Background:
Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, the first master of blank verse, was born in 1564, and lived for twenty nine intriguing years The son of a shoemaker, he attended Cambridge University on a scholarship from the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he earned a Bachelor's degree. The scholarship had been given with the understanding that Marlowe would become a minister, but Marlowe seems to have had other ideas. Cambridge awarded him a M.A., but only at the behest of the Queen's Privy Council, possibly as part of his compensation for espionage conducted on the continent. He then left Cambridge to write plays for the blossoming theaters of London. A member of the School of Night, along with Sir Walter Raleigh and the mathematician John Dee, Marlowe was also suspected of homosexuality and atheism, and was actually picked up and questioned about the latter just days before his death in a barroom brawl--which itself has led to speculation about assassination--in 1593.
A sampling of the words others claimed to be Marlowe's:
Doctor Faustus
The play both partakes of traditional forms--it is in some ways a medieval
morality play, with its good and bad angels--and breaks with them--Faustus, for
instance is the hero of this tragedy, which contains a classic chorus, but unlike
the classic tragic character (though similar to Marlowe's own Tamburlaine) "...
he is born of parents base of stock" (1.1.11). The proud Doctor Faustus himself
appears as a liminal figure, straddling the ground between residual and emergent
modes of behavior and thought, presenting to Marlowe's audience an aspect at
times inspiring, but at others frightening, or worse, despicable. Faustus sells
his soul for knowledge and power, but gets very little of either.
Before reading the play students were asked to keep in mind three questions:
What is knowledge? Where does it come from? What are its uses?
They are then asked to respond to those questions with a view towards our present world, and in light of Doctor Faustus.
What similarities or differences do you discern? Is knowledge out there somewhere, waiting to be found? Do we create knowledge? What motivates research? What ethical questions arise? What is the relationship between the issues in this play and 20th century issues like splitting the atom and genetic cloning.
At the play's outset it is clear that for Faustus, as for many at the time, knowledge was found in books, and in the play's first scene Faustus chafes against the limitations this has imposed. He has mastered--and now wishes to discard--the works of Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and finally, Jerome's Bible. He wishes instead to have magic books, books that seem to contain forbidden knowledge, recalling at once the story of Eden, but also keeping to the notion that all knowledge which humanity was capable of, was that which God allowed to be revealed. (Students are informed of the scholastic tradition, and the work of explicators of Greek texts.) To do the work of a scientist, to investigate the natural world, was to attempt to read the book of nature. The ethical question up to this time revolved around whether, in failing, one was simply a poor reader, or if the text was intentionally hidden, and one had inquired too far. So for Faustus it seems knowledge still comes from books, but they are unauthorized texts, secret papers full of information somehow pirated by the devil:
But there is a significant break with this traditional view of knowledge and its sources in the play, and it concerns astronomy. Faustus puts to Mephostophilis a series of questions in Act II about the nature of the universe, receiving standard Ptolemaic replies to all. The audience would recognize instantly the rejection of the Copernican theory, which was well known in a casual way to so many in England (in no small part due to Thomas Digges). It is likely better for Marlowe that he not distract from his drama by inserting a controversial opinion, but this matter continues offstage. The chorus tells us,
So even as Marlowe uses the metaphor of the book, he presents us with a Faustus who is still unsatisfied with the authority of books and of Mephostophilis, and who conducts empirical research. When the chorus speaks at the beginning of the fourth act, we find that Faustus has returned home to Wittenberg where he is questioned about
Faustus lectures on astronomy in the place where the Copernican theory was first taught. Yet all of this action has occurred out of sight, and therefore, though it is interesting in light of past work on the play to find and instance where Marlowe seems to say one thing, and yet believe another, of more significance in the context of this course is this moment when knowledge does not seem to come from books, when authority of tradition is rejected in favor of gathering new data for evaluation.
Doctor Faustus Conjures
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