In embracing magic, in allowing himself to be ravished again, Faustus attempts to ensure his commitment through firmer means than he had exercised with his earlier devotions—hence, the contract’s specificity, and its insurance of his merger with Lucifer and Mephastophilis, not twenty-four years in the future but from the very moment of signing. And he must ensure (or at least attempt to secure) this continued obligation contractually because he knows what Seneca, Calvin, Foxe, and Perkins have illuminated before him: devotion is difficult.
If to some viewers Faustus’s failure to challenge the contract signals his reprobation (he literally cannot see what the audience is able to recognize—he’s making a terrible bargain in selling his soul to the devil), this chapter suggests how the play offers a more complex portrait of the hero than this answer allows. Faustus is not merely an emblem of Icarus, even if the Chorus might frame him this way. What makes Faustus’s situation at all sympathetic is his drive to devote himself to his studies, and through the contract he attempts to demonstrate—indeed, bloodily performs—precisely this devotion. Despite challenges to logic and reason, despite isolation from friends and distance from the heavens, Faustus binds himself to his field of study. The dilemma he faces—whether to commit himself to his path despite all of this evidence against it—is a compelling and inherently dramatic one not because it involves summoning the devil and being devoured by a hellmouth, but because it mirrors the travails of all aspiring addicts. Faustus wants to be bound, compelled, reshaped, and overcome by a metaphysical force. He seeks, as he repeatedly states, ravishment. While Faustus’s commitment to his contract might be, as Yeager calls it, “numbingly self-defeating,” Marlowe’s play illuminates, in this drama of self-defeat, the nature of attempted devotion.77 “Self” defeating might, in another context, be the precisely desirable outcome of devotion. The dissolution of the self in the supernatural is what the Christian faithful pray for and what the addict seeks. Indeed, even the bodily inscription warning Faustus away from the contract serves, arguably, to remind him of his desire for merger. When Faustus finds “Homo fuge” inscribed on his arm, he responds, “Whither shall I fly?” (2.1.77). This phrase of course refers to the biblical invocation, “man of god, flye,” from 1 Timothy 6:11.78 But one might also read “fuge” in its musical sense, which originated in the sixteenth century. A fugue, or fuga (out of fugere), is a form of composition weaving together two distinct threads contrapuntally. In this case, “fuge” resonates with Faustus’s broader desire to be subsumed or ravished by a greater power. Man, were he “fuge,” might turn into the music of the spheres. The word teasingly evokes an ideal, nonviolent form of union: just as the music emerges out of intertwining two strands of sound, producing harmony and depth, so too might Faustus be taken up into a relationship greater than himself.
Yet, tragically, in attempting union through a legal contract, Marlowe exposes Faustus’s desired but ultimately failed addiction. Like the Roman slave contractually bound to a master, Faustus becomes an addict through the law. But the addiction celebrated from Seneca to Calvin is not legal but vocational. It involves a calling. A contract upholds Faustus’s rights, even if they seem paltry. A contract can be negotiated and annulled, as Posner and Yeager note. One does not, by contrast, “wiggle out of” addiction. Thus, Faustus’s attempt to secure his addiction through contract exposes his devotional failure before he even begins. True devotion requires no contract, no promptings, and no threats. In the same way a beloved might erroneously hope a marriage contract could secure a lover’s fidelity, Faustus relies on the necromantic contract to fix his own insufficient desires.
