7/28/2019 A Shapeless Mess

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Matthew Paul

A shapeless mess; a good beginning, a great ending but nothing in between.

Do you agree with this assessment of Dr Faustus?

Certainly the beginning and end of the play contain the scenes for which Dr Faustus is most

famous. The middle contains the comic scenes with low and high comedians being represented.

This certainly seems to lend the middle a somewhat piecemeal aspect as it is packed with numerous

disjointed scenes. The blank verse itself is testimony to the strength of the beginning and end, with

such brilliant lines like; O, what a world of profit and delight// Of power, of honour, of

omnipotence//Is promised to the studious artisan! This wonderful verse would seem to be far more

insightful and emotive than the bland prose of the comic scenes.

The powerful verse in the first speech is extraordinarily captivating and the audience are stunned by

Faustus sweeping ambition in the images A sound magician is a mighty god. We first see Faustusdesire to rise above his mortal powers here in this grandiose speech of how Tis magic, magic that

hath ravished me. The sudden and absolute turnaround of Faustus mind is shown in this quotation

as it echoes his earlier statement that SweetAnalytics, tis thou hast ravishedme! Yet now instead

of Aristotle it is necromantic skill that Faustus obsesses over. So too Faustus end is quite amazing

in the power of the verse and the vivacity of Marlowes language. We see a man utterly damned and

suddenly acutely aware of this; thou must be damned perpetually. He veers from resigned to

rabidly desperate and everywhere in between, scrabbling for ways out; One drop would save my

soul here he is making a last desperate bid to God to save him with a single drop of Christs blood.

We see quite how desperate he is as he realises God cannot save him and yet he continues Then

will I headlong run into the earth.//Earth, gape! Yet still it will not harbour him such is his

repugnance and damnation. Such is Marlowes brilliance in the final stages that he has Faustus make

a wonderfully ironic and cyclic reference to Pythagoras metempsychosis, mirroring his words in

the opening speech, and so Faustus is taken in a full turn back to wishing his acceptable, scholarly

books were true, rather than indulging in occult books as he has. The gothic elements in this speech

and he early conjuring scene make the beginning and the end particularly emphatic as the diabolic,

fiendish images and language hold a morbid, transgressive fascination for the audience and the

reader.

In stark contrast to this are the slapstick, unsophisticated scenes of comedy that almost seem to be

filler between the dramatic scenes at the beginning and end. The papal scene especially, contains all

the elements of slapstick comedy which, despite it being funny, far from stands up to the complexity

and drama of the Conjuring scene for example. The scenes with seven deadly sins, Duchess of

Vanholt, Emperor and others are very much disjointed set pieces in the middle and bear little

instrumentality to the plot or themes of the play as a whole. This represents a typical flaw of

Jacobean tragedy, for a tragedy Dr Faustus most certainly is, as we see the tragedy is elevated

beyond the domestic (unlike modern tragedy) and so the play takes on a fairly episodic form. This

may also have been due in large part to Marlowes source: The English Faust Book which itself has

a definite episodic or chronicle-like narrative.

7/28/2019 A Shapeless Mess

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Matthew Paul

However there is some evidence that the middle scenes parody, if not echo the plot in the main

scenes. Certainly I think it would be unfair to say they do not mirror many of the themes. For

example the goblet used by Rafe and Robin to conjure would almost certainly have been the same

prop as the goblet snatched from the Pope in the previous scene. Thus Marlowe interweaves the

plots as Faustus goblet appears to have been stolen by Robin and so the conjuring and

Mephistopheles appearance also echo the main plot. As individual scenes the intervening moments

certainly have emotive power, whether it is the riotous, sinister entertainment of the seven deadly

sins which Lucifer shows Faustus, or the diabolic beauty and luscious verse of Faustus as he falls for

her. However, whilst these scenes do have a certain congruity with the earlier and later scenes, The

Duchess of Vanholt, and The Emperor do not seem to fit for me. Finally the Prologue and Epilogue

perpetuate this view of the play as the Chorus explains to us how our sympathies are going to be

aroused by Faustus as a human rather than a despised diabolic man, and in the Epilogue Marlowe

gives us a masterfully ironic moral to the story that contains a critical edge; labelling religion as

oppressive as the chorus makes a distinction of the fact that it was the restrictions of heavenly

power that were to blame rather than Faustus brilliantly human capacity to wonder at unlawfulthings, thus we are left with an extremely powerful image, loaded with gothic overtones, as Faustus

is ultimately set down as the example of transgression for the audience and reader.