The Ironic Vision: Diction and Theme in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Author(s): T. McAlindon
Source: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 32, No. 126 (May, 1981), pp. 129-141
Published by: Oxford University Press
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THE IRONIC VISION: DICTION AND THEME
IN MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS
By T. MCALINDON

THE extreme unevenness of quality which marks Doctor Faustus-as it has

come down to us-has meant that its reputation rests very much on its
larger effects. Like a cathedral hit by a bomb (to borrow one critic's
comparison), it asks to be viewed at a distance with an imaginative eye.
So we stress the grandeur of its tragic vision, the symmetry of its ironic
structure, and the eloquent intensity of those scattered scenes and speeches
in which the poetry is commensurate with the dramatic conception. What
we are naturally disinclined to look for is continuous subtlety of design
at the purely verbal level. Yet a fair measure of such subtlety is to be
found in the play and is well worth critical attention. To consider it in
some detail is to sharpen our understanding of the play's central issues, our
sense of its imaginative unity, and our appreciation of how far the author of
Tamburlaine the Great has come in the direction of dramatic economy.
It is also to conclude that, if the play was the fruit of collaboration, then
Marlowe had a collaborator who recognized his verbal strategies and tried
hard to sustain them.
Conspicuous in the vocabulary of Doctor Faustus is a set of words which
work in partnership with verbal and stage imagery to clarify the play's
thematic pattern. As in Edward II, Marlowe seems markedly aware here
of the value of steady but unobtrusive iteration of particular words (and
their synonyms). But he also contrives to allow two or more of his key
words to move together from time to time in seemingly casual contiguities
which have the effect of enforcing their special significance. And although
by comparison with Shakespeare he is quite restrained in the overt use of
wordplay, he continually employs the semantic duality of certain key
words in the service of his deeply ironic perspective on the character and
fate of Faustus.
The key words can be put together to form an ironical sentence which I
shall offer as a revelation in miniature of most of the play's controlling
ideas and attitudes: 'View [or see] here with thine eye the resoluteperform-
ance ofpromiseddeeds.' Of these, the first word to be considered is 'resolute',
since in the Marlowe canon it denotes the primary attribute of the heroic
type.' The vast majority of men being (in Marlowe's view) chronically
I The most explicit identification of heroic quality with resolution occurs in the best-

known and most Marlowan speech in The Massacre of Paris-ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke,
R.E.S. New Series, Vol. XXXII, No. 126 (1981)
9

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130 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
changeful, confused, and weak, the truly exceptional person is endowed
with clarity of purpose and strength of character: he marries word and
deed, boast and fulfilment, promise and performance. Whereas Tambur-
laine was the very embodiment of this type, Faustus is so in his own
imagination, and only there. Thus to follow the fortunes of the word
'resolute' in Doctor Faustus is to perceive that this is, in a sense, the
tragedy of a man who thought he was a hero when assuredly he was not.
Corresponding in function to the image of Icarus and his waxen wings, the
word 'resolute' adumbrates the learned man's almost complete identifica-
tion with false form and sudden, treacherous change.'
Faustus is formally acquainted at the outset of his magical career of the
need for resolution when Valdes warns him that all the power, fame, riches,
and pleasures he dreams of-'The miracles that magic will perform'-will
materialize only 'If learned Faustus will be resolute' (i. I32-5).2 Since he
proceeds so vigorously with the conjuration rites, it would seem that
Faustus does indeed possess the kind of resolution Valdes has in mind.
Yet his response to Valdes' warning-'As resolute am I in this / As thou to
live; therefore object it not' (11. I33-4)-and the way in which he has to
prompt himself when the crucial moment arrives-'Then fear not, Faus-
tus, to be resolute / And try the utmost magic can perform' (iii. I4-15)-
suggest that this resolution has no assured basis in his character. At best
it is a role assumed to meet the demands of a 'desperate enterprise' (i. 80).
At worst it is the kind of 'desperate and unnatural resolution' which takes
possession of the volatile Edward to allow him his one, passing moment of
martial glory (Edward II, 1. 1525). It is just this quality of 'desperate
resolution' which is parodied in Faustus's alter-ego, the foolish knight
whose sceptical and rebellious attitudes provoke the magician's wrath.
The parallel between the two men is nicely secured by the way in which
Benvolio, brandishing the assertive 'will' and 'shall', mimics the style of
Faustian resolution:
If you will aid me in this enterprise,
Then drawyour weapons and be resolute:
If not, depart: here will Benvolio die
But Faustus' death shall quit my infamy. (xiii. 1-13)3
The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910), 11.75-166. See also (in the same edition)
Tamburlaine the Great, 11.63, 824, 835-46, I083-94, I420; Edward II, 11.340, 369, 528-30,
927-8, 132I-34; The Jew of Malta, 11.2004-7, 2364.
I I am by no means the first to emphasize Faustus's lack of resolution: see, for example,
M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1935),
pp. I50-I.
2 For Faustus I have used the Revels Plays text, ed. John D. Jump (London, 1962).
3
Compare 'For Will and Shall best fitteth Tamburlain' (Tamburlaine, ed. Brooke,
1. II39), and note the resounding presence of the two words in Faustus's amorous-heroic

