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Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

Lily B. Campbell
Lily B. Campbell*
Affiliation:
University of California Los Angeles 24
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Extract

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , March 1952 , pp. 219 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

Notes

1 Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1940), p. 211.

2 Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: Parallel Texts (Oxford, 1950), pp. 130-132.

3 Robert Hunter West discusses earlier comment on the angels in Faustus and offers new material on the subject but generally ignores the sermons of the period in The Invisible World (Athens, Georgia, 1939), pp. 102-103 et passim.

4 Christopher Marlowe (London, 1927), p. 78.

5 MLN, xii, 258-274.

6 PMLA, l, 661-678. See also notes on the play by William Jackson, W. W. Greg, and Celeste Wine in TLS for 7 Sept., 26 Oct., and 23 Nov. 1933.

7 (Chapel Hill, 1946), pp. 106-107.

8 The History . . . of Doctor John Faustus, modernized and edited by William Rose, Broadway Translations (London, 1925), pp. 89-90.

9 Poetry and Humanism (New Haven, 1950), pp. 18, 21, 64-74, 217.

10 Greg (see n. 2), p. 102.

11 The contrasting attitudes of Catholic and Protestant in reconciling the epistles of Paul and of James are set forth in the Catholic Encyclopedia article on “Justification,” by J. Pohle (vii, 573-578). The Protestant interpretation made good works the fruit of faith.

12 It is interesting to note that in Biothanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise, John Donne argues that not all who kill themselves have done it “out of a despaire of God's mercy (which is the onely sinnefull despaire).” Facsimile Text Soc. ed. (New York, 1930), p. 28.

13 For English editions between 1490 and 1506, both in Latin and in English, see STC, Nos. 786-793.

14 For the account of Spira's life and for the identification of the Italian writers who considered his case I have consulted, in addition to the primary sources referred to below, the following works: Emilio Comba, I Nostri Protestanti (Firenze, 1897), ii, 259-295; Comba, Francesco Spiera (Roma and Firenze, 1872); Thomas McCrie, The History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh and London, 1827); Christopher Hare, Men and Women of the Italian Reformation (New York, n.d.); Frederic C. Church, The Italian Reformers: 1534-1564 (New York, 1932).

15 See DNB article by Thompson Cooper; Thomas McCrie, Life of Andrew Melville (Edinburgh and London, 1824), i, 38-41, 425-427.

16 Church, Italian Reformers, p. 206, n. 69.

17 See article on Sigismund G. Gelen (or Ghelen or Gelenius) in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1876).

18 See article in All. Deutsche Bibl.

19 Letters of John Calvin, comp. Jules Bonnet (Edinburgh and London, 1857), ii, 231-232.

20 The title reads: Francisci Spierae, quiquod susceptam semel Evangelice veritatis professionem abnegasset, damnassetque, in horrendam incidit, desperationem, Historia, a quatuor summis viris, summa fide conscripta.

21 I have not thought it relevant to attempt a bibliography. The B.M. Cat. entries are not adequate. Comba has a bibliography valuable for identifying other records of the case. See also Wine's footnotes in PMLA, l, 664-667. The Catholic reply was that of Georgio Siculo, Epistola . . . alli cittadini di Riva di Trento contra il mendatio di F. Spira, & falso dottrina di Protestanti (Bologna, 1550).

22 Cooper's Chronicle (London, 1560), fol. 343.

23 Joannes Philippson, A Famous Chronicle of oure time, called Sleidanes Commentaries, trans. John Daus (London, 1560), fols. 327-329.

24 The Common Places, trans. Anthonie Marten (London, 1583), Pt. 3, pp. 23-24.

25 Actes and Monumentes (London, 1576), i, 1351 (misnumbered 1341). References to Spira can be traced in the Parker Soc. editions of the works of John Bradford, Thomas Rogers, Edwin Sandys.

26 See note 6. The play has come down to us in two issues, the first naming Spira on the title page, the second substituting the name Philologus because, as the prologue explained, the audience could more easily apply the lesson of the play to themselves if a general rather than a particular name was used. Wood tacked on a happy ending by making Nuntius rush in with a sort of epilogue announcing that Philologus had finally been converted through godly counsel and was saved.

The play opens with Satan determined to reclaim the world with the help of his agent, the Pope, who has Avarice and Tyranny and now Hypocrisy to support him. The history of the creation and the fall is rehearsed. Philologus debates various matters with the spokesmen for the devil, but it not until the fourth act that he embraces “the glass of delight” offered by a Cardinal, moved thereto also by the thoughts of the sufferings of his wife and children if he persists in opposing the Pope's laws. He is warned by a spirit and by his conscience, but Sensual Suggestion and Hypocrisy win, rejoicing thereafter in his recantation. In the fifth act Horror shows Philologus what he has done. His children argue that God is merciful, and Theologus points out the mercy extended to Peter when he had denied Christ and to the thief on the cross. But the sinner will not be comforted and only wishes for the means to commit suicide. Finally, after the moral has been pointed out, Nuntius rushes in with the happy ending.

27 Beard's book (London, 1597) placed Spira among the “Apostates and Backsliders, that through infirmitie and feare have fallen away” in Chap. xvii, pp. 62-65.

28 Goulart's work was trans. by E. Grimeston. Spira was placed in the section on “Desperate Persons” taking up two thirds of the section, pp. 187-196.

29 I have seen only the 1672 and 1683 eds. The 1683 ed. adds “A Further Account of God's severe Judgments on several other Apostates” from Julian the Apostate to Bishop Gardiner. A Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira with the “miserable lives and deaths” of various others was published in Philadelphia in 1814 by the Rev. W. C. Brownlee with the account of the theological arguments which had risen from the case.

30 R. C. Bald has called my attention to the mention of the case in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1904), iii, 466.

31 The Faust Book, however, does recognize Faustus' failure to claim God's mercy in the passage I quoted on p. 221 and elsewhere.

32 Both the 1604 and the 1616 eds. have a question mark after heaven, and the 1604 ed. also has one after sav'd. I prefer the 1604 pointing but I here follow Boas as elsewhere.

33 v.ii. 137-194. Miss Mahood discusses the effect of this scene upon Donne as reflected in his sermons, pp. 89-90.