Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them

Why Devils Came When Faustus Called ThemAuthor(s): Genevieve GuentherSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 109, No. 1 (August 2011), pp. 46-70Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662147 .

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Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them

G E N E V I E V E G U E N T H E R

New York

Certainly, even at this time I do most plainly seeThe devils to be about me round, which make great preparation,And keep a stir here in this place which only is for me.Neither do I conceive these things by vain imagination,But even as truly as mine eyes behold your shape and fashion.

(NATHANIEL WOODES, The Conflict of Conscience [1581])

In his 1632 Histriomastix, a key text of early modern antitheatricality, the Pu-ritan lawyer William Prynne reported that a devil had once appeared ‘‘onthe stage at the Belsavage Play-house, in Queen Elizabeth’s dayes (to thegreat amazement of both the actors and spectators) while they were thereprophanely playing the History of Faustus (the truth of which I have heardfrom many now alive, who well remember it) there being some there dis-tracted with that fearful sight.’’1 Prynne repeated this story about Christo-pher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594) to argue that stage plays were inher-ently evil, but these rumors about extra devils circulated even among moreneutral commentators. For instance, in a note written on the last page ofa sixteenth-century monograph, one G. J. R. recorded the experience of‘‘certain players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical story of Dr.Faustus the conjurer’’:

As a certain number of devils kept every one his circle there, and as Faustus wasbusy in his magical invocations, on a sudden they were all dashed, every oneharkening the other in the ear, for they were all persuaded, there was one deviltoo many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people topardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people alsounderstanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of doors.The players (as I heard it) contrary to their custom spending the night inreading and in prayer got them out of the town the next morning.2

� 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2011/10901-0003$10.00

1. William Prynne, Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedy (London, 1633), 556r.2. G. J. R., quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press,

1923), 3:424. Chambers cites other rumors of the same kind, such as the incident to whichThomas Middleton referred in his 1604 Black Book when he attempted to describe someone’sunruly coif: ‘‘he had a head of hair like one of my devils in Dr. Faustus when the old Theater

46



When we take these rumors seriously, what do they tell us? Critics of Renais-sance drama have tended to assimilate these strange tales into what we knowto be scandalous about Marlowe: his deliberate provocations, his politicalequivocations, his uncanny ability, as Leah Marcus puts it, to produce plays‘‘hovering on the razor’s edge of exaltation and transgression.’’3 But whatfinally accounts for audiences believing that Marlowe’s drama conjured anactual devil in particular? This is not a question about why early modernsbelieved in magic. Rather this is a question about why they believed that thedramatic representation of magic had the power to make a spirit appear.

The answer to this question lies partly in the doctrinal and aestheticassumptions that audiences in the early 1590s brought with them to Mar-lowe’s theater. Doctor Faustus was first performed in the wake of a funda-mental shift in the way that magic was characterized and taught in EnglishProtestant theology. In the late 1580s and early 1590s, just before DoctorFaustus premiered, popular Protestant devotional writers such as GeorgeGifford and William Perkins attacked the traditional understanding of con-juration as a tool wielded by the magician himself, who had been imaginedto command devils by iterating a version of the performative formula ‘‘inthe name of the divine, I conjure you no more to resist, but to appear andbe obedient.’’ These Protestant preachers brought remarkably corrosiveskepticism to bear on the essentialist linguistic assumptions underlying thebelief that devils could be conjured with performative language whilesimultaneously maintaining or even buttressing theological justificationsfor the idea that devils, and Satan in particular, intervened in people’s livesvia the instrumentality of the magician. What the reformers argued is thatmagical language has no intrinsic spiritual efficacy—that it cannot controlthe devil or any other supernatural being—yet in so arguing they did notgo on to dismiss conjuration as a superstitious fiction. Rather, they placedmagic within a providential eschatology, recasting it as an expression ofGod-permitted diabolical agency. Devils appeared to magicians, the reform-ers argued, because Satan himself staged conjurations as theatrical spec-

cracked and frightened the audience’’ (424). Samuel Rowland also liked to say that EdwardAlleyn would wear a cross on his surplice when he played Faustus for fear that he might be inthe presence of devils. See Gareth Roberts, ‘‘Necromantic Books: Christopher Marlowe, DoctorFaustus and Agrippa of Nettesheim,’’ in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed.Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (London: Scolar, 1996), 157.

3. Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Rout-ledge, 1996), 42. See also Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 121; Michael Goldman, ‘‘Marlowe and the His-trionics of Ravishment,’’ in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed.Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 40; and Richard Halpern,‘‘Marlowe’s Theater of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital,’’ ELH 71 (2004): 472. For Halpern,the extra devils locate Marlowe’s ability to transform theater’s internal ontological lack into agenerative force.

47Genevieve Guenther Why Devils Came



tacles, which he used instrumentally to ensnare people into damnation. Inthis account of magic, the formula of conjuration functioned as a script thatcued devils to appear and behave as if they had been commanded, and thistheatrical, but not ontologically performative, spectacle of human powerover devils not only compounded the reprobation of the magician himselfbut also, the reformers warned, produced aesthetic responses in witnessesto the conjuration that would anger God and lead him to withdraw his sal-vific grace.

Marlowe seems to have realized that this revisionary account of magic,which produced theological meaning from audiences’ interest in spectaclesof conjuration, had powerful dramatic potential—and that it had circulatedwidely enough in the cultural imaginary to be recognized on the popularstage—for in Doctor Faustus he represented the mechanism of conjurationin precisely the reformers’ terms.4 Marlowe’s Faustus is a man so investedin the idea that spiritual efficacy inheres in the material, in bodies and texts,that he believes there is ‘‘virtue’’ in the ‘‘heavenly words’’ that seem to con-jure Mephistopheles forth.5 Mephistopheles, however, tells Faustus explic-itly that his magical words worked only ‘‘per accidens’’ (1.3.47) and that intruth he appeared only in the hope that he could ‘‘get’’ Faustus’s ‘‘glorioussoul’’ (1.3.50). Yet Faustus persists, his misgivings about magic repeatedlyovercome by Mephistopheles’ ability to stage magical pageants and dumb-shows populated by apparently embodied spirits. These spectacles suggestto Faustus that in hell the individuated personhood delineated by thebody’s boundaries will last in a spiritual form that the magician may inhabitand control. But it goes without saying that this ocular proof of embodiedimmortality is only theatrical spectacle, in all its ontological insufficiency.Yet at some performances of Doctor Faustus in the last decade of the six-teenth century, this fact—that the instrument of Faustus’s damnation is thevery spectacle represented on stage—seemed to produce a mirror effect inspectators who feared that their own interest in Faustus’s magic was theo-logically dangerous. The metatheatrical doubling solicited their terrifyingidentification with Faustus, whereby their absorption in the events on stage

4. Paul Kocher (‘‘The Witchcraft Bias in Marlowe’s ‘Faustus,’’’ Modern Philology 38 [1940]:9–36) and Barbara Traister (‘‘Doctor Faustus : Master of Self-Delusion,’’ in Christopher Marlowe’s‘‘Doctor Faustus,’’ ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1988], 77–92) have noted thatMarlowe used the reformed theory of magic in Doctor Faustus, although both critics have elidedthe reformers’ emphasis on the theatrical nature of conjuration and its relevance to the play’sdramatic effects.

5. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevingtonand Eric Rasmussen (Manchester University Press, 1993), 1.3.28, hereafter cited parentheti-cally. Because I am interested in Marlowe’s use of Protestant attacks on magic, I cite the A textof the play, which consistently manifests the theology underlying reformist polemics. For thetheologies of the A and B texts, see Marcus, Unediting, chap. 2.

48 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y



served as evidence of their own reprobation. At times this evidence seems tohave been overwhelming enough to cause collective hysteria, as if wholegroups of people involved in productions of Faustus, like the despairing sin-ner in The Conflict of Conscience, felt suddenly convinced that devils had flownto the scene, having panicked that God had judged them irredeemable fortheir investment in the play. In Doctor Faustus, then, Protestant anxiety aboutsalvation and popular desire for entertainment converged to produce his-torically contingent aesthetic effects. Marlowe’s brilliant strategy for Faustuswas to exploit the reformist understanding of magic as at once theatricalspectacle and theological instrument in order to produce an aesthetic in-strumentality in which onstage performativity—the staging of conjuration—generated effects that offstage performativity quite obviously could not.