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 131
Fundamental to Faustus's conception of himself as a resolute individual-
ist is his belief that he will uncover truths hidden from the rest of mankind:
at his command, servile spirits will resolve enigma and mystery. Marlowe's
use of 'resolve' in this sense is adroitly managed in such a way that the
sense of heroic determination is simultaneously implied: Faustus imagines,
and then acts out, the part of an imperious interrogator who will get to the
heart of the matter and not be side-tracked from his quest for truth:
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Performwhat desperateenterpriseI will? (i. 78-80)
... meet me in my study at midnight,
And then resolve me of thy master'smind. (iii. IOI-2)
Resolve me then in this one question. (vi. 64)
The truth of course is that the spirits resolve nothing of importance: after
the pact has been signed Mephostophilis refuses to answer pertinent
questions and helps to develop in Faustus a natural penchant for ambiguity
and contradiction. The first sign of this tendency in Faustus has been his
declaration that he 'confounds hell in Elysium' (iii. 62), and its ultimate
development is the apostrophe to the succubine Helen ('heaven is in these
lips').' But its most revealing manifestation is his use of the word 'resolute'
after he has begun to have second thoughts about committing himself to
Lucifer. When he declares, 'I will renounce this magic and repent' (vi. I ),
the style itself is enough to indicate how his resolution might be truly put to
the test. In failing this test, however, Faustus protects his self-image by
inverting the sense of 'resolution': to repent is to waver, to quail before the
devils is to be steadfast, to retreat is to advance-'Now go not backward;
no, Faustus, be resolute: / Why waverest thou?' (v. 5-6); 'Why should I
die, then, or basely despair? / I am resolv'd Faustus shall not repent' (vi.
30-I).
By far the most suggestive sign of Faustus's 'tumble into confusion' (xix.
132) arises from Marlowe's ironic recognition that in one of its senses the
word 'resolve' is synonymous with its antonym: 'resolution' may signify
fixity and persistence, but it also denotes disintegration, the breaking up of
address to Helen: 'Here will I dwell... I will be Paris... I will combat with weak
Menelaus ... I will wound Achilles in the heel ... And none but thou shalt be my
paramour' (xviii. 104-I8).
In ' "Ignorance in Knowledge": Marlowe's Faustus and Ford's Giovanni', MP lvii
(I960), 148, Cyrus Hoy argues that in the context of the line 'all is dross that is not Helena'
(xviii. I05), 'the lady's name can be nothing less than a pun... the phrasing of the line
is all too reminiscent of Mephostophilis' earlier statement of how, "when all the world
dissolves/ And every creature shall be purified, / All places shall be hell that is not
heaven" '

