnself to this end. In order to write Ductor fiustas, a play about knowledge, Marlrrwe too had to be familiar with such esoteric wisdom, and what we do know of his leaming from such scholars as Boas and Kocher, supports this theory.

Marlowe's version of the Faust myth, although taken from the L*ng&i.shFuust-book, has its mots in German mysticism as well as in the traditions of the [talian Renaissance. Marlowe's main on the particulars of ma@c spells and Cabala cornes fiom the historical Faust's contemporaiy, Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, whom some condemned as a black magician.

Yet his De ~J~LW~~LIphtio.sophiu, which concludes with instructions on how to pnctice the art of necromancy, inspired Marlowe's depiction of magic. Influenced in his writing by Hennes

Trismegistus, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Ludovico Lazzarelli, and Johannes Reuchlin,

Agrippa's De occuItu philusophiu was, in tum, "a major source for such later Hermetists as John

Dee, Giordano Bruno, and (in the following century) Thomas ~au~han."'Agrippa's notorious reputation as a necromancer is fimly established within the canon of occult and drarnatic literature, and Faustus pays tribute to the occultist by proclaiming that he "Will be as cunning as

Midire1 H Keefer. LIAgrippa's Dikmma: Hermetic 'Rebinh' and the Ambivalences of De vmtiuie and Du aemlfu phil~~~phiu,~Remtisrculce Quurter& 4 1 ( 1988): 614- 15. Agrippa was" (1. i. 1 18)? Marlowe's description of the conjunng circle, a device originally designeci to protect the white magician from demonic spirits, is also denved fiom Agrippa.

Gareth Roberts confimis that Marlowe had read Agrippa: Doctor fimm 'bwill bear, indeed demands, commentary on its representation of magic, which is more detailed than any other sixteenth-century English play. Its depiction of magic is far more technicaily precise than that of the Erzg&ish-~'uustBook which can offer very linle as the basis for the play3 drtaikd

imagination of the contents of the books of magie."" The conjuration scene in Doctor Fuwm

is intentionally Agrippan, once again tocusing on the hidden power of words and symbols, and emphasizing a revival of cabalistic anagammatizations:

Within this circle is Jehovah's name,

Fonvard and backward anapmmatiz'd,

The breviated names of holy saints,

Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,

And characters of signs and emhg stars

By which the spirits are enforc'd to nse;

Then feu not, Faustus, but be resolute,

And try the uttermost magic can perfom. (1. iii. 8- 14)

Agrippa is clearly similar to Marlowe's Faustus, and he may well have been a prime mode1 for

the creation of the character. Yet particularly relevant to this study is what Agrippa signifies as a

farnously defiant scholar linked to the subversive side of intellectualism. In addition, the

'Quoting Gamh Roberts, uNecromantic Books: Christopher Marlowe htorF~nw: and Agrippa of Netteshek" in DarryU Grantiey and Peter Roberts, eds., C'hristopkr Mdoward hglish Remrissance Culture (Km: Scholar Press, 1996). pp. 148-50, who gives a brief survey of Agrippa's theatrical sipificance using Ly1y and Nashe as his connection to the German occultist. "~oberts, 151. vilitication of Agrippa as a Faustian sorcerer indicates how conservative thinken sought to make an admonitory example of his liberal and dangerous intellectualism. Even much Iater, Mary

Shelley identifies her Promethean young Victor Frankenstein as a disciple of Agrippa's work in

Frunkenstetn, while also mentioning the studies of Albenus Magnus and Paracelsus.

The subject of Agrippa's writing, and mainly the forbidden aspects of the knowledge he chose to interpret, defined him as a disruptive, wayward individuai. His writing çan not be disregarded as mundane or innocuous, because it was read with caution and oflen judged with demeaning contempt. In Duernondogie, James "has much more to Say about 'the Divel's school' which thinks to climb to knowledge of things to corne 'mounting from degree to degree on the slippery scale of curiosity', brlieving that circles and conjurations tied to the words of

God will raise spirits.'4* The contemporary treatment of Agrippa's work confirms the anxiety which accompanied the spiead of heterodox knowledge. The orthodox reaction to Agrippa, which he had anticipated and addressed in his prologue to De occultu philawphtu, il 1ustrates the authontarian condemnation of "heretica!" beliefs, and the conflict attending the "spirit of discovery and rebirthn in the Renaissance. The anxiety over forbidden knowledge is unambiguously associated w*th this conflict of the late sixteenth century: "The general intellectual climate - as opposed to the nature of specifically religious thought - of the period tvas very different fiom that of the heyday of the Renaissance in the late fifieenth and rarly sixteenth centuries. The outlook of many writen, in particular, became less sanguine; their mincis were skeptical, or disenchanted wvith the ideas of the ~enaissance?~This change in attitude is typical of the "Counter-Renaissance," to apply Haydn's term. Marlowe's decision to use Agrippa as a

$8 Yates, p. 91. 49 Haydn, pp. 87-1 16. mode1 for Doctor Fuw'tus Merdemonstrates the playwright's affinity for charactea, either fictional or historical, who contest authority.

Given the essential conflict between newer forms of intellectualism and traditional sectors of scholanhip, and the nse of superstition that accompanied the Reformation, it is entirely fitting that the English Fuuvt-Book was to be reinterpreted into a popular Elizabethan play. The theme of the Faust kgend gained considerable establishment after the Refiomation, partially due to the period's spirit of probing intellectualism and related problems with social conforrnity . Anviety over forbidden knowledge and hidden mysteries is traceable in many writings fiom the Renaissance. Thomas Kyd, a contemporary acquaintance of Marlowe who shared a London room with him in 159 1, narrowly rscaped fatal punishment brought about by charges of atheism. Kyd's lïte Spunish Trugeùy contains within its revenge plot an effective example of Counter-Renaissance operations, for the play presents an epitome of Pandora's dilemma, while simultaneously displaying Shattuck's Wife of Bath effect that I defined earlier: a page declares, "My master hath forbidden me to look in this box, and by my troth 'tis likely, if he had not warned me, 1 should not have had so much idle time; for we men's-kind in our minority are like women in their uncertainty: that they are most forbidden they wili soonest attempt" (III. v. 1-5). The protective taboos which warn against the deviousness of forbidden knowledge are also traceable within the more "liberal" ltalian traditions that inspired Marlowe so greatly.sO For example, Dante the Pilgrim's upward joumey is analogous to the Renaissance scholar's quest for knowledge, but the search for knowledge has limits, as he is infonned by

Peter Damian in Purudiso: The tmth you seek to fathom lies so deep

in the abyss of the eternal law.

it is cut off fiom every creature's sight

And tell the mortal world when you rem

what 1 told you, so that no man presume

to try to reach a goal as high as this.

(Purudisu,IW, 94- 102)~'

Of course, Saint Augustine discusses the tempting appeal of forbidden knowledge. and is the major authority on its damning risks. According to Roger Shattuck. the individual cannot climinate the Wife of Bath effect because it is an inetritable human trait," but as Milton suggest. in the Archangel Raphael's attitude towards Adam, the key to preserving virtue is to limit knowledge: "Be lowly wise" (!'urudisr Lost, VIII, 173). Forbidden knowledge is an ineffable part of the Renaissance individual's self-fashioning impulse, and it exists everywhere in

Marlowe's work, as well as in the heanay details of his flamboyant, yet violently short life.

Certainly his most famous and compelling gibe, if it is authentically Marlowe's, solidifies his reputation as a man who sought both forbidden pleasure and knowledge: 'rli they that loue not

Tobacco & Boies were foole~.*~~The same reckless behavior can be perceived in Doctor

Faustus's radical humanism.

In the Renaissance. certain foms of knowledge rebom from earlier periods in history were not so highly regarded by orthodoxy as others, and this created a great deal of tension for

5 1 Quoting Dame as adduced by Shattuck, p. 24. Shamielg p. 76. " This is point 2g in the Bahes note as cited from Kocher. p. 35. the Elizabethan censon Apart from Wety about Christian hwnanism, which sought to reconcile pogan antiquity with Christian belief, there existed within the Renaissance a rigid distrust of magic. The Cabalists, begi~ingwith Pico della Mirandola, prornoted the Christian orientation of their quest for spiritual truth, and yet their methods opened the door for further exploration into occult philosophy and the art of invoking spirits. The "Christian" thought of

Hermes Trismegistus, who was falseiy considered an anaient Egyptian sage, tas also udvrrtised in order to promote the hermetic writings as a prudent fom of knowledge, even though supposedly existed well before ~hrist.'" In addition to this, Renaissance Neoplatonism was extremely receptive to the occult idea of man's ability to operate cosmic forces, and the

Hernietic notion of "man as magus." According to Yates, "the dominant philosophy of the

Elizabethan age was precisely the occult philosophy, with its magic, its melancholy, its aim of penetrating into the profound spheres of knowledge and experience."j5 AIthough Yates's daim is rather exaggerated, especially when she furilier claims the occult philosophy was the pivota1 foundation of scientific mentalities, she brings appropriate attention to the importance of the

Hermetic-Cabalist tradition as an intellectual movement in the Renaissance. j6

Doetor FCCUFIZUkeenl y depicts the period' s am bivalence concerning forbidden knowledge and magic. Marlowe's farniliarity with treatises on witchcraft, which he only utilizes in the composition of this particular play, allows for compelling descriptions OF Faustus's blasphemies that are not taken fiom the Engfish Fuusr-Book. Besides reflecting loss of faith in the powen of authority to control human behavior by right of any generally perceived supremacy

Y Hine, p. 170. '' Yates, p. 75. " Several seholars, such as Keefa, Schmitt, Vickem and Westman, rightly hdYates's claims exaggerate the effeer the occutt phlosophy had on the büth of m-entific mentahies or the "new scienccwand the Enlightenment tradition of the advancement of leaming. of the dominant societal and ideological structure, Doctor Fuusiuv Merindicates signs of the mounting opposition against worldly knowledge which illustrate the animus of regulating forces in Marlowe's time: the vilification of Agrippa, the difficulties experienced by alchemist John

Dee, the censonhip of Francesco Giorgi, the immolation of Giordano Bruno, and the overwhelming amount of anti-occult literature produced in the late-sixteenth century are but only a few instances of this trend. The witch craze is the most notorious and extreme example of how superstitions re-ignited by Reforrnation beliefs repressed the more worldly spirit of intellectualism in the Renaissance: this evinces "the Counter-Reformation attempt to suppress the Renaissance" os well as "a retum to a more Rgorous type of ~ristotelianisrn."~~During this backlash apinst radical study. and specitically against the pursuit of holy mystenes. magic and the occult became synonymous with forbidden knowledge; Buctor FUZI,P~U~exemplifies this point profoundly.

One of the most noticeable fmtures in Doaor IC1ut~~ttn,and a further result of the backlash against secular knowledge, is Marlowe's insistence on the physical appetite for intellectual scholarship or the inflarning of lua for knowledge. Faustus is constantly descnbed as ''glutteâ," and his libidinous intellect becomes further apparent as the play moves towards his inevitable damnation which results from his conjuing in *'some lusty grove" (1. i. 152). The ascetic and celibate image of an old Franciscan fnar is amusingly appropriate for the devil, in

Faustus's view, but not for Faustus himself, who would rather be a ravisher like Jove or an abductor like Paris. When the enticing thrill of the forbidden is introduced to conventional scholarly searching what results, in Marlowe's representation, is a quasi-sexual bliss that cannot be detached fiom intellectual longing: "Faustus [is] a man whose sexual and erotic energies have been diverted into the successful pursuit of' knowledge and fame, and who is iherefore leR with a vague feeling of unsatisfied emptiness, the satisfaction of which he associates with powers that derive from forbidden knowledge."" Shattuck's references to the Wife of Bath's curiosity cannot be disassociated from her position as a figure of bawdiness and unequivocal sexual appeti te.

Marlowe's own erotic zeal has been referred to tirne and again by al1 of his biographers, and it is hardly surprishg that the playwtight excelled at depicting intellectual overreaching with such a sensuous precision. Hany Levin uses the well-known term Iibdo srrndt to define the appetite for intellectual sensation that belongs to ~austus." The phrase appears in Blaise

Pascal's Pclmkes, and I pragmatically adopt it 1ike Levi n, because the linkage of concupiscence of mind with iust of the flesh aptly describes Faustus's situation in Marlowe's play, and reflects a much earlier tradition that can be traced back at least to Book X of Augustine's C'onfkssran.~,as

Pascal's own context indicates? Pascal cites 1 John 2: 16 of the Vulgate Novwn Testumrntum to explain the term's meaning, and the English translation in the Geneva Bible clarifies the severity of what Pascal implies when he discusses the subversive force of libido scirndi: "For al1 that is in the worlde (as the luste of the flesh, the luste of the eyes, & the pnde of life) is not of the

Father, but is of the worlde." " Libido sciendi not only expresses the camal implications of

5II Kay Stockholder, ^'Wahin the massy entrailes of the ah': Faustus's Relation to Women," in Kenneth Friedrich, Roma GiII, and Constance B. Kuriyama, eds., A Puez daFiMy Pfày-miakr (New York: AMS Press, 1988), p. 204. 59 Hany Levin, christophur hfmfowe:The ûvemackr (London: Faber and Faber, 196 1). p. 1 10. 60 Oemws Je Biaise Pascal. Léon Brunschvicr~,ed. (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 192 1). In the second volume of the Pellsy*es, 6 no. 458, Pascal employs the tem Mido sciena See t'urther Shamick. pp. 45-7. 61 Thr Gewva Bible, intrcxî. Lloyd E. Berry?(Madison. Wis. : University of Wtsconsin Press, 1969); 1 siienly expand contractions in this and al1 subsequent quotations of this ta. learning that would have been most famously exemplified in the stoiy of Adam and ~ve:~but is also implicit in Faustus's prorniscuous mind. Although there are many different versions of "lut for knowledge" or "camal rea~on,"~al1 impiy that appetite of the mind is closely analogous to appetite of the body. In the Renaissance, "knowledge" had sexual as well as mental implications, and the link between intellectml stimulation and sexual stimulation does not only appear in Marlowe's work, for the notion of Yust for knowledge" has û strung and rccurring presence in uit literary traditions.

Marlowe's extravagant and frequent use of classical mythology is panially due to its rich interpretations of "lust for knowledge," and this is a recurring motif of the myths evoked in

Doctor Fuustt~rur. Hesiod's sequences about Prometheus have been particularly useful to critics seeking to define the unlimited capacity of the Renaissance scholar, and yet, although Faustus's aspiration is typically Promethean, Marlowe chooses several other sources to demonstrate the consequences of Faustus's quest for the unknown. The story of Icam has special importance in the Renaissance, and Marlowe places the rnyth in his opening prologue, because the fail of

Icarus is the quintessential symbol for the tragedy of the ciassical overreacher. A myth even more kquently referred to by Renaissance writen is the story of Actaeon. Marlowe employs the tale in his depiction of Faustus's comic transformation of Benvolio into a stag, and in the description of Faustus's tragic end. The myth was often moralized as a warning against uncontrollable passions. Yet it offers insight into the taboos smounding forbidden knowledge, because Actaeon's passions are kindled by gazing upon the naked Diana, which is a sight no mortal mm was ever supposed to see. In this case, a type of forbidden knowledge is represented

62 Kenneth Born's, "Ailegories of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lm," in Mihn StuJizs, 3 31 ( 1994): 45-72. " Don Cameron Men, Doubt 's BorrnJlesu Sea (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, I964), p. 134. by the ferninine body itself, and this recurs in Marlowe's depiction of Helen, as my third chapter shows.

