The Flaw in the Indentures

by

Barry Kritzberg

Presented: November 18, 2013

Chicago Literary Club

It is a commonplace of jurisprudence that a contract to do something illegal is, ipso facto, illegal and, therefore, unenforceable. Any lawyer, and even a few people not involved in judicial matters, might readily acknowledge as much without the slightest hesitation.

How is it, then, that the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, the most learned man of his day, did not recognize the flaw in his indentures—that the contract Faustus signed with Mephistophilis could not have committed his soul to the devil, for such a bargain was illegal, under all existing law, civil and ecclesiastical?

The simplistic answer would be that Christopher Marlowe was merely following the text of the German Faust book, which was published in English in 1592. Another possible explanation that is frequently advanced is that Marlowe’s play is a religious parable, showing the terrible fate of those who give themselves to the Seven Deadly Sins, a kind of reverse Everyman, where the protagonist does everything in his power to merit hell rather than heaven.

This explanation of the play as a Christian parable is unlikely, however, for it seems that Christopher Marlowe was an atheist. I use the word “seems,” for the evidence of Marlowe’s atheism is perhaps no more reliable than some of the testimony offered about communists at the McCarthy hearings. (Incidentally, the name of Christopher Marlowe did come up in the Dies Committee hearings on the Federal Theater Project in 1938. Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theater Project, was asked by Congressman Joseph Starnes of Alabama about an allusion to Marlowe in one of her articles: “You are quoting from this Marlowe,” he asked. “Is he a communist?” Congressman Starnes also wished to know if Mr. Euripides was a communist.)

Two of Marlowe’s contemporaries accused him of atheism, Richard Baines, a government informer to the infamous Court of the Star Chamber, the English Protestant version of the Catholic Inquisition, and Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy and other plays.

Baines’s report to the Star Chamber spoke of Marlowe’s “damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God’s word,” and included eighteen items, all of which suggested that Marlowe frequently scoffed at the “pretension of the Old and New Testaments,” and “persuade[d] men to atheism.”

When the officers of the Star Chamber, suspecting sedition, searched the apartment of Thomas Kyd, a one-time roommate of Marlowe, they found a manuscript among his papers containing statements that smacked of atheism. Kyd denied that he was the author, insisting that the blasphemous manuscript was the work his former roommate.

Both of these accusations seem to be self-serving, however. Baines, according to a report of the governor of Flushing, had malice toward Marlowe from a previous conflict. Kyd apparently pointed the finger at Marlowe after being tortured.

Ten days after these accusations in 1593, the 29 year-old Marlowe was dead, killed during an altercation with Ingram Frizer about a tavern bill. Frizer, it was later determined, acted in self-defense. This episode has led to two curious lines of speculation, which I will mention, but not pursue. The first contends that this was no ordinary tavern brawl, but the assassination of one of Queen Elizabeth’s continental spies who perhaps knew too much or was suspected of disloyalty. The second line of speculation derives from the first, but alters the plot to suggest something entirely different: Marlowe’s death was a hoax, contrived by the Queen’s secret service so that Marlowe could return to the continent and (under an alias, of course) continue his spying activities. In his spare time, he continued to write plays, but since it would be unseemly for a dead man to continue a literary career, he sent his plays back to England, where his good friend William Shakespeare cheerfully staged the plays under his own name.

Alas, poor Yorick, there is yet another Shakespeare claimant: A Cambridge Master of the Arts who became a spy!

Christopher Marlowe does have one definite thing in common with Shakespeare, aside from being a poet and a playwright and English: both were born in 1564, as was another man who had his own troubles with the Inquisition, Galileo.

Marlowe had written seven plays (the last, Massacre at Paris, was unfinished) in his short stage career, yet most scholars readily concede that “Marlowe’s mighty line,” as playwright Ben Jonson put it, was clearly superior in literary quality to what Shakespeare had produced by that time.

The protagonists in each of Marlowe’s plays, as Harry Levin noted in The Overreacher, are driven by the same demons, summed up here in these lines from The Massacre at Paris:

Oft have I levell’d, and at last have learn’d

That peril is the chiefest way to happiness,

And resolution honour’s fairest aim.

What glory is there in the common good,

That hangs for every peasant to achieve?

That like I best, that flies beyond my reach.

Set me to scale the high Pyramides,

And thereon set the diadem of France;

I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,

Or mount to the top with aspiring wings,

Although my downfall be the deepest hell.