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132 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
something into parts. In Tamburlaine Marlowe had used this semantic
contradiction to underline the idea that a man may be sealing his own
dissolution in the very act of affirming his unshakeable integrity. The most
conspicuous instance of the device occurs in the speech where Cosroe
boldly commits himself against an invincible foe:
Nobly resolu'd, my good Ortygius.
And since we all haue suck't one wholesome aire
And with the same proportionof Elements,
Resolue [i.e. dissolve], I hope we are resembled,
Vowing our loues to equall death and life,
Let's cheere oure souldiersto incounterhim,
That grieuous image of ingratitude:
That fiery thirster after Soueraingtie:
And burne him in the fury of that flame
That none can quench but blood and Emperie.
Resolue my Lords and louing souldiers now,
To saue your King and country from decay. (11.835-46)
The ironic implication which pervades this speech is crystallized in a
single word in the Prologue to Faustus: in the lines, 'His waxen wings did
mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow'
(11. 2I-2), the context helps to turn 'waxen' into a paradoxical pun which
conjoins the ideas of waxing and waning (compare Baldock's aphorism 'all
liue to die, and rise to fall'-Edward II, 1. 1979). But the same innuendo is
soon to be advanced by means of a play on the affinity between 'resolution'
and 'dissolution'. Aptly, it occurs in the scene where Faustus formally
makes the Devil his ally and God his enemy. Faustus urges himself to 'be
resolute' (v. 6), declares that the love of Beelzebub is 'fix'd' in him (1. 12),
and signs the pact; at the same time, Mephostophilis offers to fetch fire to
'dissolve' (1. 63) the divinely congealed blood, and is soon admitting that
'when all the world dissolves ... every creature shall be purify'd', and 'All
places shall be hell that is not heaven' (11.I25-7).
Combined with the imagery of congealed and melting blood (an echo of
the waxen wings), the wordplay here confirms that resolute Faustus is now
married to the spirit of dissolution. This idea soon gives rise in turn to one
of the play's most important symbols, for from now on all Faustus's
resolves to repent will be instantly undone by the devils' threat to tear him
in pieces (vi. 83, xviii. 76, xix. 72); and of course the symbol acquires a
horribly literal status at the end when his body is discovered 'All torn
asunder' by the devils whom he served (xx. 7-8). Yet the final irony is not
that Faustus's desperate resolution has proved to be a guarantee of violent
dissolution. It is that he dies longing in vain for the dissolution of his soul.
In his last soliloquy he imagines at first that the resolution of his body into

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 133
the component elements of earth, air, and water (he avoids mentioning fire)
would save him from the horrors that begin at midnight. But he quickly
recalls that the meaning of hell lies in the indissoluble nature of man's
soul-only the souls of beasts 'are soon dissolv'd in elements' (xix. I78).'
The word 'perform' also carries a latent semantic contradiction which
gently pre-echoes Faustus's final 'tumble into confusion'. In the sense of
'to do' or 'to carry into effect', it is regularly used with reference to the
promised actions of both Faustus and Mephostophilis. As future magician,
Faustus resolves to 'perform what desperate enterprise I will' and 'try the
utmost magic can perform'. As faithful co-signatory to the deed of gift,
Mephostophilis swears to 'perform / All covenants and articles' (v. 90-I);
and as servile familiar, he proclaims: 'This or what else my Faustus shall
desire / Shall be perform'd in twinkling of an eye' (xviii. 97-8). Given the
nature of the activities in which the two spend most of their time, the
primary meaning of 'perform' often shades, in accordance with the speaker's
intentions, into the second-'to execute tricks', 'to put on a show' (as in
Mephostophilis' 'devise what best contents thy mind ... / And I'll perform
it' [viii. 80, 88], where sixteenth-century usage enables the word 'devise'
to reinforce the theatrical implication of the sentence). This semantic
shading is in itself a reminder that most of 'the miracles that magic will
perform' are in reality no more than what the Bad Angel claims contrition,
prayer, and repentance to be-'illusions' (v. I9). More important, how-
ever, is the fact that the second meaning always seems apposite even when
Faustus is conscious only of the first: his air of resolute authority and his
familiar's servile fidelity have no more reality that that of a dramatic
performance. The quibble in the Prologue's promise to 'perform / The
form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad' (11.7-8) is thus an omen of the
fact that the hero's tragic misfortune will be to exchange everything of
substance for the mere form or appearance of power (it is noticeable
that the phrase 'form and substance' creeps into the first article of the
covenant-v. 96). This irony is reinforced throughout by the implicit
comparison between what the characters in the play see and do and what
our own 'eyes ... see perform'd' (Chor. 2. I7).
References to the eye occur frequently: in fact the play has an extensive
visual vocabulary, composed mainly of verbs in the imperative mood:
'view', 'see', 'look', 'peruse', 'behold', 'gaze', 'mark', 'stare', 'gape', 'per-
ceive'. This emphasis reflects the urgent endeavour of the demons to sub-
due Faustus's understanding and control his will by stimulating a desire