* * *

The Protestant attack on the idea of intrinsically magical language wasan inflection of the broadly confessional attack on sacramentality. Argu-ments connecting the formula for conjuration to the Catholic Eucharistbegan to emerge in Germany and Denmark in the 1560s and ’70s, and thesearguments were imported into England by a distinctly heterogeneousgroup of devotional writers.6 Gifford and Perkins are often reductively char-acterized as Puritans, perhaps for their early interest in Presbyterianism,although in fact they both embraced the Elizabethan settlement before theypublished their major tracts on magic.7 Other writers who rehearsed thecontinental account of conjuration had little association with nonconfor-

6. See Conrad Platz, Kurtzer, Nottwendiger, und Wollgegrundter bericht (n.p., 1565); and NielsHemmingsen, Admonitio de superstitionibus magicis vitandis (Copenhagen, 1575). On Platz, andthe German case more broadly, see Robert Scribner, ‘‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, andthe ‘Disenchantment of the World,’’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94; seealso Stuart Clark, ‘‘Protestant Demonology: Sin, Superstition, Society (c. 1520–c. 1630),’’ inEarly Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Hen-ningsen (Oxford University Press, 1990), 45–81, and Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraftin Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 1997), 435–526.

7. In 1590 and 1591, Gifford wrote two pamphlets arguing against schism and preachedfrom the established pulpit of St. Paul’s Cross; he published his longest work on magic, A Dia-logue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, in 1593. In An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apos-tles (London, 1595), William Perkins invoked the Thirty-Nine Articles—or, as he called it, ‘‘theBooke of the articles of faith agreed upon in open Parliament’’—as expressing what he calledthe ‘‘true faith’’ (501). For the scope of Gifford’s pamphleteering, see Alan MacFarlane, ‘‘ATudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue,’’ in The Damned Art: Essays inthe Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (New York: Routledge, 1977), 140–55; and Christo-pher Haigh, ‘‘The Taming of the Reformation: Preachers, Pastors, and Parishioners in Eliza-bethan and Early Stuart England,’’ History 85 (2000): 572–88. For Perkins as defender of theElizabethan settlement, see W. B. Patterson, ‘‘William Perkins as Apologist for the Church ofEngland,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57 (2006): 252–69.




mity: Henry Holland, for instance, was settled in his London living by theestablishment dean of Westminster, and Robert Burton, the author of TheAnatomy of Melancholy (1621), used the opportunity of his Oxford fellowshipto ignore theological controversy almost entirely. James I (then James VI ofScotland) repeated verbatim the new Protestant arguments about magic inhis 1597 Daemonologie, as did the seventeenth-century physician John Cottain The Triall of Witchcraft (1616).8 The new reformed discourse of magic was,then, generated in pastoral, academic, royal, commercial, and theatricalspaces to various and divergent ends. Historians of the English reformationhave generally seen the emergence of a reformist theory of magical languageas linked to pastoral attempts to discredit ‘‘cunning’’ men and women asmedical authorities and to reinterpret witchcraft as a form of spiritual afflic-tion.9 But this model of the pastorate attacking popular practices fromabove, as it were, in order to consolidate its own spiritual authority againstthe traditions of the laity tends not to provide for the breadth of perspec-tives and interests that generated and disseminated the new account of thespiritual instrumentality of representation.

It may at first seem as if the reformers did not allow for the theologicalinstrumentality of signs at all, for their primary argument is that humanrepresentation has no performative efficacy in the spiritual realm. The sup-posedly sacred signs of conjuration—the figures and characters carved intothe protective circle, the gestures enacted to awe demons, and the wordspronounced in the conjuration itself—are all, the reformers argue, simply‘‘natural’’ or material things; as such, they cannot force supernatural crea-tures to obey human will. Thus Gifford wonders how the magician couldbe ‘‘so foolish as to imagine’’ that spiritual beings are ‘‘affected by the virtueof words, gestures, figures, or such like.’’10 ‘‘All words made and uttered bymen,’’ Perkins elaborates, ‘‘are in their own nature but sounds framed by

8. See James I, Daemonologie, ed. G. B. Harrison (1597; repr., London: Lane, 1924), 17;and John Cotta, The Triall of Witchcraft (London, 1616). See also Alexander Roberts, A Treatiseof Witchcraft (London, 1617); and Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (London, 1617). Inthe interest of concision, I will confine my discussion of the tracts on magic to those publishedin England around the time Doctor Faustus was first performed.

9. For the narrative of the Protestant pastorate attempting to discredit cunning men andwomen, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth Century England (1971; repr., Oxford University Press, 1997), 151–279, esp. 263–67; Clark, ‘‘Protestant Demonology,’’ and Thinking with Demons, 457–71; and Scott McGinnis,‘‘‘Subtiltie’ Exposed: Pastoral Perspectives on Witch Belief in the Thought of George Gifford,’’Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 665–86. For the pastoral reinterpretation of witchcraft asspiritual affliction, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 438–71; Alexandra Walsham, Providence inEarly Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 25–28; and Nathan Johnstone, TheDevil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 3–4.

10. George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtle Practice of Deuilles by Witches and Sorcerers (Lon-don, 1587), Biiv.




the tongue, of the breath that comes from the lungs; and that which is onlya bare sound, in all reason can have no virtue in it to cause a real work,much less to produce a wonder.’’11 Even the text of scripture itself has noessential efficacy: ‘‘The truth is,’’ Holland ruefully explains, that Satan‘‘nothing regards the outward letter of the Word [any] more than [magi-cians’] characters, signs, crosses, figures, &c.’’12

Yet, although they maintain that the letter of the Word lacks the perfor-mative power to conjure devils, the reformers nonetheless argue that bibli-cal texts, as well as signs made sacred by scriptural authorization, do havespiritual efficacy when deployed properly by preachers. Under the rightconditions, such signs can produce or strengthen faith and prepare the be-liever to receive God’s grace, which otherwise might run off, as it were, likerainwater on rocky ground. For the reformers, the Eucharist exemplifiesthe spiritual instrumentality of the letter. ‘‘Though it be a thing above [its]common and natural use,’’ Perkins explains, eucharistic bread, as an effica-cious sign, has ‘‘the power and property . . . to seal and signify unto everybelieving receiver the body of Christ, [for] thereupon we have warrantfrom Christ’s own commandment, ordinance, and example to use it’’ (Dis-course of the Damned, 137–38). Such a spiritual impression is not producedautomatically, however, but according to the inward attitude and intent ofthose who participate in the ritual (not ex opere operato, that is, but ex opereoperantis). Perkins elaborates: ‘‘There is not any such force or efficacy ofmaking us holy inherent or tied unto the external figures’’; rather, all suchefficacy is ‘‘an inseparable companion of true faith and repentance, and ofsuch as turn unto the Lord.’’13 For Perkins, those who ‘‘turn unto the Lord’’do so by using the Eucharist as a figure for interpretation, or an instrumentof intellectual meditation that increases repentance and faith. The medita-tion on the spiritual significance of the sacrament is a special means ofeschewing the materiality of the letter and dedicating the inward self toGod, a dedication that in turn, the reformers argue, readies the believer tofeel and know God’s saving mercy.

In these instrumentalist eucharistic hermeneutics, then, letter and spiritare not exactly equivalent to vehicle and tenor: the letter does not just sig-nify the spirit in a purely referential sense; rather, if used with the properintention, the letter enables the spirit to enter the soul as a sacred gift to

11. William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (London, 1608), 134–35. Fur-ther references to this text will appear parenthetically.

12. Henry Holland, A Treatise Against Witchcraft; [and] A Short Discourse Shewing the Most Cer-tain and Principal Means Ordeined of God to Discover, Expell, and to Confound all the SathanicallInventions of Witchcraft and Sorcierie (London, 1590), 5, I3r. For a reading connecting the refor-mers’ ordinary language philosophy to scientific empiricism, see Stuart Clark, ‘‘Magical Powerof Signs,’’ in his Thinking with Demons, 281–93.

