Adapted from Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, from W.W. Norton & Company, September 2025.
Sometime in the late 1580s, Christopher Marlowe came upon a book that jolted him. Entitled The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, it was an English translation, done by someone who signed himself “P.F. Gent.,” of a text originally published in German. It professed to be the true story of a notorious magician named Johann Faust. There seems to have been an actual person of this name in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Germany, a Johann Georg Faust who traveled widely performing magic tricks, casting horoscopes, practicing alchemy, and claiming to possess mysterious powers. His career became the stuff of wild legend, and the account that reached Marlowe was full of magical flights through the heavens, carriages drawn by fire-breathing dragons, and paramours conjured up from the spirits of the dead, all woven together with farcical episodes drawn from popular jest books.
None of this would have been of obvious appeal to Marlowe, given the plays and the poems he had already written, but the tangle of fantastic adventures narrated in the English Faust book was wrapped around a core of theological transgression in pursuit of power and hidden knowledge. It was this core that evidently seized the attention of the former theology student at Cambridge University. The itinerant magician, Marlowe read, was not a typical charlatan, coaxing pennies from the crowd with his shopworn bag of tricks. He claimed or was thought to be something far more alarming than a showman. In exchange for scientific enlightenment, forbidden experiences, and superhuman powers, he had sold his soul to the devil.
Born in a small town in central Germany, the story goes, Faustus attends university in Wittenberg, where he studies theology, earning the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He is well on his way to a brilliant academic career, but he is secretly drawn to the study of necromancy and conjuration. One night in a dark wood, he draws a mystic circle around himself, and making many special characters in the dust, he calls up a spirit named Mephistopheles. The spirit’s initial apparition is terrifying: trees bow their tops to the ground, the whole forest shakes to the sound of innumerable lions roaring, lightning flashes, a dragon hovers in the air, a cry echoes as if of souls in torment, and a strange flame descends and turns into a fiery globe.
To continue the conjuration takes great courage, but Faustus persists, and out of the globe emerges a burning man who eventually takes on the appearance of a Franciscan friar—the first of the English Faust book’s many swipes at the Catholic Church. On the following day the spirit appears in the conjuror’s chamber, where they negotiate an agreement. In return for giving himself, body and soul, to Lucifer, Faustus will be granted a period of twenty-four years during which he will receive whatever his heart desires. At the end of this period, he will be fetched away. Faustus confirms the agreement by opening a vein, writing out the terms in his own blood, and signing his name.
Having taken this fatal step, Faustus begins to ask Mephistopheles such questions as the precise nature and location of hell, the torments of the damned, the possibility of an ultimate reconciliation with God, and the like. The devil is compelled by the agreement to reply truthfully, but the answers bring the magician no comfort: Lucifer and his followers fell through pride; their only satisfaction is to lure souls to their damnation; God is their eternal enemy; there will be no forgiveness. Faustus has scientific questions as well—the cause of eclipses of the moon, the distance and height of the poles, etc.—but the answers to these leave him no happier.
Persuaded that he can do nothing to save himself, Faustus embraces whatever pleasures he can conceive to fill his allotted years. The bulk of the remaining narrative—several hundred pages chronicles these pleasures, a confused jumble of erotic adventures, journeys through the air, encounters with the rich and powerful, shrewd tricks played on his enemies and on the gullible, all interleaved with periodic attacks of despair and failed attempts to repent. Along the way he converses pleasantly with the Holy Roman Emperor in Innsbruck, conjures the spirits of Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy, sleeps with six of the sultan’s concubines in Istanbul, and visits Rome, where he makes himself invisible and enters the innermost chambers of the Vatican. There, observing the pope and his cardinals—a pack of “gluttons, drunkards, whoremongers, breakers of wedlock”—all gorging themselves, he gives himself (and the Protestant readers) the satisfaction of striking the pope on the face.
