The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe is a 16th century tragedy that centers around the character Dr. John Faustus, who makes a pact with the demon Mephastophilis for knowledge and power in exchange for a portion of his life and damnation after death. From the title alone one can gather that the narrative of this play differs greatly from that of Everyman – characters have individual names, and individual bodies onstage are meant to represent individual persons as opposed to generalized concepts. (There are, however, the Seven Deadly Sins, though these are not created characters.) And while Everyman argues that all actions in the name of personal identity are pointless before the shared fate of divine judgment before God, Faustus argues that fates are not shared and that individual choices have a substantial effect on where a person finds themself at the end of their life.
In his essay “Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Faustus,” David Kaula compares the forms of the morality play and the Renaissance tragedy: “One of the chief purposes of the older plays was to demonstrate the possibility of salvation for all humanity: hence the generalized hero and the happy ending. The later plays, on the other hand, were more concerned with the exceptional individual and the dilemmas he must cope with in this life rather than the next” (Kaula, 9). During the Renaissance, playwrights began scrapping the idea of telling the story of no one in particular (often a sort of “ideal” person) and opting instead to tell the stories of individuals. This meant that characters who were not always meant to be emulated – or rather, characters who were not supposed to provide any sort of message of the importance of communal interconnectedness or holy repentance in their story – were showing up on stage. These were individual characters with individual wants, and with these wants arose vices and sins. These characters were also often not humble commoners like the Everyman: they were people of influence, people who took great risks in the hopes of attaining great power, no matter the cost.
Considering that the birth of the Renaissance drama was immediately following the morality play, perhaps the two forms’ projections of selfhood are linked. If, as in Everyman, the denial of self leads to salvation, then the creation and maintenance of self found in Faustus must be in direct correlation to damnation, or at the very least, aligning oneself less with God and more with Satan. This proposal is supported by Pompa Banerjee in her essay “I, Mephastophilis: Self, Other, and Demonic Parody in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” in which she states that the play “magnifies the darkness implicit in the concept of artful self-fashioning in the Renaissance … for the individual is seldom self-begot; identity needs an Other in order to define itself” (Banerjee, 221). The “Other,” in this case, is clearly Satan, represented by Mephastophilis. In order to separate himself from the conformity of the Christian masses, Faustus had to align himself with the opposite of their allegiance – as a result, he defined and held his position as an individual, separate from the “community” that is so encouraged through morality plays.
The notion that there is still a chance for Faustus to change his ways and move toward God again (like Everyman) is constantly brought up and refuted, especially by the characters of the Good Angel and the Evil Angel, perhaps as a nod toward morality plays. At one point the Good Angel says to Faustus, “Faustus, repent, yet God will pity thee,” to which the Evil Angel retaliates, “Thou art a spirit, God cannot pity thee” (188-189). The idea that all people are equal in their connection to God is completely discredited in this play. Thus, at least in some cases, the self can be entirely separated from the whole of humanity. He had made his choice to align himself with Satan, and from the repercussions of that choice he could no longer back out of. After making their pact, Mephastophilis asks, “Speak, Faustus: do you deliver this as your deed?” to which Faustus responds, “Ay, take it; and the devil give thee good on’t” (111-112). Mephastophilis asks for confirmation that this is his own – and no one else’s – choice, and Faustus confirms for him that it is his and only his. Selfhood is thus strongly represented as being under an individual’s jurisdiction – it is ultimately their choice to do with it what they please.
Pride in the self is ultimately a pride in Satan – selfishness, as opposed to the selflessness of Everyman. But whether or not Faustus is meant to be portrayed as an evil person cannot be understood, for he is consistently shown to be conscious of the fact that his choices are his alone, and to blame anyone but himself (or by extension, Satan) is wrongful. As he is being dragged into Hell at the end of the play, he yells, “Cursed be the parents that engendered me! / No, Faustus, curse thy self, curse Lucifer” (103-104). Here he is shown to be taking account for his actions, removing blame from anyone else. Thus, it cannot be said that maintaining autonomous selfhood and being a completely morally corrupt person are inherently linked. What specifically Marlowe meant to say by questioning this connection is unclear. What is clear, however, is that English society’s move toward secularism in the 16th century allowed for him and his audiences to ponder on what it could be like to value the needs of the self over the wants of the whole.
Works Cited
Banerjee, Pompa. “I, Mephastophilis: Self, Other, and Demonic Parody in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.” Christianity & Literature 42.2 (1993): 221-241.
Kaula, David. “Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Faustus.” College English, vol. 22, no. 1, 1960, pp. 9–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/373857.
Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Simpson, James, et al. 10th ed., W.W. Norton, 2018.