Doctor Faustus is a spiritual tragedy, a play centred on what cannot be staged, the invisible, immortal soul. Part of what is so disturbing about the pact that consigns in his own blood Faustus’ soul to the devil is the ontological uncertainty over how exactly such material, corporeal forms, can bind the immaterial soul. Is it, in fact, the pact that damns Faustus? What does it mean to sell one’s soul? Faustus gains no new knowledge: Mephistopheles’s answers to his cosmological questions are freshman truisms, and Faustus is stupidly blind to the evidence of his own senses:

FAUSTUS Come, I think hell’s a fable.

…

MEPHISTOPHELES

But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,
For I am damnèd and am now in hell. (5.129, 138–9)

Faustus lives for twenty-four years after he signs the pact, but in some sense he is already damned.

A witty student once remarked that the play has ‘a beginning, a muddle, and an end’,18 and Marlowe may not have written all its middle scenes. But there is a terrible bathos in Faustus’ adventures. His journeys seem aimless; time is uncertain (the chronology shifts uneasily to the reign of Charles V) and empty, structured only by episodes of trickery. Elizabethan audiences probably enjoyed Faustus’ pope-baiting as a liberating defiance of an exploded religious solemnity. Yet there is something troubling here. Magic, in sixteenth-century eyes, was an inverted religion, and, when Faustus and Mephistopheles are anathematized, though they ‘beat the FRIARS, and fling fireworks among them’ (8.99SD), they do also leave. It is not quite clear how much spiritual power the old religion still commands.

The clowning scenes too seem confused and irrelevant. One of their functions is parodic. Wagner is a sorcerer’s apprentice whose taking Robin the Clown into his service reflects ironically on Faustus’ ambiguous master-servant relationship with Mephistopheles. Faustus experiences his longings as appetites to be glutted, and thinks the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins ‘feeds [his] soul’ (7.163): Hazlitt called it ‘a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness’.19 The Clown’s hunger is comparable (‘he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton’, 4.8–9), but more safely comic. The devils Robin and Rafe conjure up (remember that in the main plot Mephistopheles is free not to answer Faustus’ summons) are as familiar as their lice. There is never a sense that their souls are in danger, the clowns are safe with these devils: they are the devils you know, and they play by the older rules. When Mephistopheles punishes them by turning them into animals, they look forward to satisfying their humble appetites: Robin will ‘get nuts and apples enow’ as an ape; Rafe’s head, as a dog, ‘will never be out of the pottage pot’ (9.49, 51). Faustus’ jokey adventures, by contrast, are pointless distractions from the appalling reality of his damnation, and, as the ‘fatal time’ draws closer, they are full of grim anticipation: ‘What, dost think I am a horse-doctor?’ he mockingly asks the Horse-courser, who later pulls off his leg in innocent anticipation of Mephistopheles’s threats to dismember him; and then immediately reels to a sudden apprehension of despair: ‘What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?’ (11.30, 27–8, 29). The play’s middle scenes accord with a contradictory Elizabethan aesthetic, violently juxtaposing the serious and the comic.

Its final scenes are highly concentrated. With Faustus’ return to Wittenberg, space and time contract, and Marlowe exploits the audience’s consciousness of the approaching end. Body and soul are again prominent. ‘Belly-cheer’ at the scholars’ feast and lust for Helen ‘glut the longing of [his] heart’s desire’ (13.6, 82), but we are watching a man lose his soul. The good and evil angels no longer appear, their allegorical contest replaced by one between Helen and Mephistopheles and the mysterious Old Man who suddenly materializes with each of Helen’s appearances and calls on Faustus to repent. Helen takes both his soul and his bodily substance: Faustus is committing the sin of demoniality, carnal intercourse with an evil spirit (one of the play’s editors thought this his unforgivable sin).20 The Old Man draws attention to other body fluids, calling on Faustus to ‘drop blood, and mingle it with tears’ (13.39) in a highly corporeal appeal to the redeemer whose blood Faustus will see streaming ‘in the firmament’ in his last hour. Instead, Faustus again uses it to sign away his soul. The bodily and the spiritual are interfused. Faustus has taken a ‘surfeit of deadly sin that hath damned both body and soul’, and when he finds himself unable to pray – ‘I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them’ (14.75, 11–12, 31–2) – it is all the more disturbing that ‘they’ are not, to our eyes, there.

When the Old Man dies, his body tormented but his soul untouched, he walks off the stage into another world (‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God’, 13.118), and we are made acutely aware of that other world at the end of the play. As in the first scene, Faustus is alone in his study; but he ‘sees’ Heaven and Hell. Time ‘really’ passes in this scene’s ‘one bare hour’ – the clock strikes it – and beyond it, ‘perpetually’ (14.63, 64), stretches damnation. Faustus’ monologue is a frenzied attempt to stop the cosmic clock, but his magic is useless: ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (14.72–3). His punishment approaches with the inexorability of a natural law.