In the end, having returned to Wittenberg, Faustus delivers a farewell oration to his students, urging them to be good Christians and to avoid his terrible fate. That same night, between midnight and one a.m., a violent storm arises; from inside Faustus’ house, the frightened students hear a noise as of hissing snakes. In the morning, when they go to see what has happened, they find the great magician lying dead. “All the hall lay besprinkled with blood, his brains cleaving to the wall: for the Devil had beaten him from one wall against another, in one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth, a pitiful and fearful sight to behold.”
It is not immediately apparent that this rambling combination of moral parable, Protestant satire, and jokebook could have been made into a coherent play by anyone, let alone by the author of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s works had gone out of their way to challenge conventional morality; the story of Faustus, aside from its farcical episodes, seemed designed to reinforce the most rigidly orthodox and punitive vision of the Christian faith. But he embraced the story all the same, not only the fatal pact with the devil but the whole jumble of adventures, from pummeling the pope and hobnobbing with the great all the way to indulging in sensual pleasures and tricking fools out of their money.
Marlowe set to work using theatrical skills he had perfected in The Jew of Malta. A succession of cruel, often grotesquely comical stories, culminating in the wicked protagonist’s violent end: this is precisely what Marlowe might have been expected to make out of his source. The actor who had played the Jew, Edward Alleyn, would have a similar part in another savage farce, and the audience would laugh and shudder. But something strange happened, something Marlowe himself might not have anticipated. He created in Faustus a tragic hero unprecedented not merely in his own writing but in all of English drama.
The play begins deep within Faustus’ mind and follows his restless struggle to make a crucial life decision. Today, we are so familiar with the dramatic representation of a powerful, complex inner life, largely through the intimacy of the soliloquy, that we somehow assume it was always an available artistic resource. But in Doctor Faustus, it emerged on stage for the first time. Along with Marlowe’s other contemporaries, Shakespeare was watching its astonishing emergence. It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done.
In writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe tapped into the world he knew firsthand. The play’s opening setting, as the prologue announces, is a scholar’s study. Its action is driven forward not by the sword or by gold but by the dangerous allure of books. “Necromantic books are heavenly,” the hero exclaims. Ardent student that he is, he enlists as his teachers two experienced German magicians who can guide him in his reading. “Faustus,” they tell him, “these books, thy wit, and our experience / Shall make all nations to canonize us.” He must master a daunting series of “Lines, circles, seals, letters and characters.” Once he has done so, they are confident that the whole world will worship them.
The teachers acknowledge that they themselves cannot reach the necessary level of mastery; they know they lack the “wit”—the sheer intellectual firepower—that Faustus possesses. They can provide him access to the books and the basic instruction he needs, but he will have to take it from there. “First I’ll instruct thee in the rudiments,” one of them says, “And then wilt thou be perfecter than I.” The play captures a teacher’s excitement at encountering a spectacularly brilliant student, one who absorbs with uncanny quickness what the teacher grasps only laboriously and imperfectly. It captures a student’s pride at being recognized for his brilliance. Above all, it captures the joy of serious study.
Buried in the background of these moments may be traces of Marlowe’s own earliest instruction “in the rudiments”: his still unexplained access to the literacy that no one else in his family possessed, the excitement he must have felt—that any child feels—when he was first able to sound out the marks made in black ink, the particular satisfaction that he must have derived from acquiring Latin. That acquisition brought with it the dream of extraordinary things. And it was this dream that Marlowe’s tragedy deftly turned into brilliant nightmare.
In a scene that terrified contemporary audiences (and that is depicted in a woodcut on the title page of the first printed edition), Faustus sets about putting his serious study into practice. He draws a magic circle on the ground, writes mystic characters and signs within it, and then recites a long Latin incantation. The incantation is left untranslated. If they listened very attentively, some of the better-educated members in the galleries might have understood it, but it is clearly meant to impress precisely by being opaque. It relies on the magic of strange words—Acheron Beelzebub, Demogorgon—and the special resonance of the Latin language.