Faustus is closely comparable to Prometheus, Icarus and Actaeon. Al1 four of these charactea exhibit Millicent Bell's notion of the "instinct of waywardness" and ''the lust for

forbidden kn~wled~e.'~But Marlowe creates a bolder and slightly more complicated link brtween his protagonist and Paris, another mythic figure who pcrtains to forbidden knowleâge.

The Judgment of Paris broadly corresponds to the Christian myth of the Fa11 in ~enesis?and not unlike the Trojan prince, Faustus blunders when he succurnbs to the beauty of Helen of Troy.

Indeed, Faustus's dilemma is correlative to the one presented at the Judgment of Paris: "the

Trojan prince is no proper mythical mode1 for imitation: the prince ought to have given the golden apple to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, instead of to , or voluptuousness.*66

Faustus has similarly Forsaken wisdom, and an orthodox god, for pagan lwury, much as he promises to sack Wittenberg, a traditional center of wisdom in Germany (V. i. 98-99). Faustus and Paris are remarkably similar characten because both display a subversive attitude towards

prohibition, and a flagrant disregard for abstemious wisdom. Without shame, Paris, the tieshly bathed and lubricious lover of Homer's epic , loses himself in aesthetic and sexual pleasures. Both he and Faustus choose to live in all voluptuousness, which makes Paris a

"womanish man" to Ovid and irnplies that Faustus's seduction by beauty is ~nrnanl~.~~The

-- - * Mülicent BeU. "The Fallacy of the Fa11 in Paradis Lcu't,'" PMU. 68 (1953): 863-83. Margaret I. Ehrhart 's Jttdgment of the ïrojm Prince Pans in rlft!rli~valLitemm (P hiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. L 987) explores, among other things, the Judgnient as allegory. In the Oviclr moraIisi. Discord throws the golden apple into the wedcüng fwultimately causing the Trojan War. That the chaos brought about by the symbolic golden apple mut be an analogue of Gen& where the apple disnipted Adam and Eve's bliss. is, as Ehrhart argues, "naturd and obviousn (p. 90). '' Erîksen, p. 84. 67 ovid, Tiw IieroiJrrs, trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947). pp. 20 1-03, aesthetic appeal of Marlowe's language, which is especially Ovidian in the apostrophe to Helen, coincides perfectly with Faustus's fa11 into voluptuousness, and into the arms of Helen of Troy.

Marlowe's play reinvests much interest in the voluptuousness of the min& and as with

Paris's faulty judgrnent, Faustus's fa11 fiom grace is brought about by his clouded curiosiry and appetitive desire to pursue sensuous intellectual paths of esoteric knowledge. Several

Marlovians, most notably Douglas Cole and J. P. Brockbank, have concentrated on Augustine's influence in Doctur hiru~tus,primarily in an attempt to clari@ the ambiguous theological doctrine of Marlowe's drama. However, of greater relevance to my inquiry is the anti- intellectual distrust of human curiosity exhibited by both Augustine and Paul. Roy T. Enksen notices that "Faustus's defection from vinuous temporal leaming and scriptural wisdom naturally suggests Augustine's definition of as spiritual darkne~s.+~Furt hermore,

Augustine's articulation of the analogy between curiosity and erotic desire has been monumentally influential. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Book X of his ( i~njC;.csions:

1 must now speak of a different kind of temptation, more dangerous than these

because it is more complicated. For in addition to our bodily appetites, which

make us long to ptiball our senses and our pleasures and lead to our min if we

stay away fiom you by becoming their slaves, the mind is also subject to a certain

propnsity to use the sense of the body, not for self-indulgence of a physical kind,

but for the satisfaction of its own inquisitiveness. This Futile curiosity

masquerades under the name of science and learning, and since it denves ftom our thirst for knowledge and sight is the principle sense by which knowledge is

acquired, in the Scriptures it is called grcitificution of' the rye. (Chapter 35)

Undoubtedly Marlowe would have been keenly aware of the anxi-ety surrounding notions of camal wisdom or libido sciendt, and reappearing time and again in the literature of the

Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino most fully anticipates the mysterious qualities of Marlowe's intellectual vision according to J. P. Brockbank and in Ficino's C'ummrniuy on Pluro '.Y

''Synposiwn, " the liberty of human reason allows for the possibility OF being misled by the senses in the same manner as the tragic Actaeon is."' Ficino asserts that there is a sensual appetite in seeking knowledge, and it must be regarded with caution;70 similady, Thomas

Hobbes ~cknowledgesin Chapter Six o€l.rvcuthun that camal pleasure exists within the desire to know.

Examplrs such as these con finn that Renaissance currents of intellectualism, including new fonns of esotenc knowledge. were being challenged by a strict moral Frame of orthodox beliefs. "Lust for knowledge" not only functions as a dramatic device in Marlowe's play, but as an ideological function which promotes confomity with conventional beliefs and social structure. L)octor Fuusrus is representative of the conflict between the limiting structure of religious and philosophical orthodoxy and the putative transgressions of intellectually adventurous individuals. Therefore it is hardly surpnsing that this play, which cornrnents on

Protean ambition, would contah traces of the tradition which links libidinous carnality to pursuits of the mind.

69 Marsilio Ficino, Commentaryun Pfuto 's '*Sympium,"tram. Sears Iayne (DaIIas: Sphg Publication, 1985). pp. 92-3. Brocbank, p. 28. Ficino, pp. 66-7. HETERODOX REVELATIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE

The rise of the notion of the individual in the Renaissance accompanied a scholarly movement away tiom the intellectual integration promoted by prescnbrd knowlrdp. However, contrary to this vibrant and progressive trend in scholarship, as we have seen. the Counter-

Renaissance movement, with its anti-intrllectuaIistic bias and exaltation of --the lowly and the humble,"' expressed concem over supposedly dangernus detachment Rom traditional values and onhodox religious thinking. Doctor ~*UZI.~~UYsimultaneously celebratrs and condemns the intellectual ambition ine?

Marlowe's controvenial reputation for blasphemous "table talk," as Kyd described it, indicatrs that he would not have been interested in upholding an orthodox belief system . To the modem

reader who chooses to accept the nurncrous hearsay biognphical details of Marlowe's life, the pet projects an image of dissension that borders on rebellious exhibitionism. Of course,

biopphen and ctitics have Frequentiy been guilty of sensationalizing Marlowe's controversiai blasphemies and intellectual inclinations, perhaps in an attempt to counter Shakespeare's greater

prestig by focusing on the appeal of Marlowe's detiant penonality rather than the depth of his

literary contribution. For example, J. E. Morpurgo's Introduction to an edition of EchuurJ II

includes a Iurid commentary on Marlowe's Me: "Few Fat writers are as interesting as their

works. . . . But Christopher Marlowe, even had he written nothing, would make the wonderful,

' Haydn, p. JUï. swashbuckling hem-villain of an exciting, blood-filled and fiequently sordid romance.'" Yet, what we most ofien identifi as distinctly Marlovian disobedience, and what contributes vastly to the force of Marlowe's literary achievement, has strong mots in more general currents of

Renaissance thought. The rise of skepticism, atheism, and Machiavellianism had powerful effects on the way in which intellectual inquiry was perceived in the Renaissance, particularly with regard to the unsteady reiationship betwern attaining secular knowledge and maintaining religious faith. Furthemore, the Faust myth, together with contemporary interest in the Protean potential of the magus demonstrated on stage, disphys the cssential ideological contlicts of a period that had undergone religious refonnation. One of the main attractions of Ihctor FUUWÏ, and of Marlowe himself, originates fiom the passions involved in these contlicting ideologies, which are strongly retlected in the play.

The notion of the leamed Renaissance individual pro ficient in designing personai identity, and the orthodox opposition to such a notion, are both concurrent with considerable doubt circulating among scholars in the sixteenth century. The writing of the period included a movement in which rationalism and historical arguments resurrected kom ancient tex& accumulated in infiammatory literature which often discredited the validity of the most fundamental doctrinal beliefs of society. Certain works of the Renaissance attack the forces of govemment, but more significantly, they sometimes criticize organized religion and the supremacy of Scripture, fiequently citing pagan authorities in order to do so. Marlowe's abstruse drarna is part of this subversive category of literature. The rationale for this need to challenge conventional authorities is complicated, and cannot be sufficiently explained by sirnply citing human inquisitiveness. Marlowe's particularly combative temperament is an

' Christopher Marlowe. E&md Il, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Faleon Educationai Books, 1949). emblematic, although somewhat intensified, example of how scholars had been conditioned by their own liberal intellectualism to doubt sources that were dopatic, or even deemed sacred.

Indeed, the Renaissance can be categorized as the pend for foundation of anti-intellectualism.

The most persistent features of the Counter-Renaissance, and primarily the tendency to emphasize the vanity of leaming and arrogance of inte 1lectuals, reveal how the establ ished hierarchy was attempting to reclaim the power that had been claimed by knowledgeable individuais. The reaction to Renaissance intellectualism il1 ustrates how developments in leaming are assimilated by society. Any period characterized by an increased interest in knowledge, especially new and unorthodox knowledge, appears accompanied by a wave of speculation and doubt.

Beginning with the opening soliloquy, i3ocror f~ùicstz~vreveals a current of skepticism that abounds throughout the entirety of the play. Faustus re-creates Agrippa's arguments in Of the Vunitute und hcertuiny uf the -4rte.s cm/ Sciences, belonging to the Counter-Renaissance tradition identified by Haydn, although Faustus chooses not to digress in praise of the ass as

Agrippa had when he mimickrd the classical argument of ~~ulrius.~Faustus is skcptically motivated to search farther for absolute knowledge, and it is perfectly clear that his dissatisfaction is the result of what he has already leamt. Marlowe% prologue asserts that

Faustus has studied a great deal, for he is "glutted now with leaming's golden @fi" (24).

According to Marlowe, skepticism stems from knowing, and this is further implied by the lack of skepticism dernon~lfatedby Marlowe's indifierent fools. Faustus's skepticism lures him to covet the tangible, and although he constantly claims an aspiration for the status of a demigod, it

Agrippa condudes Oftk Vmitate ami Vncertuinty of the Arres adSciences by dudhg to Apdeius's Ine Goidett Ass, Sunilar in tone to Eramus's In Praise of Foi&, Agrippa shrewdiy argues that true wisdom cornes tiom understanding the hUy of inteUectual inquiry. is quite clear that the physical satisfaction of the senses becomes his top priority: "For the

skeptical person the senses are the beginning and the end of human knowiedge. Faustus,

proceeding in the sceptical manner, doubts the existence of thing he cannot directly perceive."

in such behavior, Faustus reveals a positively Agrippan attitude. Faustus embarks on an

intellectual journey that is very sensually alluring. By observing Faustus's experience, we can

learn much about Mariowe's own intellectualism and creative yenius, or what Hany Lzvin ternis the Marlovian impetus: a combination of bbsensuousperception" and "speculative inte~ligence."~

Despite Nicholas Davidson's protestations that -*theperiod lacked the mental equipment

to reject the Christian religion," and 'rhat intellectual unbelief was actually impossible in the

sixteenth century," the English Renaissance is in fact an ideal period for observing increased

cunents of doubt.' Whether doubt compts or enlightens the Renaissance individual is a matter

of debate, but disbelief surely erists as a rnotivationol condition for insatiable curiosity and

libido scirndi Certainly, the advancement of science throughout the Renaissance, although

much more significantly afier Marlowe's age, poses a geater threat to the supremacy of

religious thought. However, waves of skepticism had their deepest beginnings within Marlowe's

period, and the tension surrounding this reality is everywhere to be observed in Marlowe's

writing, as well as in the biographical details of his life which describe his frequent clashes with

religious, govemrnental, and academic authorities.

Francis Bacon argues that the Refomation brought so much attention to the debatable

nature of church doctrine, that for many, spiritual tmh had to lie outside the peripheries of ~hristianit~.'Indeed, subversive currents of t hought are inevitable when traditionally accepted orthodoxy cornes into question, and the division between hotestants and Catholics provoked the rise of a hedonistic code of intellectualism: 'The dike of faith was going down as the sea of rationalism burst through. Christians realized that when it had ovenvhelmed the steeples and cûowned the cocks, it would sweep al1 men into a material skepticism or, at best, into a rational theism.'" Jonathan Dollimore argues that Montaigne's skepticism is particularly applicable to the way in which Renaissance writen were challenging al1 foms of authority because it involves the anti-essentialist view of the *-decentringof man."' Marlowe's writing is, without a doubt, part of this tradition, and Docior ~U~CSIZLSpresents a *'decentreg individual whose instances of skepticism provide an interesting view of the period's preoccupation with obedience venus indecent behavior, as well as the power of intellectual study inextricably linked with this conflict.

Returning to the opening soliloquy in bctw Fuzc.~i.v, it must be noted that, by identimng the limitations of the knowledge he has already achieved, Faustus is not doing anything unorthodox per se; Renaissance skepticism does not have to apply itsrlf in opposition to the orthodoxy, although in several cases doubt includes a reaction against traditional

Christianity. For instance, Sir Walter Raleigh's The Scrprzc never counten Christian beIieE

Critics have been pondering the possibility of Marlowe's skepticism for years. Although the current of such thought unquestionably exists in Dumr Fuusttn, Marlowe's own intellectual character tends to suggest that he was not a skeptic, and unlike Raleigh, he had few qualms

7 Levin, p. 3. n Men, p. x Dollimore. p. 18. 10 Kocher, p. 1 1. about opposing Christian doctrine. Kocher argues against the view of Marlowe as skeptic, and creates an interesting distance between the playwright and Faustus in his opening soliloquy:

"Marlowe seems never to have been a sceptic. . . . [HJe never questioned the worth of the

knowledge already attained and the possibility of attaining ever more, or the truth of the impressions beauty made upon his senses. Animation is the pith of his character.""

Considering Marlowe's use of Agrippa's style in Faustus's opening prologue, it would bt: interesting to know if he had read Ofthe Vunitute und Vncertuinfy of the Artes und Sciences as a

literal renunciation of Agippa's Dr o~~'zllruphilo.sophio, or if hr: had chosen to extract the irony

irnplicit in Agippa's anti-intellectualism. Either way, lloctor Fuustvrus is indicative of

Marlowe's acute comprehension of the wave of skepticism that was probing the cstablished

ideologies of his tirne. Furthemore, the opening soliloquy suggests Marlowe's understanding of

the fundamental connection between knowledge and doubt, and of the ravishing power of

Faustian ambition so feared by Elizabethan hierarchy. in Don Cameron Allen's study of skepticism and faith in the Renaissance. Botrht +.Y

~~wtdfes.~Sm, he describes the typical atheist: "'one who could not accept any religious

principle shared by ail Christian creeds. . . . The men who started the trouble, who pointed to the

variations in the texts of Old Testament, who questioned the divine inspiration of passages, even

books, of the Bible, who uttered ridicdous doubts about Eden, the Flood, the career of os es.""