Compare M. M. Mahood, who has commented on Faustus's descent from 'pride in

an individuality which could not be destroyed' to a 'craving for annihilation' which
'becomes frantic'-'Marlowe's Heroes', rept. from Poetry and Humanism (1950) in
Elizabethan Drama, ed. R. J. Kaufmann (New York, I961), p. III.

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134 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
for sensual and above all visual delights. It is a reminder of the ethico-
psychologists' principle that the will-that faculty to which there are so
many literal and punning allusions in the dialogue-is by nature blind,
a force to be guided by the eye of reason.
From the moment Mephostophilis refuses him a wife and promises
instead a courtesan 'whom thine eye shall like' (v. 155), Faustus's pre-
occupation with visual excitements is more or less continuous. It has,
however, two obvious climaxes, significantly coinciding with the highest
points of his magical career. One is the conjuration of Helen ('perform'd
in twinkling of an eye'-xviii. 98), the other the Grand Tour which culmin-
ates in the discomfiture of the Pope and the liberation of Bruno, the papal
pretender. The emphasis on the visual in this middle section of the play,
both in the choruses and the dialogue, is remarkably explicit. Faustus
recalls that when their aerial travels began he and Mephostophilis 'view'd
the face of heaven, of earth, and hell' (viii. 70). Then they scrutinized the
earth more closely: 'There did we view the kingdoms of the world, / And
what might please mine eye I there beheld' (11.74-5). And now, having
seen a multiplicity of 'buildings fair and gorgeous to the eye' (1. io) in all
the other cities of Europe, he has arrived at 'bright-resplendent Rome' with
high hopes of everything 'to delight thine eyes' (11.32, 50). The chorus
which rounds off the section and prepares for Faustus's development into
an active purveyor of 'wondrous' and 'pleasant sights' (xii. 72, xvii. I) is
structurally as well as verbally designed to stress the importance of the
visual: beginning with, 'When Faustus had with pleasure ta'en the view /
Of rarest things', this seventeen-line speech ends with the prospective,
'What there he did in trial of his art, / I leave untold: your eyes shall see
performed' (Chor. 2. I-2, I6-I7). It is of course true that the pleasures of
sight-seeing specified in these narrative passages are not actually dramatized
in the Roman section. Nevertheless the visual theme is embodied in the
action, and in a characteristically ironic manner: for the whole success of
Faustus's Roman holiday turns on the delight he takes in watching the
discomfiture of those who are the victims of optical illusion. We are to
remember this episode when Faustus exits with 'Helen', and Lucifer,
Beelzebub, and Mephostophilis enter 'above': they have come 'To view
the subjects of our monarchy', and in particular to 'mark' how Faustus
'doth demean himself' in his 'world of idle fantasies' (xix. 2-14).
An even more ironic comment on Faustus's addiction to pleasant sights
is the fact that at the end he is assaulted with hideous and frightful images
and even adds to their number. This ironic pattern is quite carefully
developed. Before the vision of 'Helen', Faustus has twice seen the face
of hell in its true form (not clad in the beauty of a thousand stars), and
it has not pleased him: he has dismissed Mephostophilis on their first

