{"id":105881,"date":"2016-12-15T16:43:42","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T21:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105881"},"modified":"2016-12-15T17:09:52","modified_gmt":"2016-12-15T22:09:52","slug":"one-devil-too-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/15\/one-devil-too-many\/","title":{"rendered":"One Devil Too Many"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Marlowe\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Doctor Faustus at four hundred<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

The Devil and Dr. Faustus Meet<\/i>, ca. 1825.\u00a0Via Wellcome Images.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Christopher Marlowe\u2019s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus<\/em><\/a> premiered in 1594. Nearly forty years later, people were still talking about those earliest performances. The Puritan pamphleteer and ideologue William Prynne, in his massive 1633 antitheatrical tome Histriomastix,<\/em> recounted diabolical legends surrounding this most infernal of plays. The spectators and actors \u201cprophanely playing\u201d in that first production, he reported, had a \u201cvisible apparition of the Devill on the Stage.\u201d The good Puritan\u2014soon to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he would have his ears cropped for having implied that the queen was a whore\u2014assures us that though he was not himself familiar with such theatrical dens of iniquity, he can confirm the event\u2019s veracity as \u201cthe truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, a monograph by someone identified only as \u201cG.J.R\u201d recounts that during a performance of the scene where Dr. Faustus begins his conjurations, there suddenly \u201cwas one devil too many amongst them.\u201d It seems that the hocus pocus nonsense magic of Marlowe\u2019s immense Latin learning had accidentally triggered an actual occult transaction, pulling one of Lucifer\u2019s servants from hell into our own realm. On that stage in Exeter\u2014there among conjuring circles, chanted invocations, and the adjuring of God\u2019s love\u2014the extras playing stock devils with caked-on red makeup and fake horns strapped to their heads found themselves with the chance to meet the real thing. G.J.R. informs us that \u201cafter a little pause\u2026 every man hastened to be first out of doors.\u201d The actors (\u201ccontrary to their custom,\u201d he duly informs us) spent the night in \u201creading and in prayer,\u201d making sure to get \u201cout of the town the next morning.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even that is no match for the premiere of the play, at the Rose Theatre in Southwark (which today lay underneath a parking garage) among taverns, brothels, and bear-baiting pits, when some in the audience claimed that they spied Mephistopheles\u2019s master himself among the crowd, having availed himself of the opportunity to travel up to Earth and to see how accurately his old friend Kit Marlowe had presented him. No word on the review.<\/p>\n

These claims are in keeping with a longstanding sense of the medieval in Dr. Faustus<\/em>, with its cursed (goat-skin?) grimoires and its personified Sins, with devils and angels on shoulders tempting its main character, and demons dancing on stage. Dr. Faustus<\/em>, after all, parrots the genre of the medieval morality play. Even so, Marlowe\u2019s text is in some ways one of our first modern plays\u2014and its title character is our first modern man. Strung as he is between faith and doubt, insignificance and omnipotence, sin and salvation, and particularly between freedom and fate. Dr. Faustus is a creature, and in part a creator, of our world. (What could be a more Faustian bargain than ours, in which we gain immense technological power under the perennial threat of complete ecological collapse?) In his skepticism and arrogance, his total dependence and painful doubt, Faustus is our contemporary: an imperfect man with the power to sell the world. Whiffs of sulfur are not just on those stages in Exeter and Southwark where Marlowe dreamed of the modern world. They were also in the mustard gas factories of World War I; the desert plains at Alamogordo, New Mexico, where Oppenheimer detonated his grand experiment; and on the disappearing Arctic ice caps. I hear echoes of Dr. Faustus\u2019s screams of damnation time and again over the last century: for \u201cthis is hell, nor am I out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Illustration: WPA Federal Theater Project.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dr. Faustus <\/em>has conjured a lot of extra devils over the years. Evidence of those hoofprints of Satan, and of the infernal contract he offered to that poor necromancer, skitter across the pages of history and literature. There are, of course, the literary treatments\u2014Goethe, Stephen Vincent Ben\u00e9t\u2019s \u201cThe Devil and Daniel Webster,\u201d Mikhail Bulgakov\u2019s The Master and Margarita, <\/em>Thomas Mann\u2019s Doktor Faustus, <\/em>even the baseball musical Damn Yankees. <\/em>But real Faustian bargains are just as plentiful. Think of the German Faustbuchs <\/em>of the mid-sixteenth century, which Marlowe mined for his source material. Or of Urbain Grandier, the Satanic French priest of the seventeenth-century, who made a devilish pact and held monastic orgies. Then there\u2019s the Scotsman Thomas Weir, who professed to be a loyal and solemn Covenanter, but strolled the winding cobblestoned streets of Edinburgh with Satan. Jonathan Moulton, the \u201cYankee Faust\u201d of Revolutionary New Hampshire, was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for two bootfuls of gold coins every month; to trick the devil, Moulton removed the soles of his boots and put them over a hole in the floor, so his basement filled with gold. (The devil burned down his house in revenge.) And, of course, there\u2019s the dusty crossroads of Highway 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where the bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil sometime around 1931.<\/p>\n

