by David Riggs
11.1 ‘Poverty obstructs the progress of the most gifted minds’, image on the title page of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, 1604. From Geffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems, 1586.
Mephistopheles supplies Dr Faustus with books to control the weather, books to summon spirits and books to set all the planets, ‘plants, herbs and trees that grow upon the earth’ (II.i.178–79) before his eyes. But the books only consist of letters and words; they signify a meaning that can never be present. Herein lay the irony of giving poor boys like John Faustus and Christopher Marlowe a classical education. Books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority. The great works of Greek and Roman literature signified a plenitude that could never be theirs. Aphthonius was right: the only escape from poverty is suicide. Dr Faustus signals Marlowe’s awareness of his own position in the world after Cambridge. The scholar’s passion for literature condemns him to a solipsistic existence. Like his near-contemporary Don Quixote, Dr Faustus’s fondest wish is to become a character in a book; and not just any book, but the greatest book about the most beautiful woman who ever lived, Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (V.i.89–90). Patient judges could have told him, ‘No, this is the face of the cross-dressed devil that appeared when you asked for a wife; he performs the part of Dame Lechery in Act Two.’ Dr Faustus does not stay for an answer, but plunges straight into the pages of Homer’s Iliad: ‘I will be Paris, and for love of thee, / Instead of Troy shall Wertenberge be sacked’ (96–97).
Helen of Troy transports Faustus into another book, The Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, where he reverts to his ghostly prototype Simon Magus. Simon’s Helen was a female assistant who performed in his act. He proclaimed her ‘the all-bearing being, and wisdom, for whose sake, says he, the Greeks and barbarians fought’. The Christian Fathers countered that Simon had purchased a ‘woman of the name of Helen out of a brothel, with the same money which he had offered for the Holy Spirit’. Marlowe evokes this figure in a flash of poetic insight:
O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appeared to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.
Exeunt.
(V.i.102–8)
Faustus’s glancing allusion to the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon – ‘she is more beautiful than the Sun, and above all the order of the stars, and the light is not to be compared unto her’ – evokes the mystery woman in Simon’s pagan theology. The devil is in the gender reversals, which grow legible under the veil of sly allusions to another book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Faustus takes the woman’s part in this text, assuming the position of hapless Semele and turning chaste Arethusa into a wanton, while heavenly Helen takes the man’s part. The scholar remains in the all-male world of academic humanism, where books take the place of women. After the interlude is over, Faustus and Helen, like John Stubbes’s besotted playgoers, ‘play the Sodomites, or worse’.
The scholar’s inability to repent inspires his finest performance:
O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him. O, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ’Tis gone! And see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows!
(V.ii.78–84)
The great soliloquy lays bare the ‘form of Faustus’ fortunes / Good or bad’. In the heart-rending agony of damnation, Dr Faustus performs the experience of being torn apart between God and Lucifer, good and bad. Although he can neither comprehend ‘who pulls me down’ nor control the words that issue from his mouth, he remains accountable for his fate. The best he can do, in the end, is gesture towards the instruments of his undoing: ‘I’ll burn my books’ (V.ii.122).
This is the point at which Marlowe broke with his sources. Faustus’s twisted corpse, its mangled state authenticated by Luther’s disciples Melanchthon and Gast, supplied the indispensable material evidence in the case against Johann Faust. The devil’s dismemberment of the conjuror whom the authorities failed to prosecute proved that magicians deserved to be executed. At the end of The Damnable Life, the students discover the scholar’s dismembered body parts: ‘his brains cleaving to the wall: for the devil had beaten him from one wall against the other, on one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth’. Outside, ‘lying on the horse dung, most monstrously torn and fearful to behold … his head and all his joints were dashed in pieces’. Marlowe hints that his play will have the stock ending. The devil repeatedly disciplines Faustus with the threat of dismemberment; the disgruntled horse trader pulls his leg off; the clowns joke about lacerated bodies. A modern critic summarizes the impact of these grisly reminders when he writes that the ‘play needs the dismemberment of Faustus, at the appointed time’. Precisely; and the play refuses to gratify that need. All the relevant evidence remains equivocal. The devils threaten to dismember Faustus, but only if he breaks his word; there is nothing in the contract about tearing Faustus to pieces after the twenty-four years have been duly and faithfully executed. The horse trader’s assault reminds us that the Doctor’s legs are not real; like any stage performer he has make-believe limbs. In the end, Dr Faustus’s immateriality – his nothingness – is what saves him. The devil turns Faustus into the man who cannot be killed, and so he remains at the end, an indestructible performer marking his final exit with words that defer his annihilation one last time: ‘ah Mephistopheles!’ (V.ii.122)