This, explained Harry Levin, “is Marlovian tragedy in stark outline. The overreaching image, reinforced by the mighty line, sums up the whole dramatic predicament.”

The prologue to Dr. Faustus—lines spoken by a single actor, serving as an Elizabethan playbill—also alludes to the myth of Icarus:

Till swollen with cunning of a self-conceit,

His waxen wings did mount above his reach

And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow!

The plot of Dr. Faustus is so neatly summed up in those opening lines that those who came to the theater to only see how it all would end might have headed for the exits at that moment.

A curtain is drawn back, and there the great man sits, doing what the most learned man of his day should be doing: studying. In sixty lines of blank verse soliloquy, Dr. Faustus considers—and dismisses—the major fields of learning of which he is the undisputed master. He takes up a volume of Aristotle, representing philosophy, and casts it aside:

Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?

Affords this art no greater miracle?

Then read no more, thou hast attained that end.

He next turns to Galen, the second century A.D. Greek authority on medicine. He reads from the Latin text “summum bonum medicinae sanitas,” and translates for the benefit of the groundlings, who very likely knew little Latin and even less Greek than Shakespeare: “The end of physic is our body’s health.” Faustus reminds himself that he has had some modest success as a physician, for he has saved whole cities from the plague “and [by his prescriptions] a thousand desperate maladies have been cured.”

That success is meaningless to Faustus. Medicine would be worthy of further pursuit only if he could “make men to live eternally, or being dead raise them to life again.”

Faustus takes up another volume, the Institutes of Justinian, the Emperor at Constantinople (527-565 A.D.) who reorganized and codified Roman law. He reads a few sentences, in Latin once again, and concludes that the law is no more than “a petty case of paltry legacies,” a study of which fits only “a mercenary drudge.”

Faustus is a doctor of divinity, of course, and it is instructive to remember that he studied at Wittenberg, that hotbed of religious radicalism, where Martin Luther was fond of tacking up little messages on church doors.

He then reads from St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, but can find nothing consoling or compelling in it, and so, in the twinkling of an eye, divinity is dismissed as of no consequence.

Here we perhaps have the earliest portrait of that familiar type, that intellectual who is bored by all that he knows; but Faustus is restless, and he suspects that there is more to be learned, and so he seeks the unknown in that area of knowledge that is still a mystery to him: necromancy.

He seeks two expert practitioners of magic, Valdes and Cornelius, and tells them where he stands:

Philosophy is odious and obscure,

Both law and physic are for petty wits;

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vil[e]:

‘Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me.

Valdes and Cornelius are eager to team up with the most learned man of the time, suggesting, in effect, that with Faustus’s brains and their experience, they might rule the world. Faustus ignores their proposal, signs no contract, but borrows books of magic, which he studies intently.

He learns to conjure up spirits and, lo and behold, when he does so, the spirit who appears to him is one of the high lieutenants of hell, Mephistophilis, who sees Faustus’s soul as a great addition to Lucifer’s kingdom.

Mephistophilis, as one might expect, is a rather intimidating figure, but Faustus orders him away:

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;

Thou art too ugly to attend on me.

Go and return an old Franciscan friar;

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

Fireworks accompanied each appearance of a devil on the stage, a very unusual, but very dramatic, addition to an Elizabethan play, which typically disdained all stage props. (There is an anecdote about actor Edward Alleyn, who when he played Faustus, and did the conjuring scene an actual devil appeared to him; he was so terrified by the experience that he retired from the stage and devoted himself to good works. The story also suggests, if nothing else, that the Elizabethan promoters knew a thing or two about how to get people into the theater.)

Mephistophilis returns, properly attired as a Franciscan friar, and Faustus starts giving orders:

I charge thee to wait upon me whilst I live,

To do whatever Faustus shall command,

Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere,

Or the ocean to overwhelm the world.

Honest Mephistophilis tells him that he can only do what Lucifer allows. He also admits that the conjuring was so much hocus pocus nonsense, entirely unnecessary, for all one has to do to summon devils is to denounce God. Faustus brushes these considerations aside and, like the eager student, begins asking questions of this new source of knowledge.

Faustus asks why Mephistophilis is out of hell, and he answers that this is hell, nor is he out of it, being deprived of everlasting bliss. Undaunted by this blunt answer, Faustus proposes the contract: he will surrender his soul for twenty-fours of voluptuousness and the full-time services of Mephistophilis to “give me whatsoever I ask, to tell me whatsoever I demand.”

Mephistophilis goes to consult Lucifer, and Faustus exults in this newly discovered power. “Had there be as many souls as there be stars,” he proclaims, “I’d give them all for Mephistophilis.”