Allen's description places emphasis on the perceived authonty of wrîting. Certainly, doubten

were oRen observed pointing out biblical contradictions, and the most dangerous were the

learned "smug hurnanist~."'~The spread of movable type in the Renaissance is inexaicably

-- - II Kocher, pp. 1 1-13. '* Allen, pp. v-vi. 13 Ailen, p. 10. connected to the spread of doubt, as well as the societal empowerment of the censors, as

Shattuck notes: -'Even the prospect that ordinary people might read the Bible for themselveolet alone works of modern heresy-challenged the authority of the ~hurch." l4 Atheisrn, whether

practical or ~~eculative~'~is illustrative of how the advancement of leaming leads to doubt:

the rise of atheism was ineextricably linked with the spread of literacy, the

imitation of Greek and Latin wribrs. and the skeptical thrust of sixttxnth-century

dialect. English atheism becarne articulate with the advent of Protestant

humanism. It was the unintended consequence of an cducational program

designed to yoke literacy to belief, and eloquence to religion. While this project

possessed enonnous marketing power, the grand synthesis between leaming and

piety proved elusive in practice. lh

In an attempt to use literacy in defense of Christianity, satiric portraya1 oF the atheist becarne a

Renaissance priority in works such as Thomas Nashe's Christs Trures ovcr lr>uwlm, and

writings apinst atheism were published throughout the seventeenth-crntury including, among

others. books by the Catholic Campanella and the Protestant Cuperus. "

Of course there is Iittle chance of reading any study of Marlowe without encountering

some sort of position on his alleged atheism, and despite Paul Kocher's crucial contribution to

the understanding of Marlowe's religious thought, he is perhaps too certain of the mind and heart

of Marlowe when he declares "it is clear to us where his sympathies lie."[' During his six years

14 Shattuck, p. 27. I5 Allen, pp. 4-8. 16 David Riggs' "Marlowe's Quarrel wirh God," in EmiIy C. Bartek, ed., C'rt~tcalEïsoys un CÏrrisropkr Marlowe (New York: Hall, 1997), p. 43. If ArIen, p. 20. 18 Kocher, p- 5. at Cambridge, Marlowe would have been introduced to atheistic intellectual cunents, and works by Aristotle, Pliny, Lucretius, and Lucian, which were considered the ancient foundation for modem atheism. l9 He also became famil iar with Machiavel1ian pol icy, which infunated Robert

Greene, who was the firn to print a public accusation of Marlowe's athei~rn.'~That dangerous ideas were circulating, particularly as a result of the study of writings fiom the ancient world and modem ltaly, 1s inherent in the world of Ductor I*uzistuv,as Fiustus himself indicates:

Valdes, sweet Valdes, and Cornelius,

Know that your words have won me at the last

To practise rnagic and concealed arts:

Yet not your words only, but mine own fantasy,

That will receive no object, for my head

But niminates on necromantic skill. (1. i. 10 1-06)

Since the playwight cannot be conclusively linked to the details of the Baines note,

Marlowe's thought is perhaps more reliably expressed within bis dramatic writing, in spite of the substantial intervention of the Elizabethan censon. Cenainly, criticism of Christianity is a recumng therne in Marlowe's writing, but identifying his theological stance or ovenll intention in wnting Doctor FUUYWShas always been a matter of debate for Marlowe critics. However, within Marlowe's irony and eloquence lies a powerful understanding of his own tirne period, expressing his vision as a man of "high thinking and low living."" Whether Marlowe was an

- '" Riggs, p. 48. in reaction to Marlowe's earty succes as a playwright with the popuiar ïumbttr/ariw. Greene penned Perime&s the BIackeSmith ( 1588). The letter which appears as 'To the Gentlemen Readers,' expresses Greene's outrage at Marlowe's "danng God out of heaven." Greene continues to lash out at Marlowe by degrad'uig him as ^a cobblefs eldest son." '' LMn, p 8. atheist or not, he was well aware of the term and its connotations. According to Kyd, Marlowe was undoubtedly connected with Raleigh's School of Ni& appropnately named due to suspicions aroused by the secretive nature of the circle." Raleigh's intellectual group was constantly under attack for i ts al leged at heism. Furthemore, ïirmburluine the Grrut is

Marlowe's dramatic masterpiece which directly confronts the subject of atheism, while illustrating Elizabethan anuieties about exotic power and dangerous secularity. The Othemess of

Tamburlaine, the "scourge of God," is significant because part of our natural inclinations, according to Shattuck's Wife of Bath effect, is to reach in the direction of the Other. However, the exotic nature of Tamburlaine is symbolically manipulated by Marlowe in order to emphasize the hero's identity as a singulûr force, unattached to the hierarchy of onhodox English society.

Interestingly, Tarnburlaine shares several qualities with the character of Faustus. Yet these qualitics can be etTictively compressed into one definition: the force of powerful singularity or individualism. Hamy Levin rightly appreciates that the essence of the Marlovian cxperience is its analysis of Renaissance individualism and the ideology of libernl man:

In so far as he worked within the univenal fnmework of the monilities, he was

filling in particulaa, subordinating abstraction to individuality. His protagonia is

never Everyman but always I 'uomo stnguiure, the exceptional man who becomes

king because he is hero, not hero because he is a king; the private individual who

remains captain of his fate, at least until his ambition overleaps itself; the

According to Thomas Kyd's Ietter to SiJohn hckering, three mernbers ofthe School ofNight were ofien together with Marlowe: "such as he conversd wittiall that is, as i am geven to understand, with Hanïott, Wamer, Royden." Of course, Kyd is referring to Thomas Hanot, the eminent astronomer, Matthew Royden, the poe~and either alchemist Walter Warner or perhaps the poet William Warner. overreacher whose tragedy is more of an action than a passion, rather an assertion

of man's will than an acceptance of ~od's.'~

The notion of the intellectually "wandering scholar" relates to the proverbial idea of man's natural tendency to stray fiom the pths of righteousness towards sin, or what Milton pejoratively termed 'The instinct of waywardness." The theme is ever-present in Faustian literature. ln a 1563 letter from the Loconim i 'ommz~nrurn( 'OkCf~n~ffof Johanncs bnlius, which describes the historical Faust, he is said to have "wandered about everywhere and talked of many mysterious things,'''4 and an excerpt dated 1591 from Philipp Camerarius's Oprru hormsubcisivurt~m mentions Faust's *'criminal curio~it~."~~Such wayward intellectualism attnbuted to the searching scholar is analogous to the idea of a "knight-errantTTin chivalric romance. Glory cm be achieved in either a physical or an intellectual realm. The Arthurian romances, such as those written by Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, promote the ideal that there is a hunger for glory inherent in the spiritually elevated hem. However, such glory is often shown to serve a grander utilitanan purpose, such as bnnging honor and renown to the court and therefore adding to the political stability of the organization. In contrast, Faustian literature describes man's natural tendency to desire individual elevation. regardless of the consequences, and the hero inevitably suffea harshly when consurned by his own heightened ambitions. Phyacal testing is essenhal to establishing the value of the Arthunan hero, but perhaps the Renaissance hero should not strive to test himself intellectually, for he could suffer an Icarian fall, as says Faustus's First Scholar or student: "1 fear he is fallen into that damned art"

23 Levin, p. 24. " Philip Mason Palmer and Robert Paniron More, eds., 7hu kurces of the huit TMon:Fm Sinon Magrs to Lessing (London: MordUniversity Press, 1%6), p. 1O 1, 25 Palmer and More, p. 124. (1. ii. 30). Roger Shattuck provides a good summation of how parables conceming forbidden knowledge ofien reach the same didactic conclusion: "Ignorance may not be bliss, but the observation of prudent restrictions on knowledge might have prevented the fate of Orpheus, of

Icms, and of Lot's ~ife.'''~Marlowe's Faustus rnay be added to this list.

Marlowe's version of the Faust myth ad& another crucial element to the legend: the danger of inteilectuaiism lies in knowledge itself as an innigator of passion in the minci, as well as in man's natural limits in dealing with knowledge. Knowledge is temptress and seductress at the same tirne, and thus libido scirncli expresses the instinct of waywardness which plagues

Faustus's character. Faustus has been ravished by the subject of his study, and this is evident when he states, 'Sweer .4nu[vticv 'tis thoir han ravish'd meœ'( 1. i. 6). Later in the play, Faustus declares, "'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravish'd me'' (1. i. 1 1 1 ). The appetitive desire is ignited by the high degree OF intellectualism he has already ac hieved. It is for this reason that greater knowledge breeds greater doubt, and faith survives best on ignorance. The ability to hypnotize people into a state of awe, what Marlowe believed to be the "firn begimingWof religion, becomes superfluous and dulled in the Renaissance climate of unbounded leaming. Faustus's standpoint may well reflect Lucretian and Epicurean skepticism, which assumes, as Allen says, that Whe Christian concept of the spiritual . . . is the invention of 'deceiving and deceived

literati, scholastics, phiiosophers, and theologen enchanting men's understanding. ?""

Considering the conservative Lutheran tone of the English Faust-Book, it is hardly surprising that the work is packed with anti-intellectual sentiments, as well as markedly unsympathetic presentation of Faust, in cornparison with Marlowe's psychologically engaging character. As 1 have noted, Marlowe's years in Corpus Christi at Cambridge would have introduced highly influential and controversial literature to him, which is an important factor to consider when assessing Marlowe's intellectual position within the rise of Renaissance skepticism and doubt. A similar concem of Marlowe criticism is where to place Docrur Fuuïlus within sixteenth-century social developments, which involve power structures that conflicted with, and otken censored the beliefs of such autonomous individuais as the play3 hero. Certainly, as

Michael Keefer asserts, Faustus is "a univenity scholar in full rebellion ûgainst the received system of knowledge,"" and it is rssential to the play's meaning that forbidden knowledge is so often at the heart of such Renaissance conflicts between liberal individualism and orthodox authority. Such contlicts intluenced Marlowe's portrayal of the magus, who in the medieval romance tradition is generally amoral yet supernatural, and whose power is designated at birth, and only cnhanced by years of study. Marlowe's concentration on the acquired leaming of

Faustus, which was not a priority for the anonymous author of the Engitsh fiust-Boc~k,on his interest in secular books that contain power, and on his dependence on Mephastophilis, "moves the magician closer to the ordinary man."" Although the exceptional Faustus is no Everyman, he is powerless without his books and spirits. Therefore, Marlowe's play is not so concemed with liminal, supernaturai forces as it is in analyzing the universal longings and desires that characterize humanity. More specifically, Marlowe psychoiogically anaiyzes the operations of hurnan curiosity and aspiration in a conflicted envimnrnent of Promethean individualism and religious regdation.

- 28 KeeKer, "Right Eye and Left Eb&" 79. Similady, Matthew N. Proser argues in -fie Gift ofFife: Aggresion antl the PIays of Christopkr Mmfowe (New York: Peter Lang Publishing 1995), p. 142, that Faustus's seIf-assertion gesents Win hk desire br fo&idden hmwledge. Traister, p. 28. The wave of anti-intellectualism in the Renaissance represents an attempt by power structures to counter emergent curiosity and doubt by condemning the vanity and danger of knowledge. The primacy of faith over reason was vociferously upheld by religious authorities.

Considering the widening concem about anti-intellectualism, it is hardly surprising that the Faust legend was created wkh Simon Magus as, possibly, the great inspiration for it. As Michael

Keefer explains, *gTheSimon Magus lepnd is thus not rncrely the eaarlicst of a large nurnber of textual sources of the Faustus lepnd; it is also in a full sense its prototype and parallel."O In the second book of the ( 'lementine Rrcognition.~,Simon is descnbed as having been "exceedingly well trained in the Greek literat~re."~'Excessive knowledge of pagan classics would appeal to the mind of Marlowe, but there existed in his penod a need to set proper limits in order to hinder such intellectual activity. Indeed, Christian hmanists were careful to qualifi their zest for recovenng knowledge, by expressing the importance of moderation and balance in their punuits.32 Moderation cstablishes order, as does the Christian ideal of setting limits, but in the

Renaissance, many thinken conscientiously exceeded these limits, panicularly in learning.

Dollimore notices the repeal of lirnits in the play in Faustus's rebellious behavior:

In Dr EGuîrur however sin is not the error of faIlen judgemcnt but a conscious

and deliberate transgression of limit. It is a limit which, among other things,

renders God remote and inscrutable yet subjects the individual to constant

surveillance and correction; whic h ho lds the individual subject terrifjmgly

responsible for the fallen hwnan condition while disallowing him or her any

subjective power of redemption. Out of such conditions is bom a mode of

------30 Keefier, p. 88. 31 Palmer and More. p. 12. 32 Haydn, p. 3 17. transgression identifiably protestant in origin: despairing yet defiant, masochistic

yet wi~ful.~~

If limits are not forced upon the initial stages of individual curiosity there can be serious ramifications, as the original man's transgression in Genesis demonstrates In Milton's Purudise

Lo.vt, Adam is particularly specific on this issue when he wams against "perplexing thoughts" as the inception of --wanderingthoughts'* and "notions vain- (WU, 183-87)." Simiiarly, Nicholas

Coeffeteau, a seventeenth-centuiy Catholic philosopher, argues that "reasoning leads to doubt and every atheist was first a philosopher."" Although he specifically identifies philosophy or reasoning as the birthplace of doubt, intellectualism in general and the act of inquiry provoke many of the insecurities expressed by conventional social structures and ideologies.

Marlowe's work evinces the playwriçht's awareness of these essentiai societal insecurities, particularly with regard to the authonty of the Church. IJoctor 'UILS~~LYcontains antiChnstian gibing, and abjuring the Scriptures and Christ recalls what Baines and Kyd reported of Marlowe. Such behavior leads Kocher to cal! Marlowe, in his later years. "a crusader against ~hristianit~."~~lasphern~equals power in the Ianguap of Docior FUustm, and magic is secondary, as Mephastophilis declares:

For when we hear one rack the name of Gocl,

Abjure the Scriptures and his saviour Christ,

We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul;

Nor wiIl we corne unless he use such means

33 Doliimore, p. 1 15. John Milton, PdseLost, in ïhu Pwms of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968). 3s Allen cites CoeEeteau. p. i 14. 36 Kocher, p. 3 17. Whereby he is in danger to be damn'd-

Therefore the shortest cut for conjunng

1s stoutly to abjure the Trinity,

And pray devoutly tu the prince of hell. (1. iii. 46-54)

Strikingly, Faustus is described as having an intensely rebellious nature which attempts to violate the authonty of religion. Faustus craves Agrippa's cunninp, strange philosophies, and the pleasures of concealed arts. What Faustus desires the most is a defiant transgression, and

Mephastophilis understands this. It is through this comprehension of Faustus's psychology that

Mephastophi lis becomes empowered in his persuasion. Marlowe emphasizes this by creating a demon who will not trick Faustus into damnation with deceitful rhetoric, because Faustus has already fooled himsel f.

