Faustus and the Critic

...Such a drama would be worthy of Marlowe, or even Shakespeare—and a fitting ancestor to Goethe's Faust...

...His study of Marlowe's play is organized as a mystery story...

...Empson emphasizes that both the English Faust book and Marlowe depict the devils as mischievous, not really wicked or scary (unlike the German version...

...He explores earth and sky on the back of a dragon, and takes Helen of Troy as his mistress...

...Marlowe scholars must either accept Doctor Faustus as an inconsistent mishmash or else devise some ingenious explanation to reconcile its internal contradictions...

...This lurid story contained all the ingredients of a blockbuster— sex, religion, violence, hocus pocus—and indeed became a much-translated bestseller...

...Marlowe identified strongly with Faust, and he seems to have worked many of his own anxieties into the text: his ambiguous sexuality, his heterodoxy, his equivocal social status...

...At first this appears to be an abuse of subjectivity—the last scene of Doctor Faustus has long been considered as horrific as anything in literature...

...There would be no record remaining in this case, because it was illegal to mention government censorship...

...And among such explanations I can find none more plausible and comprehensive than the one we are given in Faustus and the Censor...

...The drama is available in two corrupt versions...

...I am inclined to suspect that the essays in Using Biography functioned for Empson as preliminary sketches to help him formulate the weightier arguments of Faustus and the Censor...

...He did not, moreover, hide his contempt for second-hand ideas, nor was he loath to express outré views: He insisted that the Christian God was a torturer and a bully, and believed academia had replaced the Church by molding itself in the Father's image to suppress original thinking...

...Empson is comfortable with this: "Both Faust and Meph use the language of passion about their different needs, and this gives a positive warmth to their relations while they are working together...

...the Church of England had not, and the English Faust book is ambiguous on this matter...

...As for the companionship of Mephastophilis and the doctor, many critics have noticed overtones of a homosexual love pact (echoing the playwright's own inclinations...

...In exchange, Faust agrees to forgo immortality—which he doubts anyway: "Come, I think Hell's a fable...

...It is the happiest death in all drama...

...Throughout the next hundred years, heresy trials clogged the courts, whole villages were burned to eradicate witchcraft, and people were assured by preachers and rulers that those who sought to pry into the secrets of the universe ended up in Hell...

...Jones has added a lucid Introduction on the background of Empson's manuscript and the history of the Faust legend...

...If so, an imperfect morality play has been lost...

...Personally, I hope Empson understood Marlowe correctly...

...Empson forces his readers to confront the crucial issue: Did Marlowe, out of self-loathing, damn a character so like himself...

...how he sold himself to the Devil in return for a fixed number of years, what strange feats he accomplished during that time, and how he finally reaped his well-meritedreward...

...Then one recalls the nagging questions Empson had raised: Why should a man of Marlowe's convictions want to write a Christian morality play, especially in support of the witch-hunters...

...The last two words of Faust are'Ah Mephastophilis,' and the censor could not rule how the actor was to speak them...

...Mephastophilis tells Marlowe's Faust that he can be " on earth as Jove is in the skies, /Lord and commander of these elements"—in other words, a Middle Spirit...

...The climax—and its revelation is essential to any discussion—is that both extant versions of the drama were bowdlerized by the theatrical licenser...

...yet if, as Empson maintains, the play was not meant to be a tragedy, the burlesque would be in keeping with its subversive spirit (Faust boxes the Pope's ears at one point) and would underline the fact that he is a folk hero, undeserving of punishment...

...If this had been his aim, would he have portrayed Faust sympathetically before exulting over his fall...

...Inits place, we can see the framework of a bold humanist affirmation of man's quest to know and live fully...

...The expanded B-text (1616) includes burlesque episodes and much bombastic padding (not by Marlowe), as well as a sadistic scene at the end in which Faust's belated remorse and torments are gloated over in a fashion hardly more refined than bear-baiting...

...The British critic and poet Sir William Empson struggled for at least 10 years to discover Marlowe's intention in writing this play...

...The B-text finale strikes an incongruous note, since Faust is elsewhere in the play a figure the audience can identify with...

...By the end of Faust's life, however, they had been condemned by both Rome and the Lutherans...

...When he died in 1985 he left behind a chaotic bundle of drafts and a thesis so radical as to seem absurd on first reading...

...One cannot overpraise Jones' labor...

...The historical Faust, a contemporary of Martin Luther, was Germany's most notorious Magus...

...Luther had condemned the belief in such fairy-like beings as superstition...