Musicians in particular seem to have a bit of the Faustian about them, something mysterious in their alchemy of melody and rhythm. The Italian violinists Giuseppe Tartini and Niccol\u00f2 Paganini, and the French composer Phillipe Mussard, all from the eighteenth century, supposedly saw their names on contracts with the devil. Some have suggested that the minor-keyed \u201cGloomy Sunday\u201d\u2014the notorious \u201cHungarian suicide song\u201d written by Rezs\u0151 Seress around the same time Johnson went down to the crossroads\u2014has some of the heat of hell in it, too. If Dr. Faustus is the first modern man, it\u2019s because he is the first of a modern type: the artist. The bohemian archetype has long been understood as a devilish one. Where once the individual was but a conduit for God, with Faustus he began to serve a different master, either his own consciousness or, well, Satan. Or maybe those are really the same thing. Dr. Faustus during the witching hour, with his leatherbound tomes and his scrying mirrors, scribbling furiously on vellum and divinating with the sacred geometry, wasn\u2019t a mad scientist: he was the artist. He was Marlowe himself.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A portrait of Marlowe.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

If Dr. Faustus is one of the first modern men, then his creator, in his ambiguities, contradictions, and secrets, is right there with him. Marlowe was of the supposed \u201cSchool of Night\u201d: he met with Walter Raleigh and the astrologer John Dee in graveyards to summon their own extra devils. He may have shared a bed with his colleague Thomas Kyd, and he declared, according to the renegade priest Richard Baines, \u201cthat all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.\u201d A supposed nonbeliever, Marlowe also said that Moses \u201cwas but a juggler\u201d and that \u201cChrist was a bastard and his mother dishonest\u201d (this, again, per Baines). A possible agent of Sir Francis Walshingham\u2019s fearsome Privy Council, Marlowe performed god knows what manner of subterfuge and espionage on the continent, and he may have been assassinated for it. Certainly he was accused of nailing a threat to the door of one of London\u2019s Dutch-Protestant \u201cStranger Churches,\u201d written in perfect iambic pentameter and signed \u201cTamburlaine\u201d (another act for which he may have been killed). Marlowe, who perhaps once saw the face of the Devil, and was \u201ctormented with ten thousand hells \/ In being deprived of everlasting bliss.\u201d He was, finally, stabbed to death through the eye in a Deptford tavern over a bill\u2014at least that was the official story.<\/p>\n

Just as there are mysteries with Marlowe, there are mysteries with the text of his masterpiece. There\u2019s a quarto \u201cText A\u201d printed in 1604, a decade after his murder, and a longer, funnier \u201cText B,\u201d published four hundred years ago as of 2016. Its 676 new lines include a bevy of dark, comic interludes. One difference between the two texts is crucial. It hinges on the question of whether Faustus can <\/em>or will <\/em>repent\u2014a massive theological difference. Text A has it, \u201cNever too late, if Faustus can repent;\u201d Text B says \u201cFaustus will repent.\u201d The former implies that Faustus\u2019s agency may be constrained by some larger force, while the word will<\/em> grants the doctor the ability to choose his own course. \u201cCan\u201d has a connotation of helplessness; \u201cwill\u201d preserves the possibility that the individual is still free, that he may choose damnation instead of having it thrust upon him. Does Dr. Faustus admit that he\u2019s powerless? The debates then concerned predestination; just as the medieval schoolmen had their Fortuna, <\/em>today we have neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, base and superstructure, determinism, fatalism, and the teleology of history. The problem remains same as it ever was, whether Faustus \u201ccan\u201d or \u201cwill\u201d repent\u2014because the fact is that he\u2019s damned either way. In the contemporary world, since it was born four centuries ago, we\u2019ve always found ourselves in Dr. Faustus\u2019s study, and it\u2019s always a half hour before midnight. The tragedy isn\u2019t about whether or not salvation is possible, but whether we can even try.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ed Simon<\/a> is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University. His writing has appeared online at\u00a0<\/em>The Atlantic, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Millions, <\/em>Lit Hub, <\/em>The Revealer, <\/em>Killing the Buddha, <\/em>Berfrois, <\/em>The Public Domain Review, and <\/em>Nautilus. Follow him\u00a0on Twitter @WithEdSimon<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Simon argues that Marlowe\u2019s masterpiece featured the first truly modern man in 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