Marlowe's awareness of his period, and his well planned attacks on specific social authorhies, were influenced by generally enhanced consciousness of societal structure; this consciousness allowed for the spread of skepticism, atheism and an overall understanding of religion as ideology that is ofien affiliated with atheisrn. Jonathan Dollimore asserts that the

"system of illusory beliefs held in the state of so-called false-consciousness, beliefs which serve to perpeniate a particular social formation or power structure," was dirninishing within the

Renaissance, and a new subversive view of ideology was accompanying the rise of the individual." The learned intellectuals of the Renaissance had become increasingly aware of what it meent to manipulate a text as well. For example, David Riggs cites Romans 13:1 as a partïcularly maneuverable passage which was tiequently distorted by many a secular prince in imposing power "'authonzed by divine rigMA8 The Machiavellian notion that religion is an instrument of state power, derived From ;The Discozrrses, stems From such outwardly cormpt political behavior. Pietro Aretino, who was a cobbler's son like Marlowe, is possibly the rnost famous example of the misuse and distortion of Machiavellian policy for political gain.

Exposing the political workings of ideology became an increasingly popular activity for wrïters in Marlowe's time who challenged conservative prejudice, as the prologue for his ïhr Jw of'

ILluftu indicates:

Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead,

Yet was his sou1 but flown beyond the Alp5;

And, now the Guise is dead, is corne frorn France,

To view this land, and frolic with his friends.

To some perhaps my name is odious;

But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,

And let them know that t am Machiavel,

And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words.

Admir'd i am of those that hate me most:

Though some speak openly against my books,

Yet will they read me, and thereby attain

To Peter's chair, an4 when they cast me off,

Are poison'd by my clirnbing followea.

1 count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance. ( 1-1 5)39

Marlowe, along with Kyd was a pioneer in bringing the caricature of the depraved Machiavel to the stage.lu Of course, it should be noted that in The Mù.ssucre ut Puris, Machiavellian political policy is shown to be evil, represented by the diabolical character of the Guise. Marlowe had been linked with Machiavelism by Robert Greene, and certainly Marlowe's The Jew uf'bfuitu expresses how "religions have always bcen invcnted by the ambitious who have understood that the m of man is a far less tem@ing instrument of power than the voice of a god.'A1 Doctor

I;circsru.s not only represents the Machiavellian notion of the power of religion, but also the spectacle of its self-aggrandizement. Among the accusations in the Baines note is Marlowe's belief that the Catholics have superÏor cerernonial practices because they stade and create wonder with pornp. How fitting it is that Faustus, having just wimessed the procession of the seven deadly sins, is described as being highiy arnused and temporarily satisfied by

Mephastophilis's show.

Ducfur f.YziSm is part of the Renaissance movement that challenged, or at lean reconsidereci, the structural architecture of society's most fundamental ideologies. Religion is at the hean of this movement, but so is learning. Ignorance is what keeps men subjected to fears of

"bugbeares and hobgoblins," while leaming frees the mind from negative superstition. It is interesting that comparatively few are damned in the pend between Goethe's death and

1900; certainly that later perd was far less concemed with unorthodox intellectual inclinations

- 39 Chnstopher Mariowe, ïkJtnv of Maitu, ed. H. S. Bennett (London: Methuen, 193 1). 40 As 1 have stated eariier, Machiavelii's cynicai thought was greatly criticized although he was not an atheist, and his character was viiified in Marlowe's tirne. For instance, in Thomas Heywood's tract hfachimel.published in 164 1, Machiaveiii is cbaracterized by a sinister and evil nature. Interestingiy, one of Mariowe's many nicknames was 'UheViL' 41 Kocher, p. 49. that might lead an individual towards powerknowledge." Of course, in Marlowe's version,

Faustus remains ignorant despite his high level of academic leaming, and this mut have greatly pleased the Elizabethan censors; but Marlowe's play still manages to contain provocative analysis of the most controversial and subversive currents of thought in his period. For instance,

Faustus has no qualrns about challenging the supremacy of religious dogrna, especially when that dopa preaches the certainty of damnation:

Stipendiurn peccuti mors est. Ha! Stipendium. etc.

The reward of sin is death? That's hard.

Si peccusse nrgumus.fullirnur,

et nullu est in nob is veritus:

If we say that we have no sin

We deceive ourselves, and there's no tmth in us.

Why then belike we must sin,

And so consequently die.

Ay, we must die, an everlasiing death.

What doctrine cal1 you this? ( 'he srrrù. .surÙ,

What ~illbe, shall be? Divinity adieu! (1. i. 39-49)

Faustus rebels against moral codes, conventional order and prescribed limits. To accept

God means achieving no more than servitude and submission, and Faustu rejects this in order to pursue unattainable goals and voluptuous living. Instead of serving God, Faustus will be a

"divine in shown (1. i. 3), and this exaggerated image confimis his typically Machiavellian impression of divinity. Faustus's indiscreet behavtor also reflects Marlowe's naturai preference

42 I. W+Smeed, Fattsf i,t Liferature (London: Oxford U~versityPress, 1975), p. 10. for heterodox Mews or "monstrous opinions,T43as Kyd had termed them: as Levin declares,

-what was worse for Faustus, he was no ordinary sinner. he was, like Marlowe himself, that

impenitent and willful miscreant whom Elizabethan preachers tenned a scomer.'" Marlowe

displays Faustus as the defiant ideal of Renaissance self-awareness and overreaching. Doctor

F'u~tuc. transgresses the hostile legends about the historical Faust which were promoted by

German Protestants like Luther and Melanchthon, and regardless of the tact that Marlowe's play

never vindicaies Faustus for his sins of radicalism, and unshakable ignorance, he is a martyr to

the powen of anti-intellectualism and confomity.

The study of Marlovian disobedience inevitably focuses a great deal of necessary

attention on the acute Renaissance awareness of how society forms ideology, as wdl as how

these ideologies effectively govem over consciousness itself Michael Keefer's studies have

been effective in directing criticism towards the ideological signitïcance of the Faust legend,

which is an instrument of power in its own right. In the introduction to his A text edition of

[Ioctor Fuwm, Keefer looks specifically at what the lepnd affrms, and Marlowe's keen irony

indicates he would have been well aware of these circumstances:

But whatever it contained of antiSatholic polemic or of folktale. the legend

remained a repressive narrative-one which sought to legitimize Protestant

orthodoxy through a temfying representation of the wages of transgression. It is

no coïncidence that the pend between 1560 and the late 1580's. during which

the legend received its full narrative elaborahon, also saw the first major outbreak

of witch-hunts in Western Europe-an outbreak in which, with the vehement

43 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil,- Psychokq$caf Pattern in Christophm Murluwtr 5- Phys (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Utüversity Press, 1980), p. 225. Levin, p. 132. approval of orthodox intellectuals, thousands of people, most of them women,

were imprisoned tortured and judicially rnurdered."

Both the German and English Fuu~r-bookshad a tremendous amount of didactic value

within a historical period when authority, both religious and secuiar, was often being challenged and disobeyed. Perhaps more as a work of propaganda than literature, with overtones of what

was to come from sensationalist campaignea like Jean Bodin in later years, the Fuust-book

enjoyed commercial popularity and several re-publications. The Faust tndition expresses so

many of mankind's most troublesome and interesting questions that the legend continually

widens into epic scope, and Keefer correctly asserts that this hm caused several problems for

critics who have attempted to isolate the "embryonic foms" of the legend From its grander

function as polemical narrative."' The geat history of the tradition in folklore alone makes it

dificult to identify or assign the ideological beginnings of its popularity to, for instance, a

movement which was reacting against uncontrollable Gennan humanism.'" And yet, as Keefer

argues, some definite conclusions can be drawn from the ideological origins of the lepnd of

Faustus:

the legend of Faustus arose in the early decades of the sixteenth century as a fotm

of ideological assassination, as an abusive attack upon representatives of a current

of thought which proposed to deconstnict and to transcend the orthodox

categones of knowledge, which appropriated Christian doctrine in the service of a

kind of gnosta, a radically heterodox powedknowledge and in which, finally, the

metaphor of rebirth that is parodied and inverted in Marlowe's play occupied a

I5Keefer, ed. Docror FQUYCIIS,pp. div-dv a Kder, ."Rifit Eve and Let2 HECL'' 83. Paimer and More+ p. 3. central place. . . . The Faustus legend of the sixteenth century thus preserves, for

those whose disciplinary commitrnents do not blind them to the evidence, traces

of a vicious ideological struggle-one in which, to oversimpliQ matten

somewhat, a radically relativistic current of thought which challenged religious

and academic orthodoxies succumbed to the onslaught of an authontanan,

exclusivist biblical fundamentalism that had made its own compromises with the

structures of political powec4R

The Faust legnd focuses on the complexities of human nature, and as a part of the

Protestant Refonation, this includes a specific fascination with the dual existence of religious impulses and darker, more secular urges. Marlowe's play probes the natuml insecurities of humanity, as well as those of the societal authorities that wish to govem individual and collective behavior. These are characteristics which Renaissance audiences would readily comprehend, and so Marlowe's own defiant intellectualism exercises itself by expressing the reality of these insecurities.

The origins of the Faust legend, or the "embryonic" details Keefer discusses, show that societal insecurities conceming forbidden knowledge and deviant intellectualism existed long before Marlowe. This study has already touched upon the relation of the terni libido sciendi to changing views on magic and secular intellectualism. The roots of the Faust legend follow a similar development, and as with the notion of libido scirndi, there are ideological implications in the ever-changing stanis of the magus.

In the Renaissance, the magus becomes the most popular icon for notions of infinite human potential and also for symbolically representing the uncomfortabIe inquiry into how

" Keefér, "Right Eye and Left He+Lw83. much an individual is pennitted to know. One of the reasons Faust is so important to an understanding of the historicity of the Renaissance is that the legend's factual basis cannot be wholly extracted fiom the multitude of anti-magical anecdotes and wild mors of blasphemous and sexually deviant behavior that have surrounded the myth. Similar to the motif ofthe Protean individual, the story of Faust is a legend which poses some of Renaissance society's grandest questions. niere are also several ways in which the lcgend rvas molded, embellished, and moralized as propaganda which is highly representative of the period.

Marlowe's delineation of the demonic allegiance of the magus, which is an accurate depiction of the standpoint of Renaissance orthodoxy, is not indicative of how the magus has always been treated in literature. [ndeed, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, whose Neoplatonism and mystical beliefs infl uenced Renaissance consciousness of the malleability and interchangeability of the individual, nised the status of the magus in the late fifieenth century. It is interesting to note that both of these men were reputable philosophen. Yet their contributions allowed the magus to be a link between heavenly and eanhly powen through ceremonies involvittg Neoplatonic, hermetic, and cabalistic lore. According to Albertus Magnus's etymology, "since a Magus is surely nothing unless a great man, knowledgeable and making guesses about nature fiom al1 its requirements and effects, he ofien demonstrates and teaches nature's wonders."" However. the Refomation tended to condemn magic, and question whether naturespirits or Middle spirits were indeed amoral and unaffiliated with the Devil.

Doctor Fuu~adamantly affirms the language of magic is the language of power; this power certainly has destructive effects on the protagonist as well. The distinction of magic as powerknowledge was the result of its conception as an activity or means to some sort of selfish end, losing its higher status as philosophical leaming. Barbara Traister explains: Tuming theory into practice . . . changed philosophical rnagic. Mat had ken for Pico a symbol of

man's potential, and for Ficino a theory of how to obtain infinite wisdom, became for Agrippa and Dee an increasingly concrete and practical way of operating the wor~d."~~'Unlike Pico and

Ficino, Agrippa and Dee experienced a geat deai of penecution during thrir livas, and occultist

Giordano Bruno was executed for heretical doctrines. However, the historical Faust, ofien

refened to as a sorcerer during his own lifetime, allegedly signed hirnself "The philosopher of

phil~sophen."~'

The ongins of the Faust legend, including Hebrew, Persian, and subsequent Christian

sources~'center on stories that are typically controvenial in rheir representation of the magus,

and so that is a fitting beginning for the legend of Faustus. Medieval Europe loved moral stories

of devilish magicians, and the Golden Legerzd is Filled with such delightful tales." Palmer and

More's thorough chronicling of the rise of the Faust legnd comprehensively illustrates how the

magus developed into Marlowe's version and beyond- and discusses magical predecessors

including Solomon, Simon Magus, Virgil, Cyprian, Merlin, Roger Bacon, Robert the Devil,

Zyto, and vanvouspopes. According to Marlowe, as revealed in the Baines note, Moses should

be added to this list.

Simon Magus is oeen the first listed source for the Faust legend, and his infmous

conflict with the Apostle Peter has achieved legenâary status itself. Keefer is quick to point out

- 50 Traisîer, p. 19. '' Palmer and More, p. 94. Palmer and More. p. W. 53 lacobus de Voragine, ?lie Golden Legt!nJ. tram Wiiliam Granger Ryan, 2 vois- (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). the similarities between Faustus and Simon, not only in the specific details of the two stories, but

in the ideological implications of both as well:

The legend of Simon Magus, moreover, shows the same pattern of

development-fiom doctrinal and demonological polemic to a narrative

exfoliation resulting in the occultation of the Gnostic ideology-that 1 have

show to be traceable in the Faustus legend. Furthemore. in several important

aspects-the emphasis upon demonic flight, the episode of Helen of Troy, and the

magician's irretrievable damnation-the later lepnd borrows fiom the carlier

one. The Simon Magus legend is thus not merely the earliest of a large number of

textual sources of the Faustus lepnd: it is also in a full sense its prototype and

paral le1 ."

Despite medieval awareness of both the Simon Magus and the Faust themc, the puppet plays give more attention to a craving for wealth than intellectual curiosity.j5 The high degree OF

intellectualism in the Renaissance, accompanied by the Refortnation' s crac kdown on dangerous curiosity, promoted resurgence of the Faust legend. Marlowe's version is further representative

of the period in which he was wnSting, and Doctor I.cristz~s specifically demonstrates an

understanding of the construction of ideology and conservatively-minded orthodoxy, as well as

the problems that heterodox leaming brings to such societal structure. The myth of the magus

stands against this structure, as does the mrtamorphic quality of occult language, and this is why

Marlowe employed the myth of the magus so effectively and deliberately.

" Keefer, 'Wght Eve and Lefi Hd"88. 5s Sm&, pp. 6-7. Marlowe's Faustus has a solid place within the tradition of the literary magus, and the play is cettainly the most fascinating rendering OF the legend dangerously contained within

Luther's age of the Devil. Magic is synonymous with subversion in Doctor Fuwtw, and although it is only a delusion as Wilbur Sandea notices,56magic provides an illmry yet heightened potential for greatness by rneans of inspiring creativity and rewarding with pleasure.

Faustus's subversion of intellectual prohibitions and religious replations establishes his character as a transgressor of social codes. This study has adduced numerous examples which indicate Faumis's intellectual ly subversive behavior. In addition, Faustus showcases the politically subversive side of magic, which recalls how Trithemius's magic was politically used.

For instance, Faustus wishes to ?hase the Prince of Parma fiom our land" (1. i. 94), and his colonialist aspirations for nile of an empire abound throughout the play." Subversion of any kind seems to be, according to Faustus, the most effective way of becoming more than man, and it is for this reason that he is so valuable to any study of Renaissance individualism. It is also because of his impossible goals that Faustus is so inescapably admirable, cven to a conservative and unsympathetic reader. Reflecting the appeal of Faustus's search for power, and indicating why he has achieved the statu of a martyr for many readers, Levin States "the course of Icanis, defying the laws of gravity and common sense, was obviously uncertain and unsafe ... [but] its youthful swiftness kindled a certain magnanimity."5"ndeed7 this is perhaps why Marlowe enthusiasts concentrate so heavily on the mysteries of his turbulent life.