Since the Act of Uniformity in 1559, the Mass throughout Queen Elizabeth’s realm could legally be celebrated only in English, the Latin Mass having been banned. But many of those who crowded into the theater in Marlowe’s time could have still heard in Faustus’ incantation parodic echoes of the illegal Catholic ritual: “Per Jehovam, Gehennam, et consecratam aquam quam nunc spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facio.” (“By Jehovah, Gehenna, and the holy water I now sprinkle, and by the sign of the cross I now make.”) Faustus is celebrating a Black Mass.
Marlowe spent years at Cambridge poring over books that were meant to prepare him for the priesthood. Now he was using the fruits of his scholarship to entertain London audiences with the spectacle of a character poring over books and using the fruits of his scholarship to conjure up the devil. From the perspective of the Puritans, who regarded the theater as Satan’s playground, it was Marlowe who had betrayed the proper purpose of learning and turned his theological studies into devil worship. For neither the playwright nor his character does this enterprise signal a repudiation of learning. All of Marlowe’s plays, including Doctor Faustus, entailed a deep dive into books.
And what does Faustus do as soon as he has mastered the books his magician teachers have given him and signed away his soul? He asks Mephistopheles to bring him more books: “a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations,” “a book where I might see all characters and planets of the heavens,” and “one book more... wherein I might see all plants, herbs, and trees that grow upon the earth.” The play is nominally set in Wittenberg, but we are eerily close to the library at Corpus Christi College or to the headmaster’s library at the King’s School in Canterbury, where Marlowe must have first encountered the seductive, subversive, magical power of books.
The prologue goes on to provide a crucial piece of information: Faustus’ origins were lower-class. His parents, like Marlowe’s own, were “base of stock,” yet through sheer intelligence, he managed to get from the town of his birth to a prestigious university. Like Marlowe’s Master of the Arts course at Cambridge, Faustus’ education at Wittenberg centered on training to be a Protestant minister, but in the play’s long opening soliloquy, he flatly declares his intention to be only what he calls “a divine in show.” Notwithstanding the years of preparation and the promising career that lies ahead, something inside him resists his ostensible vocation. Now, thinking about his future, he reviews the disciplines that he has studied, from philosophy to medicine to law to theology. In these studies, he has experienced the special thrill that comes with serious intellectual engagement, the feeling of blissful absorption that Marlowe must have known throughout his years at school. Ancient books that no doubt struck his fellow students as burdensome and boring filled him with pleasure that bordered on the erotic. “Sweet Analytics,” Faustus says of Aristotle’s treatise on logic, “thou hast ravished me.”
Philosophy is not the only subject that has had this effect on him. Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus. “Where the philosopher leaves off,” he says to himself, quoting Aristotle (in Latin translation), “the physician begins.” In the study of medicine, too, Faustus has known intellectual passion and success. He has already made important discoveries. Thanks to him, “whole cities have escaped the plague,” and he has reaped both praise and profit. “Be a physician Faustus,” he tells himself, “heap up gold, / And be eternized for some wondrous cure.” His mind then turns to two further disciplines he has mastered. One of these, law, now leaves him cold. He may have begun, like so many law students, thinking that its principal focus is the pursuit of justice, but it is, he has concluded, entirely dominated by questions of property. Faustus is not indifferent to money, but accumulating wealth cannot for him be the whole point of a career: “Too servile and illiberal for me.” The fourth and final subject that he has studied, theology, seems to him the best of the lot.
The problem, however, is that with each of these disciplines, Faustus feels he has reached the end. That is, he has grasped their core, or so he thinks, and has therefore exhausted whatever interest they once had for him. As he considers them in turn, rehearsing key tenets he has committed to memory, he experiences a growing disillusionment bordering on disgust:
Bene dissesrere est finis logices.
Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?
Affords this art no greater miracle?
Then read no more, thou hast attained that end.
Summum bonum medicinae sanitas:
The end of physic is our body’s health.
Why Faustus, has thou not attained that end?