13. Willam Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or The Description of Theology (London, 1591), 127.




the believer. Thus in his commentary on Corinthians Calvin argues, ‘‘Thesewords, LETTER and SPIRIT, pertain nothing to exposition [i.e., typological al-legory], but to force and fruit.’’14 Unlike the signs of magic, which suppos-edly produce the outward embodiment of spirits, the Eucharist functionsas a vehicle for an idea that works regeneratively in the inward person, if it isinterpreted, or used, with a felicitous spiritual intention. This theory of effi-cacious allegorical hermeneutics, while sustaining an Aristotelian concep-tion of instrumentality, radically devalues the materiality of the sign, givingit only contingent force. And it is this commitment to material contingencythat motivates the reformers’ identification of conjurers with Catholic priestswho attempt to make God present in bread by pronouncing what Reginald

Scot calls Latin ‘‘babbles.’’15 Indeed, the prestidigitator’s phrase ‘‘hocus po-cus’’ is based on ‘‘hoc est enim corpus meum,’’ finding its genealogical root inthe Catholic Mass or, more precisely, in the Protestant argument that Catho-lic priests do the work of the devil in claiming that their articulations havethe performative efficacy to invoke the presence of God.16

Yet despite their critique of the Catholic Eucharist as a sacrilegious andinefficacious conjuration, the reformers hold that the devil does, in fact,come when the magician calls him. The premise that devils are being con-jured all the time is so fundamental to their polemic that it is never debatedor even really discussed. With their commitment to providentialism, theyassume that a personified Satan must be using people’s desires for magicalefficacy as a weapon of spiritual attack. But even if we accept this premisefor the sake of argument, the question still arises: how does the magician’slanguage manage to conjure the devil when it lacks power? Although itsessence is merely material, Perkins answers, conjuration nonetheless has‘‘another nature in regard of its immediate relation to the devil, to whom itis a sign’’ (Discourse of the Damned, 132). In its second nature, conjurationworks not by essential performativity but per accidens (1.3.47). It functions tomanifest not the magician’s power to command spirits with language buthis inward alienation from the spirit of God. As Perkins insists, although‘‘signs, characters, and figures [are] no whit effectual in themselves,’’ theydo ‘‘serve for watchwords unto Satan,’’ revealing that ‘‘the user thereof hathhis heart secretly indented . . . for the accomplishment of [Satan’s] in-tended works’’ (Discourse of the Damned, 53–54). Perkins’s rhetoric here is ofspiritual warfare: ‘‘watchword’’ is a military term denoting a preconcerted

14. John Calvin, A Commentarie upon S. Paule’s Epistles to the Corinthians, trans. ThomasTymme (London, 1577), 226, fol. Ggiiv.

15. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Montague Summers (1584; London: Rod-ker, 1930), 234.

16. In the first chapter of Duessa as Theological Satire (Columbia: University of MissouriPress, 1970), D. Douglas Waters provides a comprehensive discussion of the Protestant charac-terization of the Catholic priest as a conjurer.




signal to begin an assault. But in this case the devil attacks not with violencebut with the apparent satisfaction of desire. As soon as he apprehends hiswatchwords, he appears and, as Gifford puts it, ‘‘doth . . . feign himself to bebound.’’17 In other words, Satan attacks the soul of the magician by behav-ing as if he had been conjured by the magician’s language. ‘‘In all conjura-tions,’’ Perkins goes on to say, ‘‘when [Satan] is raised by the Sorcerer, he iswilling to be adjured by all the holy names of God that are in the Scripture,to the end that he may more deeply seduce his own instruments, and makethem to think that . . . names will bind him & force him to yield unto theirdesires in the particular, when indeed there is no such matter’’ (Discourse ofthe Damned, 151). (As Burton iterates it, ‘‘There is [no] power at all in thosespells, charms, characters, and barbarous words, but that the Devil doth usesuch means to delude them, ut fideles inde magos [so that he might keepthose magi faithful to him].)18 To believe that ‘‘names will bind’’ the deviland force him to yield to desire is, in these writers’ accounts, to believe thathuman beings may rise above their fundamentally wretched place in thecosmos, that they may escape their irreducible dependence on God’s gracefor any satisfaction that would transcend mortality. And to fail to see God asat once the source and the limit of all transcendent satisfaction is to fail tosee the need for faith.

Now if Satan’s goal is to ruin the magician’s faith, his further goal,according to these preachers, is to use the magician as what Perkins calls‘‘his own instrument’’ to undermine the faith of others beside the magicianhimself. ‘‘As Satan used the serpent in the beginning to seduce our firstparents from the obedience of God’s word,’’ Holland argues, ‘‘so is it not tobe doubted that after the fall he uses man himself as his instrument by mag-ical arts to withdraw men from faith in the promise of their redemption byChrist.’’19 Satan performs this feat, the reformers warn, by staging his falseconjuration as a theater piece that has the instrumental end of producingaesthetic responses in spectators that incline them toward false belief.‘‘The power of this Prince of darkness . . . manifests itself herein,’’ Perkinsinsists, ‘‘by works of wonder, transcendent in regard of ordinary capacity,and diversely dispensed by his chosen instruments of both sexes . . .sometime by Enchantment, sometime by rare sleights and delusions . . .and all to purchase himself the admiration, fear, and faith of the credulousworld, which is usually carried away, with affectation and applause of signsand wonders’’ (Discourse of the Damned, ‘‘Epistle Dedicatory,’’ 2v). If ‘‘won-der’’ here is ontological, engendered by a frightening yet awe-inspiring en-

17. Gifford, Discourse of the Subtle Practice, F4v.18. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (1621; New York

Review of Books, 2001), 1.205.19. Holland, Treatise Against Witchcraft, B3v.




counter with a supernatural being, it is also theatrical, produced by the aes-thetic ‘‘enchantment’’ and the spectacular ‘‘rare sleights and delusions’’that generate precisely the ‘‘admiration’’ and ‘‘fear’’ that sixteenth-centuryliterary theory defines as the dual effect of the most elevated dramaticmodes.20 And this wonder in turn inspires the ‘‘affectation’’—that is, theaffection or delight—that leads spectators to offer ‘‘applause.’’ Such ap-plause expresses, for the reformers, ‘‘faith’’ in magical power, the very an-tithesis of the justification that leads to salvation. The reformers thus imag-ine that the devil may use theater to produce an aesthetic delight that inturn will help damn his victims. Indeed, the reformers never posit anythingapproaching a modern model of theatrical experience, in which staged illu-sions, institutionally marked out as such, are cultivated and consumed asends in themselves; rather, they imagine that forms of theatrical cognitionand pleasure undermine the habits of mind that sustain faith and thus areby definition instruments producing disastrous theological effects. Thereformers thus warn their readers to avoid participating in spectacles ofmagic at all costs or, at least, to monitor their responses to such spectaclesvery carefully and root out the sources of any pleasure they might feel withintensive self-examination and repentance, lest their enjoyment corrupttheir faith or undermine their certainty of their own salvation.

In the reformers’ accounts, then, faith itself is performative since it hasno objective ontological status outside of the acts of consuming representa-tions that either produce or obscure it. The performativity of faith even hasa constant witness: God himself, who surveils the subject’s invisible perfor-mances very closely. For it turns out, in these arguments, that God moni-tors people’s aesthetic responses to theatrical representations as well astheir thoughts about their responses. These feelings and thoughts at oncemanifest and transform the quality of one’s faith, judged by God when hedecides to save or damn the soul. Indeed, it is God who allows Satan to usethe magician instrumentally; or, more specifically, it is God who uses Sataninstrumentally, as he did in the book of Job, to test the faith of his professedbelievers, and confirm the declining fortunes of nonbelievers, by indirectlyproducing and directly scrutinizing human beings’ inward responses to di-abolical spectacle and drama.21 Holland explicitly argues that God uses

20. For ‘‘admiration’’ as a tragic effect, along with the Aristotelian ‘‘pity’’ and ‘‘fear,’’ see,e.g., Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (1595;Manchester University Press, 1965), 118.

21. For accounts of the eschatological instrumentality of the devil in various providentialschema, see Jeffery Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1986), 25–58; Walsham, Providence, 8–15; and Johnstone, Devil andDemonism. See also Peter Lake’s interesting discussion of diabolical agency in Lake and Mi-chael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation En-gland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 40–53.