56 WlIbtu Saaders. ïk llwrarna~cisCU& riw Rcceived ldeu: SMïes b the Plays of MarIowe and Shcrke~~pt'are (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l968), p. 228. 57 in his biographical study, C'stopkrMwbwe: Thr Muse 's DarIing, p. 7 1, Charles Norman descni Marlowe as "the mie Elizabethan, voyaging on strange seas to mine the mines of beauty." 58 Levin, p. 165. PAGAN RAVISHMENT AND FAUSTUS'S INVOCATION OF CARNAL WiSDOM

The image OP the ravished and appetitive mind occurs frequently throughout Ducfor

Ihaius. As Faustus's character devrlops, or rather regesses into a state of sinFu1 voluptuousness, his fervent libidinousness becomes increasingly apparent Marlowe emphasizes

Faustus's loss of scholarly wisdom and integity, and there is some expression of his loss of striving intellectualism too. However, although Faustus no longer resembles the overreiiching academic of the play's opening prologue. his fa11 into srnsuousness is still ultimately connected with the perils of knowledge and libido sciendi. Marlowe never signals the rnind's disengapment from the tlesh, and the invocation of Helen of Troy. which several critics ser as the most damning context in the play or the moment when Faustus's fate is pemanently detemined, corresponds with the erotic, rapturous, and perverse potentials of knowledge and intellect. Helen's evil appeals to the senses, and this is the most standard interpretation of

Faustus's fall to her kiss; but Marlowe's version of her subversive and liminal character further symbolizes the destructive beauty of intellectualism without bounâs.

Appetitive imagery surrounds notions of how the intellect operates in Df~cfrrFut~sf us, and this is introduced in the play's opening prologue by Marlowe's use of such words as

"swoll'n" and -glutted." The over-intellectualism of Faustus is suggested by such painful images of bloated indigestion.' The process of consuming knowledge, along with its latent

' Weil, p. 53. similarities to the cursed hunger of Eve in the Garden of Eden, is a frenzied and restless action when perfonned by such an overreacher as Faustus. Faustian appetite is also linked with longing and desire, and its erotically self-perpetuating nature constantly demonstrates itself in the perverse need for oral Fulfillment, or "negative onlity" as Edward A. Snow ternis it;' this heightened sexual imagery climaxes when Marlowe's succubus Helen sucks forth Faustus's sou1 with her demonic lips (V. i. 94). It is axtremely tempting to take such moments in the play and define them as Marlowe's method of signahg Faustus's complete loss of wisdom: not only the loss of divine wisdom, as in allusions retlecting the Hebraic sources of the wisdom tradition: but of a scholarly and intellectual wisdom too.

Faunus's arrogant mind, disillusioned with Divinity, seeks the pleasure of a pagan past.

Of course, Marlowe enjoys describing such delights with rapturous quality, and such concentration on Faustus's aesthrtic existence creates the popular cntical sentiment that he bas abandoned intellectual pursuits, and wisdom. Using a grand style to suggest the dangers of pagan rapture, Marlowe employs a similar technique in Mwurcl 11, when Gaveston plans to assert his influence by weakening the king's resolve to a life of sensuality:

These are not men for me.

Imust have wanton pets, pleasant wits,

Musicians, that with touching of a string

May draw the pliant king which way Iplease:

Music and poetry is his delight;

'Snow, p. 90. Arguing Mariowe is preaeaipïed with wisdom, Weil obsaves in htorF~ll~~ctts the %adow oftht laây who pm-sed herseWin the books of Proverbs and Wisdom as the bride of God and mother of ail creation," and notes that Marlowe's allusions ta wisdom appear to derive fiom %e books of Job and Proverbs, and the 'ecclesiastical' books of Wsdom and EccIesiasticusW(p. 10). Therefore 1'11 have Italian masques by night,

Sweet speeches, cornedies, and pleasing shows;

And in the day, when he shall wvalk abroaâ,

Li ke sylvan nymphs my pages shal l be clad;

My men, Iike satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-fret dance an antic hay;

Sometirne a lovely boy in Dian's shape,

With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

And in his sportfui hands an olive-tree,

To hide those parts which men delight to see,

Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,

One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove,

Shall be the angy goddess transform'd,

And running in the likeness of an hart,

By yelping hounds pull'd down, and seem to die:

Such things as these best please his majesty. (1. i. 5 1-71 f

In Doctur E*'crusrw.,the triviality of feeding a dish of ripe grapes to a pregnant Duchess, and other numerous scenes containing such Foolery, would appear to support the theory that Faustus has abandoned intellectualism, and yet this entirely literal reading creates certain problems when interpceting the crucial role of knowledge in the play. Faustus is not dways an active initiator of

'Chcistopher Marlowe, Lihard TI, ed. W. Moelwyn Merchant (London: Ems&M, 1967). voluptuous expenence. The erotic quality or appeal of intellectual experience, that is the mechanism which allows one to be ravished by knowledge, accornpanies and motivates Faustus througtiout his jowney towards etemal damnation, even before the of

Mephastophilis provides a tangible figure to take over the role of erotically charged persuasion.

As Douglas Cole correctly asserts, Faustus "is still his own worst tempter."' Settling his studies

in his fiat spoken soliloquy, Faustus admits that he has already been intellectuallv "ravish'd" (1. i. 6). This element of sexual desire is omnipresent in the intellectual striving of Faustus, although the effects of camal thinking, which make Faustus's mind appear trivial in nature, are only made outrageously clear by the second half of the play.

Marlowe's notonous attraction to images of ravishment is evident in his dnmatic wnhing. Al1 of his herws are, to a certain degree, ravished beings: Tamburlaine is ravished by violent conquest, Banbas by wealth, and Edward by his passion br Gaveston. Ravishment allows for the subversive enjoyment of a certain type of blissful exPenence: and more specitically, there is always a sense of erotic abandon or sexual delight in giving onesel f up to such agonizing pleasure. However, despite Marlowe's fondness for images of ravishrnent, this is not a distinctly Marlovian motif within the Faustian tradition. The ravished mind infiltrates al1 of Faustian literature, and its recum-ng presence in the genre makes the ideological significance of the myth, as Keefer argues, al1 the more relevant with regard to the notions of forbidden howledge and libido scit'ndi.

In the English FCIm- Book, whic h was Marlowe's anonymous source, the perversity of

Faustus's mind is oflen confinned by images of ravishment. In the seventh chapter,

5 Cole, p. 202. 6 Michael Goldman, "Marlowe and the Ciistrionics of Ravishment," in Alvin Keraan, ed., Two Renaissance MythtwaRurs: C'hristopkr MmIowe ad&n Jotwn (London: John Hopkins University hss, 1977), p. 40. "Mephostophiles" uses spectacle and musical instruments to ravish Faunis. Thomas Mann would pick up on this image in creating his own version of artistic genius in his novel Doctor

Fuu~lw,for the same sweet music causes Faustus to forget his fears in chapter 19 of the Euxvt- book, leaving him simply "rauished with delight."' The passivity involved in the act of king ravished is an essential component of Faustus's fa11 in Marlowe's play. Faustus becomes a target for spectacle, or a passive spectator to Mephastophilis's active role as director and manipulator of images; both the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins and the invocation of Helen of Troy are proof of this. His power to command Mephastophilis for twenty-four yean does nor elevate him at all, but rather confimis his passive slavery to the demonic powers within the play. By the end of ihctor k'crtr.~fir~.it is ridiculously clear that the protagonist has not fulfilled his potential or become the skilled magician he had envisioned himself as becorning and Faustus is certainly no demigoci. Though Faustus's obvious failure might seem to show that he has abandoned the intellectual realms for the entirely sensual, that is simply not true. Indeed, although Marlowe's imagery moves from powver io pleasure, thus sipaling Faustus's passive fa11 into voluptuousness and f'lery, Faustus has been a passive victim of ravishment throughout the entirety of the play.

In this sense, Faustus has always bren a foolish figure like Actaeon or karus. and the comic scenes just serve to emphasize this. Stylistically, Marlowe chooses to identifi the failiny of his heroes and expresses their burden early in the dramatic text. This technique, which emphasizes the psychological realism of the hero's fall, allows for the character to become slowiy enclosed and captivated, as if by a malignant sickness, and ultimately destroyed by the aspiration of the self, or by what the personality allows itself to be ravished by. In the case of Doctor FUUVI~;the ravishing force is the power of libido sciendi and the seductive nature of intellectual ambition.

7 Palmer and More, p, 166. When Marlowe's play is examined as a product of its own historical significance and specificity, as a play which passes judgment on knowledge in a period where different forms of intelellectualism were so abundantly available to scholars, the dramatic text accumulates an added importance as a warning against promiscuity of the mind.

"Hunger for knowledge" is a proverbial expression for extreme intellectual appetite, and

Marlowe's play associates Faustus with such appetitive excess. This imag links the sensual enjoyment of information to desire for intellectual saturation. So powerful and inebriating is the desire for knowledge that, in chapter 16 of the Grrmun Ihst-Book and chapter 15 of the

Eng/ish Fuusi-book, Faust declares, when trying to get "Mephostophiles" to explain the concept of Hell, *'ngingly, 1 will know, or I will not live."' Such desire is effectively conceptualized as a form of appetite. It is significant that a portrait believed to be the likeness of Marlowe, discovered at Corpus Christi Collep in 1953, includcs a Latin inscription beneath the date,

*'Quc*I me nutrit me desrmir": That which nourishes me destroys me" (Figure One). It is not difficult to imagine Marlowe as consumed by knowledge in this manner similar to Faustus.

The appetite for knowledge is not lost in Marlowe's version of the Faust legend, and images of'intellectual aspiration occur throughout the play, including the hmous -*toplesstowen of !liwn" (V. i. 921, which presents a pagan ideal of the unattainable. However, Marlowe's preoccupation with the oral enjoyment of tasting knowledg transforms the cliché "hunger for knowledge" into an actual moment of sensuai delight. This transgression of a more orthodox attainrnent of knowledge, where an appropriate degree of obedience or "wisdom" is displayed, is demonstrated in the manner of oral voraciousness. This has m'ghtening and apocalyptic connotations by the play's end when Faustus renounces individualism and faces his own

"negative orality":

Mountains and hills, corne, come, and faIl on me

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.

No, no?

Then will Iheadlong run into the earth:

Earth, sape! O no, it will not harbor me.

You stars that reign'd at my nativity,

Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the rntrails of yon laboring cloud,

That when you vomit forth into the air

My limbs rnay issue fiom your smoky mouths,

So that my sou1 may but ascend to heaven. (V. ii. 78-89)

Faustus is himself to be consurned, just as he has been consuming throughout the play. The appetitive nature of his character dooms him even before the pact is signed with Mephastophilis.

It is Faustus's appetitive mind that allows Mephastophilis to be such a successful

KlugheitsrrufeI-a devil who "tempts men through their intellectual curiosity and arrogance."'

Marlowe play with oral imagery, affiming his own enjoyment of themes dealing with the lustfil, appetitive, and thirst-ridden desire for knowledge. The fùitillment of desire through lust for power/knowledge has typically Marlovian overtones to it, although the theme exists in varying degrees within earlier versions of the Faust legend. Marlowe's hostility towards authority and defiant temperament makes it dificult to separate Faustus's behavior fiom the histot-ical evidence which defines the playwright who created him. Both Marlowe and Faustus are intellectual oveneachers who scoff at authority.

These similanties are especially noticeable when reading moments in the play that are rebellious and heterodox, and a significant psychological study of character by a critic like Constance

Brown Kuriyama can be hclpful to undentanding Faustus despite the heavy shadow cast by literary biography: "Marlowe, like Byron, is one of those exceptional figures whose actual experience not only rivais the excitement of their litenry creations but also seems gowmed by the sarne temperament. . . . Marlowe's works and life are so clearly intertwhed that the pertinent question is not whether but how precisely, they are related.""' Empson pes so far as to Say that

Marlowe "could imagine himsel f doomed to Hell," and that he "would regard the psychology of

Faust as a thing he could rasily understand."" The similarities between Marlowe and Faustus are clear, but perhaps what is most revealing is the fact that Marlowe seems to have had a

sensual craving for knowledge as well. While finding Marlowe's work undervalued, William

Hazlitt's famous description of Marlowe emphasizes subversive ambition, which, for a senous

writer such as Marlowe, is intellectual: lhere is a lust of potver in his writings, a hunger and thirst aller unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by any thing but its own

energie~."'~

10 KUnyama, pr 213. '' Empmn, 1%. '' Hazlitt, qtd. in Mllar Maclurr, ed.. Mwlowe: 17>r Chiticai Htiritage 1588-1896 (London: Routledge & Kegan Fat& 1979), p. 77. In my first chapter, I explained the ongins of the lust for knowledge or iibido sciendi tradition, and the resurgence and popularity of the motif on account of the boundless intellectualism of the Renaissance. Certain critics like Cole prefer to focus on the universal and essentiaily human quality of Faustus's suffering. To him, Marlowe's play comments on the

"burden of humanity that is the mot of his suffering."13 Indeed, this may be the case with

Faustus's universally shared desire to be more than what he already is, but the play also suggests that an exceptional intellectualisrn, one that cannot possibly be assigned to the character of an

Everyrnan, endangers the conventional authonty of Elizabethan onhodoxy. If reasoning leads to doubt, then the rational mind is the potentially subversive force Marlowe's play wams of.

Certainly, the play's epilogue, delivered by the chorus, reinforces this point:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is Apollo's laure1 bough

That sometime gew within this leamed man:

Faustus is pne, regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise

Only to wonder at unlawfil things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practice more than heavenly power permits. ( 1-8)

There appears to be an underlying meaning in Marlowe's words, beyond what is so often called the "conventional warning against c~riositas."~" The play not only promotes the universal preservation of wisdom, but is a specific exhortation for the wise. The demonic powers that

13 Cole, p. 242. Kurjama, p. 99. etemally damn Faustus do not even present themselves to the foolish or ignorant, and thus

Faustus is damned alone without the comic fools who appear and reappear throughout the play.

Indeeci, wisdom is gained by avoiding the pitfalls of unbounded learning, but a high degree of learning is needed in order for these piifalls to present themselves to begin with. Faustus's great intellectual potential is emphasized by Marlowe in the epilogue, and so are the dangerous enticements which present themselves to "such fonvard wits." Of course, nowhere does

Marlowe subscnbe to Agrippa's digression in praise of the ass, but the message of waming is clearly directed at a specifk sort of Renaissance individual: a precocious and rare scholar like

Marlowe himselE Here as elsewhere, [Ioctor fiuvruv concems itself with the meteoric rise, and potentir1 fall, that accompanies the individual's advancement of knowledge.

