The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Christopher Marlowe · a tragedy for the stage in verse and prose · a Prologue, thirteen scenes grouped by modern editors into five acts, Choruses before the third and fourth acts, and an Epilogue · the A-text, the quarto printed in 1604 for Thomas Law, with its comic scenes, scored as a text for performance · written between about 1588 and 1592, the date disputed · in English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where the words are certain, in modernised spelling
Mode
Tragedy within a morality play; the English Faust Book’s story set as a damned mind seen from inside
Mythos
The pact signed in blood; the flight of Icarus and the fall; Helen as the summit of beauty and a spirit in her shape; the twenty-four years cashed in one hour; mercy offered and refused
Phase
From the scholar’s dismissal of the disciplines and the conjuring, through the bond, the dispute on the spheres and the Sins, the shows at Rome and at court, and Helen, to the last hour and the Epilogue
Presentation
A Prologue, thirteen scenes in the continuous numbering grouped into five acts, Choruses and an Epilogue; blank verse for Faustus, the scholars, Mephistopheles, the Angels and the Old Man; prose for the clowns and much of the court business
Register
Grave and soaring in the frame, farce and slapstick in the clowns’ scenes and at Rome, terror at the close
Scale
One mind in time, set against God, the devil, the university, antiquity, the spheres, the Pope, the Emperor and the clowns who copy its bargain
Governing Proposition
A Wittenberg doctor who has mastered the disciplines and found them wanting sells his soul for twenty-four years of power, spends them on shows and tricks, and is damned at the stroke of midnight, with mercy offered to the end and refused for want of belief. The wager of the play is that the morality form, built to save, can be made to damn and to play the damnation as tragedy, and that a mind which has decided it cannot be forgiven will make itself unforgivable: hell is not a place it goes to but the condition of the self it has chosen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Prologue gives the plan of the play before the play begins. Its Faustus is an Icarus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.” The image is not ornament. The play is built as that flight and that fall, and the Chorus that speaks it returns before the third act and the fourth and again at the close, a frame round the hero that his verse will overflow.
Among his books at Wittenberg, Faustus turns the disciplines over in their own Latin tags, from Aristotle’s logic to Galen to Justinian to Jerome’s Bible, and dismisses each in a line. Divinity he reads in half a verse of Romans: “Stipendium peccati mors est”
“The wages of sin is death”. He stops before the grace that follows, joins the half verse to 1 John on universal sin, and arrives at “Che sarà, sarà”, what will be, will be. The mind selects its doom from the text in front of it, and only magic is left: “A sound magician is a mighty god” (1.1).
The unit is the A-text, the quarto printed in 1604 for Thomas Law, as a text for performance: the Prologue, thirteen scenes in the continuous numbering, grouped by modern editors into five acts with a Chorus before the third and the fourth, the comic scenes of Wagner, Robin and Rafe, and the Epilogue. The B-text, printed in 1616 for John Wright, with its much enlarged papal scene, a rival pope and a revised close in which Faustus’s limbs are found torn asunder, is context and is not scored. Which of the two stands nearer the play as first performed has been argued both ways. The comic prose scenes are often given to a collaborator; whoever wrote them, they are part of the work and are credited or charged with it.
Movement II
Faustus conjures, and Mephistopheles comes. He speaks of hell from inside it: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (1.3). His lines on the loss of heaven have a cold grandeur that the scholar does not hear. Later he gives it as doctrine: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In one self place, for where we are is hell” (2.1).
That is the play’s disclosure, and it holds without the theology: a mind that has decided it cannot be forgiven makes itself unforgivable, and hell is the condition of that self. The Good and Evil Angels speak on either side of him, the morality’s external voices set beside the soliloquy, and the form never settles whether they are outside him or his own. Whether he is damned by choice or is a reprobate who could never repent, as a Calvinist audience might have taken him, is a question four centuries have not closed.
The matter is the English Faust Book, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, translated by “P. F.” from the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten printed by Spies at Frankfurt in 1587; its earliest surviving edition is of 1592. The date of the play is disputed between about 1588 and 1592, the early date resting on its relation to Tamburlaine, the late on the Faust Book. Marlowe died on 30 May 1593. The form is the morality play, with its Angels, its Sins and its figure of Mercy, crossed with the tragedy of the fall of princes; the turn is that this morality damns.