11.2 Dr Faustus’s dismembered body. From the Dutch translation of the German Faust book, 1590.
Marlowe’s Epilogue emphasizes the finality of what has happened:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight …
Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things …
(1–6)
The Epilogue reinforces Calvin’s view that God’s judgements are unthinkable; they can only be wondered at. Yet questions persist. The first line of Marlowe’s Epilogue (‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight’) echoes Thomas Churchyard’s famous tale of Shore’s Wife. The allusion to Churchyard’s ‘wand that might have grown full straight’ points toward the story that the Epilogue wants to suppress. Shore’s wife is complaining about oppression and entrapment. ‘They brake the boughs and shaked the tree by sleight, / And bent the wand that might have grown full straight.’ The case of Dr Faustus remains open. If the moralizing epilogue exhorts ‘the wise / Only to wonder at unlawful things’, the Latin motto that has the last word in the printed text invites them to keep thinking: ‘Terminat hora diem; terminat author opus.’
The hour ends the day, the author ends the work. The hour that ends the day is midnight, the hour that has just ended the work. The overlapping cycles of nature and art summon up the shade of the author, Christopher Marlowe, completing his labour at midnight, when Doctor Faustus’s last exit coincides with the final strokes of Marlowe’s pen. The coincidence links the making of the play to the implementation of the pact, while the motto asserts Marlowe’s ultimate authority over his own work. At the end of the day, Dr Faustus proves to be a literary artefact, a man who owes his existence to the writers who invented him.
* * *
Dr Faustus is the longest lived of the Protestant myths that flourished in the wake of the Reformation. Just as the biblical apostles contended with Simon Magus, their successors in the Reformed Church, Luther and Melanchthon, coped with his double, Dr Faustus. Since L
uther, Melanchthon and Spies believed in witchcraft, they did not let the meagre facts of George Faust’s life get in the way of the spiritual truth that he embodied. The Faust legend offered them a powerful reaffirmation of Satan and Hell just when people were beginning to question their existence. But the invention of the Faust legend also undermined Lutheran beliefs, since the facts in this case were relatively accessible. The commodification of the myth with the printing of Spies’s History intensified public interest in who Faust really was: witness Fynes Morrison’s fact-finding journey to Wittenberg or Augustine Lercheimer’s vexation on discovering that Faust had been posthumously granted a doctorate in divinity from his alma mater, Wittenberg University.
Marlowe worked both aspects of the Faust phenomenon into his stage adaptation. He used the visual and auditory effects available in the playhouse to instil belief in hell and the devil. He used his poetic gift of irony, indirectness and erudite allusion to notify patient judges that Dr Faustus is a fictional being – a character in a book or an unwitting actor in the theatre of God’s judgements. Marlowe’s play appealed both to true believers and to freethinking sceptics. By incorporating the problem of belief into his story, Marlowe transformed the Faust legend into literature.
In rebutting the charge that poets falsify nature, Sir Philip Sidney argues that ‘the Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.’ In the idiom of Dr Faustus, the ‘Poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes.’ Marlowe raised the stakes by reproducing Satan, Good and Bad Angels, the angry face of God and Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament as literary fictions. The poetic ‘suspension of disbelief’ in what the spectator knows to be false is radically different from religious faith, where subjects really do believe in what they cannot prove. The dramatic poet who ‘never affirmeth’ the sacred objects of religious belief thus opens the door to irony, scepticism and the reprehensible custom of ‘Profane Scoffing in Holy Matters’.