Satan’s magic so that he may both ‘‘fatherly forewarn his Saints to pass theirdwelling here [on earth] with all diligence, to avoid the contagion of thewicked with whom they have any conversation,’’ and ‘‘in justice punishthem who would not receive his truth,’’ sending these reprobates ‘‘strongdelusions that they may believe lies.’’22 For Holland, God’s active, providen-tial intervention into the world via Satan’s theater of magic is, in a strangeway, a blessing that allows the faithful to recognize their own sins and infir-mities, giving them the opportunity to repent. In his view, even the magi-cian himself can repent and be saved.23 For Perkins, by contrast, God’s useof Satan as his instrument is less an opportunity for the faithful than aninterrogation of the individual subject, whose response to the magician’sstrong delusions reveals the predestined fate of his immortal soul. Glori-fied by his own power above all, Perkins’s God uses Satan’s magic ‘‘toavenge himself on Man for his ingratitude’’ and ‘‘to try and prove his peo-ple, whether they will cleave to him and his Word, or seek unto Satan andhis wicked Spirits’’ (Discourse of the Damned, ‘‘Epistle Dedicatory,’’ 5r–v).

* * *

When in his opening soliloquy Faustus resolves to learn the secrets ofmagic, he articulates a phrase that echoes those used by the reformers to de-scribe the signs that serve as ‘‘watchwords’’ for Satan: ‘‘lines, circles, schemes,letters and characters!’’ Faustus cries, ‘‘ay, these are those that Faustus mostdesires’’ (1.1.53–54). With this phrase, Faustus signals to the audience thathe is the conjurer their ministers warned them about, the magician whomost desires to possess the signs of magic for their purported spiritualpower ‘‘to gain a deity’’ (1.1.65). And at first such signs do seem to have spir-itual force, for Faustus does manage to conjure up the devil’s emissary inMephistopheles. When the spirit responds obediently to his commands,Faustus, delighted, exclaims: ‘‘I see there’s virtue in my heavenly words!’’(1.3.28). But Mephistopheles goes on to explain that he appeared notbecause Faustus’s conjuration enforced him to rise but because he recog-nized the watchwords that indicate that the enchanter has a relation in hismind to the devil. When Faustus demands to know whether his ‘‘conjuringspeeches’’ (1.3.46) in fact raised him, Mephistopheles replies (in lines thatwe have already partly quoted):

22. Holland, Short Discourse, G4r.23. ‘‘If any such be sorry and begin to show any tokens of true repentance, which either

have sought unto or practiced any sorcery . . . they must be wisely informed and comforted,for Jesus Christ can and will cast forth an unclean spirit, if in truth of heart with weeping andfasting, and mourning, he be sought unto by repentance’’ (ibid., 15, K4r).




That was the cause, but yet per accidensFor when we hear one rack the name of God,Abjure the Scriptures, and his savior Christ,We fly in hope to get his glorious soul,Nor will we come, unless he use such meansWhereby he is in danger to be damned:Therefore the shortest cut for conjuringIs stoutly to abjure the Trinity,And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.

(1.3.47–55)

Dismissing the notion that magical signs have essential spiritual efficacy,Mephistopheles explains that magical language works performatively inthe spiritual realm only by its accidental as opposed to essential qualities,or by its second nature regarding its relation to the devil. It was not anyforce in the literal instruments of conjuration—the lines, circles, charac-ters, letters, or the utterance of the invocation—that induced him to ap-pear. Rather, it was the mere fact that Faustus took to conjuring at all thatraised the ‘‘hope’’ in Mephistopheles that the devil might ‘‘get his glorioussoul,’’ and only in this hope did the spirit ‘‘fly’’ to the scene.24 Hence, asMephistopheles goes on to explain, magic is not even the most effectiveinstrument with which to invoke the devil’s presence, for it is not the mostdirect ‘‘means’’ whereby the magician ‘‘is in danger to be damned.’’ To con-jure the devil, one need just ‘‘stoutly . . . abjure the Trinity, / And praydevoutly to the prince of hell.’’ As if disdaining the idea that he neglectedto use any tool of magical efficacy, Faustus assures Mephistopheles that hehas already taken this shortest of shortcuts: ‘‘So Faustus hath already done,and holds this principle: / There is no chief [sic] but only Beelzebub, / Towhom Faustus doth dedicate himself ’’ (1.3.56–58). With this reply, Faustusboth performs and confirms what the reformers would call his inward rela-tion to Satan.

But why, then, does Faustus have this relation in his mind to the devil?As the reformers argued about the magician, Faustus inclines to the devilbecause he rejects faith, which is to say that he refuses to believe that Godpromises him immortal happiness. Indeed, critics have long since noticed

24. The fact that Rafe and Robin are able to conjure Mephistopheles from Constantinople,making him ‘‘vexed’’ with their ‘‘charms’’ (3.2.32), may seem to contradict the reformist doc-trine that the devil articulates here, and indeed the ‘‘second nature’’ of magical signs seemsalways to raise the hope in devils that they might get the souls of those that use them. ButMephistopheles does not really perform conjuration for the clowns—he not only declines tofeign to enter into their service but even translates them into an ape and a dog—because Rafeand Robin are not really in danger of being damned, having no real desire to commit them-selves to the devil.




that Faustus has complete aphasia on the subject of mercy—in his first so-liloquy, of course, he omits the lines of 1 John that promise forgivenessto those who repent, rather perversely proclaiming instead that the Bibleinsists ‘‘we must sin, / And so consequently die . . . an everlasting death’’(1.1.46–48).25 But Faustus erases the promise of God’s mercy because hedisdains the dualistic Christian metaphysics that underlie that very pro-mise. Christian dualism is taken for granted in the play even by Mephis-topheles, who makes a clear distinction between body and soul, radicallysubordinating the value of the former to the latter. When Faustus ordershim to attack the old man, the devil replies: ‘‘his faith is great / I cannottouch his soul. / But what I may afflict his body with / I will attempt, whichis but little worth’’ (5.1.79–82). In contrast to his conjured companion,Faustus values the body more than the soul, as if for him the truly sacredcommunion were found not in the valence of symbolic bread but in thejuicy and perfumed grapes he gives to the hugely pregnant duchess, whohas been longing for fruit through the dearth of winter.

Faustus’s investment in embodiment is less social, though, than episte-mological: he implicitly denies the assumption that signification shoulddematerialize consciousness, and that ‘‘real’’ meaning should be fundamen-tally allegorical. Indeed, Faustus eschews allegorical interpretation. Henever reads past the letter, as it were, to search for spirit; he never seeks whatrecedes beyond the textual mark as if it were the invisible, impalpable, tran-scendent truth. To read in that way is to perform faith. The old man, forinstance, describes faith as the first step on an unfolding journey to salva-tion, calling it ‘‘the way of life / By which sweet path thou may’st attain thegoal / That shall conduct thee to celestial rest’’ (5.1.37–39). The striking cat-achresis of the ‘‘goal’’ that becomes the boatman or the angel that will ‘‘con-duct’’ the believer to ‘‘celestial rest’’—not to mention the pun that makes‘‘way of life’’ at once a method and a path with duration—emphasizes thestrange requirement that faith places on the believer to seek in thought whatis not only absent but also deferred beyond any end that he can conceive forhimself. Faustus refuses this injunction to read the Word and the world alle-gorically, to perform faith by consuming representation like a Protestant.

Faustus enters into the play with his antiallegorical habit of mind firmlyin place. In his opening soliloquy, he not only ignores the scriptural prom-ise of salvation but also never acknowledges that every profession he con-siders and abandons resounds as a figure for salvation. In his refusal to readallegorically, Faustus articulates but does not hear that the study of each art

25. See, e.g., C. L. Barber, ‘‘The Forme of Faustus’ Fortunes Good or Bad,’’ in Creating Eliza-bethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard Wheeler (University of ChicagoPress, 1988), 87–130. Barber argues that Faustus suffers from the theological condition ofdespair.




stands as a metonym for a larger spiritual quest to come to God; he makesvisible but does not see the eschatological trajectory in which the ends ofearthly things are themselves means to move the soul toward an invisible,deferred ending in heaven.26 Thus Faustus begins with Aristotle, askingwhether ‘‘to dispute well’’ is ‘‘logic’s chiefest end’’ (1.1.8). When he con-cludes that it is, and that this ‘‘art’’ affords ‘‘no greater miracle’’ (1.1.9),he decides to abandon its study since he has already ‘‘attained the end’’(1.1.10). This seems fair enough, since merely to dispute may well indeedseem a rather limited goal, yet in the very next line, as Faustus actuallyrenounces the art, he bids ‘‘on kai me on, farewell’’ (1.1.12), and the signifi-cance of what he is abandoning changes.27 Faustus is abandoning not justthe form of disputation but the opportunity to study being and nonbeing,existence itself; yet Faustus seems to think he understands the mysteries ofontology since he has mastered the external form of the art that is the vehi-cle for its study. In the same manner, Faustus renounces the law with analmost Pauline critique, calling it a form of ‘‘external trash’’ (1.1.35), yet,from the perspective of faith, even the Justinian rule ‘‘if one and the samething is bequeathed to two persons, one should have the thing itself, theother the value of the thing’’—which Faustus dismisses as a case of ‘‘paltrylegacies’’ (1.1.30)—may be seen as a vehicle with which to ruminate on thevery problem of having a self split into body and soul, with one part, ‘‘thething,’’ going to the earth after death and the other part, ‘‘the value of thething,’’ going to the spiritual domain that God judges it deserves.