Movement III
The bond is written in blood, and the blood congeals in the writing. A warning appears on the arm, “Homo, fuge!”
“Man, fly!” And the scholar sets on a contract with hell the last word of Christ from the cross, “Consummatum est”
“It is finished” (2.1). The bond fixes twenty-four years. Every particular of the pact is load-bearing, and each returns at the close.
Faustus asks for knowledge and is given shows. The dispute on the spheres ends with his question of who made the world, and in place of an answer the devils offer the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Between the bond and Helen the play rises here once, and then the twenty-four years are spent.
The middle is a run of episodes from the Faust Book: at Rome the invisible Faustus boxes the Pope’s ear; at the Emperor’s court he raises Alexander’s shade and gives a knight horns; there is the business of the horse-courser and the leg, and the Duchess of Vanholt’s grapes in January. Robin and Rafe, with a stolen book, conjure Mephistopheles from Constantinople to the devil’s irritation (3.2): the main plot at a clown’s scale, and the clearest statement of the law that the bargain cheapens what it buys. The dwindling of “a mighty god” to a conjuror of tricks is the argument, but one or two episodes make it, and about a third of the play makes it several times.
Movement IV
Helen is raised, and the verse rises with her: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” (5.1). In some twenty lines the speech moves from wonder to possession to the rhetoric of chivalry.
She is archetypal both ways at once: the summit of classical beauty, and a spirit in her shape. So “Her lips suck forth my soul” is the lover’s hyperbole and the literal damnation in the same words. Mercy is still on offer, from the Good Angel and from the Old Man, and it is refused for want of belief, not of offer.
The line outlived its scene. Shakespeare echoes it in Troilus and Cressida, where Helen “is a pearl, / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships”, and it is proverbial far beyond the theatre. Shakespeare carried the inward tragic soliloquy, the instrument this play made of a consciousness in time, into Hamlet and Macbeth.
Movement V
The clock strikes eleven: “Ah, Faustus, / Now hast thou but one bare hour to live” (5.2). The twenty-four years are compressed to an hour, and the hour is struck on stage. The line slows: “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.” Ovid’s lover, begging the night to last, is turned to dread: “O lente, lente currite noctis equi”
“Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night”.
The half hour strikes, and the verse breaks into appeal and cries: “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, half a drop”; “Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me”. At twelve it shatters: “Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer! / I’ll burn my books! Ah, Mephistopheles!” The form has run out of time with him.
The Epilogue gives the moral: “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, / And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough”, and “Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall”. It is a container the verse has overflowed, and it sounds smaller than what has been heard. The Admiral’s Men played it with Edward Alleyn in the title role, Henslowe recording performances from 1594; it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1601 and printed in A-text quartos of 1604, 1609 and 1611 and in B-text quartos from 1616. After a long neglect of the play as written, Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) recovered it, and since William Poel’s staging of 1896 it has not left the stage or the classroom.
