Doctor Faustusand the Art of Dying Badly

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeDoctor Faustus and the Art of Dying BadlyMaggie VinterMaggie VinterCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFaustus:Lucifer and Mephastophilis! Ah, gentlemen, I gave them my soul for my cunning.All:God forbid!Faustus:God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it.1What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to fix. Critics have plausibly interpreted the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to free-thinking iconoclasm.2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly and the godless, social superiors and inferiors, and angels and devils, all of whom offer different, and sometimes shifting, interpretations of the cosmos. These voices agree on almost nothing. Nothing, that is, except that Faustus’s bad actions will end in damnation.That Marlowe should emphasize the bald fact of Faustus’s badness over the religious context from which it emerges is all the more surprising because badness has traditionally been conceived in terms of privation or distortion. Augustine influentially defined evil as a departure from God.3 The Good is a unitary, positive attribute of divinity, which stands as both the source and the model for all goodness on earth. The Bad, as such, is nothing. Rather, different badnesses represent different, ever-multiplying perversions of the Good. This negative characterization of evil found new expression in the sixteenth century through the theology of Luther and Calvin, who offer broadly similar accounts of agency after the fall. The human will is at once entirely derivative and, when not illuminated by grace, irredeemably vicious.4 When Marlowe emphasizes Faustus’s depravity while obscuring the divinity it rejects, he perversely presents the consequence without the cause, the flawed reflection without the object that it mirrors.Perhaps, though, representational perversity is the point. In this article, I argue that theories of parody can help us understand such free-floating badness. From Julius Caesar Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridicula in 1560, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, parodic techniques have generally been understood as derogatory in intent.5 However, Giorgio Agamben suggests a fruitful alternative approach when he argues that parody might not simply deflate its target but could also function as a strategy for representing mysteries obliquely.6 To assess the value of Agamben’s ideas, I analyze Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus alongside another sixteenth-century dramatization of dying badly, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570). Both plays certainly use derogatory parody to ridicule characters who, at the last, are unable to relinquish worldly things. But they also suggest that parody can function as an investigative and representational tool, akin to a negative theology, that helps us to explicate obscured divinity through avowedly imperfect imitations. Marlowe and Wager share Calvin’s interest in depravity, but they reverse his emphasis.7 Instead of simply asserting that human will is irredeemably vicious, they ask what viciousness can reveal about the scope and limits of human agency or about the gap between fallen perception and divine truth. In particular, parody in their plays becomes a tool for analyzing and representing the approach to death, when the disjuncture between a person’s earthly and spiritual state can appear especially stark and especially in need of resolution.Furthermore, a focus on the affinities between parodic techniques and privative understandings of bad action can clarify the changing fortunes of religious theater in the sixteenth century. Between the publication of Enough Is as Good as a Feast around 1570, the writing of Doctor Faustus in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and the virtual prohibition on religious language onstage under the “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players” in 1606, a growing group of religious thinkers came to understand dramatic representation as an inherently blasphemous practice.8 While there is no necessary link between antitheatricality and predestinarian accounts of the will, both discourses share a common concern with how imperfect human imitations approach an unseen, perfect original. Moreover, many of the same Protestant thinkers who elaborated Augustine’s account of evil to deny the possibility of good works independent of God’s grace also engaged in polemic against drama.9 Enough Is as Good as a Feast can help explain this slippage, since it indicates how hard it is to inoculate any representation of a religious subject from charges of profanation. By the end of the play, the derogatory potential of parody subsumes its use as an investigative strategy, and all forms of mimesis risk being revealed as blasphemous. Wager himself seems to have become disenchanted with religious theater, since he abandoned dramatic writing toward the end of the 1570s even as he remained “active in the Anglican ministry well into the 1580s.”10This context suggests that in writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe was engaged not so much in secularizing religious forms as in reviving a dead genre abandoned by its original practitioners as unsatisfactory. His play, I argue, offers an implicit rejoinder to antitheatrical condemnations of drama. Marlowe appears to agree with the polemicists that dramatic mimesis necessarily offers a distorted, deficient version of what it imitates. But the theater’s representational badness reflects the ingrained badness of human performances generally, all of which are necessarily failed imitations of an inaccessible model. We are all doing what Faustus is doing. By