But Faustus feels little need to read allegorically, to seek the significationthat transcends direct presentation, for he never imagines spirit or even pres-ence as anywhere but in signs themselves. Despite striking moments ofdoubt and panic in which he senses he is deceived, he consistently readswith the belief that spirit is entirely immanent in the letter. That is why he soloves the signs of magic: the lines, circles, schemes, and characters thatapparently perform ‘‘the metaphysics of magicians’’ (1.1.51) by seeming toenact visibly, palpably, and presently that letter and spirit, and matter and

soul, are one.28 The fantasy that objects have spiritual efficacy provides his

26. Edward Snow argues that Faustus uses the word ‘‘end’’ in his opening soliloquy to meannot ‘‘an opening upon immanent horizons,’’ but a ‘‘termination,’’ so that ‘‘having ‘attained’[an] end means that he has arrived at the end of it, used it up, finished with it’’ (‘‘Marlowe’sDoctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire,’’ in Bloom, Marlowe’s ‘‘Doctor Faustus,’’ 54).

27. On kai me on is the transliteration of the Greek for ‘‘being and not being.’’ As Bevingtonand Rasmussen note, the phrase is not in fact Aristotelian but from Gorgias (Doctor Faustus,A- and B-Texts, 110 n. 12).

28. As Graham L. Hammill has argued, ‘‘When Faustus chooses necromantic books [he]unwittingly chooses signifiers whose materiality mark his desire for a signified as his own onto-logical insufficiency’’ (Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon [University of Chi-cago Press, 2000], 316).




consolation. Indeed, Faustus seems even more invested in the spiritualpower of the materiality of the sign than is the devil himself: when at onepoint Lucifer warns Faustus to ‘‘not think of God’’ (2.3.92), Faustus re-sponds by vowing ‘‘never to look to heaven, / Never to name God’’ (2.3.95–96), as if naming God or performing acts that mark or deal in ‘‘the outside’’of things were equivalent to thinking about God—as if naming and think-ing were phenomenologically identical or produced the same results. ForFaustus, naming suffices: for him spirit inheres in surfaces, and being there-fore exists only in embodied form. And Faustus manifests this principleboth in his epistemology and in his very sense of subjectivity itself. WhenFaustus reflects on his achievements in medicine—his having helped‘‘whole cities’’ (1.1.21) to escape plague—he decides that such successes areworthless, and that only by being able to ‘‘make men . . . live eternally, / Or,being dead, raise them to life again’’ (1.1.24–25) were the medical profes-sion ‘‘to be esteemed’’ (1.1.26). Faustus is not abandoning medicine here inorder to take up divinity, as if he thought that the prolongation of earthlylife were less vital than the pastoral care of immortal souls. Rather, Faustus isrevealing that he conceives of eternal life itself as something that must entailembodiment, the literal survival or resurrection of the body.

Faustus depends on fantasies of embodiment because he imagines nobeing, no self, grounded in the soul at all, neither in the future of salvationnor even in the present, where the identity of the man ‘‘Faustus’’ mightseem to emerge from some invisible core within. For Faustus, there is sim-ply nothing there: when Faustus refers to himself in the third person, forexample (‘‘I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live, / To do what ever Fau-stus shall command’’ [1.3.37–38]), or when he addresses himself with hisname (‘‘why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?’’ [1.1.18]), it oftenseems as if he were swerving away from speaking from the phantasmicinward plenitude of an ‘‘I,’’ or as if he needed to imagine himself as abounded object, seen from the outside in his mind’s eye, in order to articu-late himself (and thus could make himself present only by naming himself‘‘Faustus’’).29 Faustus must name himself, conceive of himself from the out-side, as it were, because he never identifies with his soul.30 Faustus finds hissoul to be alien to him, so much so that he feels it to be a burden he wouldbe happy to be rid of (‘‘why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?’’ he cries

29. Whereas someone like Tamburlaine, for example, almost exclusively uses the third per-son in the self-aggrandizing style of Julius Caesar, Faustus, although he shares some of Tam-burlaine’s mighty bombast, uses the third person even, or even especially, in his mostwretched moments: ‘‘Ah Christ my savior, seek to save / Distressed Faustus’ soul’’ (2.3.82–83).

30. Snow has already marked this about Faustus: ‘‘When the possibility of the transmigra-tion of souls is envisioned, . . . the ‘I’ identifies not with the soul . . . but with what remainsbehind when it is gone’’ (‘‘Ends of Desire,’’ 67).




out desperately at one point [5.2.105]). There is some theological justifica-tion for Faustus’s dissociation. Perkins, for instance, argues that ‘‘God isthe life of the soul’’ just as ‘‘the soul is the life of the body.’’31 With Godresiding inwardly as his immortal, animating essence, Faustus views his soulonly as an absent, impalpable other to which he knows he is responsiblebut about which he feels that it is ‘‘not Faustus.’’ Subject to this vertiginousalienation from his soul, Faustus takes salvation to be a fate that entails thevery annihilation of his identity, an annihilation more complete and terrify-ing to him than that imposed by earthly death itself.

Faustus’s rejection of faith is both producer and product of his sense thatsalvation will entail his own erasure, because it alienates him from his soulby alienating him from God; it is both producer and product of his determi-nation not to read ‘‘past’’ what is material and embodied to what is intangi-ble, because it gives him the sense that the intangible will turn out to benothing. Yet Faustus’s lack of faith does not enable him to feel that there isin fact no life after death. On the contrary, Faustus is obsessed with the after-life and with hell specifically, about which he repeatedly questions Mephis-topheles. Not that Faustus believes what Mephistopheles tells him abouthell, however: he scoffs, ‘‘come, I think hell’s a fable’’ (2.1.130) when thedevil informs him that ‘‘hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In oneself place; for where we are is hell, / And where hell is, must we ever be’’(2.1.124–26). Faustus will not imagine hell as a universally diffused, Augus-tinian state of privation; rather, he insists on imagining hell as an extensionor reproduction of the university where he currently resides. In response toMephistopheles’ insistence that he himself is ‘‘damned, and . . . now in hell’’(2.1.140), Faustus impatiently replies, ‘‘how now, in hell? Nay, and this behell, / I’ll willingly be damned here! What, walking, disputing, / etc.’’(2.1.141–43). ‘‘Damned here . . . walking, disputing, etc.’’: Faustus revealshow much it matters to him that hell be a place, and not a state of the soul.Faced with a salvation that seems to entail his annihilation in the disappear-ance or dissolution of his body, Faustus is comforted by the idea of a hellwhere he will walk and dispute, where he can have reading groups with the‘‘old philosophers’’ (1.3.62) and where ‘‘the infernal spirits’’ will ‘‘swarm’’(1.1.117) to his lectures. Imagining hell as a continuation of his brilliant aca-demic career, Faustus simply sees damnation as the better choice.

