"Where We are is Hell": Necromancy, Voyeurism and the Magic Circle in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus

Abstract

This study aims to uncover the politics and poetics of the human body within the cultural context of the English Renaissance through the analysis of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, a tragedy on the rebellious hero's fatal valuing of corporeality (body) over spirituality (soul). Corporeality is to Faustus the truth of his searching of immortality, the signifier of the exercise of the mighty godlike power, in that he claims himself a demi-god, soaring above the human confinement. Above all, Faustus envisions the decay of the human body as being even more horrible than the damnation of the soul, thus he is driven to worship the fullest corporeal satisfaction. His conjuring up of Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy has suggested to some critics the replacing of life with death, regeneration with decay, classical knowledge with necromancy, God with Lucifer. The ”art” of necromancy is to the magician his telescope, the transgressive tool with which one may peep/penetrate into heaven. Like his corporeal eye's circular field of vision which also encompasses the powers of memory and imagination, the conjurer's circle that surrounds his/her body blurs the boundaries between past and present, living and dead. In his voyeuristic gaze of Helen, we see the congruence of the conjurer’s circle and the circular field of vision of the eye, where the latter now has an active necromantic force or power: the necromancer's lustful voyeurism is also his power to conjure the very physical object of his desire. With Faustus' kiss of Helen, the corporeal part-tongue-is brought into lay, a body part untamed and associated with Faustus’ inflamed, impassioned, swollen rhetoric, hyperbolic, winged lingua, which has extended to his incantations. The words written on Faustus' body, with its self-negating command to ”flee,” like the blood that congeals and then recommences to flow, suggests a kind of magic power that resides finally in stasis and self-control, if not quite total self-negation.