foregrounding the validity of parody as a representational strategy for figuring otherwise unapproachable mysteries, and by attending to the forms of human agency that make such representation possible, Marlowe implies that drama is compatible with theological investigation precisely because of its blasphemous potential. The play encourages us to expand Scaliger, Bakhtin, and Agamben’s understandings of parody to theorize performances on the Elizabethan stage and beyond.Parody, Beside and BelowThe impulse to parody is ancient. The word itself derives from the Greek term parodos, which was probably initially used to describe any variant poem or song written beside an older work but took on particular connotations of comedy by the time Aristotle used it in the Poetics.11 Although the word (transliterated into Latin as parodia) and the concept disappeared from rhetorical manuals by the fifth century, a vigorous European tradition of adapting privileged genres or subjects for new ends persisted through the Middle Ages.12 The Coena Cypriani, celebrations of feasts of the fool, and drunkards’ and gamblers’ masses all manifest a particular appetite for burlesque revision, especially of sacred models. While modern critics have disagreed over the significance of these texts, Martha Bayless is persuasive when she emphasizes their diversity and cautions against any grand theory of medieval parody as prima facie orthodox or heterodox.13 The technique was everywhere, capable of advancing many ends.By the early modern period, though, parodies (especially of religious subjects) were attracting more controversy. Sixteenth-century discussions of parody focalized broader debates about the aesthetic and moral value of imitative art. Humanists revived parodia as a rhetorical term but altered its connotations to imply that imitation of a serious subject necessarily derogates that subject. In 1560, Scaliger influentially defined the word as “Rhapsodia inversa mutatis vocibus ad ridicula sensum retrahens” [rhapsody turned upside down, redirecting the sense toward amusing things with altered words].14 Where the Greek prefix para had suggested juxtaposition, Scaliger describes inversion and institutes a hierarchy between serious literature and comic travesty. Though ridicula may neutrally connote an amusing subject in Latin, Margaret Rose suggests Scaliger’s early modern English readers largely understood parody as derogatory.15 Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), for instance, describes parody as what would make something “absurder then it was.”16And this revaluation of parody was not confined to rhetorical theory. Over the same period that Scaliger’s construction of parody started to gain more widespread acceptance in literary contexts, religious reformers came increasingly to reject comic adaptations and inversions of religious motifs as blasphemous by definition. The Henrican state suppressed festivals of boy bishops in 1541, objecting that “boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit … rather to the derision than any true glory of god, or honour of His saints.”17 In 1583, Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses condemned surviving festivals of the Lord of Misrule in similar terms as “horrible prophanation[s] of the Sabboth.”18 Significantly, Stubbes’s objection to misrule immediately follows his more famous condemnation of theater on the grounds that “the blessed word of God, is to be handled reverently, gravely, and sagely with veneration to the glorious Majesty of God, which shineth therein, and not scoffingly, floutingly, and jybingly as it is upon Stages in Playes and Enterludes” (236). Stubbes’s direct intellectual inspirations are the antitheatrical Church Fathers, including Augustine, whom he cites in his own support (237). However, when he denies the possibility of any genuinely sacred theater, he evokes an older Platonic logic that sees all imitation as inherently duplicitous. Plato’s Republic depicts Socrates condemning the tragic poet as “in his nature three removes from the king [i.e., God] and the truth, as are all other imitators.”19 For Stubbes, the problem is not that playwrights sometimes choose to mock God. Rather, he suggests that it is impossible to talk about God on stage without mockery. Any attempt to represent a religious truth dramatically, no matter what the motive, will necessarily fall into blasphemy. Imitation is parody.Modern critics trying to account for the character of parody in the early modern era, or to explain the hostility it increasingly inspired, have most often drawn on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.20 Bakhtin essentially accepts Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridiculing inversion but revalues ridicule as a folk challenge to elite monoculture and a spur to social and aesthetic change. Parody provides “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them.”21 It defamiliarizes the object of representation and anticipates the development of novelistic heteroglossia by revealing the power of language as language (60–61). Applied to Elizabethan theater, Bakhtin’s account would align dramatic parody of religious models with subversive and secularizing impulses. Though elements of Bakhtin’s historiography have been questioned, the theoretical framework he proposes has remained powerfully influential and (superficially, at least) feels consonant with the iconoclastic, scoffing Marlovian persona evoked by documents like the Baines note.22Descriptions of parody as inversion, however, are by themselves inadequate to explain texts like Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Doctor Faustus. These plays sometimes exploit the deflationary capacity of imperfect imitation but at other points employ dramatic parody to explore theological problems