When Mephistophilis returns, Faustus asks what Lucifer will gain by acquiring his soul.

Mephistophilis answers in Latin: “Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris,” or as one might quaintly put it in English: “Misery loves company.” He also insists that Lucifer wants assurances, a contract, signed in blood.

Faustus readily complies, but when he attempts to write, his blood congeals, and it seems as though his physical being revolts at what he is about to do. He sees an inscription on his arm, written in blood presumably, which screams against the deed: “Homo fuge! [Man fly!]”

But Faustus doesn’t fly; he signs the contract. In return for surrendering his soul to Lucifer after 24 years, Mephistophilis “shall be his servant and at his command.” That includes, so Faustus thinks, answers to any questions he might ask.

His first question is about the location of hell. Mephistophilis promptly responds that they are now in hell, for it is not heaven.

Faustus confesses that he is “wanton and lascivious,” and so asks Mephistophilis to fetch him the fairest maid in Germany for his wife.

This Mephistophilis cannot do, however, for marriage is sacrament of the church and, therefore, beyond his or Lucifer’s power. A reasonably intelligent lawyer might, at that point, have some doubts about that contract or, at the very least, a few questions.

The goal of Mephistophilis is to have Faustus believe, for the next twenty-four years, that the contract has sealed his fate. This is not “a petty case of paltry legacies,” and that great legal scholar, Dr. Faustus, ought to see that, but he does not.

Mephistophilis keeps Faustus from thinking about the contract through distraction or intimidation. When Faustus asks for a wife, for example, he is given, instead, courtesans (actually devils), or he might fly Faustus up to the Empyrean, or make him invisible so he can box the Pope’s ears. Entertaining things, to be sure, particularly the anti-Catholic scenes, which played well on the Protestant English stage.

The intimidation is plain and simple. Mephistophilis, and sometimes Lucifer too,

threaten to tear him piecemeal if he so much as thinks of repentance. Those very threats should suggest that the contract he signed is no more valid than the magic books of Valdes and Cornelius. And this Wittenberg doctor of divinity should also know that Christianity offers salvation to any and all who sincerely repent of their sins, no matter how great.

Why, then, doesn’t the learned Faustus send Mephistophilis and his devilish companions packing?

His quest for knowledge is insatiable, as the opening soliloquy makes very plain. Soon after signing the contract, he asks for books that might reveal to him the nature of all the planets in the universe and all the plants, herbs, and trees that grow on earth. When he peruses the books that Mephistophilis readily supplies to him, Faustus realizes that they contain nothing beyond what he already knows.

As he badgers Mephistophilis with more questions, it becomes even more obvious that no enlightenment will be forthcoming. Faustus complains, “These slender questions Wagner [his servant] can decide; hath Mephistophilis no greater skill?”

A simple question—who made the world? —gives Faustus’s desire for knowledge another sharp check.

I will not, [Mephistophilis replies].

Sweet Mephistophilis, tell me.

Move me not, for I will not tell thee.

Villain, have I not bound thee to tell me anything?

Ay, that is not against our kingdom.

Here is another escape clause for Faustus, for that limitation was not a part of the original contract. But escaping is difficult, when Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistophilis gang up on him and threaten to immediately drag him off to hell, which seems to be another potential breach of contract.

Faustus is terrified and promises to “never look to heaven, never to name God or pray to him.” He is rewarded for this good behavior by a dumb show of the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Covetousness, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, and Lechery). Faustus is guilty of all seven, especially pride, and that makes him a prime candidate for hell, contract or no contract.

Faustus fritters away the twenty-four years of his contracted time with Mephistophilis, degenerating into a mere trickster who can fetch grapes out of season for a duchess, or call up the spirit of Helen of Troy to dazzle some fellow students.

The students stare in awe-struck wonder at the beauty of Helen, but Faustus, who speaks three-quarters of the lines in the play, goes into raptures:

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!

Come Helen, come give me my soul again.

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

And all is dross that is not Helena.

There are some scholars who argue that the battle for Faustus’s soul is concluded at this moment, for he has committed the unpardonable sin of demoniality—sexual intercourse with a devil—for that is what Helen is, a spirit, a devil. Those scholars would have us take “her lips suck forth my soul” literally, that is, regard it as it is represented in some medieval woodcuts, where the devil is seen snatching souls right out of the mouths of the unwary.