The hedonistic potential of intellectualism was certainly recognized before the Ençlish

Renaissance; but, with the ominous superstitions that had become awakened during the

Refonnation, sensual and promiscuous intellectualism became connected w*th the solitary, evil mind. For instance, Yates discusses how the notion of inspired rnelancholy, propagated by

Albrecht Durer among othen, belongs within the subversive category of thinking which comprised Renaissance occult philosophy. l5 Durer's 1 5 1 4 engraving of illr(rnco1iu I is believed to have been heavily influenced by Agrippa's description of the inspired artistic melancholy in the 15 1O manuscnpt of De occdtu philosophiu, and there is reason to believe that Marlowe was equally connected to the rnelancholy of mistrated genius or the idea of inspired vision (Figure

Two).

l5 Yates, p. 58. FIGURE WO Certainly, not all melancholics are intellectual figures. is a good exarnple of a more physical type,16 but the temperament of Faustus, which has both physical and mental dimensions, has many similarities to Renaissance theories on melancholy. There are several different stages of inspired vision in the humor mr~un~hoIic~~s,but the most relevant here is

Agippa's third stage in whiçh man "leams the secrets of divine manen, as for instance the law of Goâ, the anplic hitrarchy, and that which putains to the tnowledge of eternal things."17 The humor mrlmcholicw has ecstatic implications which are associated with prophetic rapture.Ix

However, Durer's inclusion in hfrlrnwl~ui of the starved dog of the senses, which is reminiscent of the sensual hunting dogs of the Actaeon myth, expresses the close link between bodily sensrs and the powen of the embodicd mind. "' The melancholy temperament *-was supposed to subdue the senses," and Durer's starved dog symbolizes that." However, Faustus is breaking out of this mode in the beginning of the play. He has already fed himself, or his senses, but he is just getting started on his intellectual feast. Although there are several interpretations of melancholy in the Elizabethan period, Marlowe would have seen the erotic connotation in

Agrippa, as well as in Durer. The danger which is not so explicitly evident in hfe.lrlencoliuI is provokingly clear in Dt~cturFU~LS~ZLI. when Mephastophilis threatens Rustus: "Revolt, or 1'11 in

l6 Yates, p. 52. " Yates, p. 58. In Erwin Panofsky's Sànlm ondbf~Icu~cho/y,he tiranslates into English the 15 1O manuscript version of Agrippa's Dr? ~~'~~~ItaphiIosophÏa.The ecstatic nature of the hmor mdanchoIic71s is made cl= by Agrippa, who descriies the dernonic and hnzied mcewhen certain dernons are attracted to the body of a melancholic individuai, rhrough whose presence and activity men fall into ecstacies and pronounce many wondefi1 things" (p. 357). l9 Yates &ers to the dasic rnodization ofthe senses as hunhg dogs in the Actaeon &bible, given by Natsüs Cornes in MythoIogiue, Lîb, IV, Cap. xxiv (cit. Yates. p. 56). She aiso observes Milton's II Penrerom includes the mdancho[y inspiration as a dernonic force, and an ascetic starved dog is used to represent the repressed senses. The evet-present image of the huntiag dog atlirms the signifiaoce of the bdysenses in what mi@ othefwise be interpmed as the haration of strictlymental genius, 20 Yates, p. 56. piece-meal tear thy flesh!" (V. i. 68). The solitary intellect or "individual" should beware of the

sensual side of forbidden knowledge, or else risk suffering Actaeon's homfic fate.

The battle for control, be it the intemal controlling of one's senses or the extemal grandeur of controlling vast territory, riches, demons and women, has elements of the sexually sublime for Faustus. Specifkally indicative of libido sciendi, Faustus's knowledge, both what he

already has and what he plans on having, becomes objectified and arotiçized. Kuriyama notes the "homoerotic implications of necromancy7' as well as the diabolical sexuality which exists

everywhere between Faustus and Mephastophilis, as Levin concurs: 'The man has an extraordinary affection for the spirit, the spirit a mysterious attraction in the man."" But one

need not look any further than Faustus's mind for evidence of an erotic appetite. indeed Faustus

wishes to control occult knowledge in the Agippan sense of controlling spirits, so that

Mephastophilis would be slave to Faustus as rulet. The conjuring sccnr makcs it clear that

Faustus wants this control over the spirits, as does the lanyage of power and command that

charges the opening soliloquy. But untortunately Faustus becomes a slave to his own

shortcomings, which in tum serve the powen of evil that destroy him in the play. Traister

clarifies what hris happened to Faustus by making reference to Pico's definition of magic in his

famous Orut ion:

Magic has two forms: one consists entirely in the operations and powen of

demons . . . which appean to me to be a distorted and monstrous business; and

the other . . . is nothing other than the highest realization of natural philosophy.

The disciple of the first tries to conceaf his practices because they are shameful and unholy; while cultivation of the second has always been the source of highest

glory and renown in the arena of knowledge. No philosopher of merit, eager in

the study of the beneficial arts, ever devoted himself to the tint. . . . For just as

that fint form of magic makes man a slave and pawn of evil powers, so the

second form makes him their mler and lord."

Faustus has aimed For the second catrgory of knowlrdp, but he is too sesually motivated to use the restraint which is necessary for proper command. He wishes for the gconsummationof ec~tas~,"'~or what the Cabbal ists called binvicu (mors oscdi). Faustus cannot ascetical ly command knowledge because he is unable to tame the passion of libido siendi. This is the reason that Doctor F~mst~isis so often called a play which moves from power to pleasure.

Although Faustus's fall into a voluptuous lifestyle is oflen regarded as a shifl from the intellrctual realms of knowledge, the Rorentine Neoplatonists cxalted cpisternological pleasure, and would not designate knowledge a higher good than it, for they found "the firuition of knowledge is in pleasure."'4 Marlowe realized the hedonistic value of knowledge, and his emtic language more than fulfills Faustus's promise to "live in al1 voluptuousness" for twenty-four years (1. iii. 92).

Critics of Marlowe frequently daim the comic scenes in Doctor Fbu.vtu6v illustrate

Faustus's tum From wisdom, although these scenes are somewhat neglected in Marlovian criticism. At times, the triviality of the comic scenes is problematic for the reader concemed with the play's more "serious" issues. Another problem with these scenes is that they are largely regarded as an iderior piece of dramatic composition which, in turn, raises questions about how much of the play was actually &en by Marlowe himself. It is not dificult to see why the foolery of Doctor fiustus has so often been dismissed as a secondary issue, but perhaps there is more going on here than some cntics are willing to realize." The momentary fulfillment of the pact, "~'onsz~mrnuturnest" (11. i. 74), is followed by Faustus's feeding frenzy in which he gorges himself on the world. He experiences the pagan worlds of antiquity, while abusively overindulging in their plewures. He dsu drfiantly brings the pagan world into the strict religious environment of Rome. Mephastophilis keeps the imagery of consurnption alive in his diabolical suggestion:

Nay Faustus, stay: I know pu'd fain see the Pope,

And take some part of holy Peter's feas?,

Where thou shah see a troop of bald-pate friars

Whose summum bonutn is in belly-cheer. (III. i. 48-5 1 )

The sensual life delineated by the comic scenes suggests Faustus's deterioration of character, but it is also indicative of his intellectual indiscretions. In the opening prologue, the icanan flight of

Faustus's ambition is associated w*thgluttony:

Till swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit,

His waven wings did mount above his reach

And melting heavens conspir'd his overthrow:

For falling to a devilish exercise,

And glutted now wii leaming's golden gifts,

- C. L. Barber's defeme ofthe play's more tragic elements in Cieating Eli~~6d~hge@: ne Tieuo»uof Mdweand Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)- gives a proper nod to Marlowe's, as weU as Faustus's complexity, Barber, righthiiy 1 Ceve, is not too concenied with upholding the play's morality elements as do the studies of David Bevhgton and Douglas Cole: -It is because healternatives are not simply good or evil that Marlowe has not written a morality play but a tragedy" (p. 123). He surfeits upon cursed necromacy. . . . (20-25)

The intensity of Faustus's intellectual appetite becomes increasingly clear as the play progresses through leisurely amusements towards the scholar's demise. Faustus is more bestial by the second half of the play, and excessively libidinous. Such promiscuity corresponds with

Faust's carnal behavior in the Engiish FUW-Book. Marlowe's Faustus quickly forgets his whim

for a wife. tnstead hr: accepts Mephastophilis's clah thar mamage is but a "ceremonid toy" (II. i. 151). In the Engfish I.irust-Book, the hero is libidinous enough to indulge in six days of

continuou sex:

II~LLSIILVtooke the Fairest by the hanci, and led her into a chamber, where after his

manner hee feIl to dalliance, and thus he continued a whole day and night: and

when her had delighted himselfe sufficiently with hcr, hee put her away, and

made his spirite bnng him another, so likewise hee knept with her 24 houres play,

causing his spirit to fetch him most dainty €are, and so hee passed way sixe daies,

hauing each day his pleasure of a sundry ad^.'^

Though Marlowe wisely leaves this episode out of Bwor f+uu.stu.s, Mephastophilis erotically

offers the fairest courtesans of the world in response to Faustus's desire for a wife (il. i. 15 1-65).

Christian piety in such scenes gives way to the pagan grandeur of Saba, Penelope, and eventually

Helen. However, the forces that wish to convert Faustus to Christianity view sexual fulfillment

as an . The Old Man's castigation of "most vile and loathsome filthiness, / The

stench whereof comtpts the inward sou1 / With such flagitious crimes of heinous sins" (V. i. 4 1-

26 Palmer and More, p. 187. 3), opposes Faustus's vulgat-ity to the pietistic orthodoxy that Elizabethan audiences would have been able to recognize.

Faustus's intellectual faculties are not alienated from the passions of his body. Too often in Marlovian studies, the spiritual ignorance of Faustus, which implies an absence of Wisdom or ability to realize God's tnith, is extended to suggest that Faustus has no wisdom at all, scholariy or otherwise. Faustus's passion is not a refusai of inteiiectual wi3dorn, but it does illustrate

Marlowe's ability to mock overreaching ambition entertainingly. If Faustus's spiritual ignorance in the second half of the play were accompanied by a complete sumender of intellectual activity, then Doctor I;cri~urlî.s would be a hain pnise of the ass. Marlowe's writing is not so anti- intellectual because Faustus is given a sympathetically appealing penonality, and the play begs to be read somewhat ironically. Faustus's intellectual wisdom is actually enhanced by the end of the play, because he has had experiences, both sexual and non-sexual, which are nothinp less than exceptional. By using the word "enhanced," i do not mean to suggest that he has grown in his wisdom, but simply that he has ben feeding the hunger of libido sciendi, for better or for worse. He has pushed Christianity to the peripheries of his being, and tasted pre-Christian antiquity, albeit by way of imitation. Certainly, there is the inevitable price of damnation to pay for such humanistic wisdom, forbidden knowledge, and general intellectual overreaching.

Marlowe may have considered this to be a pnce worth paying; but Faustus is never Faustms, as certain cntics like to joke that he is. Ultimately, Faustus expenences pleasure of the rnind, and this is an elemental force which motivates intellectualism, especially in the zealously academic

Renaissance, Though Marlowe's Faustus clearly has a supenor intellect, there is an element of scholarly disobedience and arrogance characterizhg such a "nûughty minde,"" and this becomes further cultivated during his restless search for esoteric knowledge. In the play, intellectualism is synonymous with the evil curiosity which, as Shattuck explains, caused the Fa11 in the Garden of Eden: 'The actions of both Adam and Eve show evil coming into the world through an ine'xtricable combination of prrmisting outside force (the serpent) and of free choice in disobeying Cod's prohibition (seen clearly by Augustine). No other extant creation myth displays greater vividness and concentration in dealing with forbidden knowledge."" In addition to seeking forbidden knowledge, the mind of Faustus displays sexually libidinous appetite as well. Intellectual pride is a variant of lust, as Augustine noted.?" and Faustus's pride causes him to move awy fiom conventionally prescribed study and divine wisdom, and seek the less trodden but potentially more rewarding paths of forbidden knowledge. Kay Stockholder conectly identifies the procession of the seven deadly sins as an interesting study in the sexuality of the play.w Interestingly enough, Pnde's speech has greater sexual content than Lrchery's:

1 am Pride. I disâain to have any parents. 1 am like to Ovid's flea, I cm creep

into every corner of a wench: sometimes like a periwig 1 sit upon her brow; ne.xt

like a necklace I hang about her neck; then like a fan of feathers I kiss her lips;

and then, tuming mysel f to a wrought smock, do what 1 lia But fie, what a smell

is here? I'll not speak a word more, unless the ground be perfumed and covered

with cloth of arras. (II. iii. 1 12- 18)

n PaImer and More, p. 135. = Shanuc~p. 52. ErGluen, p. 40. 'O Stockholder, p. 207. When we consider Marlowe's emphasis on intellechial pnde, and the looming temptations of libido sciendi, this description becomes more cornprehensible and fitting. Faustus's pride leads him to self-annihilation. He would nther be destroyed by the rapturous powen of knowledge than give them up.

The second necromantic evocation of Helcn of Troy is the most erotically sensual moment in the play, and it is in hrr çharactrr that Marlowe is able to penoniQ the dangers of carnal reason, and Faustus's final fall. Marlowe's decision to use Helen of Troy as a liminal figure in such a momentous scene in Iltx~orFuu~tuc. is hardly surprising given the strength of her symbolism, most famously defined by the traditional portraits of her character in Homer's

Iliud and O&s.vry, and in Virgil' s A meid Marlowe had studied the classics at Cambridge, and his choice to begin a career of dramatic writing with L)rtlo. Queen oj' C'urthuge shows his fascination with the stories of classical antiquity. Certainly, Helen's influence displays itself in much of his dramatic work, most notably with Tamburlaine's Zenocrate and Edward's

~aveston." Marlowe treats Helen distinctively in Bocror fiustus, giving her a material presence in the play. However, she is only the tlimsy imitation of the actuol Helen of Troy.

The most farnous description of Helen, where her position as a tigure of guilt and shame is powerfùlly articulated, as it is when Marlowe's Dido refers to Helen as "she that caus'd this war" (ll. i. 292):' appears in the third book of Homer's Ilid. As Homer descnbes Helen, she must behold the covenant between the warring Greeks and Trojans at the gates of Troy.

Although Helen is summoned to look upon the others, it is clear that her appearance is necessary so that she may be the one iooked upon. Norman Austin provides a good summation of the

Levh, p. 124. Di& Queen of Cmilwge, ed. H 1. Oliver (London: Methuen, 1968). literary function of Helen of Troy: "In the story spun for her by the Gods, Helen must be object of desire and its subject, the source of desire and its goal. To fulfill this function she must not only appear equivocal; she must also equivocate, if she is to appear credible.".'' Marlowe upholds the ambiguity of Helen in his depiction of her ghostly and wordless appeamce in

Ducfor Fuuvtus. Moreover, in literary tradition, Helen causes men to stray from the paths of righteousness and into certain disgrace. As the scapegoat for those involved in the Trojan War, she is the superficial figure that men mut battle for, and for whom they must leave their families and homelands for several tiresorne years. As a seductress, she leads men away fiom their original paths of intention and promotes wandering ways. An example of this occurs when

Odysseus informs a more politically active Helen of the plan of the Greeks when his original intention was to gather information for himself (O+.v.wy, 4.254-55). In the ~IJvssey,Helen also cnftily manages to beguile and tempt the Greeks, who are hidden inside the Wooden Horsc, by imitating their wives' voices in a Siren-like display of evil diversion which nearly foils their military plan. Certainly, Helen's chams can cloud the judgment of the most heroic tigures, and so it is hardly surprising that Faustus's fa11 is so quickly accelerated by this supematural yet abstract embodiment of sexual passion.