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 135
encounter as 'too ugly' to attend on him ('I charge thee to ... change thy
shape'-iii. 25-6); and he has been frightened out of his penitent resolve by
the look of Lucifer: 'O, what art thou that look'st so terribly?' (vi. 89).
Omened in these two incidents are the moments when Faustus beholds
'the jaws of hell' (xix. II5) and the face of the divine wrath. Like the
second chorus, the speech in which the Bad Angel gleefully shows him the
horrors inside hell-mouth is structurally as well as verbally designed to
emphasize vision. It begins, 'Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror
stare', and ends, 'But yet all these are nothing; thou shalt see / Ten
thousand tortures that more horrid be' (11. II6-27). And it elicits from
Faustus a cry of ocular agony: '0, I have seen enough to torture me'. This
agony threads the great soliloquy which follows and dominates its climax.
In the darkness, Faustus charges 'Fair nature's eye' to shine, but it will
not; he can 'See, see ... and see' not only Christ's blood but also God's
'ireful brows', and he cannot hide from that look; and he ends uttering
impotent cries for heaven and hell to change their visage: 'My God, my
God! Look not so fierce on me!. .. Ugly hell, gape not!' The First Scholar
had foreshadowed what was coming when he remarked a little earlier:
'methinks your looks are chang'd' (1. 25); for Faustus dies with horror
written on his face, and is then resolved into ghastly images himself: 'see,
here are Faustus' limbs, / All torn asunder . . .'.
The scholar's grave 'see, here . . .' is the last and least emphatic of many
injunctions in the play to see and understand. Repeated with almost ritual
frequency, and necessarily enforced in performance by chironomic action,
they provide a continuous and usually ironic allusion to the nature of
Faustus's tragic error. Fundamental to this motif of seeing-and-under-
standing is a distinction between the books proper to a scholar (identifiable
with substance, permanence, and truth) and the books and shows of the
magician (identifiable with appearance, change, and deceit). This dis-
tinction is boldly embodied in the stylized opening scene, where Faustus,
proposing to 'sound the depth' (i. 2) of all available knowledge, rejects in
turn the books of philosophy, 'physic', law, and divinity. The manner in
which he rejects each of these is illuminating (the dismissal of the 'universal
body of the law' as 'external trash'-11. 33-5-particularly so); but the most
revealing of all the rejections is that of divinity, represented by 'Jerome's
Bible'. Despite his avowed intention to examine it carefully ('Faustus,
view it well'-l. 38), he discounts its message of mercy and redemption on
the grounds of two gross and surely wilful misreadings.I And in passing

As is now well known, Faustus omits the second and crucial half of two apostolic
sayings: see Helen Gardner, 'Milton's Satan and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan
Tragedy', ES N i (I948), 49 n. 2 (on the misuse of i John I: 8-9), and Mahood, 'Marlowe's
Heroes', ed. Kaufmann, p. Io8 (on Rom. 6: 23).

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136 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
immediately to the book of his choice, he does so in a manner which seems
intended to suggest a passage from truth itself into a maze of error and
confusion: 'necromantic books are heavenly; / Lines, circles, signs, letters
and characters . . .'. This suggestion is reinforced dramatically by the way
in which Faustus, fascinated by the strange book, fails to hear Good Angel's
injunction to 'lay that damned book aside / And gaze not on it lest it tempt
thy soul . . . Read, read the scriptures' (11.69-72).x
Subsequent references to reading and construing, nicely merged with
the tragic convention of omens ignored or misunderstood, help to keep
this original error in mind. At the signing of the pact (a parody of the
Crucifixion and so of the New Testament or New Covenant), Faustus tells
Mephostophilis to 'View here this blood', and asks what its staying might
'portend'; yet he resolutely rejects the 'plain' message which divine grace
adds to the wordless omen ('Homo fuge!') (v. 57-8I).2 Mephostophilis'
behaviour clarifies and develops the significance of this rejection: after
bringing the chafers to 'dissolve it straight', he ensures that Faustus will
have no second thoughts about the miraculous 'inscription' (1. 76) by dis-
tracting his attention with the first of many glittering and inherently
meaningless shows:
Fau. What means this show? Speak, Mephostophilis.
Meph. Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind
And let thee see what magic can perform. (11.83-5)
In the same scene, Mephostophilis ceremoniously presents Faustus with
four books (the numerical parallel with the rejected books makes for good
stage symbolism), and urges him to read the first of them with special care:
'Hold; take this book, peruse it thoroughly' (1. I59). The injunction is
ominous indeed, for this is the book which teaches how to bring 'thunder,
whirlwinds, storm, and lightning', thus presaging the midnight hour when
Lucifer will come with 'Thunder and lightning' to bear Faustus 'quick to
hell' (xix. I84, s.d.). In the following scene (or next but one, since a scene
has probably been lost here), Lucifer himself distracts Faustus with
theatrical show and magical book. The ominous injunction is virtually the
same, but the ironies and ambiguities which foreshadow the end and refine
Good Angel recalls his deafness at the end: 'O Faustus, if thou hadst given ear to me
...' (xix. 99).
2 In Christian thought, the shedding of Christ's blood has always been conceived as the
sacrificial act which seals the covenant of grace or redemption expounded by God in the
New Testament. Indeed the names given to the two parts of the Bible indicate that it is
seen as combining two forms of the one divine covenant, testamentum being the word used
in the Vulgate to translate the Greek word for 'covenant' (thus all Marlowe's allusions to
wills, legacies, bonds, Christ's blood, and the Bible are intimately related). For a concise
account of the history of the covenant idea in Christian thought, see W. Adams Brown,
'Covenant Theology', The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings
(Edinburgh and New York, I9II), iv. 216-24.