Marlowe surely noticed that Dr Faustus came ‘from Parents base of stock’, took his university degrees at a place remarkably similar to Cambridge, scoffed at religion yet aspired to aid the Protestants in their war with Parma, remained unmarried and made his living as an entertainer and illusionist of no fixed abode. Marlowe’s peers were cast-off and disillusioned scholars; he knew the paradoxes of acculturation and repudiation from firsthand experience. Whatever the truth about his rumoured journey to Rheims, or his abortive counterfeiting scheme in Flushing, or his public atheism in 1593, he was the subject of defamatory, even life-threatening stories for much of his adult existence. Marlowe knew what it was like to be a figment of someone else’s imagination. During the last year of his life, the alternative date for Dr Faustus, he himself would become the object of a witch-hunt, ‘a shithouse’ like Faust.
In writing Dr Faustus, Marlowe projected his predicament on to his protagonist. The play registers his awareness that the Church produces sin and damnation for its own ends. ‘Faustus is gone, regard his hellish fall!’ But Marlowe was still there: at the end of the day, ‘the author ends the work.’ From his perspective, the play performed a cathartic function. Dr Faustus demystifies the Calvinist theology that would and did condemn Christopher Marlowe to destruction and hellfire. The protagonist’s entrapment is the best measure of the poet’s freedom.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Double Agents
On 18 September 1589, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon, the flesh-and-blood Christopher Marlowe flashes into view. He was on Hog Lane, near the Theatre in Shoreditch, fighting with William Bradley, a twenty-six-year-old innkeeper from Bishopsgate. The poet Thomas Watson lurked near by. According to the coroner’s report, Watson drew his sword, allegedly to ‘separate’ the two men and ‘to keep the Queen’s peace’. ‘Art thou now come?’ Bradley exclaimed, ‘Then I will have a bout with thee’, and turned on Watson with his sword and dagger. Bradley inflicted wounds on his opponent, who retreated until he reached a ditch and could go no further. Then Watson killed Bradley with a thrust that went six inches deep into his chest. It sounds like a spontaneous outburst of violence, and maybe it was; but this quarrel had been brewing for a long time.
Eighteen months previously, Bradley had bound himself to pay £14 to John Alleyn by 25 August 1588, with a penalty of forty marks if he failed to meet his obligation. Besides being an actor, theatrical entrepreneur and brother of the player Edward Alleyn, John Alleyn was an innholder in his own right. He had recently purchased four landed townhouses next to Fisher’s Folly, the Earl of Oxford’s residence on Bishopsgate Street. When Bradley defaulted, Alleyn held on to the bond so that he could sue his creditor in the Court of Common Pleas. Since Bradley was ‘a very troublesome person’, who frequently quarrelled, the makings of a feud were now in place.
In the summer of 1589, Bradley, acting ‘from fear of death’, petitioned the Queen’s Bench for ‘securities of the peace’ against John Alleyn, Thomas Watson and Watson’s brother-in-law, the attorney Hugo Swift. Had his request been granted, Alleyn, Watson and Swift would have had to find two property owners (Bradley’s ‘securities’) who were prepared to forfeit substantial sums of money if any of the three did bodily harm to Bradley. John Alleyn’s link to Watson most likely involved a professional relationship. Making plays was Watson’s ‘daily practice and his living’; Alleyn’s company, the Admiral’s Men, were among the principal employers of scriptwriters. On the face of it, Watson and his brother-in-law were assisting Alleyn in a case of debt collection. The tradesman Bradley recruited his neighbour Captain George Orrell (‘a most desperate rakehell that lives’) to provide some extra muscle in his quarrel with Alleyn. Hugo Swift now feared for his life, and asked the court for securities of the peace against Captain Orrell. When the court reopened after the summer recess, the justices summoned the petitioners and their opponents to appear before them on 25 November.