or even to model orthodox behavior. As a corrective to Scaliger and Bakhtin, we might consider Agamben’s strikingly different claim that “parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance … parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing.”23 Departing from Scaliger—and effectively dismissing the dialogical play celebrated by Bakhtin as mere “fiction”—Agamben instead follows Plato in focusing on the relationship between the representation and the distanced reality it purports to stand for. However, he crucially revalues Platonic concepts. Where Plato asserts the hierarchical inferiority of representations, Agamben notes the prefix para implies a horizontal arrangement of original and copy. And where Plato rejects mimesis on the grounds of its imperfection, Agamben argues that avowed distortion has a sacralizing effect. When parody draws attention to its inability to display an object directly, it reverently casts that object as a mystery. Viewed in this light, the “liturgy of the mass, the representation par excellence of the modern mystery, [is] parodic,” and medieval scatological reworkings are respectful elaborations, rather than profanations, of liturgical form (42). Agamben rejects Bakhtin’s suggestion that parodies contest privileged forms and ideas from below and claims instead that they offer esoteric avenues to otherwise inaccessible truths.24 Reworking the terms that Stubbes uses to condemn the theater, we might say the scoffing, flouting, and jibing of players does not misappropriate or dampen the light of God’s majesty shining within his word, so much as it veils that light so that it can be looked on indirectly, without the risk of blindness.Although Bakhtin and Agamben’s accounts of parody are markedly different, I do not think we necessarily need to choose between them in all cases. Parody is capable of being deployed for many purposes and of appearing in many forms and many locations. It can emerge reverently beside or profanely below the object it mimics.25 Superimposing these two theoretical models, moreover, might be particularly helpful for understanding sixteenth-century texts. During this period, the reemergence of parodia as a topic of explicit consideration in rhetorical studies and the increased religious scrutiny of representation combined to render parody’s true position especially uncertain. Moreover, this uncertainty seems to have been recognized by at least some Elizabethan writers, who responded to it in markedly different ways. The ambiguous place of parody contributes to Stubbes’s distrust of scoffing mimesis. But to other writers struggling to depict ambiguous or dangerous subjects, the very instability of parodic forms might prove useful. To see just how useful, I now turn to representations of the bad death.Dying like a ProtestantIn many Christian traditions, death is something you do. Popular ars moriendi texts present death not just a misfortune to be suffered but also as a discipline to be studied or an action to be performed.26 From its inception in the fifteenth century, this homiletic literature of the good death troubled easy distinctions between activity and passivity and considered complex interactions between divine and human will.27 However, questions of how to die well became charged in new ways after the Reformation. The art of dying, like other devotional practices, became a site of sectarian controversy. Protestant reformers challenged many Catholic rituals such as the anointing of the sick and intercessory prayers.28 And polemicists from both confessions politicized the moment of death through highly publicized accounts of victorious martyrdoms29 and propagandistic accusations that dying leaders of rival sects had despaired or recanted.30 More fundamentally, popular predestinarian theologies threatened the conceptual basis of conduct books. The deathbed renders this theoretical challenge especially pressing, first, because the dying person’s diminished mental and physical capacity can make problems of human will more apparent and, second, because the moment of death was commonly understood to unmask the true distribution of agency between the human and the divine. Death reveals whether a person was always already saved or damned, and this revelation has two effects that are somewhat in tension with one another.31 On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of grace to salvation and the insufficiency of human endeavor. On the other hand, it encourages a reconceptualization of individuals’ earthly actions as direct expressions of their ultimate spiritual status. Their earlier moral vacillations must be retroactively reclassified either as true expressions of their election (or depravity) or as temporary and misleading departures from their essential nature. Sectarian disputes and doctrinal innovations did not destroy the genre of ars moriendi; indeed more, and more varied, examples were produced by both Catholics and Protestants over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than ever before.32 But controversy altered the nature of the genre. Ars moriendi developed from a broadly applicable template for the final good work of a Christian to a site of contention over what both a Christian and a work could be.Doctrinal disputes about mortality also had consequences for the form of religious drama. The long-standing link between deathbed conduct books and drama is evident in the 1528 printed edition of Everyman, which advertises itself as a “treatyse how ye hye fader of heuen sendenth dethe to somon euery creature … in maner of a morall playe.”33 Medieval interludes portraying the approach to death typically illustrated the practices outlined in ars moriendi texts by depicting morally malleable, universalized protagonists who oscillate between good and bad impulses. Elizabethan