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The Two Hells of Doctor Faustus: a Theatrical Polyphony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
The first article in the first issue of the original TQ was a piece by Jan Knott, utilizing the concept of the absurd as a means of understanding Greek tragedy. Recently, his essays, of which many first appeared in TQ, have been published in a new collection, The Theatre of Essence, from Northwestern University Press. Kott's idiosyncratic approach to the interpretation of theatre texts continues to distinguish him as one of those rare literary critics whose insights illuminate the play in production – the reflection in the Brook–Scofield King Lear of his Beckettian interpretation in the seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary being just the most famous instance. Now Jan Kott, who teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, turns to the world of Shakespeare's own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and examines Doctor Faustus as the meeting-place of many kinds of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan theatre, contributing to an understanding of the play that is rooted not in a dead theology but in a living theatricality.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985
References
Notes and References
1. Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 187Google Scholar.
2. Tamburlaine tears the crowns from the heads of kings he has defeated and throws them on the stage. These ‘crowns’ appear 35 times in Part I. In Edward II, the word ‘crown’ appears 23 times. In The Jew of Malta, the appearance of those gold crowns of the money-lender is five times greater than that of the royal crowns in Edward II.
3. Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964), p. 208 ffGoogle Scholar.
4. John Melton (1620), cited by Bakeless, John in The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), p. 298Google Scholar.
5. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909–1956), the most splendid of Polish aphorists, who could be compared only with Karol Kraus, wrote: ‘Illiterates have to dictate’. See Unkempt Thoughts (New York: St Martin Press, 1962), p. 157.
6. Many scholars question Marlowe's authorship of this scene. This is not for me to judge, but there is, in fact, a striking similarity to Nashe's The Terrors of the Night, in which the nightmares seem to be close to Bosch's version. See Nashe, Thomas, Selected Writings, ed. Wells, Stanley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), Introduction, p. 12Google Scholar.
7. This juxtaposition of the two different visions of hell exists in the German Faustbuch: ‘…in this confused hell is nought to find but a filthy, sulphurish, fiery, stinking mist or fog…Further, we Devils know not how God hath laid the foundation of our hell, nor whereof it is: but to be short…we know that hell hath neither bottom nor end’. See The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Faustus, ed. Pfeiler, W. K. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p. 84–5Google Scholar. Compare this with ‘hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed/In one self place…’ (II, i, 119–20). Marlowe made two opposing theatres of this opposition of the two ‘hells’.
8. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 86Google Scholar.
9. Henslowe's Diary, as cited in Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1547–1642 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 121Google Scholar.
10. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to compare Faustus's warning with Prospero's warning in The Tempest to the young couple before the mythological masque dedicated to them: ‘No tonguel; all eyesl; be silent’ (IV, i, 59).
11. In Gorboduc (1561–62), the first English tragedy written in blank verse, each act ends with a ‘dumb show’ that anticipates the events which will follow. In The Arraignment of Paris (1581–82), the earliest of the preserved pastorals with music and songs, Helen, in the ‘Venus' Show’, ‘Ent'reth in her bravery, with four Cupids attending on her, each having his fan in his hand to fan fresh air in her face’. Helen's second entrance in Faustus appears to repeat this ‘dumb show’ from The Arraignment of Paris: ‘Enter Helen again, passing over [the stage] between two Cupids’. The ‘dumb-show’ appears in Shakespeare at least three times: in Hamlet in the comedians' first pantomime, ‘Gonzago's Murder’ in Macbeth in the dumb-show of the future kings of Scotland; and in The Tempest, in the scene with Ariel/Harpy when the strange shapes carry in the enchanted table and then carry it out again, straining under its weight.
12. Selected Satires of Lucian, ed. and trans. Casson, Lionel (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 205Google Scholar.
13. Compare Don Juan's ironic comparison of himself to Alexander in Molière: ‘I feel it is in me to love the whole world, and like Alexander still wish for new worlds to conquer’ (I, ii). And once again in the scene with Elvira: ‘Madame: We left because of Alexander and the other worlds he still had to conquer’ (I, iii).
14. ‘The “throne” which descends from the heavens in Faustus and A Looking Glass for London and England, the “creaking throne” scorned by Jonson, which Henslowe notes as being stored in the heavens, was a chair for flights and nothing else quite different from the “state”.’ See Gurr, op. cit., p. 127.
15. The word ‘despair’ appears very frequently in Shakespeare– some 60 times. On most of the occasions, ‘despair’ comes in the context of suicidal death, and, therefore, in Christian theology, the certainly of going to hell, as, for example, in Richard III, in Richard's scene with Anne: ‘Anne. No excuse…but to hang yourself. Richard. By such despair I should accuse myself’ (I, ii, 84–5). Special attention should be drawn to what is probably taken from Faustus, the phrase ‘despair and die’ (which is repeated nine times) in the scene where the ghosts of the murdered appear to Richard the night before the battle (V, viii). ‘Despair and die’ means simply, ‘die and go to hell’. At the end of the curse of Buckingham's Ghost, for example, we find, ‘And die in terror of thy guiltinessl; / Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death: / Fainting, despair; despairing, yield thy breath!;’ (V, iii, 170 ff). Among the last words Richard utters in this scene is the same sentence as in Faustus: ‘I shall despair’ (200).
16. The Occult Philosophy, op. cit., p. 92.
17. See Baron, Frank, Doctor Faustus: from History to Legend (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1978), pp. 31 ff. Rabelais had already been making fun of this Faust–Agrippa the sorcerer, who foretold the ruture, when he described him (in Gargantua) as Panurg who goes for advice to Herr Trippa: ‘you know how, through the arts of astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, metomancy, and others of the same gest, he predicts all things to come…’ (III, Ch. XXV). Rabelais, of course, in opposition to Lutherans and Jesuits, poked fun at sorcery because he did not believe in it. Marlowe also did not believe in the conjuring of spirits, and that is why Faustus's selling of his soul takes place among the ‘diableries’, in the comic theatre of the devils. Frances Yates's interpretation (that Marlowe joined the Counter-Reformation ‘witch hunters’ in Doctor Faustus by presenting the Renaissance magus as a ‘warlock’) is a completely mistaken reading of the drama. Sometimes even the greatest historians of intellectual history are incapable of deciphering theatrical signs. For them drama is only a printed textGoogle Scholar.
18. Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600. The history of the text does not belong to this essay, but it is worthwhile noting that in the 1616 edition Faustus, dressed as a cardinal in the scene with the pope, announces the sentence of the holy council on Bruno, the anti-Pope recognized by the German emperor: ‘He shall be straight condemn'd of heresy / And on a pile of faggots burnt to death’ (III, i, 183–4).