Obsessed with his afterlife yet disdaining to be dissolved into God’sheaven, Faustus develops a relation in his mind to the devil as his solutionto his dilemma. By adopting the ‘‘metaphysics of magicians,’’ Faustus findsa way, he thinks, to control the terms of his own death, securing for himself

31. William Perkins, A Salve for a Sicke Man (Cambridge, 1595), 7. Ian Watt has remarkedthat in Doctor Faustus the soul seems to be ‘‘an invisible but immortal stranger within, God’shostage’’ (Myths of Modern Individualism [Cambridge University Press, 1997], 45).




an eternity of continued embodiment and lack of self-transcendence.Indeed, at first Faustus passionately catalogs the epicurean marvels that hewill command his spirits to procure—the ‘‘orient pearl’’ (1.1.85), the ‘‘prince-ly delicates’’ (1.1.87)—but it becomes increasingly clear over the course ofthe play that whatever worldly rewards magic may afford him are second-ary. Thus when Valdes promises Faustus that by magic he will gain fameand sex and money if only he will ‘‘be resolute’’ (1.1.135), Faustus answersin a way that tells more than he knows: ‘‘Valdes,’’ he says, ‘‘as resolute am Iin this / As thou to live’’ (1.1.136–37). His resolution to live indicates lessFaustus’s determination to satisfy himself than his determination to savehimself, to use magic to self-create the materialized afterlife, the embodiedend, he most ardently desires. Thus the ability to conjure up and play withspirits is what he wants; magical personation enables him to face his owndeath and what is then to come, for it enables him to experience being, asFaustus believes, already in hell, where he will not only continue to walk,dispute, eat, and give lectures but also participate in delightful entertain-ments that celebrate personation itself. That is why Faustus is so easily dis-tracted from repentance and doubt by the apparently trivial shows that thedevil stages for him, or that he thinks he conjures up himself.32 Far frombeing inexplicably minor applications of the exalted magical power Fau-stus supposedly possesses, those pageants and dumbshows are at the verycore of the satisfaction that Faustus looks to magic to afford him. The spir-its personating poetic figures give Faustus visible evidence that he too mayremain embodied after death, perhaps in an even more heroic form thanthe one he inhabits in earthly life. Of course, this representation of embod-ied forms by the devil is the very theatrical pretense to which the Protes-tant witchcraft writers referred. Yet Marlowe makes Mephistopheles’ pre-tense much more subtle than the one imagined even by Perkins in hisfierce obsession with Satan’s wiles. Whereas the Protestant witchcraft writ-ers assumed that Satan would feign himself to be bound by conjuration,Marlowe has Mephistopheles deceive Faustus not by feigning to be bound(for the spirit clearly defies Faustus’s commands at many points along theway) but by feigning hell to be a place where bodies last (and are in factmore beautiful than those on earth) and where they perform delightfulspectacle after delightful spectacle that Faustus may not only watch but per-form in as an actor himself.

32. The theatrical ‘‘triviality’’ of Faustus’s magic has long since exercised critics of the play.See, e.g., Levin, who decries the ‘‘incongruity between the . . . seemingly endless possibilitiesenvisioned by Faustus’ speeches and their all too concretely vulgar realization in the stage busi-ness’’ (Overreacher, 120–21); and Halpern, who laments more broadly that the play stages an‘‘aesthetics of disappointment’’ (‘‘Marlowe’s Theater,’’ 467).




When, for instance, Faustus attempts to make his eternal end immedi-ately by signing the diabolical contract that he believes will ensure that heremains forever an embodied spirit ‘‘in form and substance’’ (2.1.72), andwhen he discovers to his utter horror that despite his signing of the con-tract, his body remains a disobedient vehicle for the invisible hand thatwrites ‘‘Homo fuge’’ (2.1.76) on his arm, Mephistopheles manages to distractFaustus from his dramatic crisis simply by going to ‘‘fetch him somewhat todelight his mind’’ (2.1.82). The devil exits stage left, then:

Enter[s] [again] with devils, giving crowns and rich apparel to Faustus; they dance,and then depart.FAUSTUS. Speak Mephistopheles, what means this show?MEPHISTOPHELES. Nothing Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal,And to show thee what magic can perform.

(s.d., 2.1.83–85)

In contrast to the riddling texts that use Faustus’s body and that demandinterpretation, ‘‘this show,’’ although allegorical in the morality tradition,here means ‘‘nothing.’’ It demands no interpretation, no deferral of signifi-cance, no acknowledgment of transcendence. It is all surface. The ‘‘crowns’’and the ‘‘rich apparel’’ that the devils give Faustus emblematize the atten-tion to materials and to outsides that characterizes both life in hell and acertain kind of disinterested aestheticism which in this context functionsonly to deceive. Over and over, Mephistopheles tricks Faustus into believingthat the shows conjured up in the theater of hell’s delights find their endsin the enjoyment of their own performance. Perhaps his most telling trick isto seem to make ‘‘music’’ (2.3.30) with Amphion simply to provide ‘‘sweetpleasure’’ (2.3.25) to Faustus. Amphion along with Orpheus usually exem-plifies the dream of an instrumental aesthetics, a beauty that can pacifybeasts and even compel rocks and stones to organize themselves into citieswith its moving sweetness of song. But Mephistopheles makes this sweetpleasure seem inconsequential, as he makes all magic seem inconsequen-tial, as if magic were a production that celebrated only itself, showed only‘‘what magic can perform,’’ or as if the delight inspired by the spirits person-ated on stage had no effect. But, of course, there will be an effect, no end ofeffect, just not yet.

* * *

I would now like to return to the rumor circulated by Prynne about theperformances of Doctor Faustus that seemed to conjure ‘‘the visible appari-tion of the Devil on the stage’’ to the ‘‘great amazement of both the actorsand spectators . . . there being some there distracted with that fearful sight.’’




The ambiguity of Prynne’s final phrase, ‘‘there being some there distractedwith that fearful sight,’’ suggests both that the participants in the perfor-mance were distracted by the fearful sight of the devil appearing among themand that the devil appeared among them exactly because some participantswere already driven to distraction by a fearful sight. And what else was thislatter sight but the representation of conjuration itself ? If you imaginedmagic as a spectacle meant to produce thoughts and feelings that would bewatched and judged by both devils and God, to apprehend yourself takingpleasure in the staging of conjuration was to sense yourself being led intoreprobation. Let us take, for example, the divertissement we have justquoted, in which Mephistopheles brings in devils who give ‘‘crowns and richapparel’’ to Faustus and ‘‘dance and depart.’’ Mephistopheles is quite obvi-ously entertaining the audience with this spectacle as much as he is enter-taining the magician himself. And he is doing so after having made the au-dience complicit in his intent to deceive Faustus with his confiding aside:‘‘I’ll fetch him something to delight his mind’’ (2.1.82). To characterize‘‘delight’’ as what would fatally distract Faustus from thoughts of God and re-pentance is to remind the audience that delight is theologically suspect inthis context, and as such is something to be resisted. Yet how could the audi-ence not delight, at least somewhat, in the unusual sight of jewels andembroidered brocade glittering bright, in the sweet sound of the musicplaying as graceful devils moved in intricate patterns, in the very qualities oflightness and harmony that the moving figures exuded into the heavens?To disdain these things would be to disdain the sensuous pleasures of the-ater itself. Yet how could spectators also not have felt anxious about theirdelight if they believed that it indicated that they were in spiritual danger?Such anxiety indeed sometimes reached such a pitch of collective tensionthat audiences became convinced there was ‘‘one too many devils amongthem,’’ as G. J. R. put it. But the palpable sense that devils had actually ap-peared in the playhouse was precisely the theatrical effect that Marloweattempted to produce: in order to tie the aesthetic effects of his play to thetheological effects of magic, he had Mephistopheles proclaim at the outsetthat he had been summoned not because there was any ‘‘virtue’’ (1.3.28) inFaustus’s words, but because Faustus’s interest in magical language indi-cated he was ‘‘in danger of being damned’’ (1.3.52).

It is not only when Mephistopheles first appears and contextualizes hisinvocation in terms of the reformed understanding of magic that the playattempts to cast its spectators as active participants in a production that hastheological import. Take, for example, the knight’s refusal to remain onthe scene when Faustus conjures at the Duke of Vanholt’s palace. Theknight seems like a throwaway character, a mere opportunity for Faustus toperform yet another trivial prank, but he also enacts the reformed doctrinethat Marlowe deploys to make the audience anxious about their own inter-




est in magical spectacles. As if assessing everything through a lens of faith(he begins most of his statements with the preface, ‘‘I’faith’’), the knightreacts to Faustus in the exemplary Protestant manner: on the one hand, heentirely devalues the magician’s abilities (when Faustus promises to ‘‘accom-plish’’ the duke’s request by the ‘‘power’’ of his ‘‘spirit’’ [4.1.43– 44], theknight spits out contemptuously, ‘‘I’faith that’s nothing at all’’ [1.3.45]); onthe other hand, he seems to fear the spiritual implications of witnessing theinvocation performed through the instrumentality of the magician. Accord-ingly, he leaves the hall when Faustus begins, as if refusing to risk the dangerof being interested in or pleased by a magical sight.