Marlowe utilizes Helen's associations from the classical epic tradition. His treatment of

Helen is similar to Virgil's unsympathetically bitter portrayal, although the momentous second evocation of her spirit, as well as the first evocation's reference to the famous "?en years' war" for "the rape of such a queen" (V. i. 28), recalls her visual importance in the third book of the

IIiud. She is also the visual seductress of Ovidian splendor, and quite unlike her manipulative speaking role in Homer's Odyssey, it is more important that she be seen than heard. Of course,

33 Norman A@ Heirin of Troy MiiHm S'mPhtom (London: Cornet1 University Press, 1994). p. 32. the absence of any dialogue for Marlowe's Helen suggests her purely symbolic value, as does her

role as a flimsy conjuration, who can never have a fully substantial presence. Only Faustus,

feeling ravished by her beauty, is pennitted to speak. The intensity of Faustus's wish-fulfillment,

so often expressed within the play in tems of oral longing, is about to be hlly satisfied by a demonic kiss of death. Helen is the end of Faustus's deepest desire, and so she is more

representative of Faustus than she is of Helen of Troy, despite Marlowe's great debt to rpic.

Certainly, this is the rnost beautifully erotic poetry in the entire play, and it is sensually spoken

by Faustus himself:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships

And bumt the toplrss towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss;

Her Iips suck fonh my soul, see where it flies again;

Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,

And al1 is dross that is not Helena. (V. i. 9 1-97}

Helen silently accepts nny sort of subversive sema1 fantasy Faustus has in store for

himself, and what is more, she promotes these fantasies by allowing them to be projected onto

her mute character. It is important to mention that Helen never exists as a downright slave in

literature, no matter who or how she is being possessed or objectified, and perhaps this is why

her character is so duplicitous. Her passivity is paradoxical because, with her legendary beauty,

she is an actively initiating force that unleashes the erotic power associated with man's

imagination: "she is both the signifier and the ~ignified-"~~With Helen, the possibilities for

W Austin, p. 89. pleasure are endless, and Faustus's imaginative fantasy of copulating with her can become somewhat ridiculous as well. For instance, Faustus wishes to prove hirnself so sexually potent to

Helen that he is content to transform himself into a braver version of that ultimate sensualist

Paris, and willingly confiont both "weak Menelaus" and Achilles. This display includes the sacking of Wittenberg, a definite change fiom protectively encircling it with brass and river (1. i.

89-90), and thus recalls Faustusos mbeliiun against ücadmic authority in his wish to fiIl the public schools with silk. The language of courtly love resonates here in his challenge against the authorities who would withhold Helen's pleasures tiom him:

1 will be Pans, and for love ofthee

Instead of Troy shal l W ittenbeq be sack'd,

And 1 will combat with weak Menelaus

and Wear thy coloun on my plumed crest;

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel

And then retum to Helrn for a kiss. 1V. i. 98-103)

The conflict between pagan and Christian values has entered the realms of knowledge as Faustus sees it, although his enjoyment of pagan antiquity is decidedly sexual as well. In hrr ability to satifi the desires of men's projected fantasies, Helen displays herself as openly libidinous like

Faustus, or like a "lustie minion liiss J That can give sport to thee thy bellyfull" as George Peele desmis her in his 1584 play The Arruignment of Puris (II. i. 17~-75),~'and this is typically assumed to be the case with al1 versions of her character: "Who would Helen be without her libido?"36

35 George Peele, 'k Awaigruntmt of Paris, ed-Oliphant Smeaton (London: Aldine House, 1905). " Austin, p. 42. In her most abstract fm, Helen is the quintessential symbol for beautiful evil. Several stoties which are concerned with forbidden knowledge and illicit curiosity, most notably the myth of Genesis and the introduction of temptation into the Garden of Eden by Eve, use fernale figures of beautiful evil in order to penonifL intellectual overreaching. Certainly there is a connection in Doctor Fuzïstm, as well as in most parables which deal with the notion of intellectually challenging prohibition, betwern womrn's sexuai power and rorbiddzn knowlrdge.

The sin Ptide, which cannot be separated from notions of Faustus's intellectual pride, describes himself as a flea who can "creep into every corner of a wench (II. iii. 1 13). HesiodTsPandora, the fiat wornan according to the stoiy, and a wornan with "the mind of a bitchVw3'is a significant example of how the sin of cuiosity for forbidden knowledge is often embodied by a ferninine image of beautiful evil. Shattuck argues that Adam is not defiant enough to be a Promethean figure? However, Pandora complements Eve, for in both stones humankind mut suffrr continually due to the unbridled cunVosityand sexuality of these women. Of coune, as Mihoko

Smki observes, Helen is another pagan version of Eve wvho causes the fall of Troy: "Like Eve and Pandora, Helen becarne a type of al1 women who bring woe to man."3' Several writen, like

Gorgias for instance, have been fascinated by the destructive beauty possrssed by Helen. Indeeà,

Faustus's search for beauty is destructive in Marlowe's play, and thus constitutes a fom of illicit curiosity that is rendered alming due to its ultimate objective of beautiful evil. As is the case

*th Faustus, sexual curiosity is intenningled with the intellectual need to consume, or be consumed, by what Helen of Troy represents-the most beautiful, yet destructive, elements of a pre-Chnstian past

* Shattuck, p. 15. " Shattuck, p. 15. Mihoko SmuIIl. tamu mur ph oses of Hden (London: Corne11 University Press? I989), p. 13. Faustus's awe at the sight of Helen reflects her great beauty, but it must be noted that

Marlowe's play has far less of a focus on Helen's appearance, as well as on Faustus's sexual escapades with her, than the ERglish Fuurr-Book does. The Fuwt-book describes Helen more substantially, including the announcement of her pregnancy in Chapter 55. Helen's appearance is a procession of luxury:

This Lady appeared before the in a most sumptuous pwne of purple Veluet,

richly imbrodereâ, her hayre hanpd downe loose as fayre as the beaten Gold &

of such length that it reached dowe to her hammes, with amorous cole-black

eyes, a sweete and pleasant round face, her lips read as a Cherry, her cheekes of

rose al1 colour, her mouth small, her neck as white as the Swanne, tall and slender

of personage, and in summe,there was not one imperfect part in her.'40

But Marlowe's Helen floats in and out of the play's action in a matter of seconds. Hardly enough time to become impregnated, if she is even capable of such a funciion. The rneaning of

Marlowe's Helen consists less in her physical appearmce or status as a concubine, than in the sin of subversive curiosity, and that is what she symbolizes. Helen's erotic appeal is strongly connected to Faustus's, as well as Marlowe's. intellectual fascination with the pst. Analyzing the literary problems created by the passage of time, Thomas Greene quotes a letter from Fra

Giocondo to Lorenzo Medici, in which classical writing is said to "not suffciently till our desire wiless we could see the things which they S~W.*~'Marlowe's "humanist intoxication over the project of recovering antiquity" adds to the awe of Faustus's evocation of ele en." Helen is the

U) Pairner and More, p. 3 1 1. 41 Greene, p. 9. n Quoting Bhr, p. 1O4. ideal image of paganism, wholly opposite to the play's ascetically Christian Old Man of morals.

She symbolizes al1 the poetic elements of Greece that Marlowe loved so much, an& as Una

Ellis-Femor notices, appeals to Faustus in a similar intellectual longhg for past beauty: "Faustus is at peace, not when he is bending his mind to the stem task of abstract thought and the contemplation of pure reason, not when he is allowing himself to be immersed in the delusions of Mephastophilis' ma& but when. looking at the face of Helen, he enters that pagan world to which his mind truly bel~n~ed."'~

The passion of the Helen episode is extremely sexual, but the longing that Faustus experiences is synonymous with the intellectual hunger throughout the course of the play.

Perhaps the blasphemous nature of the scene would have added to Marlowe's own erotic enjoyment of it; but for now, the subversive interest in secular leaming contributes enough to this rhapsody. Faustus has not found this type of passion in conventional knowledge. Marlowe makes this point clear enough in Faustus's opening soliloquy, and the Engiish Eùust-Book has

Faustus state in a similar fashion, "1 haue not tound through the gift that is giuen mee from aboue, any such learning and wisdome, that can bring mee to my desires.'" It is hardly surprising that the historicol Faust lived during the geat popularity of humanism and magic, partially due to the recovery and translation of the ~rnneti'u." [ndeed Faust's period saw the rise of a golden age in magic, as well as its remarkable decline after the Refonnation. Marlowe borrows fiom the tension involved in forbidden and secular knowledge and injects it into the evocation of Helen. To be perverted by Helen is to be taken in by older foms of knowledge, which are less regulated and far fiom Christian. Faustus embodies the Renaissance obsession

-- -- - 43 Una EIIis-Fmor, Chrisropkr Marfme (London: Methuen, I927), p. 80. W Palmer and More, p. 142. 45 EInpson, p. 5. with hurnanist recovery, and he would rather plunge into the world of pagan aestheticism and magic than appreciate the strict and proper knowledge associated with religious teachings.

Helen is the erotic spark of a more radical intellectualism, which allows the weaiy scholar to fulfill his curious hunger and explore various different avenues of knowledge.

Throughout the classical traditions of literature, and specifically in Homer's treatment of her as daughter of in the O&.vsq, Hcien has ucçupied an unusual place between cclestial and worldly realms. In Chaprnan's hd,her "sweet countenance . . . lookes like the Goddesses"

(III, 169-70). She is an other-worldly figure, and in the I

O. thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stm;

Brighter art thou than tlaming Jupiter

When he appear'd to hapless Semele,

More lovety than the monarch of the sky

In wamn Arethusa's azur'd ms,

- .16 Paimer and More, p. 2 1 1. 47 Suzuki, p. 35. And none but thou shalt be my paramour. (V.i. 104-1 10)

Mariowe's artistic controi is evident in this intended moment of hemaphroditic sexual identity, and it bring to mind the mysteriously male muse of the Prologue, as well as Mephastophilis's reference to Lucifer's beauty while describing the world's fairest courtesans (II. i. 158). As is usually the case with Helen, and certainly Faustus's situation is indicative of this, the feminine world of sweetrtess and love is joined in an unstable mamage with masculine violence and destruction. The cross-gendering of Helen, especially the assimilation of her character to

Jupiter's, makes her a power figure, not just a "hot whore." She is the icon of power/knowledge with the chann oflibidu sciendi which attracts the Renaissance scholar to pagan luxuries. She is rxactly what Faustus has been searching for.

However, Helen is not the actual Helen of Troy in Boctor F'u~rus, but a demonic semblance, and Marlowe's ironic language complicates her position as traditional symbol of destructive beauty. Helen, like the necromantic books of Faustus's opening soliloquy, is woahipped as "heavenly," and perhaps this recalls her divine status in the Pulinode of Socrates.

Once again we get the sense that Marlowe is allowhg the spiritual to become perverse: "magical dominion ambiguously mingles the divine and the human, giving to the temporal world a wonder and excitement appropriûted, daringl y and precariously, fiom the ~upematural.?~~It is unclear whether or not Helen is heavenly or demonic, and certainly her voice does not betray her true allegiance. The fact that she appeals to the sensuality of both Faustus's body and mind makes her even more difficult to deconstruct. Marlowe's Helen boasts certain attributes that can be categorized as demonic, and Walter

Greg fint argued this point in his discussion of Faustus's sinful joining with herSJ"at

Marlowe's Helen is a baiting and delectable succuba, contrary to her role as a common concubine in the Engfish Fuw-Book, indicates how witch lore had influenced the writing of

Docior ~;crww.~Helen's demonic lips consume Faustus, and as such they are comparable to the orally consumptive mouth of hell that terrifies Faustus at the and of the play, as he cries

"Ugly hell gape not" (V. ii. 1 14). Of course, Faustus has commented that "heaven be in these lips," which 1s similar to the Christian idea that heavrn's bliss exists in the face of God

(Matthew 18: 10). The enjoyment of pagan pleasures and rnagic, or what Cole would describe as the Free act of choosing the "not-~od,"" is like a heavenly existence for Faustus, but he is pemmently damned for such wanton gratification. He worships the God of his own appetite, as he had promised he would (II. i. 1 l), and rejects the Old Man's counseling. But Faustus is also choosing to wonhip a secular fom of intellectual wisdom which opposes itself to, and inhibits

Faustus from reaching, Augustine's notion of divine wisdom.

Faustus's desire for Helen is indicative of his drive for pagan, aesthetic wisdom. Clearly, the opening prologue demonstrates Faustus3 disillusionment with the limitations of scholastic learning, and Marlowe had expenenced a similar distaste for the theological studies offered at

Corpus Christi. By choosing Helen, Faustus abandons Divinity. He also abandons what

Elizabethan authorities traditionally construed as Wisdom. Marlowe's own rejection of a career in the church seems analogous to Faustus's choice of beauty. Ostensibly, the play's dogmatic standpoint is tbat Faustus's tme ignorance, what rnight be conceived by some as his tnie wisdom,

49 W. W.Gmg, -The Damnation of Faum"Mdern Lungtiagcr Rriview, 4 1 ( 1946): 97-1 07. 'Weil, p. 209. *'Cole, p. 193. lies in his inability to achieve divine wkdorn. An aspect of the ambiguity surrounding

Marlowe's Helen is her association with Wisdom. Faustus describes Helen as "Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars," and bnghter ''thflaming Jupiter / When he appear'd to hapless

Semele" (V. i. 105-07). Marlowe alludes to the bnghtness of the wisdorn figure of Christian theology, and by doing so, he emphasizes the reasons Faustus is finally damned. Faustus's splendid speech is reminiscent of the plitristic description of Wisdom featured in the apocryphal

Wisdom of Soiomon:

For she is the brightnes of the euerlasting light, the vndefiled mirroure of the

maiestie of God, and the image of his goocines. And king one, she can do al1

things, and remaininy in her self, renueth all, and according to the ages she

entreth into the holie soules, and maketh them the friends of God and Prophetes.