Act III · The Twelve
The frame is iron. The bond fixes twenty-four years (2.1); the opening soliloquy closes the disciplines one by one and leaves only magic; the conjuring, the bond, the dispute on the spheres with the Sins, Helen and the last hour each turn the screw, and none can be cut. The clock is the spine, and the last hour cashes the years. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the middle, which fails the subtractive test. Rome, the Emperor’s court, the horse-courser’s leg and the Duchess’s grapes in January could each go with little loss. The dwindling from “A sound magician is a mighty god” (1.1) to tricks at court is the argument, but one or two episodes make it and the middle makes it several times. Robin’s conjuring earns more, repeating the sin at a clown’s scale.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds without the theology: a mind that has decided it cannot be forgiven makes itself unforgivable, and hell is the condition of that self. Mephistopheles says it first, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (1.3), and again, “where we are is hell” (2.1). Faustus shows it in the opening soliloquy, reading half a verse of Romans, “Stipendium peccati mors est”, the wages of sin is death, stopping before the grace that follows, and arguing himself into “Che sarà, sarà”. Mercy is offered to the end, by the Good Angel and by the Old Man, and refused for want of belief, not of offer. Held off the top because the middle adds nothing to the disclosure, and the Chorus’s moral states a smaller truth than the play shows.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The heights are among the highest in the English drama, and the frequency is uneven. The terror of the last hour runs from “one bare hour to live” (5.2) through Ovid’s lover’s plea turned to dread, “O lente, lente currite noctis equi”, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night, to “One drop would save my soul, half a drop”. The beauty of Helen (5.1); the cold grandeur of Mephistopheles on the loss of heaven (1.3); the dread of the congealing blood and “Homo, fuge!” (2.1), man, fly. Between the bond and Helen the play rises once, in the Sins and the astronomy, and is otherwise flat for a long stretch. The axis weighs frequency, and that stretch holds it below the top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The pact is load-bearing in every particular: the blood that congeals in the writing, the warning written on the arm, “Consummatum est” (2.1), Christ’s last word from the cross, set on a contract with hell, and the twenty-four years that become one hour and then a stroke of the clock. The Prologue’s Icarus is the plan of the play, its flight and its fall. Helen is archetypal both ways at once, the summit of classical beauty and a spirit in her shape, so that “Her lips suck forth my soul” (5.1) is the lover’s hyperbole and the literal damnation. Faustus stays particular, a Wittenberg doctor with his books, his servant Wagner, his friends Valdes and Cornelius. Held a step below the top because the matter is the Faust Book’s, and in the middle the myth runs down into anecdote.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the morality play, with its Good and Evil Angels, its pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins and its Old Man as a figure of Mercy; the tragedy of the fall of princes; and the English Faust Book, which supplied the episodes. The turn is to set a tragic hero, whose aspiration the verse loves, inside a morality whose mercy is offered and refused to the end. The morality form exists to save; this one damns, and plays the damnation as tragedy, not warning. The stake was real: conjuring, a blood pact and an anti-papal farce on the London stage. Held below the top because the mighty line was already Tamburlaine’s, the morality furniture is taken over whole, and the middle follows the Faust Book closely.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The morality’s external voices, the two Angels, set beside the soliloquy, make the play’s question formal: are these voices outside him or his own? The form keeps both answers in play, and the predestinarian doubt the play is known for lives in that doubling. The last hour is the form’s great stroke: twenty-four years compressed to an hour, the hour struck on stage at eleven, at the half and at twelve, so that the verse itself runs out of time and breaks into half-lines and cries. The Chorus’s moral is a container the verse overflows, and the gap is meaning. Held below the upper band because the episodic middle is the Faust Book’s container, not the play’s instrument: its scenes could be reordered without altering what the play knows.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: four centuries have kept the central questions open. Is Faustus damned by choice, or a reprobate who could never repent, as a Calvinist audience might have taken him? Is the play orthodox warning, or does its sympathy lie with the aspirer? Is Helen the play’s one beauty, its last damnation, or both? The text is itself a question: W. W. Greg’s preference for the B-text (1950) and the later rehabilitation of the A-text changed what the play was thought to be, and William Empson’s Faustus and the Censor (1987) read a suppressed heterodox play beneath it. Formal depth yields too: the Robin scenes as parody, the half-read verse, the inversions of the Mass and the Passion. Held a step below the top because the questions gather on a few speeches, and the middle yields little on return.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the English drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s, just turned by Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and by Tamburlaine, and beyond it the European tradition of the Faust story. The force is the first English tragedy of a damned mind seen from inside, in which the soliloquy becomes the instrument of a consciousness in time, and the stage’s first tragic hero whose ruin is spiritual rather than political. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the inward tragic soliloquy that Shakespeare carried into Macbeth and Hamlet, and the Helen line echoed in Troilus and Cressida, where Helen “is a pearl, / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships”. How far the play, and not the Faust Book, carried the story into the German line that runs to Goethe’s Faust is not settled; that reach is discounted. Held below the top because Tamburlaine made the larger rupture on the English stage.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over some four hundred and thirty years. Form: the text survives whole but double, and neither version is certainly the play as Marlowe left it; the A-text carries scenes often given to another hand, the B-text later revision by others. The great speeches agree in substance across both, so the charge on form is small but real. Presence: steady performance and reprinting from the 1590s to the 1660s; then a long neglect of the play as written, until Romantic criticism recovered it; staged and taught continuously since the late nineteenth century, by William Poel (1896), Orson Welles (1937), Richard Burton at Oxford and on film (1967) and the Royal Shakespeare Company repeatedly. The Helen line is proverbial far beyond the theatre. Centuries, with a long neglect and a presence now concentrated in the academy and the theatre: the top of the lower band.