The play implicitly opposes the attitude and behavior of this doctrinallyexemplary character to those of the audience on the ground and in the gal-leries, who have not only gathered but paid their own coin to watch a stag-ing of a historical magician’s courtly spectacles. Indeed, by conflating the-atrical and magical shows, and by staging that conflation in ways thatimplicate the audience in the action, Doctor Faustus repeatedly attempts tocompel its spectators to identify almost involuntarily with characters whoare invested in the effects of magic. When the scholars ask Faustus to pro-duce Helen, for instance, the play positions these scholars as members ofthe audience who desire to see a conjuration, while it subsumes the audi-ence into the group of scholars by having the boy actor playing Helen movethrough the paying crowd. (Allardyce Nicoll has argued that the stage di-rection ‘‘music sounds, and Helen passeth over the stage’’ [s.d., 5.1.26]implies that the actor entered from one side of the yard, walked throughthe audience, and exited at the other side.)33 And the play stages this sceneto attempt to produce the diabolical wonder, the very combination of ero-tic admiration and fear, that Perkins identified as augmenting the devil’spower. As the boy actor makes his way through the close-pressed ground-lings, his body becomes tactile and almost invasive, polluting the visual do-main of spectatorship with the presence of materiality. That polluting pres-ence may well be frightening as much as erotic, not least because Faustuscommands the scholars, and by extension the audience, to ‘‘be silent, fordanger is in words,’’ as if their hushed attention were the only prophylacticagainst the transformation of this feminine impersonation into a violent di-abolical horror.

Yet the structure of theatrical identification changes when the actorreturns to the stage as Helen and Faustus are swept up into their eroticunion. Then it is Faustus who consumes and is ravished by Helen as animpersonation, and insofar as the audience becomes swept up in the high

33. See Allardyce Nicoll, ‘‘Passing Over the Stage,’’ Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959): 47–55. Fordetails on the layout of the Bell Savage, see Herbert Barry, ‘‘The Bell Savage Inn and Playhousein London,’’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 19 (2006): 121–43.




power of Marlowe’s heroic verse and in the actors’ ability to project eroticdesire and fulfillment, they too become transported by the pleasures of theillusion of rhetorical and theatrical embodiment. The play increases theterror of the pleasure of this identification by juxtaposing this celebrationof magical and theatrical mimesis to the theological imperatives of the oldman, who appears here specifically in contrast to Helen’s conjuration. Theold man’s theological directives (‘‘break heart . . . and mingle it with tears’’[5.1.40]) remind the audience of their obligation to attend to their faithjust at the moment when their inclinations are being most sorely tested bythe erotics of the spectacle that they are witnessing. In making the audi-ence aware of the requirements of faith while ravishing them with theatri-cal spectacle, the play lays bare the dangers of identification with Faustus,whose desire to consider repentance is repeatedly obscured by his absorp-tion in the shows Mephistopheles stages. Yet again and again the audienceis invited to enjoy Mephistopheles’ spectacles while being made aware thatthe aesthetic effects of these same spectacles serve to bring Faustus ever clos-er to the point at which it would be too late for him to repent. Even whenFaustus acts less as a passive consumer of Mephistopheles’ theater piecesand more as a jester who seeks to ‘‘delight’’ his patrons ‘‘with some mirth’’(4.1.90), the audience is encouraged to feel that Faustus represents theirinterests, as it were, since even his cheapest tricks stand as forms of socialwish fulfillment. If Faustus and Mephistopheles are able to slap around thepope and his friars despite their curses, not only do they thereby confirmthe reformed argument about magic (which of course dismisses any maledi-cat Dominus as being entirely ineffective), but they also enact the desire ofany hot-blooded apprentice who would fully enjoy beating up one of hisnation’s enemies. Or, again, by selling the horse courser a bum steed andthen undoing him by disappearing his leg, Faustus would provide vicariousif gruff satisfaction to any resentful spectator who had been fleeced by,essentially, the used-car salesman of his day. In both its high and low plea-sures, then, Doctor Faustus solicits identification with its hero, attempting toincrease the audience’s queasy sense of sympathy with a magician beingled to his damnation.

And just as the play solicits sympathy with Faustus in its spectacle and itscomedy, so does it invite pity for Faustus in its tragedy. Such pity emergesfrom a slightly different kind of theatrical identification, however. Ratherthan accompanying the spectator’s recognition that a character shares hisor her interests, pity may arise when the spectator recognizes the charac-ter’s otherness, when he apprehends or infers that the character suffersinwardly in an extraordinary way. Yet in pity the spectator also identifies insome sense with the tragic character, for he feels psychic pain in his imagi-nation of the character’s suffering. For Levinas, for instance, pity, as anexpression of the subject’s irreducibly asymmetrical obligation to the




other, is fundamental to ethics.34 But in Doctor Faustus, pity has no salutaryethical or moral value; on the contrary, the play explicitly contrasts thequality of human pity to that of divine mercy, thereby fashioning pity forFaustus as an aesthetic response that undermines the spectator’s faith inGod. It is the old man who thus devalues tragic pity. After Helen leaves thestage for the first time, the old man tells Faustus that an ‘‘angel’’ hovers overhis head ‘‘with a vial full of precious grace’’ to ‘‘pour’’ into his ‘‘soul’’(5.1.54–56), and he urges Faustus to repent—to ‘‘break heart, drop blood,and mingle it with tears’’ (5.1.40)—warning him that he has endangeredhis inward soul ‘‘with such flagitious crimes of heinous sins / As no commis-eration may expel / But mercy, Faustus, of thy Savior sweet, / Whose bloodalone must wash away thy guilt’’ (5.1.43–46). ‘‘Commiseration’’ is, of course,the contemporaneous word for the pity inspired by tragedy; Sidney uses itas such in The Defense of Poesy.35 The old man argues, then, that Faustus is noless damnable for being pitiful, yet his argument, orthodox as it may be, notonly makes God seem somehow less compassionate than even the crudestmember of the audience moved by Faustus’s suffering but also makes hisjustice seem all the more inscrutable.

The play’s implication that God lacks compassion and, even more capri-ciously, that he has subjected Faustus to some inexorable, necessary dam-nation, is concentrated in Faustus’s final soliloquy, where the audience wit-nesses Faustus struggling to save himself:

O I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah my Christ—Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;Yet I will call on him—O spare me Lucifer!Where is it now? ’Tis gone: and see where GodStretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!

(5.2.77–83)

It is utterly clear that Faustus’s inner life is tortured. The longing and thesense of exile invoked by his cries (‘‘see, see where Christ’s blood streams. . . one drop would save my soul . . . ah my Christ’’) are utterly palpable yethorribly answered by sharp internal pain, as if an invisible claw slashed at

34. See esp. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lin-gis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). For a critique of this ethical basis as elidingthe potential for monstrosity or inhumanity in the other, see Slavoj Zizek, ‘‘Neighbors andOther Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,’’ in Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and KennethReinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2006),136–90. Zizek does not entirely discard pity as an ethical category, but instead requires that itbe supplemented to counterbalance its excess.

35. See Sidney, Apology for Poetry, 35.




Faustus’s heart for its very longing (‘‘Ah, rend not my heart for naming ofChrist’’). And by this rending sharpness Faustus becomes all the more alien-ated from mercy, as if he were confronted with the hallucination of Christ’sblood disappearing (‘‘Where is it now? ’Tis gone’’), or as if God himselflooked down in the sternest, most unforgiving judgment (‘‘see where God /Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!’’). But what makes Godseem entirely confounding is not merely that he seems to all too ready tosquash Faustus, as if Marlowe’s hero were nothing more than a scurrying,terrified bug, but also that Faustus himself finally seems horrified by damna-tion yet remains utterly exiled and bereft of any chance for his soul to findrest because he manifests the very same habit of mind he displayed in hisopening soliloquy. He still feels that he can live only in his body, addressingthe earth as if it could hide him from God by hiding his body (‘‘Then will Iheadlong run into the earth: Earth gape! O no, it will not harbor me’’[5.2.87]). He still feels like salvation is an annihilation worse than death,and for that very reason he cannot help but prefer either to be in endlesspain in hell or to have no soul at all (‘‘O no end is limited to damned souls!/ Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?’’ [5.2.104–5]). And he stillthinks that his soul is flesh and that his flesh will endure forever in hell(‘‘Now body, turn to air, / Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell / O soul,be changed into little water drops, / And fall into the ocean, ne’er to befound’’ [5.2.116–19]). Thus he can do nothing but call on God in a gaspingpanic (‘‘My God, My God!’’ he cries, just before the devils enter to drag himaway). Is he not performing the old man’s injunction to ‘‘break heart, dropblood, and mingle it with tears’’? Yet God rejects him (‘‘My God, my God,look not so fierce on me!’’ [5.2.120]).