This study [the law] fits a mercenary drudge
Who aims at nothing but external trash. (1.1.7ff)
Only theology continues to retain some interest for him, but then, as he contemplates the New Testament and broods about its basic propositions, this interest too begins to crumble. The dominant theologians and ministers of Marlowe’s time, the kind of men he studied under and whose long weekly sermons he listened to, did not generally traffic in reassurances. Deeply influenced by Calvin, they embraced the doctrine of predestination according to which God from the beginning of time had chosen those who would be saved and those who would be damned. The choice was not determined by anything that believers or unbelievers would or could actually do. Having absorbed Calvin’s doctrine, Faustus knows that salvation exists only for those whom God has chosen, and he knows too that you cannot simply will yourself to have a faith that you do not possess. What he is left with then is the dual certainty that he will sin and that the reward of sin is death. “That’s hard,” he says to himself.
The Scriptures repeatedly urge sinners to repent and look to God, but there is no guarantee, as contemporary preachers stressed, that God will regard the repentance as adequate and look back with favor upon the sinner. Several times in the play, a character called the Good Angel appears and urges the magician to leave his wicked ways and rely on God’s mercy, but there is, as Marlowe makes clear, something absurd about thinking that a timely reminder might return Faustus to the happy assurance of pious faith. The salvation of the elect, Calvin wrote, depends on God’s “free mercy, without any respect of the worthiness of man.” Conversely, the vast majority of humans, however well they behave, are feared to be excluded from eternal life. They will instead be forever tortured in hell, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.
At this distance, it is difficult to reconstruct how large numbers of people could have been persuaded to embrace principles so profoundly disturbing. As Calvin himself understood, predestination is a dangerous doctrine. To inquire into it too closely, he warned, was to “pierce into the secret closets of the wisdom of God: whereinto if any man too careless and boldly break in, he shall both not attain wherewith to satisfy his curiousness, and he shall enter into a maze whereof he shall find no way to get out again.” Although they embraced the doctrine, the authorities of the Church of England in Marlowe’s time were well aware of the risk. “For curious and carnal persons, lacking the spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s predestination,” declares one of the Thirty-Nine Articles that articulated the core beliefs of the Church of England, “is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either in desperation, or into wretchlessness [i.e., recklessness] of most unclean living.” Most people were meant to rest content with the hope that they were among the elect and to leave any probing into God’s secret closets to a tiny handful of spiritual experts.
But the Faustus of Christopher Marlowe is emphatically not one of those obedient souls disposed to keep his intellectual curiosity in check, any more than the reckless Marlowe himself was. He draws what seems to him an inescapable conclusion:
Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die.
Ay, we must die, an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sarà, sarà,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu. (1.1.46-50)
Che sarà, sarà. What lies on the other side of this conclusion is his decision to cross the line into forbidden territory and practice the arts of magic.
The lure is akin to the dream of domination that inspired Tamburlaine, but Faustus promises himself something even greater than anything the Scythian conqueror achieved. Faustus’ goal is nothing less than to be the all-powerful, all-knowing master of the universe. “A sound magician,” he says to himself, “is a mighty god.” In turning to magic, Faustus is not repudiating the scholarly passion that enabled him to master a succession of academic disciplines. Rather, he is finding a new, more satisfying outset for that passion. A direct line runs from his earlier response to Aristotle—“Sweet Analytics, ’tis thou hast ravished me”—to his embrace of necromancy: “’Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me.”
