Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: the blood pact and the twenty-four years
Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan tragedy: the pact signed in blood, Mephistopheles, Helen of Troy and the damnation of the doctor of Wittenberg.
Before Goethe, it was a young English playwright who gave the Faust myth a theatrical form destined to last. Christopher Marlowe, born in Canterbury in 1564 and killed in Deptford in 1593 in a brawl whose circumstances have never been clarified, probably wrote The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus between 1588 and 1592. The exact date remains debated, as does the weight of other authors' additions in the versions that reached print.
Two texts for one tragedy
The play has come down to us in two different versions, both published after the author's death: the so-called A-text of 1604 and the B-text of 1616, longer and richer in comic and spectacular scenes. Scholars still debate which of the two is closer to the original. The main source was the English translation of the German chapbook, known as the English Faust Book and signed only with the initials P.F., whose earliest surviving edition dates from 1592.
The contract signed in blood
Faustus, a doctor of the University of Wittenberg, reviews the disciplines of learning and discards them one after another. Only books of magic attract him, promising power, wealth and mastery over the elements. He therefore summons Mephistopheles, servant of Lucifer, and agrees to give up his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service. The pact is signed in blood, which however congeals on the page, as if the body itself refused the act.
Immediately afterwards the Latin words «Homo, fuge» appear on Faustus's arm, a warning he chooses to ignore. Mephistopheles, questioned about hell, gives a memorable answer: «Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it». For Marlowe damnation is not only a place but an inner condition, the distance from God that the demon always carries with him wherever he goes.
Angels, sins and the vision of Helen
The tragedy preserves elements of medieval morality drama. A Good Angel and a Bad Angel compete for the hero's will, while Lucifer offers him the spectacle of the Seven Deadly Sins, personified and grotesque. Meanwhile the power he has acquired proves disappointing: Faustus spends it on pranks at the Pope's expense, on displays before the Emperor Charles V and on conjuring tricks to amuse his guests.
The most famous moment comes near the end, when the magician asks to see Helen of Troy. Before her apparition he speaks the line «Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?». The beauty he has conjured, however, is a demonic illusion, and the embrace of the spectre, which he hopes will make him immortal, in fact seals his final ruin.
The last hour
The closing monologue is among the most intense pages of Elizabethan drama. Faustus, alone, counts the hours that separate him from midnight, begs time to stand still, and wishes he could dissolve into little drops of water to escape judgement. In the end the devils drag him away. His last promise, «I'll burn my books», comes when he can no longer change anything.
Doctor Faustus was born in an England both fascinated and frightened by magic, the same England in which John Dee was at work. Marlowe made of it the portrait of a Renaissance intellectual who wants to overcome human limits and discovers, too late, the price of that ambition. Goethe, more than two centuries later, would give the same question a very different answer, open to the possibility of salvation.