For God loueth none, if hc: dwell not with wisdorne. For she is more beautiful

then the sunne, and is aboue al1 the order of the starres, and the light is not to be

compared vnto her. (Wisdom of Solomon 7: 26-39; Geneva Bible)

In addition to this, Marlowe would have ken aware of Simon Magus's identification with

Helena, a redeerned prosti~e,supposedly an incarnation of Helen of Troy, and a naditional figure for divine ~isdorn.~'She is similarly also refened to as Luna in the pseudo-Clementine

Recognitions:

Therefore . after the death of Dositheus, Simon twk Luna to himself; and with

her he still gws about, as you see, deceiving multitudes, and asserting that he

himself is a certain power which is above God the Creator, while Luna, who îs

-- 52 See MerPalmer and More, p. t 5. with him, has been brought dom from the higher heavens, and that she is

Wisdom, the mother of al1 things, for whom, says he, the Greeks and barbarians

contending. were able in some measure to see an image of her, but of herself, as

she is, as the dweller with the first and only God, they were wholly ignorant. (11,

12)53

To some critics, the apostrophe to Helen simply implies the finaliây of Faustus's fall. He has pemanently turned away from God by choosing her sensual passion over the wise words of the ascetic Old Man. Therefore, it would seem, Faustus has chosen to give in to the bodiiy seduction of his paramour. However, Marlowe created Helen to be an imitative character. Not only is her beauty an imitative decotation which bases itself on the "historical" Helen of Troy, but her luminous appearance, also rerniniscent of Lucifer's before his fall, flaunts the amibutes conventionally assigned to a female penonitication for divine wisdom. She appeals to much more than Faustus's libido, and therefore is not sûictly a sexual character. Certainly her great beauty, the greatest in all of history, should have been enough to satis& the desires of any sensualist. Yet Marlowe's allusions to a figure of divine wisdom indicate that Helen should be

interpreted as much more than just an image of erotic seduction.

Marlowe's treatment of Helen as a false similitude of divine wisdom illustrates how malleable her symbolic nature can be. As a literary figure, Helen's chatacter has been divenely defineci, and so she is a marvelous indicator or semiotic function to be used at the writer's discretion. Teny Eagleton notices how, in Shakespeare, Helen reveals much about those who taik about her: "she mediates their own sense of themselves to them, she is their living

53 Rrcognitions of Cïement, in irhu Writingstfl Tatim d Thuophiï~ts:ar#I The CYernentine R~cognitto~ts~uans. B. P. Fcatten, M Dods, and T. Smith, Ante-Nlcene Christian Lbrary, vol. 3 (Edinbwgh: T. and T. Clark, 1867). reflecti~n."~Similarly, Marlowe's Helen ultimately reveals the nature of Faustus, because she is the embodiment of his wish-fulfillment fantasy. This reflective role of Helen is complicated by her relation also to Wisdom. Weil somewhat clm*fies this in her discussion of supientiu creutu, or a "participation in the uncreated Wisdom of Goci," where she identifies the female wisdorn figure commonly used throughout the Renaissance: "Although she had Greek origins as well, she retained many of hzr Hebraic attnbutes, and was probably more useful to poets than to theologians. She tended to represent 'the subconscious, intuitive feminine intelligence of the heart as opposed to the active, conscious, masculine intelligence of the mind.' Such wisdom included 'direction of Iife' and 'inclination of the heart,' as well as an 'intellectual perception of

God.' Marlowe's hero is finally damned because he lacks the wisdom of the heart, a will to love goodness."'5 Marlowe's Helen is cenainly not a figure for supirntiu crmu, and neither does

Faustus's intellrctual ism includr suc h holy inclinations; but she represents, according to

Faustus's description of her, similar attributes. She mimics the patrktic definition of divine wisdom, and therefore diminishes the effect of the Old Man's presence, as well as his ability to turn Faustus towards Gd. Unlike the purely pagan wisdom of Saba, alluded to earlier in the play, Helen's pagan nature embodies libido sciendi, while falsely promising the spiritual security of supientiu creutu.

The momentum of the apostrophe to Helen moves towards the damnîng kiss, which is a heightened moment due to the Fact that Faustus has lacked sexual experience before this point in the play, despite his quick demands for a wife afier conjuring up Mephastophilis. Interestingly, both the EagIish and German Fuurl-booh show Faustus to be sexually promiscuous throughout the story. Helen is Faustus's first taste of long-awaited sexual union, and perhaps this is why she is so oflen identified as a wholly sexual being in the play.

Marlowe employs Helen's image as the deathless goddess by the city wall of Troy, and gants her the power to bestow upon Faustus a kiss of death. Faustus expects this kiss to satisfy his innate need for immortality and transcendence into more rewarding reaims than the one which he is inhabiting, but Helen's diabolic nature will punish rather than reward Faustus for his appetite. The kiss of death has traces of the Cabala attached to it, and specifically the notion of intellectually communicating with God through the archangels. Pico's eleventh Cabalist

Conclusion points out how such a moment of intellectual intensity can kill the individual involved.j6 The apostrophe to Helen is a heightened moment of experirnce in the play. but it is too ofien interpreted in strictly sexual terms. Certainfy, Helen is the ultimate bait for Faustus the sensualist, but she appeals to the sensuality and hunger of his mind as weil as his body. She is the desired end of Faustus's aesthetic intellectual experience, and therefore her appeal is significant to the Renaissance appetite for different types of knowledge. Walter Pater's mernorable conclusion to The Renuissunce is a well-suited explanation for Faustus's fa11 to libkh scieridi, syrnbolically represrnted, of course, by his fall to the spirit of Helen of Troy:

some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and

attractive to us,-for that moment only. Not the hit of experience, but

experience itself, is the end A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a

variegated, drarnatic Iife. How may we see in them a11 that is to be seen in them

by the finest senses? How shall we pass moa swiffly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their

purest energy?j7

The final end of dl that Faustus has desired is Helen, and certainly Faustus's search has

not only been for sexual pleasure alone. Marlowe allows Faustus to be self-annihilated by his

deepest desire for intellectual Fulfillment, and this is often sensationalized as the method of

Marlowe's own destruction as well. Unfortunately, the constraints O&' religious orthodoxy

require Faustus to be etenally damned for dabbling in such wish-fulfillment, and therefore

Ducror Fuu~tusis often interpreted as an unambiguously anti-intellectualist play. However,

even with the play's conventionally appropnate ending, it is small wonder that certain readen

like Empson view this as the happiest death in al l of dramaSR

57 Walter Pater. Rrnai~~~4mre(New York: Modem Library. 19 19). pp. L 96-97. sg Empson, p. 122. CONCLUSION

THE FAUSTiAN FALL: CASTING A SHADOW OVER RENAISSANCE OPTIMISM

The story of Faust Ieaves an indelible impnnt on al1 who corne across the legend.

Marlowe's version oF the Faust myth dbtinguishes itself fkom its predecrsson. not only by rejecting details such as the polygamous Faust of the I:'ngIiiih Ieuust-Book, but by masterfully playing a mimpeted sensr O€ monls off against the aesthetic attractions of the hero's chancter.

Faustus's irnprovident study of magic, or his will to be an intellectual libertine, h;is a univeml appeal. Those who wish to assuagc: the suffiring connected with their own human limitations, intellectual malcontents for instance, are especially moved by the theme of overreaching.

Marlowe differentiates betwecn his Faustus and other venions of the legend by creating a hero whose psychology is accessible, even though his mind is exceptional. Faustus is still subject to criticism, primarily due to his infamous ignorance and pride, but it is nearly impossible for him to be condemned roundly in spite of his damnable finish in the play. Perhaps the danger of

Faustus's unscrupulous bahavior is less important to the nostalgie reader than what Faustus categoricdly represents wîth regard to human potential and knowledge. Whether we choose to condemn him for being an Icarian bol, or hail him for rejecting authority, Faustus focuses a boundless aspiration that epitomizes the euphoria of early Renaissance indivîdualism.

Searching for definite answers in Doctor fizmus is difficult, and this may very generally be due to the elusiveness of tragedy, as Stephen Booth argues. ' Marlowe's technique in creating

1 Stephen Bmth, Kihg Leur. Macbrrh. Ildefinirion, unù fia@& (New Haven: Yaie University Press, 1983), pp. 79- 1 tg. a scholar who is paradoxically incomprehensible, yet deserving of our understanding, adds to the sense of mystely surrounding his rise and fall. Considering the power of Faustus's speech, specifically where second-person self-address is employed it is a wonder that a man exhibiting such a developed self-awareness can be sirnultaneously blind and unresponsive to his impending doom. Keefer refers to this problematic self-awareness as the "trap of self-authenticating predication.--' And yet, despite this distortcd view of hirnself, Faumis is undoubtedly

"individual" in his characterization; Marlowe stresses this by creating a hero who appean liminal or superimposed ont0 reality when having to deal with the dl-too-real authorities that defend institutional and societal ideology. In addition, Mephastophilis does not need to inculcate his views in the scholar because Faustus's own past inquiries have brought his mind to the point of seduction. Marlowe need not condemn Faustus either, because the scholar's obstinacy dooms him to begin with. Marlowe, perhaps more than anyone alsr who wrote during his time, understood the premise that one covets what has been identified as "forbidden," and that to taste of what is forbidden is to desire more of it. Prohibition sparks perverse curiosity in

Marlowe's play. Intellectualism is a sensual flavor in Doctor l-irustiq and 1 have identified its dangerous appeal as being mosr efYiively expressed by the term Iihkh scientli.

In .4 Treutise of the Sou&,a work that sornewhat posthtes Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh assumes that human nature craves a connection with the infinite, and this is the height which

Faustus is reaching for. Rather than resigning hirnself to the cornmon burden of humanity, incl uding the inevitable failures and disappointing realities which never measure up to ideals,

Faustus rejects what is irnplicit in king mortal. Mephastophilis's comment., "Why this is hell, nor am I out of iî," may partly satirize the human condition itself (1. iii. 76). Instead, Faustus chooses a Promethean sensibility, one that can bend and shape reality by initiating creativity through rnagic. Faustus's tenacious decision to express his "manly fortitude" has everything to do with exceeding in scholarly searching and individualism, and so he must perish alone at the end of the play despite the scholan' and the Old Man's attempts to Save him. Faustus lives and dies as the individual, even though the logical cleamess of his initial desire is a universally appealing prospect which hm resulted in him being incorrrctly labeled an Everyrnan. Marlowe has created a hero of exceptional intellect. and the universal theme of desiring heightened experience is spectacularly redeveloped through the Renaissance hunger for knowledge. Una

Ellis Fermor goes so far as to cal1 man's inability to reach infinite heights a "gigantic intellectual cheat,"' and so it is appropriate that Marlowe, probably feeling quite cheated himseif, would be resolute in making the play about oveneaching for knowledge.

It is very easy to take Marlowe's play as a pncral commentary on human selfishness, and not necessuily a drama concerned with the movement we refer to as Renaissance individualism.

Given the numerous instances within the play when matters of the selfare identified as Faustus's top priority, the former interpretation seems perfectly acceptable. There is, for instance, the genie-likc manner in which Mephastophilis grants wishes to Faustus, as well as Faustus's declaration that the God he serves is "thine own appetite" (11. i. 1 1 ). However, as I have argued before, the scenes which precede the initial summoning of Mephastophilis, and most notnbly the play's prologue and Faustus's opening soliloquy, reveal Marlowe's endeavor to centre the play on the individual's promotion of radical intellectualism, albeit in an oblique style. Docror

Fuustus, apart from king a superior play, has a tremendous value because it encapsulates Marlowe's awareness of the histoncal specificity connec ted with the theme of forbidden knowledge. Marlowe pwposefully represents his period's uneasy perception of Neoplatonic and hemetic magic, as well as pagan influences on Renaissance thought. The play enables a greater understanding of radical thinking in Elizabethan England, as well as the writer who partook in such unconventional attitudes-

Pcrhaps due to the fact that a tremendous amount of rnonetary support was needed t'or the period's rebirth of art and culture, it is oAen assumed that the powerful govemmental and religious authorities of the Renaissance had created a climate of acceptance for liberalized thinking which inevitably resulted From recovenng the ideas of classical antiquity. Certainly, there was much pressure on humanists to Chnstianize their findings, and this fact alone demonstrates the unease by which a pagan past was received by a society with the perspective of a di fferent institutional religion. Marlowe's awareness of this tension is implicit in Bwtor

Fuustuv, especially in the invocation of Helen which is the most stnkingly subversive expression of the camal mind in the play. The play also focuses on the power afforded to the Renaissance individual, although it is a temporary power as demonstrated by Faustus's Fortunes.

Nevertheless, the power of individual thought and imagination, represented by the pioneering of magic and even poetry, is a tempting proposition to those willing to be damtied for it; Marlowe undoubtedly would have chosen to collaborate with the creative powen of hell rather thm accept the ascetic prompting of religious and philosophical orth0d0~~The ideological warfare

- 4 Ian Watt reveais in kfyths of kfodemIrdiviJI~~Iism. p. 45, that "the autonomy ofthe individual motco-euist with the possibilhy of etemal damation, in theory-or in practice, unless the individual is willing to pay the ultimate price." Watt argues that for the later days of hdividualism, charactenzed by such rebels as Arthur hbaudand Huckelbeny Eh, going COheu was a standard notion of what mua be the paid pnce for individualism However, Marlowe was wnting in the sixtee!nth cenniry amidst the heat ofemergùig individualism in England. The sensitive subject merof Dorttm FQUSMis a telling account of how Marlowe did not &Uy compromise his art to avoid potentiaüy scandaIous situations and confkontatioas with the Etimbethan authorities. between the institution and the individual cornes across vibrantly in the play, even though the

tension must be resolved by authoritatively ending Faustus's intellectual romp with the forbidden side of knowledge.

Marlowe's Faustus bares the stigrna of libido scirndi, and the ideologicrl necessity of his destruction is indicative of the Counter-Renaissance retreat from individual creative impulses.

Nicholas of Cusa provides an effective summatton of why intellectual power is so dangerous when it wanders unregulated by orthodoxy: "Free intellect knows to be mie that which it

insatiably desires to attain (while it surveys al1 things by means of its innate tàculty of inference),

that which is apprehended by its affectionate embrace.'" Faustus's disintegration is actually

more of an assimilation or annhilation, as demonstrated by the tinal soliloquy which has him

renounce individualism and request to be transformed into water drops in the ocean (V. ii. 110-

1 I ); this is surely something the extraordinary Marlowe. whose contempt for cstablished authority is notorious, would have regarded as the equivalent of being tom apart limb fiom lirnb.

In this sense, it is easy to imagine Marlowe as nostalgically mourning the passing ofthe magus,

as well as the unfulfilled creative potential of the Renaissance, while ostensibly celebrating

intellectual conformity. Even though the medieval church was never inclined to support the

practice of magic, the irredeemable fall of magic and the occult philosophy occurred most

notably in the post-~eformation.6As a result of this, the glorious magus-figure, such as Pico

and Ficino, disappeared, and what emerged in literature were several punitive venions of the

Faust legend. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of Marlowe as wholeheartedly a part of the

rigidity of his period, although critics such as Frances A. Yates argue for Marlowe's orthodox

Nicholas of CmOn Lrrm>rd l~rmce,tram, Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur I. Bannlng Press, 198 1). p. 50. Traister, p. 2. condemnation of ~austus.' Marlowe's intentions in writing a play about knowledge, which appears finally to uphold orthodox values by representing the damnation of the heterodox protagonist, are inherently ambiguous. When we consider Marlowe's rebellious proclivities, such as writing on religious hypocnsy, preferring sarcastic non-conformists like Thomas Nashe and double-ùealen like Richard Chomely and Richard Baines to more "suitable" Company, and creating dramatic heroes who de@ social noms, it seems that Marlowe would have sympathized with Faustus's fi-mtration. Certainly Marlowe's focus on contemporary intellectual currents, as well as fiom his employment of the "lust for knowledge" tradition, show that he had an acutr sense of how powerfully significant to the Renaissance was the question of how much one is pemitted to know. WORKS CiTED

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