For many centuries, the expansion of knowledge by and for itself had been a goal, and it led to spectacular achievements in the Middle Ages, including Isidore of Seville’s massive Etymologiae, a seventh-century encyclopedic compilation of “everything that it is necessary to know,” and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius, a thirteenth-century compendium of history, natural science, and doctrine totaling more than 3 million words. Faustus shares something of the ambition that motivated these earlier attempts to plumb nature’s treasury and assemble all knowledge. He is bursting with questions about the nature of things: “Are there many spheres above the moon?” “Are all celestial bodies but one globe?” “Have they all one motion?” “Why are not conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses all at one time, but in some years we have more, in some less?” With the aid of his spirits, Faustus says, he will “resolve me of all ambiguities.” But his ultimate purpose is different from that of the old encyclopedists, and that difference marks a key break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
As the vision of what magic would enable Faustus to do swells up in him—“How am I glutted with conceit of this!” he cries—his mind races through one enterprise after another:
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates. (1.1.84-87)
These are not disinterested scientific inquiries; nor are they impossible dreams like raising the wind or rending the clouds. Instead, they are sensual extravagances of the kind in which European monarchs and their wealthiest followers in the sixteenth century were actually indulging themselves. For his models, Marlowe did not have to look across the Channel to Philip II of Spain or François I of France. Only a short time earlier, he had been a student cloistered in Corpus Christi College reading heavy tomes of theology; now he had before him the spectacle of his patron, Sir Walter Ralegh, who wore a sable-trimmed cloak festooned with pearls and whose agents brought him sassafras, maize, pearls, and above all, tobacco from the “new-found” land of Virginia. Faustus enacts the dream of linking Marlowe’s two worlds, of translating the specialized knowledge of scholarship into the acquisition of limitless luxuries.
The play makes explicit the exploitation that underlies these luxuries. It is precisely such exploitation that Faustus’ magic power promises to confer upon him:
As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,
So shall the subjects of every element
Be always serviceable. (1.1.123-25)
“Indian Moors”—a phrase that jumbles together the racial and religious others of East and West—denote the native peoples of the Americas who were, as Marlowe knew, being worked to death by the Spanish colonists in silver mines and sugarcane fields. Hovering somewhere in the background is the great Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas’ searing expose, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Describing in graphic detail the horrors inflicted on people robbed, raped, set upon by dogs, and mutilated, Las Casas likened the conquistadores to devils and demanded that the whole vicious enterprise be halted. But the riches flowing into Spanish coffers were irresistibly alluring, and the colonists were licensed to continue their work. Through his knowledge of magic, Faustus intends to make the devils work directly for him.
The power over the human and natural world to which Faustus aspires is the power of European colonists at their most ruthless, the power to make everything and everyone “serviceable.” But Faustus himself does not need to wield a sword in order to gain his end. The magician’s vision of how his domination will be achieved befits the fact that he is not a soldier but a scholar. It is through study that he will master certain complex instructions or rules—we would now call them algorithms—that will confer upon him a godlike power.
Since there is almost nothing of this vision in the English Faust book, Marlowe’s likely inspiration was his friend Thomas Harriot’s account of how the English could expect to make the peoples they encountered in the New World docile and obedient. “They thought,” Harriot had written, that the technological devices we showed them “were rather the works of gods than of men.” Faustus echoes this claim: “A sound magician is a mighty god.” In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe grasped Harriot’s most radical implication: liberated from all theology-based moral constraints, the pursuit of knowledge is about the pursuit not of virtue but of power. A few years later, Francis Bacon would famously write that “knowledge is power,” an aphorism repeated in the mid-seventeenth century by Bacon’s former secretary, Thomas Hobbes. In our own time, the French philosopher Michel Foucault analyzed what he called power/knowledge (le savoir-pouvoir).
Marlowe’s Faustus is the first great avatar of power/knowledge. For him, knowledge is not something set apart from the effort to control and exploit the human and natural world. It is the key element for the accumulation of power, while at the same time, power is the key constitutive agent for the accumulation of more and more knowledge. In Marlowe’s imagination, the dream of limitless riches, sensual indulgence, and hidden worldwide networks all come together with the goal of secretly moving others around to one’s own advantage, crushing competitors, and manipulating nature.
In an oddly prescient moment in the play, the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt tells her guest Faustus that she is having a craving: “Were it now summer, as it is January and the dead time of the winter, I would desire... a dish of ripe grapes.” “That’s nothing!” Faustus exclaims as he sends Mephistopheles off to fetch them. When a few moments later the devil enters with grapes, Faustus explains to the astonished duchess that there are two hemispheres in the world: “When it is here winter with us, in the contrary circle it is summer with them.” It took only the devil’s air travel to satisfy her craving. “Believe me, Master Doctor,” she tells him, “they be the best grapes that e’er I tasted in my life before.” We are in our familiar world, but it is a world that Marlowe could only imagine as the consequence of a fatal compact with the devil.