...Marlowe took further liberties: He even renders the name of Faust's otherworldly liaison as Mephastophilis ("no friend to Law...

...The ?-text, dated 1604, contains magnificent poetry, but the plot is in shreds because at least 500 lines have been cut...

...It was the nearest thing to a happy marriage in Marlowe...

...There is no denying that if the censor's reading of the play matched Empson's, expurgation would have been inevitable...

...Or did the daredevil hero represent the wish of his author to foil the powers that be...

...The consensus is that neither of these two bastardized scripts offers more than a fragmentary idea of what was evidently one of the strongest Elizabethan theatrical masterpieces...

...Most critics shy away from acknowledging such methodological solipsism—Empson candidly gloried in it...

...For instance, the comic interludes in Doctor Faustus have often been deplored as too jarring next to the horror...

...At the 1587 Frankfurt book fair, a Lutheran propagandist cashed in on the antiwitch hysteria with his Life of Doctor Johann Faustus, the renowned sorcerer and black magician...

...Like many religious sectarians of the time and many more today, Mephastophilis declares that damnation is merely a state of mind: "Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it, " he tells Faust in the latter's room...

...nothing happens, except that [Faust's] old friend advances upon him with open arms and a broad smile...

...His interpretation of the conclusion, though, is unique: "At the end...

...It made Faust into a folk hero, despite his awful fate...

...More than two centuries later, Goethe decided that such a humanistic paragon mustnotbe damned: In his Faust, Mephistopheles (the name is Greek for "no friend to light") loses his prey to Heaven at the 11th hour...

...Both magician and playwright were "low-class boys sent to university for their brains," and were always happier in taverns among bad company...

...Subsequently the protagonist's acquaintances convince him that he has damned himself, and Mephastophilis refuses to be reassuring for fear Faust will repent...

...Empson envisioned his manuscript as part of a book that would also compare the German Faustbuch with its English counterpart—the project of his friend and collaborator John Henry Jones...

...On these main points Empson's reading agrees with many others...

...Would he have ennobled the role of the Magus...

...He dies in the arms of his deceitful friend with immense relief, also gratitude, surprise, love, forgiveness, and exhaustion...

...Finally, the dread of suffering possesses him completely...

...Whether or not you buy Empson's thesis, it is hard not to admire his conception of the drama...

...The very free English rendition of the Faustbuch that appeared a few years after the original inspired Christopher Marlowe to write his Doctor Faustus—the last play he completed before his death in a tavern brawl in 1593 at the age of 29...

...Empson accepted no critical authority or system beyond his own intuition and close reading of a text...

...Empson surmises that Marlowe's plot concerned apact with a "Middle Spirit"—neither angel nor devil, but a soulless supernatural entity who would eventually cease to exist rather than live eternally in Heaven or Hell...

...The good news is that neither the authority of God nor Lucifer await him...

...The disorder of Empson's office was proverbial, and even in a completed work his mind tended to move in a bewildering number of directions at once—as readers of Seven Types of Ambiguity will have discovered...

...Marlowe dabbled in espionage, and his murder carries overtones of a political vendetta...

...One joke implicit in his posthumous Using Biography (1985) is that the biography used is Empson's own: For instance, it is his recollection of a music-box bird that reveals the inspiration for Yeats' golden automaton whose singing concludes "Sailing to Byzantium...

...No wonder Empson felt drawn to a heretical rebel like Marlowe, and to an intellectual pioneer like Faust...

...Writers & Writing FAUSTUS AND THE CRITIC BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The legend of Doctor Faustus, who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power, has intrigued readers since the late Renaissance...

...Above all, why does the play open with no mention of Hell or demons...

...Alchemy, astrology and similar blends of necromancy and fledgling science practiced by the Magi had begun to enjoy a revival just prior to Faust's career when the Catholic Church informally relaxed its medieval ban on scientific and occult inquiry...

...That was not in itself impolitic—even Queen Elizabeth kept a court magician, Doctor Dee, whom Marlowe probably knew...

...Granted, his fate is apt from a theological point of view, yet would this have mattered to Marlowe, a man whose contemporaries called him an atheist and claimed he rejected the afterlife...

...Instead, Jones has edited the critic's material into the independent Faustus and the Censor (Basil Blackwell, 226 pp., $24.95), a treatise worthy of a place alongside Empson's earlier Milton's God (1961) for its ability to shock conventional opinion...

...Magi considered themselves seekers after Divine Truth—the Christian equivalent of the Kabbalists...