Wavering Faustus
Faustus’s signing of the contract, ironically, betrays his own failed addiction. The document that secures his damnation fails to—and could never—represent his devotion. Certainly, the play’s remaining scenes offer the fulfillment of Mephastophilis’s promise: viewers see the rewards of necromancy in Faustus’s adventures. But as critics have long noted, the fruits of magic are rather slim. If Faustus hopes to command nations, he finds himself playing parlor tricks, leaving the audience, if not Faustus himself, disappointed.79 He mocks the pope and the horse-courser, he brings grapes to a duchess and conjures historical figures for the emperor and scholar friends. Why Marlowe, who stages Tamberlaine’s march across Europe and Asia, would hesitate to stage more satisfying magical triumphs has rightly preoccupied critics and audiences. The most evident answer, provided by the Chorus and ostensibly in concert with Calvinist theology and Elizabethan authorities, finds Faustus to be an emblem for misguided ambition. The failure of magic supports readings of the play as a cautionary tale (why sell one’s soul for mediocre magic?) insofar as one finds the play’s middle section to be an extended lesson on Faustus’s bad choice.
This chapter offers another answer, one—as suggested above—that finds the drama of the play to lie not in its subject matter of magic but, in properly Aristotelian fashion, in its action. For the drama of the play’s middle acts lies in Faustus’s wavering: the scholar with heroic resolve, a man who signed a contract he refuses to challenge, nonetheless falters. Indeed, perhaps more surprisingly than critics have noted, having made such a dramatic deal with the devil and having offered up his blood in signing, Faustus must nonetheless continually remind himself of his pledge. Faustus reassures himself, “Fear not, Faustus” (1.3.14). This imperative presages a series of reminders that Faustus offers himself as he wavers. “No go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute. / Why waverest thou?” (2.1.6–7). This wavering, he claims, is because “something soundeth” in his ears, a voice that counsels, “Abjure this magic, turn to God again!” (2.1.7, 8). He keeps entertaining the possibility of repentance, or rather, the possibility of escape from his chosen commitment. In the first glimpse of the scholar after signing the contract, he cries, “When I behold the heavens then I repent” (2.3.1). Even though he might lament “my heart’s so harden’d I cannot repent,” he also actively embraces magic again on recalling the “ravishing sound” of the Ampion’s harp making “music with my Mephastophilis” (2.3.18, 29–30). He cries, “I am resolved: Faustus shall ne’er repent. / Come Mephastophilis, let us dispute again” (2.3.32–33). Wanting to dedicate himself entirely but pulling away, and wanting to repent but returning to magic, Faustus seems insecure in the very bargain he designed.
Faustus both picks the wrong field and can’t quite commit himself to it. For a man who begins the play wanting to be obliterated through integration into necromancy, he never achieves full surrender or release but instead wavers between professions and masters. He tells Charles V, “I am content to do whatever your Majesty shall command me” (4.1.15–16), and in doing so receives “a bounteous reward” (4.1.92–93); the Duke of Vanholt, too, tells him, “Follow us and receive your reward” (4.3.33). Even as he is bound to Mephastophilis and Lucifer, Faustus relates to earthly authorities as a pandering courtier seeking favor. He obsequiously calls Charles V “my gracious sovereign” while deeming himself “far inferior to the report men have published, and nothing answerable to the honor of your imperial Majesty” (4.1.12–14). Seeking favor and accepting rewards from earthly authorities, Faustus then relishes his power to humiliate his social equals or inferiors. The mocking knight and the horse-courser experience Faustus’s high jinx. These comic interludes strain against Faustus’s initial desire to be ravished, enveloped, and devoted: he seems preoccupied with his own status and reputation. Rather than dissolving his self, he seeks to protect and amplify it.
Fluctuating between authorities and erratic in his devotion, Faustus then begins to reproach others for his choices. As Poole writes, “Faustus has the unattractive habit of blaming others for his actions, often positioning himself as a passive entity.”80 He blames his own fall on reading: “Oh would / I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book” (5.2.19). Or, alternatively, he blames his fall on Mephastophilis, claiming he was tricked: “go accursed spirit to ugly hell: / ’Tis thou hast damn’d distressed Faustus’ soul” (2.3.77–78). Finally, Faustus claims that his relationship to Lucifer and Mephastophilis is incomplete, since he has not experienced magical power but only indulged his appetites. He, like the Chorus, condemns himself as a glutton, surfeiting on his desires: “The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite, / Wherein