In Marlowe’s play, as in his German source, Faustus initially conjures up a hideous devil whom he peremptorily orders to go away and return in the more agreeable form of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles tells the conjuror that the incantations in themselves did not actually compel him to appear. “I came now hither of my own accord,” he says, drawn by the prospect of getting Faustus’ soul. It is not clear whether this claim is true or false; after all, the devil is the master of deceit. In a farcical scene later in the play, Faustus’ clownish servant, Robin, finds his master’s book and recites a garbled form of the conjuration: Polypragmos Belseborams framanto pacostiphos tostu Mephistopheles. Lo and behold, the angry Mephistopheles appears, complaining that “From Constantinople am I hither come / Only for the pleasure of these damned slaves” (3.2.36-37).
Whatever the force of the magical formulas, there is nothing mechanical or automatic in the encounter between Faustus and Mephistopheles. Instead, the devil has an intense desire to recruit the magician—“O, what will not I do to obtain his soul?”—and the magician feels an equally intense excitement at being recruited: “Had I as many souls as there be stars, / I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.” The play brilliantly captures the courtship dance that leads to the demonic compact—the fraught conversations, the misgivings, assurances, and promises, the approach to the fatal moment after which there is no turning back. The scenes are among the most remarkable and psychologically penetrating that Marlowe ever wrote, and with good reason: they are charged with the decision that shaped his life, the decision to join Queen Elizabeth’s secret service.
If the scenes in Doctor Faustus are any indication, the person who recruited Marlowe to work for the spy service was surprisingly candid. The devil does not pretend to be other than he is. “What are you that live with Lucifer?” Faustus asks. “Unhappy spirits,” Mephistopheles replies, that “are forever damned with Lucifer.” “Where are you damned?” he asks the devil; “In hell,” comes the reply. Faustus immediately follows up, as if he has detected a lie: “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” Mephistopheles’ answer is devastating: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Marlowe was famous as the master of the “mighty line”—grand, often exotic words—but these ten simple monosyllables are as powerful as anything he ever wrote.
Such candor, one might think, would defeat the devil’s whole purpose, but the effect, as Marlowe depicts it, is exactly the opposite. Faustus becomes ever more determined to sign away his soul. The devil continues with an account of how excruciating it is to lose everlasting bliss, but Faustus responds with a kind of contempt. “What,” he asks dismissively, “is great Mephistopheles so passionate / For being deprived of the joys of heaven?” And then, swollen with narcissistic self-congratulation: “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude.” Egotism here is twisted together with a strange form of denial.
As in certain intimate conversations where the pain of what is being said is too great to handle, Faustus simply refuses to credit what his companion is saying. “Hell hath no limits,” Mephistopheles explains: “Where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be,” to which Faustus replies, “Come, I think hell’s a fable.” When Mephistopheles continues to insist—“I am damned and am now in hell”—Faustus shuts the conversation down. If this is hell, he says, “I’ll willingly be damned here. What? Walking, disputing, etc.?”
As an MA student, Marlowe would have fully imbibed the dark warnings of Calvinist theology, and nothing in the life he had lived at Cambridge and in London could have given him any assurance that he was one of the elect rather than one of the damned. It is possible that as he completed Doctor Faustus, he was gripped, despite all his vaunted skepticism, by a personal fear of damnation. “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,” intones the chorus, after Faustus has been hauled down to hell, “And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough / That sometime grew within this learned man.” The learned man who wrote these lines might have imagined the same words could be spoken of him and might have concluded that, like his character, he was doomed. After all, he knew he was neither willing nor able to abandon the course of life on which he had embarked. The link to the spy service, the skepticism, and the transgressive imagination were essential parts of his identity, all bound together with his poetic genius. Though they might be leading to destruction, he could not turn away from them.
