It was what you accused someone else of. The unity of Christendom, at once political and religious, was split by a confessional division which turned each side’s deepest spiritual convictions to derision. For Protestants, Catholicism was a murderous conspiracy to uphold the hegemony of Spain and the papacy; in Catholic eyes, Protestants were merely seditious heretics. Much of continental Europe was involved in religious wars. Marlowe knew this world – he had been in France as well as in Holland14 – and it colours the mockeries and solemnities of the plays.

It is literally the setting of The Massacre at Paris, which dramatizes the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its aftermath. The play opens with an ecumenical marriage, but within moments the cast is divided by the key ritual that separated Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics go to mass ‘to honour this solemnity’ (which Catherine de Medici promises – aside – to ‘dissolve with blood and cruelty’, 1.24–5), leaving the Protestants to express their satisfaction at the discomfiture of the Catholic leader the duke of Guise, and their hope of making the ‘Gospel flourish in this land’ (56). Guise is a monster of politic atheism – ‘My policy hath framed religion. / Religion: O Diabole!’ (2.62–3) – who engineers the massacre to further his own ambition for the crown. The killing is done with grim sacrilegious humour which ‘reproduces with remarkable accuracy forms of ritualized violence peculiar to the French religious wars’:15 Guise kills a preacher with a mockery of a Protestant sermon (‘“Dearly beloved brother” – thus ’tis written. He stabs him’, 7.5); church-bells sound throughout. The play is virulently anti-Catholic; but, although the text in which it survives is too poor to make certain judgements, its satire seems also to cover the anti-Guisard backlash which follows. Anjou, who has gleefully joined in the killing, becomes king and coolly orders the deaths of the Catholic leaders, only to be slain himself by a treacherous friar. His death allows the Protestant Navarre to gain the throne; but one cannot be sure how complacently an Elizabethan audience would have heard the king’s dying call on his minion to ‘slice the Catholics’ (24.99), nor Navarre’s promise to continue the cycle of violence through revenge. The play’s very ‘orthodoxy’ is disquieting.

In a sense, this is also true of Doctor Faustus. A dark Morality, the play ‘tells the world-story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come’.16 Marlowe’s play should not be confused with later developments of the Faust-legend (‘the world-story’): it is a dramatization of the anonymous German Faustbook, which has been called ‘at once a cautionary tale and a book of marvels, a jest-book and a theological tract’.17 Many of the play’s least critically popular scenes are necessary, famous parts of the story Marlowe took from the Faustbook, a distinctive product of post-Reformation Germany, with its anxieties about magic and religion, knowledge and salvation. This is the world in which the play, especially in its opening scenes, is quite precisely set: the unheroic, academic world of Wittenberg, Luther’s own university, evoked by the technical language of ‘scholarism’ (Prologue, 16) and theology which the characters speak. Faustus’ ambitions too are localized: the desire to ‘be as cunning as Agrippa’ (1.119) alludes ironically to Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who explored the practice of learned magic in one book (De Occulta Philosophia, 1510, published 1533), and then renounced the follies of learning in another (De Vanitate Scientiarum, 1531); Faustus’ wish to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’ (1.95) makes him a contemporary of Spain’s wars in Northern Europe.

Faustus dreams of ‘omnipotence’ and hopes ‘All things that move between the quiet poles [of the universe] / Shall be at my command’ (1.56, 58–9); instead, he becomes, like Mephistopheles, ‘servant to great Lucifer’ (3.41) and a stage-conjuror of a type familiar from other Elizabethan plays (such as the heroes of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber, both c. 1589). The story told in Marlowe’s play, in fact, is well on the way to its ‘degeneration’ in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows – the last being the form in which Goethe first knew it. Yet it is also a spectacle of damnation.

This makes it all the more disturbing that we do not know quite what we are seeing. Consider Faustus’ first speech, his survey of the arts and decision to practise magic. The spatial setting, with Faustus turning the pages of books ‘in his study’ (1.0SD), is exact. But is this happening in real time? Are we actually watching him make his fatal decision, or is the speech a symbolic condensation of a longer process? Is this the speech of a presenter in a Morality play, or of a character in a tragedy? The soliloquy bespeaks a character with an acute inner subjectivity (Faustus names himself obsessively throughout the play), but one who still receives the ministrations of good and evil angels. The action here, like the play as a whole, is fascinatingly poised between older and still evolving dramatic forms.

There are comparable – fearful – uncertainties in Faustus’ encounters with the devil. Mephistopheles is a new kind of devil, quiet, melancholy, menacing in the very honesty with which he explains his coming ‘to get [Faustus’] glorious soul’. And he brings a new, spatially disquieting Hell with him in his own ‘fainting soul’: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ At first he comes as a familiar ‘Devil’; later, he always accompanies Faustus in the guise of ‘an old Franciscan friar’ (3.50, 84,78, 23SD, 26). Since Faustus wears the robes and cross of a Doctor of Divinity (‘a divine in show’, 1.3), the stage is occupied – apparently – by two religious figures, both of whom (since Faustus bargains to ‘be a spirit in form and substance’, 5.97) are in fact evil spirits. Wagner’s mock-academic question about his master – ‘is not he corpus naturale?’ (2.20–21) – thus has disturbing ironic force. What we see onstage may not be all that is there. Hence the stories of early performances of the play being disrupted by real devils: there is always the danger that a real spirit might answer the actor’s summons.