Score: 9.1 / 10
At its best the making is load-bearing. The opening soliloquy turns the disciplines over in their own Latin tags, from Aristotle’s logic to Galen to Justinian to Jerome’s Bible, and dismisses each in a line, so that the verse enacts the restless mind before the plot begins. The Helen speech moves from wonder to possession to the rhetoric of chivalry in some twenty lines. The last hour slows the line, “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike”, breaks it into appeal, “Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me”, and shatters it into cries at the stroke of twelve. Charged to the work: the prose of the clown scenes, serviceable and sometimes lame; the thin verse and stock business of the court scenes; a middle strung, not built. The heights are of the first rank; the whole is not.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Robin and Rafe conjuring Mephistopheles from Constantinople with a stolen book, to the devil’s irritation (3.2), and the last hour. One law governs both: the bargain cheapens what it buys, and conjuring raises hell for trifles. The clowns’ scenes are the main plot at a clown’s scale; the pageant of the Sins is a show offered in place of an answer, when Faustus asks who made the world. The law holds at the level of argument across a wide range, from slapstick to terror. It holds less well in tone and kind: the farce at Rome is topical Protestant comedy that the law accommodates more than requires, and the court scenes are looser than either the clowns’ parody or the frame. That looseness holds the axis in the low eights.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a short play holds. Consciousness, fully and in time: a mind’s desire, doubt, despair and terror. The sacred, as its centre: God, Christ’s blood, mercy, the devil, heaven’s loss. Learning: the university and its disciplines, the scholars, the books, the astronomy of the spheres. Antiquity: Helen, Troy, Alexander, Ovid. The cosmos itself, in the dispute on the spheres and the Chorus’s flight to view the heavens. Power: the Pope, the Emperor, a duke’s court. Class and service: Wagner, the clowns, the horse-courser, the vintner. One transaction integrates them, since everything in the play is something the bond can buy. What holds the axis down: the family is absent, labour slight, and power and class are held as farce more than as worlds, so that the state is a stage for tricks.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A text four centuries old that was never lost, charged for its double form and its long neglect; a pact load-bearing in every particular, from the congealing blood to the stroke of twelve; questions of choice and reprobation that have not closed; and the first English tragedy of a damned mind seen from inside. Behind them The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.7: hell as the condition of a self that has decided it cannot be forgiven, in a morality made to damn.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, lowest of the twelve, held there by a middle of shows and tricks that makes its point of dwindling once and then repeats it. The Encompassed at 7.7, for a play without the family, with labour slight and the orders of power and class held as farce. The Inner Law at 8.2, for the looseness of the court scenes and the Roman farce, and The Made and The Living Form at 8.3, where verse of the first rank stands beside the clowns’ prose and a middle strung, not built.
The Necessity Cap clears, narrowly, at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.5 against 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in the A-text, the quarto printed in 1604 for Thomas Law, scored as a text for performance with its Prologue, Choruses, the comic scenes of Wagner, Robin and Rafe, and its Epilogue. The comic prose scenes are often attributed to a collaborator; the attribution is not certain, and they are scored as part of the one work. The B-text, printed in 1616 for John Wright, is context and is not scored. The play is in English, so no translation is in question. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; the play is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, in modernised spelling, and cited by act and scene in the modern five-act division where the place is certain. The comic and court episodes are known in outline and incident rather than line by line, and the axes that turn on the middle are judged with that allowed for. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the play’s length in lines in either text and the size of the B-text’s additions, any record of payment for those additions, signs of abridgement in the A-text, the number of early performances, the date of the last seventeenth-century quarto, the length of the final soliloquy, the stage history between the 1660s and 1808, the charge of atheism made against Marlowe, the path by which the play reached the German puppet stage, and the edition in which the A-text was rehabilitated.