Bradley could not afford to wait that long. When the innkeeper deposed that Alleyn, Watson and Swift meant to kill him, he was trying to indemnify himself against a direct assault by naming names. Marlowe, who had written Tamburlaine for Alleyn’s acting company, went unnamed. His preliminary quarrel with Bradley gave Watson an excuse for drawing his sword on Bradley. It was at this instant that the victim, in the heat of combat, exclaimed, ‘Art thou now come?’ Watson yielded enough ground to justify a plea of self-defence and then finished Bradley off. If this reconstruction sounds injurious to Bradley’s witty assailants, bear in mind that Watson gained his livelihood devising ‘fictions and knaveries’; that Marlowe and the Admiral’s Men took a lively interest in staging scenes of real violence; and that both Watson and Marlowe stood to gain by doing John Alleyn a favour. Captain Orrell declined to pursue his quarrel with Hugo Swift.
After killing Bradley, Watson and Marlowe stood their ground until the constable conveyed them to Sir Owen Hopton, the nearest Justice of the Peace and a prominent figure in the Elizabethan police system. Hopton was Queen Elizabeth’s kinsman by descent from Sir Owen Tudor, and served as her Lieutenant in the Tower of London. He placed Thomas Watson, ‘gentleman’, and Christopher Marlowe, ‘yeoman’, under arrest on ‘suspicion of murder’. The two prisoners were taken to Newgate prison on the west wall of the City. Both men gave Norton Folgate, just south of the Theatre, as their place of residence.
Upon entering Newgate prison, Marlowe was manacled and taken to the lower dungeon called Limbo, ‘a dark Opaque wild room’, entered through a hatch from above. He remained in this dark, rat-infested hold until the gaoler came to collect his fee. If and when Marlowe paid the fee, he was moved to one of the upper cells. Newgate was an excellent place for Marlowe to form his own contacts with the Catholic underground. One of Walsingham’s premier spies advised the Secretary that ‘the prisons of England are very nourishers of papists’ and urged him to ‘Banish them, for God’s sake, or let them remain close prisoners, that they may not daily poison others.’
Marl
owe’s companions in Limbo included John Poole, a Cheshire gentleman who had been incarcerated for counterfeiting in 1587. According to Richard Baines, Marlowe said ‘that he was acquainted with one poole, a prisoner in newgate who hath great Skill in mixture of metals’. The fact that Baines and Marlowe were later involved in a counterfeiting scheme, coupled with Poole’s presence in Newgate during Marlowe’s incarceration there, indicates that Baines was telling the truth in this case. Marlowe’s association with Poole was a formative one.
John Poole had important connections to the Catholic underground. In the year of Poole’s imprisonment, his brother-in-law Sir William Stanley had delivered the English garrison at Deventer to the Spanish and joined forces with the enemy. Almost all the twelve hundred soldiers in Stanley’s regiment went along with him. Shortly after Poole’s arrest, the government spy Humphrey Gunson visited him in Limbo. Poole did not mince words or take precautions about whom he spoke to. Gunson’s transcript preserves a set speech, and gives a fair indication of what Poole would have said to Marlowe.
Poole came from the ranks of the country gentlemen who felt increasingly alienated from the court. Gunson’s transcript reads like a summary of their ongoing grievances and mutinous impulses. ‘Any ancient gentleman that has served his country is thought too simple or not of the religion to be of the Council,’ he complained: ‘these men and their kindred put in, and they snatch up all that has to be given, so that men’s hearts are hardened.’ Poole hated the great courtiers who hogged the rewards of office; he related the defamatory gossip about Leicester contained in a notable volume of Roman Catholic propaganda called The Copy of a Letter. Speaking darkly, ‘He told a prophecy that the red and white bear, i.e., the Queen and Leicester, should flee into the castle of care and never be seen after.’ He ‘defended Sir William Stanley as having done good service in Ireland, and been dangerously wounded, but said the land there which he hoped for in reward were given by the Queen to Sir Walter Raleigh, and he sent unrecompensed to Flanders’.
