Abstract
Marlowe’s plays are often taken to be distinctively modern in some way, as in a recent consideration of Doctor Faustus as a “degree zero for modern drama, the definitive break with the sacral theater of medieval drama.”1 One set of evidence in this case for Marlowe’s transitional status has been his participation in a general shift away from allegorical dramatic modes over the course of the sixteenth century.2 As Katharine Eisaman Maus notes, “Marlowe makes the individualist and naturalistic conventions of tragedy collide abruptly with the collectivist, allegorical procedures of the morality play, deliberately emphasizing the irreconcilability of the two genres.”3 And even as many of Marlowe’s plays employ features of the moralities— hypersymmetry, vice characters, or pageantry of the seven deadly sins—the Marlovian corpus famously confounds attempts to pin down what the moral of the story might be.4 Critics persuasively argue for diametrically opposed readings of plays such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, which is not usually the case for earlier moralities: Is Doctor Faustus an indictment of Faustus himself or of the cruelty of the Calvinist God?5 Is Faustus free to repent until the last moment, or has God himself hardened the doctor’s heart?6
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Notes
Ian Munro, “Theater and the Scriptural Economy in Doctor Faustus,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, ed. Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 296–318, quotation on 308–9.
See David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pages 10 and 175.
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 89–90.
Kristen Poole comments that this inability to find a moral is itself the “moral,” which “expresses the religious confusion of the day.” See Kristen Poole, “Dr. Faustus and Reformation Theology,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96–107, quotation on 97.
For the idea that Marlowe exposes the cruelty of the Calvinist God, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
For a range of arguments that Faustus is predestined to damnation, see Joseph Westlund, “The Orthodox Framework of Marlowe’s Faustus,” Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 191–205;
Robert Ornstein, “Marlowe and God: The Tragic Theology of Dr. Faustus,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 83 (1968): 1378–85;
and John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Stachniewski summarizes these debates on pages 292–331. For contrary views arguing that Faustus damns himself in one way or another, see T. McAlindon, “Doctor Faustus: the Predestination Theory,” English Studies 76 (1995): 215–20;
W. W. Greg, “The Damnation of Faustus,” Modern Language Review 41 (1946): 97–107;
Nicholas Kiessling, “Doctor Faustus and the Sin of Demoniality,” Studies in English Literature 15 (1975): 205–11;
and Malcolm Pittock, “God’s Mercy Is Infinite: Faustus’s Last Soliloquy,” English Studies 65 (1984): 302–11.
For the sin of despair within a Calvinist context, see Lily B. Campbell, “Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 67 (1952): 219–39.
For critics who argue that the play cannot be reduced to a single theological perspective, see Nicholas Brooke, “The Moral Tragedy of Doctor Faustus,” Cambridge Journal 5 (1952): 662–88;
David Webb, “Damnation in Doctor Faustus: Theological Strip Tease and the Histrionic Hero,” Critical Survey 11 (1999): 31–47; and Poole, “Reformation Theology.”
See C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 87–130.
See Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 73–81. Diehl argues for a dynamic of “enchantment and disenchantment” (79) that is somewhat the reverse of the one I trace.
Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 93.
For an account of the complexities of medieval playing spaces, including the close integration of horizontal social relations with religious drama, see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 23–58.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: Norton, 2005). References to the play are cited parenthetically in the text. Unless marked otherwise, references are to the A-Text.
While an investigation of the late medieval affiliations of these horizontal orientations is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to note that this investment ofreligious value in the plane ofworldly existence continued important strands of Catholic drama and exegesis. For an account of the medieval roots of the habit of folding spiritual senses into the literal, see Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 197–99.
Also on the importance of the literal sense, see Ryan McDermott, “Henri de Lubac’s Genealogy of Modern Exegesis and Nicholas of Lyra’s Literal Sense of Scripture,” Modern Theology 29 (2013): 124–50. I thank the author for sharing this article with me before publication.
In addition to Stachniewski, cited earlier, and Poole, cited later, see the following: Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Heather Hirschfeld, “‘The Verie Paines of Hell’: Doctor Faustus and the Controversy over Christ’s Descent,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 166–81;
Angus Fletcher, “Doctor Faustus and the Lutheran Aesthetic,” English Literary Renaissance 35 (1995): 187–209;
and Nicholas McDowell, “Dead Souls and Modern Minds? Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination, from Marlowe to Milton,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.3 (2010): 559–92.
Brian Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–90.
In this same volume, see also Blair Hoxby, “Allegorical Drama,” 191–208. On the literal sense, see also Cummings, “Literally Speaking, or the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan,” Paragraph 21 (1998): 200–226.
On Luther’s view of Paul and the “flesh,” see Strier’s discussion of the preface to Luther’s translation of Romans, “Martin Luther and the Real Presence in Nature,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.2 (2007): 276–77.
On Calvin’s similar appeals to the “mind of the author” to guarantee a single meaning, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 250.
For the Cambridge context, see G. M. Pinciss, “Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus,” Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 249–64.
On the Protestant reconfiguration of human-divine relations along the axis of contiguity, see Gary Kuchar, “‘Love’s Best Habit’: Eros, Agape, and the Psychotheology of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, ed. Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 211–34.
On the process of reading divine marks in nature, see Cameron’s discussion of Melancthon in Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 177.