Protestant dramatists sought to reorient this theatrical tradition to better account for the belief that spiritual status is predetermined. William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast illustrates how this works. The play is a fairly representative example of a subgenre labeled “homiletic tragedies” by David Bevington.34 Whereas earlier medieval moralities had emphasized forgiveness and ended hopefully, Bevington claims that in the 1570s and 80s, predestinarian doctrines shifted some dramatists’ focus “from forgiveness to retribution.” Their tragedies discover “the materials for a tragic resolution” within the episodes of moral degeneracy typical of the earlier morality tradition. Transforming a comedy into tragedy merely requires “terminating its usual progression of spiritual downfall and recovery before the final phase” (247). Bevington’s demonstration that there are significant structural continuities between homiletic tragedies and earlier plays is convincing. Yet in focusing on historical persistence, he understates the extent to which these plays redirect, or even subvert, the forms they inherit as they accommodate new doctrinal positions.Enough Is as Good as a Feast centers on the protagonist named Worldly Man. Torn between the moderation advocated by the virtuous figure Heavenly Man and avarice, he eventually aligns himself with a vice called Covetousness and with his help is shown extorting a tenant and cheating a hireling. As the pair conspire to evict the tenant, Worldly Man is suddenly struck down by God’s Plague. Covetousness ministers to him, along with Ignorance (an ineffective priest) and a physician, but he continues to sicken. On his deathbed he attempts to dictate a will but dies before he finishes speaking the opening sentence “In the name ….” (1401) and is finally claimed by Satan.Wager dramatizes a distinction between the saved and the damned that is absolute but obscured for much of the action. Worldly man’s initial motions toward repentance appear sincere. Embracing moderation, he offers thanksto God the father of all might,Which will not the death of sinners as Scripture doth say,It hath pleased him to open unto me the true lightWhereby I perceive the right path from the broad way;Therefore, I am content myself for to stayWith Enough which bringeth me to quiet in body and mindYea, and all other commodities therewith I do find.(658–64)Worldly Man is a reprobate—and marked as such by his name—but in this speech he scarcely sounds like one. He claims to feel internal, affective satisfaction with “Enough.” And his statement that God has “open[ed] unto me the true light” implies a genuine change in position and perspective brought about through grace. Arguably, the speech is ironized by the term “commodities,” which implies that Worldly Man understands godly rewards through analogy to material ones.35 Yet the word by itself does not prove Worldly Man is in bad faith. Such comingling of worldly and spiritual language is common, especially in texts focusing on last things. Sixteenth-century wills, for example, performed dual religious and economic functions. Ostensibly secular testamentary documents typically had devotional preambles, while sample wills sometimes show up in religious texts.36 Thomas Becon’s devotional dialogue The Sycke Mans Salue, published in 1561, offers an instructive counterpoint to Wager’s play. Epaphroditus, the godly man at the center of Becon’s text, manifests his religious charity by dictating a will containing specific bequests to his dependents and friends and even offering 40 pounds for the upkeep of public highways.37 The need for the godly to engage with the world in material terms, if only in order to provide analogies for heavenly action, mirrors the tendency of the fallen to express themselves with spiritual language. A reprobate character such as Worldly Man held in the grip of a virtuous impulse looks the same as someone exhibiting genuine virtue. And the convergence raises questions about whether the two can ever be distinguished.The end of the play insists they can—in death. Wager uses a parody of the traditional postures of the good death to overwrite the apparent convergence between saved and damned with a radical differentiation. Superficial similarity is significant only because it reveals a far more profound distinction. The dying Worldly Man exhibits his degeneracy through perverted approximations of correct godly behavior. Like Becon’s Epaphroditus, he is surrounded by friends and advisors. However, most of them are vices; only the Physician shows even a formulaic concern for his spiritual well-being. Also, like Epaphroditus he is explicitly concerned with settling his affairs before death. However, Worldly Man envisages a will that would help his wife to “(as near as she can) forgo nought” (1392), rather than support acts of charity. The process reaches its climax as Worldly Man is prevented from using a spiritual formula simply as a formula once he finds himself physically incapable of speaking God’s name. Whereas initially Worldly Man’s mimicry of Heavenly Man had made him look like one of the saved, by the end of the play his close approximation of godly behavior is itself a marker of his fallenness.Ultimately, Enough Is as Good as a Feast rejects the apparent convergence of godly and reprobate behavior in will making to affirm a clear hierarchy between them. The worldly death is conclusively marked as a failed imitation of the godly death. This second convergence of worldly and godly, in which the sinner parodies the saved, counters the first one, where the reprobate temporarily displays repentance. Elements separated sequentially in the earlier part of the play (so that Worldly Man is wicked, then good, then wicked again) are here compressed (so that wickedness