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 137
the impression of tragic blindness are singularly artful: if we have grasped
the nature of Marlowe's symbolism, we may conclude that the whole
tragedy is here in epitome:
Fau. 0, how this sight doth delight my soul!
Luc. But, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.
Fau. O, might I see hell and return again safe, how
happy were I then!
Luc. Faustus, thou shalt; at midnight I will send for thee.
Meanwhile, peruse this book and view it thoroughly,
And thou shalt turn thyself into what shape thou wilt. (11.170-6)
Lucifer's 'meanwhile', and the exit of a delighted Faustus with the book
under his arm, exemplify a perfect marriage of language, action, and theme.
Lucifer, we feel, has now ensured that Faustus will pass his time as the
enraptured student of changing forms until eternal judgement brings in
upon him the unchanging nature of his own soul.
Faustus's treatment of Jerome's Bible is elaborately parodied in the
optical tricks played by him (with the help of Lucifer's book) during his
visit to Rome. The Pope instructs the cardinals to 'read amongst the
statutes decretal what . . . / The sacred synod hath decreed' for the pre-
tender Bruno (viii. I05-7). But in order that he and Mephostophilis can
assume the cardinals' shapes and gain custody of the condemned Bruno,
Faustus determines that they will be struck with 'sloth and drowsy idleness'
when they 'turn their superstitious books' (11. 115-i6). It is when Bruno
has been liberated from his bonds that the comic parallel with Faustus's
reading errors and consequent misery become clear. Entering 'with a
book' (ix. 38, s.d.), the cardinals ask the Pope to 'view the sentence of the
reverend synod / Concerning Bruno'; to which he replies in anger, 'where-
fore would you have me view that book?', and promptly consigns them to
prison and 'hellish misery' for 'this hateful treachery' (11.34-54). But there
is nothing elaborate in the final echo of Jerome's Bible: it is given to
Mephostophilis, and it has all the concentrated irony and ambiguity to be
expected of a mocking demon. Three pregnant puns intimate here that
the way forward was not the way backward, and that Faustus's inability to
see this clearly and steadily followed from Luciferian self-will ('I') and an
attendant subordination of understanding to sensation ('eye'):
I do confess it, Faustus, and rejoice.
'Twas I that, when thou wert i' the way to heaven,
Damm'd up thy passage; when thou took'st the book
To view the scriptures,then I turn'd the leaves
And led thine eye. (xix. 92-6)
The word 'deed' is not used with the same subtlety and insistence as any