For some of these complexities, see Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
and Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
See Walsham’s discussion of the sources and implications of Beard’s Theatre in Providence in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65–115. Walsham traces the tract’s translation of a Calvinist piece by Jean de Chassanion, published in French in 1581, itself indebted to a Lutheran source published in 1568 (71–72). Both are also tied to medieval preaching aids (72). For an excellent discussion of these kinds of images of poetic justice, see Jeffrey Dolven, “Spenser’s Sense of Poetic Justice,” Raritan 21 (2001): 127–40.
Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 44.
Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 145. See also Chapter 1, “The Devil’s in the Archive: Ovidian Physics and Doctor Faustus,” 25–57. While I have focused on Calvin’s cosmology, Poole offers a helpful outline of Hooker’s very different and more rationalist approach: “In contrast with Calvin, this [natural] law must be rigid, nearly absolute. It does not allow for metamorphosis or a plastic cosmos” (153).
For an indispensable account of Luther’s evolving ideas of the meaning of iustitia Dei, see Cummings, Grammar and Grace, 79–101. Particularly important for my purposes is the way in which “Luther sets up a theological contradiction on the basis of active and passive forms” (87). Alister E. McGrath offers a summary of the differences among Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and other reformers while showing how they all emphasize “the impotence of humanity and the omnipotence of God.” See McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 67–94, quotation on page 91.
For more details concerning the theological dimensions of the problem of justification, see McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
On rethinking the relationship between magic and the Reformation, see Robert Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World,’” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94.
For the pioneering study of relations between religion and magic, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971).
Marjorie Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays,” in Marlowe, ed. Richard Wilson (Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 30–53.
As Debora Shuger’s multifaceted study of Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker suggests, “rationalist” and “participatory” views of signs coexisted in the Protestantism of this period. See Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19. For a summary of problems concerning the magical power of signs in this period, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 18.
On Luther’s transposition of well-established views of the devil’s sacraments onto Catholic practices, see Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 171–73.
Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Methuen Drama, 2010), esp.
Chapter 1. While Shell emphasizes the dangers of performativity as a “temporary imaginative collusion” (51), I show the more extensive fears of offending God and colluding with the devil that centered on Calvinist orthopraxis. This also marks a key difference between my approach and that of David Hawkes, who offers an extended treatment of the performative sign as a demonic threat to the soul. See Hawkes, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Sofer comments, “Nowhere on the Elizabethan stage is the tension between conjuring as hocus-pocus and conjuring as black magic—or, as speech-act theory recasts the distinction, between hollow performance and efficacious performativity—explored more searchingly than in Doctor Faustus.” See Andrew Sofer, “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 1–21, quotation on page 10.
My argument is that Marlowe exploits the dangers of efficacious theatrical signs not only in relation to black magic but also in relation to God’s powers over the material world and the body. For a sustained examination of the significance of J. L. Austin and ordinary language philosophy for the drama of this period, see Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Susan Snyder has remarked that this scene parodies the Catholic rites of baptism. See Snyder, “Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as an Inverted Saint’s Life,” Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 514–23.
On the importance of this dynamic of demonic mimicry to the history of Christianity, see John Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
See Luxon’s discussion of the way in which, for a millenarian such as Mary Gadbury, a “living allegory” is “precisely not an allegory” (16). See also Barbara K. Lewalski’s discussion of Protestant typology in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 132–39.
See David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, ed., and John W. Fraser, trans., Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 14. Calvin is here commenting on Acts 14:17.
For the association of Faustus with skeptical empiricism, see Charles G. Masinton, “Faustus and the Failure of Renaissance Man,” in Christopher Marlowe’s Tragic Vision (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972). For the argument that he becomes passion’s slave, see Sara Munson Deats, “Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy,” Essays in Literature 3 (1976): 3–16.
See also Robert B. Heilman, “The Tragedy of Knowledge: Marlowe’s Treatment of Faustus,” Quarterly Review of Literature 2 (1946): 316–32.
Many earlier works took similarly complex approaches to allegory. See, for instance, the pageant of sins in William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008).
Work on early modern performance is important here, particularly the interplay between personation as a “presentational type of performance” and impersonation of a character “as part of a more intrinsic, text-sustained dramaturgy.” See Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power ofPerformance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 160.
See Garber, “‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1977), 20.
For more examples of this dynamic and the development of Calvin’s ideas about providence, see Randall C. Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 73–96. Diehl cites this passage and describes it as a “paradox” that Calvin would use the image of a theater. See Staging Reform, 73. I have sought to show why this imagery of God’s visibility in a theater was not paradoxical for Calvin or for writers like Beard.
On Calvin’s increasing emphasis on the relationship between divine agency and inferior causes, as well as his discussion of how God’s power might be concealed beneath the means he uses, see Zachman, Image and Word, 84–87. See also Susan E. Schreiner’s discussion of secondary causes in The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1991), 30–32.
See John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh: A tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), 357. On experimental Calvinism, See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979);
Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 38–39. On the role of experience in radical religion, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, esp. Chapter 1.
R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
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© 2013 Jennifer Waldron
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Waldron, J. (2013). Theatrical Authorship and Providential Bodies: The Case of Doctor Faustus . In: Reformations of the Body. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313126_4
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