and goodness attach simultaneously to the same postures and become available to the audience together). For Wager, the ostensibly poor fit between inherited dramatic models centered on a malleable everyman, and a predestinarian outlook becomes dramatically advantageous. Worldly Man’s apparently perfect and sincere mimicry of godliness acknowledges epistemological difficulties inherent to predestinarian beliefs.38 His moral oscillation indicates how earthly uncertainty of election obscures the distinction between the saved and the damned, while his fall into explicit parody reaffirms the primacy of that distinction.Over the course of the action, the play’s implicit understanding of parody evolves. Wager increasingly codes variant imitations as not merely comic but actually morally inferior and then encourages the audience to retroactively apply an assessment of inferiority to earlier episodes. An implicit understanding of parody resembling Agamben’s is replaced by one more like Scaliger’s. At first, Worldly Man’s approving reference to commodities accrued through godliness seems like a handy material analogy for intangible heavenly rewards. Later, it appears like a telling departure from true Christian practice. Once the ridicule evoked by Worldly Man’s behavior during death is belatedly extended to encompass his earlier actions, what had first emerged beside becomes refigured below. What remains unclear is if there is any necessary endpoint to this process or if Enough Is as Good as a Feast wants to suggest that all imitations are parodic and derogatory. If even Worldly Man’s repentant motions can be redefined as reprobate inversions, it is hard to imagine what imitation could conclusively avoid accusations of inappropriateness and failure. Such doubts seem to have underpinned a turn by religious writers away from the stage—a turn in which, as I said above, Wager may have participated.Doctor Faustus confronts these difficulties. Marlowe, like Wager, adapts older forms to fit new doctrinal contexts and deploys parody to adjudicate between godliness and depravity. However, his play differs from Enough Is as Good as a Feast in several important respects. First, it is less clear that there are alternatives to parody. Where Enough counterbalances the vices with unambiguous virtues, Doctor Faustus refers to heaven in terms of privation that foreground the distorting effects of human perception. Ruth Lunney notes, for example, how the Good Angel is usually misheard or misunderstood by Faustus and starts to appear more like a manifestation of psychological uncertainty than a clear link to the divine.39 The B-text, though often described as the Arminian version of the play, stresses structural impediments to Faustus’s perception of Christian teachings through Mephastophilis’s boast that “when thou took’st the book / To view the scriptures, then I turn’d the leaves / And led thine eye” (B-text, 5.2.992–94). In the context of heaven’s occlusion, Faustus’s behavior can be read almost as a practice of negative theology that engages the divine through demonstrating what it is not. Second, any attempt to characterize Faustus’s downfall simply as a blasphemous inversion is complicated by the sheer variety of ways that he perverts divine truth. Worldly Man undergoes a single, conclusive bad death; Faustus stages multiple arts of dying badly. His imitations of religious postures never disavow their dependence on a divine original. They constitute alternative approaches to inevitable damnation, rather than challenges that could evade it. But in their diversity and their refusal to explicate their precise relation to that original, they focus attention toward what constitutes fallen human action.40 Faustus may even discover a limited degree of freedom, not to avoid hell but to choose between different paths to hell. Third, parodic approaches to death in Doctor Faustus ground a metatheatrical investigation of the ethics and aesthetics of theater. If Wager’s equation of parody with depravity risks expanding (maybe unwittingly) into a condemnation of all mimesis, Marlowe’s depiction of shifting relationships between parodic religious and artistic practices explores what case can be made for embodied imitation despite, or even because of, its inevitable distortion of its object.Heaven or Helen?Doctor Faustus moves in the opposite direction to Enough Is as Good as a Feast, from parody as inversion to parody as juxtaposition. Marlowe begins the play by establishing blasphemy as the normative mode of dramatic representation, and then subsequently investigates whether mimesis can be recuperated either as a secular practice or as a tool for representing religious truths. The first scene introduces Faustus as an intellectual iconoclast, dismantling and rejecting the privileged pursuits of the sixteenth-century university.41 As Edward A. Snow demonstrates, Marlowe’s protagonist proceeds by strategically confusing two definitions of the word “end,” and misunderstanding the goals of the various disciplines as their termini.42 The fact that Faustus has learned to dispute well, for instance, means he has achieved logic’s “chiefest end” and can abandon its study (1.1.8). Magic alone survives because Faustus considers it to lack any positive content. While he glories that the scope of its study is limited only by “the mind of man” (1.1.62), his own conception seems circumscribed by the disciplines he already knows and defines magic against. His practice does not strike out into new territory but perverts other modes of thought and behavior—most notably the religious ceremonies he parodies, from the black mass that summons Mephastophilis to the exclamation “consumatus est” (2.1.74) as he finalizes his contract with Lucifer. Significantly, Faustus’s distorted performances initially stand alone