But perhaps Marlowe was not gripped by any such fear. It is at least as possible that he believed the whole story of hell and damnation was a fantasy, akin to other fantasies he had played with and staged over the course of his career. Hell, he could have told himself, was merely a poetic invention, a fable cunningly designed to terrify the gullible masses into obedience.
Like everyone in his world, Marlowe would have been introduced to the concept of hell at an early age. Generation after generation of impressionable children were treated to tales of horrific punishments in an imagined afterlife: stench, rivers of fire, gnawing worms, swirling sulfur, and pitch. Sharp stones rained down like hail on the unprotected bodies of the damned. Adulterers were strung up by their eyebrows and hair; sodomites were covered in blood and filth; unmarried girls who lost their virginity were shackled in flaming chains; women who had had abortions were impaled on flaming spits. Virtuous pagans were nonetheless blinded and placed forever in a deep pit. And, of course, there were innumerable atheists, heretics, Muslims, and Jews, tortured for all eternity by grotesque devils with sharp teeth, flaming eyes, and long claws.
From his immersion in Christian texts, Marlowe knew perfectly well how little of this elaborate demonic underworld actually came from Scripture. The realm of the dead that the Hebrew Bible called Sheol was not a place of punishment but simply the darkness of the grave. In the Greek New Testament, Jesus refers multiple times to a place called Gehenna, where the wicked will go, but he gives the name a sinister valley near Jerusalem, no further substance. The gruesome hell that was depicted in paintings and preached to Marlowe and his contemporaries had been lifted from Virgil and other pagan poets or spun out of the overheated imaginations of medieval artists and writers. Most people credited its literal existence, but a small number of skeptics concluded it was a fiction, one that had for centuries helped to confer authority and riches on a small number of hypocrites.
The unique power of Doctor Faust comes not from dragging the doubter off to eternal punishment in the afterworld but from reimagining what hell is and relocating it in the here and now. Hell is an awareness of how painfully limited life is. Hell is a progressive loss of interest in the books and subjects that had once seemed so endlessly fascinating. Hell is a vast enterprise of global exploitation that merely produces luxuries for wealthy patrons. Hell is a plan to save one’s country that shrinks into a set of tricks played on minor adversaries. Hell is a craving for access to secrets that, once revealed, shrivel into ennui: “Well, I am answered.” Hell is the despair produced by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, a despair constantly fueled by pious warnings that cannot possibly be followed and by tantalizing hopes that cannot and will not be fulfilled.
“I’ll willingly be damned!” The brilliance of the strategy is to make the recruited one—who is, after all, frankly informed that he is about to ruin his life—actively pursue his own destruction. The arrangement has to be formally concluded: as security, Lucifer demands a deed of gift written in blood. Before it is drawn up, there is one more moment of candor, as if to prove that nothing whatever has been withheld. “What good will my soul do thy lord?” Faustus asks, and the devil replies that misery loves company. “Why,” Faustus asks in surprise, “have you any pain that torture others?” “As great as have the souls of men, the devil declares,” adding, “But tell me, Faustus, shall I have thy soul?”
The answer, of course, is yes. Faustus stabs his arm to draw blood to write the fatal document. His blood at first congeals, so that he cannot complete the words, but Mephistopheles brings coals to liquify it again. “Now will I make an end immediately,” Faustus declares, and, dipping his pen into his blood, he writes that he bequeaths his soul to Lucifer. He signals his completion of the deed of gift by quoting in the Latin of the Vulgate Jesus’ last words on the cross: Consummatum est, “It is finished.” In this demonic context, the words are blasphemous, but they also serve as an acknowledgment, whether conscious or not, that the life Faustus has lived up to this point is decisively over.
Marlowe seems present, body and soul, in this scene, as if he has penned it with his own blood.
From Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. Copyright © 2025 by Stephen Greenblatt. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2025. Reprinted by permission of the author and W.W. Norton & Company.