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138 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
of the other key words. But it is wedded to visible action and object, it is
regularly underscored by means of the demonstrative pronoun, and it is
closer than any other word to the ironic centre of the tragedy. There are
only two occasions when it could be said to involve an overt pun. One is
when the pact is surrendered to Mephostophilis and he solemnly asks,
'Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?' (v. II3)-where it
would seem that the demon is thinking of the agreement as an action for
which Faustus must take responsibility. The other is when a much more
sober Faustus spells out for the scholars the simple truth of all he has
done: 'God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it. For the vain
pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity.
I writ them a bill with mine own blood; the date has expired, this is the
time, and he will fetch me' (xix. 64-8)-where the initial reference to what
was forbidden indeed and in deed anticipates the rest of the sentence and
sets up an ironic contrast between God's covenant and Lucifer's.
However, the dramatic circumstances are such that after Faustus has
signed the agreement every use of the word 'deed' in the sense of 'some-
thing done' has the effect of a covert pun (like 'perform' in the sense of 'to
do' or 'carry out'). In the first place, Marlowe has dramatized the signing
of the pact in such a way as to make clear that it is the crucial act, the deed
from which all others follow, and has been careful in that scene to refer to it
principally as a deed (v. 36, 60, 89, 13). Moreover, the immediate context
in which actions are subsequently referred to as deeds is always (with a
single exception) dominated by the idea of justice, either as due punish-
ment or due reward: thus the Pope threatens to 'depose the Emperor for
that deed' (electing the pretender) (viii. I27), and promises that Faustus's
soul will be 'Damn'd forever for this deed' (destroying ritual order) (ix. 65);
the Emperor promises to honour Faustus for 'This deed of ... setting
Bruno free' (xii. 3); Faustus transforms Benvolio and his friends in 're-
compense' for 'this deed' of 'treachery' (xiii. 70, 83); Mephostophilis in-
flicts similar punishment on Robin and Dick for 'the rashness of this cursed
deed' (magical meddling) (x. 49, 42); and, finally, the scholars would have
Faustus eternally rewarded for conjuring up the image of Trojan Helen:
'for this glorious deed, / Happy and blest be Faustus evermore' (xviii.
35-6). The last of these covert puns is also the most effective, for it ties
the end of the tragedy to the beginning, and points to the fact that Faustus's
glorious affair with Helen ('I will be Paris') is what helps him confirm his
'former vow to Lucifer' (1. 8I). It seems indisputably Marlowan.
The effect of the 'deed' pun is to intensify the impression of Faustus's
wilful or desperate blindness to an inescapable, circumscribing reality. We
are reminded by it that all his 'proud audacious deeds' (Prol., 5) take their
meaning and value from the redeeming covenant he has renounced and

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 139
the enslaving bond he has entered into. Incorporate in it is the idea that
there can be no such thing as autonomous, godlike action in the real world:
every act confirms an existing bond or creates a new one; it has binding
consequences and is a deed in two senses of the word. Faustus thought that
by breaking the bond with God and signing the pact with Lucifer he would
be a free agent for the rest of his life, whereas in fact he passes instantly
from a condition of limited freedom to one of mere bondage. He dismisses
the study of law and legacies (i.e. of wills and the limiting of will) as
'servile and illiberal', the study of theology as 'contemptible and vile', and
presumes that the study of magic can introduce him to a world where
'servile spirits' will endow him with absolute power in all things (i. 36, io8,
96). But he becomes instead the servile entertainer of petty princes; and he
becomes too the abject servant of a tyrannous master who interprets their
contract just as it suits himself and insists (wrongly) that it is binding in
eternal law.
This theme of a man cheated by his desires and fears out of his inherited
freedom ('the freedom of the sons of God') is rooted in the Judaeo-
Christian conception of goodness as fidelity to the covenant with God and
of evil as a state of bondage to the Enemy consequent upon violation of that
covenant; and it inheres in every version of the ancient legend to which
Faustus of Wittenberg has given his name.' But Marlowe was the first
dramatist to perceive its potential for the tragic stage, and the bleakly ironic
cast he imposed on it seems to have profoundly affected some of his most
distinguished successors. Most dramatists of the period tend to identify
tragic action with the breaking of bonds, a fact which we may ascribe to the
influence of Kyd. But it was probably Marlowe alone who prompted
Shakespeare (in Macbeth, Othello, and to a lesser extent King Lear),
Webster (in The White Devil), and Middleton (in The Changeling)to focus
their imagination on the appalling peripeteia whereby the undoing of a
bond which has come to seem intolerable (the fatal deed) results in a state
of claustrophobic confinement or degrading servitude. The affinity with
Marlowe in these plays may be detected in the symbolism of the demonic
vow or marriage. But in some it is evidenced more concretely by the overt
or covert pun which pinpoints the ironic process in which tragic characters
become 'the deed's creature', prisoners of what they have willed.
Although the ironic vision is present with singular force in all these
tragedies, in none is it directed against the errors and misconceptions of the
protagonist with quite the same thoroughness as in Doctor Faustus. Many
have argued however that its ironies have been greatly exaggerated, and
I should say it inheres in them potentially, for in many medieval versions the entrapped
mortal is saved by prayer and the sacraments from the devil's sway and his own inclination
to despair.

