Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Abstract

It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and has been deemed a skeptical play. 1 More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with superstition." 2 Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature." 3 And the varied testimony of Marlowe's contemporaries--Robert Greene, Richard Baines, Thomas Kyd, and Richard Cholmeley among them--strongly suggests that both the man and his writings could be considered iconoclastic and profoundly irreverent: both susceptible to charges of "monstruous opinions," "vile hereticall conceipts," even "diabolical atheism." 4 True, the circumstances in which these allegations were sometimes made force us to question their accuracy; yet, there still exists an extraordinary congruence of contemporary attitude about Marlowe--about what we might call his skepticism. But what in fact are we saying when we say an early modern writer is skeptical? In what senses does this word carry meaning with respect to the dramatic compositions of [End Page 257] Marlowe or his contemporaries? How can we allege, without being utterly vapid, that Doctor Faustus exhibits a pervasive skepticism? How, if at all, may we infer skeptical tenets from dramatic texts? What, if any, are the skeptical paradigms inherent in Marlowe's great tragedy?