But even if Faustus performs the affects of repentance, he cannot repentand be saved in the strict theological sense because until the very end heexhibits the inward disposition of the faithless magician who must chooseto be duped by Satan. But why does he have such an inward disposition inthe first place? Is it indeed that God has predestined Faustus to hell, sub-jected him to the most miserable necessity? For Paul Ricoeur, the questionof ‘‘the scandalous theology of predestination to evil’’ is the tragic questionpar excellence, which is why the tragic is always, in Ricoeur’s formulation,‘‘a temptation to despair’’ in its display of the ‘‘hostile transcendence towhich the hero is prey.’’36 But Marlowe’s play, as much as it also invites theaudience to despair, stages something more subtle and finally more wrench-ing than blank divine vengeance, for in fact it employs the more charitabletheology represented by Holland rather than that of Perkins: Faustus mayindeed repent, and God may indeed change his mind. The possibility of re-

36. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon,1967), 212, 323.




pentance provides the suspense that makes the play dramatic rather thanmerely iconographical, and that gives force and fear to those apparently triv-ial spectacles that repeatedly persuade Faustus not to perform his inwardpenance. Yet at the same time, there does seem to be something fated inthe way that Faustus is introduced to the audience with a habit of mind thatmakes it impossible for him to take his given opportunities to repent. DoctorFaustus thus brings the audience right up against the nondialectical, andtherefore tragic, contradiction of the theology of grace: the fact an omnipo-tent and supposedly loving God permits creaturely suffering, or, in termsmore specific to the play, that God rejects a man who cries out to him simplybecause that man thinks like a dramatist rather than an allegorist.37 Milton,on his part, tries to solve this problem at the heart of Christianity with a the-odicy of human insufficiency—the archangel Raphael notoriously tells Adamnot to seek to know things above his ken—but Marlowe’s play lays bare theethical poverty of this strategy (not least because it is hard to see what Fau-stus has done with his magic that is really so evil: Ask questions about thestars? Put on some shows? Find a pregnant woman some grapes?).

Even to consider these questions, let alone to feel stirred or moved bythem, is, it seems, to begin to doubt the goodness of God.38 And to doubtthe goodness of God, even if you still believe in his existence, is to slide intowhat was generally understood in the period as atheism.39 Perhaps that iswhy Prynne accused acting companies of ‘‘prophanely’’ playing the historyof Faustus despite the fact that the play stages the orthodoxy of the unre-pentant magician’s damnation. Or perhaps something else was at stake inPrynne’s sense that the play was profane. Insofar as Faustus is compellingas a tragic character, his play will reveal the inexorable negativity at theheart of Protestant Christianity; it will lay bare not that damnation is pre-destined but that salvation itself entails self-obliteration into the absoluteotherness of an inscrutable God. From a humanist perspective such Christi-anity is fundamentally tragic because the life that it offers universalizes allsensuous particularity, all subjectivity signified or even felt in the material

37. As Jonathan Dollimore has argued, the play implicitly stages the question of ‘‘how is evilpossible in a world created by an omnipotent God’’ (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, andPower in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd ed. [Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2004], 117).

38. Alan Sinfield has made a similar point in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics ofDissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 230–37.

39. See David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Holt, 2004), 30–31. Seealso the classic study on the construction of atheism in the period, Lucien Febvre’s The Problemof Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and David Wootton, ‘‘New Histories of Atheism,’’ in Athe-ism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (New York:Oxford University Press, 1992), 13–54.




embodiment of persons and texts. But the ultimate effect of Marlowe’s playis not simply for the audience to doubt whether they should continue todesire God and salvation; rather, it is for the audience terrifyingly to feelthat God is watching them doubt and, bending down his ‘‘ireful brows,’’judging their thoughts and feelings and condemning them to the damna-tion that they are compelled to contemplate. And in a context where magicwas a theatrical show created by the devil but permitted by God so he couldsee whether his subjects would, as Perkins put it, cleave to him or to thedevil and his wicked instruments, to cleave in compassion to Faustus was tosense yourself entering into alliance with the devil, alienated from the in-scrutable source of your immortal soul.

* * *

By characterizing Faustus’s magic as efficacious only because his interestin it signified that he was inclined to be damned, Marlowe turned the aes-thetic strategies of dramatic forms into instruments that produced effectsthat seemed to have soteriological consequences. Yet he dramatized thereformers’ arguments not because he wrote his play to disciplinary ends (itis hard to imagine Marlowe having an interest in reforming his audience’sfaith). Rather, Marlowe made the aesthetics of Doctor Faustus instrumentalto increase the cultural and material power of his art. He knew full well thatimmediate, popular, and even naive theatrical experiences motivate the dis-tribution of such power; from an ambitious and brilliantly cunning play-wright’s point of view, they are the means to that very end. And in writingDoctor Faustus, Marlowe was not just cunning, but fearless. If he argued, asRichard Baines claimed, that ‘‘the first beginning of Religion was only tokeep men in awe,’’ it still could not have been an easy thing, when atheismwas a felony and religious discourse saturated all of English life, to maintainsuch a demystifying view of the ideological function of the sacred.40 Yet Mar-lowe used belief in the devil and in God himself as his dramatic instrumentto wrench the psychic and social force of religious experience away from itsdominant institutional contexts and to place it in the peripheral space ofthe theater, which he, above all his immediate contemporaries, was creatingas a charged, extraordinary, and charismatic social space.

In saying this, I am not arguing that Marlowe ‘‘appropriated’’ the sacredfrom its dominant institutional contexts. On the contrary, the rumors of

40. Richard Baines, quoted in Paul H. Kocher, ‘‘Marlowe’s Atheist Lecture,’’ in Marlowe: ACollection of Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Leech (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 160.Nicholas Davidson has argued, by contrast, that the opinions attributed to Marlowe in theBaines libel were unexceptional in the period. See his ‘‘Christopher Marlowe and Atheism,’’in Grantley and Roberts, Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, 129–47.




devils appearing on the Faustian stage belie that model of the relationshipbetween the dramatic and the theological in which the theater evacuatesthe spiritual content from theological forms only to stage those formswithin a sphere of rational disenchantment that supposedly frames the ex-perience of a play.41 Such a model relies on a modern, indeed modernist,understanding of theater as a compartmentalized zone of experience whereentertainment has no further end than its own production and consump-tion, and where aesthetic efficacy, if it exists at all, remains limited to art’sability to contain the contradictions of ideology. Theatrical representationclearly had a certain kind of autonomy in Marlowe’s England, producedand consumed as it was in its own institutional space, yet at the same time,as I hope I have been able to show, that very representation could be under-stood by antitheatrical writers and theatergoers alike as an instrument thathad theological ends. Another way to put this claim is to say that theater wasnot always understood as a disenchanted product of human agency. Whenthe reformers argued that Satan staged theater pieces through the instru-mentality of the magician to the end of creating beliefs in the audience thatwould augment his own power, they were quite capable of imagining thatsuch spectacles were well-crafted illusions without needing to go on to positthat the devil was an ideological fiction. The rumors of the Faustian devilspowerfully demonstrate that even representations that announced theirown theatricality—even illusions that were institutionally marked out assuch—could still be understood as having theological consequences. Thosewho believed that the devil came when Faustus called him may have beenfully invested in their faith, but they were never so gullible as to believe thatthe actors were anything but players. They were subjected to (and by) theirculture simply just enough to fear that the pleasure and grief those playersinspired served as damning evidence of the worth of their souls. It is thisspiritual instrumentality of embodied representation that Marlowe exploitedto his own dramatic and institutional purposes. That audiences subjected tothe power of Marlowe’s play feared that devils were flying to the scene todrag their souls to hell resoundingly attests to the success of his theatricalstrategy.

41. For the original argument that early modern drama evacuated spiritual forms of theircontent, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists,’’ in Shakespearean Negotia-tions: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1988), 94 –128.




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Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them