Perhaps, then, we should also read, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” as literal, although it might be rather damaging to the countenance of the woman reputed to be the most beautiful who ever lived.

If the demoniality charge is to be taken seriously, then Faustus was doomed some twenty-four years before when he asked for a wife, only to have Mephistophilis give him a “hot whore,” not quite the stature of Helen, but still a devil in the guise of a woman.

Faustus, even though he has wallowed in the Seven Deadly Sins for almost a quarter of a century, can still gain Christian salvation through repentance, but he does not.

Why not?

One answer might be that Faustus is not as bright as he assumed himself to be. He seems, at times, as profoundly ignorant of the law as he does of theology.

There is another possible explanation, however, and that is to be found by considering the character of Faustus, as it is revealed in Marlowe’s mighty line, that magnificent blank verse.

Faustus’s twenty-four years are almost at an end. The clock strikes eleven. In about one line per minute, he considers his fate:

Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damned perpetually!

Time is the active agent that will bring about his inevitable damnation. He does see a way out, however.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come!

Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again and make

Perpetual day; or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul!

When Everyman, in that famous medieval morality play, is confronted by Death, he pleads that “all unready is my book of reckoning” and asks for a modest extension of twelve years to regain that state of grace. Faustus, too, needs time to save his soul, but his very next words, in Latin, are most revealing of his true state of mind:

O lente, lente curritie, noctis equi!

[“Run slowly, slowly, Horses of the Night”]

This is an allusion to a poem by Ovid, and the line has little do with saving one’s soul. Ovid’s persona wants time to slow down so that he can have a longer night in bed with his mistress.

The relentless charge of time seems to be working against Faustus.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

Twice within ten lines Faustus has used that terrible word, “must,” as though it were a matter beyond his control. He does call on Christ to save him at that point, but real or imagined, he feels physically restrained by devils from proceeding with the act of contrition. He looks, once again, for avenues of escape.

Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

That when you vomit forth into the air,

My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths.

No! No!

Then will I headlong run into the earth:

Earth, gape! O no, it will not harbor me!

You stars that reigned at my nativity,

Whose influence has allotted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,

So that my soul may but ascend to heaven.

The clock strikes the half hour. Thirty minutes to midnight, and the fulfilling of his contractual obligations to Lucifer. The powers that he once had through Mephistophilis have failed him; he resorts to legal maneuvering, seeking a plea bargain:

Ah, half the hour is past! ‘Twill all be past anon!

O God!

If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet for Christ’s sake whose blood hath ransomed me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain:

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years—

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d.

The heavenly judge does not respond to this plea, and Faustus once more vainly

seeks the consolation of wishful escape:

Ah, Pythagoras’s metempsychosis!

Were that true,

This soul should fly from me, and I be chang’d

Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,

For, when they die,

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;

But mine must live, still to be plagued in hell.

Life just isn’t fair sometimes, and for that reason, Faustus lashes out:

Curst be the parents that engendered me!

No, Faustus, curse thyself; curse Lucifer

That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.

It is his parents’ fault; he curses himself (o, sad fate!), but it is Lucifer, not Faustus, who has deprived him of the joys of heaven.

As the clock strikes midnight, adders and serpents join the devils in ganging up on Faustus and tearing him limb from limb and dragging his soul down to hell. The play concludes with the single-actor Chorus stepping forth to provide the moral lesson, in case the audience has missed it:

Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendish fortune may exhort the wise

Only to wonder at unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practice more than heavenly power admits.

The lesson seems a little pat, even trite, like the morals tagged on at the end the Fables of Aesop, or The Adventures of Uncle Wiggily, the Rabbit-Eared Gentleman.

How, then, can we make sense of “his hellish fall”?

If one takes the story of Faustus out of its Christian framework (which Christopher Marlowe probably didn’t believe in anyway), we can see him as an archetypal Renaissance man, who seems to be as much enthralled with Protagoras’s “man is the measure of all things” as was the Oedipus of Sophocles. It makes Faustus fit company for the mythical Prometheus, Icarus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and others who heroically defied the gods.

Faustus’s last words in the play are: “I’ll burn my books—Ah Mephistophilis!” It sounds desperate, indeed, but he is still resisting the Christian scheme of things. He certainly does not go gentle into that good night.

Earlier in the play, Faustus boasted

This word “damnation” terrifies not me

For I confound hell with Elysium;

My ghost be with the old philosophers.

And there I would like to leave Faustus, not in the Heaven that Everyman ploddingly sought, certainly not in that Christian hell, but in Elysium, with the old philosophers.

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