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140 McALINDON: THE IRONIC VISION IN
that if they were so extensive as is often claimed then we would be left with
a hero devoid of tragic stature.I In so far as it constitutes a warning against
the reductivist dangers inherent in any critical preoccupation with a
particular aspect of so richly suggestive a play, this position is well founded:
an essay such as my own must clearly acknowledge that the ironic perspec-
tive is not the sole determinant of audience or reader response to Doctor
Faustus. On the other hand, critics who play down the irony in the belief
that this is necessary in order to preserve its claim to tragic quality do so
on the basis of an assumption which is at the least questionable, and are
in danger of obscuring its unique character. Their premiss is that any
tragedy which deserves the name must have a heroic content: its protagon-
ist must excite feelings of wonder and admiration by unusual strength of
mind and character, by moral and physical courage, by stubborn fidelity to
a chosen principle, person, or course of action-by what Marlowe calls
'resolution'. But although many attempts have been made to describe
Faustus in terms which somehow or other conform to this prescription,
they collapse into plain self-contradiction when Faustus's irresolution,
cowardice, and posturing are acknowledged (as they often are). The simple
fact, as I believe, is that Faustus's failure to fit any acceptable definition of
the heroic is a central part of the play's complex irony.2
But this does not mean that his tragedy is lacking in grandeur and in-
tensity, or that he fails to command sympathy and respect. Faustus in-
spires us with feelings of wonder, not because his pride is magnificent or
his audacity unique, but because his folly is awesome in its implications.
It calls into action universal forces of good and evil, order and anarchy,
law and treachery; and the price he will have to pay for it is unthinkable.
Moreover his agony of oscillation between redemptive hope and damning
despair enacts, without resolving, the perennial tragic paradox of fate and
freedom, and so invests the action with mystery as well as intensity.
Finally, there is the paradox that Faustus grows in moral honesty and
human decency even as he sinks further and further into despair, show-
manship, and sensuality.3 Thus by the time he asks the scholars to leave
him to his fate, and looks in terror at the consequence of his deeds, we
accord him the utmost sympathy and a great deal of respect. Such feelings
have little to do with the phenomenon of fallen greatness. They are
I See especially A. L. French, 'The Philosophy of Dr Faustus', EIC xx (1970), 123-42.
2 One critic to make this point clearly is James Jensen, who-in 'Heroic Convention
and Dr Faustus', EIC xxi (1971), 104-observes that 'Marlowe's Faustus is one of the
primaryheroesmanques'.But Jensen (as it seems to me) immediatelyfudges the point in a
somewhatfamiliarmannerby adding that although Faustus is 'defectiveand unfulfilled',
he is, 'like Hamlet, distinguishednot by his attainmentsbut by the impelling reach and
relevance of his inner consciousness as desire, his bold intelligence in subjective crisis'.
To this one must reply that Faustus's bold intelligence deserts him in subjectivecrisis.
3 Robert Ornstein, 'The Tragic Theology of Dr. Faustus', PMLA lxxxiii (I968), 1382.

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 MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 141
generated by the spectacle of a fellow human being who sees clearly that
he is being called upon to suffer endlessly for his share in human pride and
wilfulness. Marlowe seems to be saying here (in reaction against what he
wrote in Tamburlaine)that man's notion of his own greatness is an illusion,
a trap; and in saying so he creates a problem for those who (perhaps un-
consciously) have kept their faith in the immutable laws of Tragedy.

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