1 [This essay, which applied a formalist-structural analysis to Marlowe's play, dates from 1980. It has not previously been published. Except in note 16, where I have added in square brackets a reference to my 2008 edition of Doctor Faustus, and note 21, which is entirely new, the text and notes have not been updated.] [Index: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, magic] [Date: 1980] Magic Circle and Celestial Macrocosm: The Structure of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus Michael H. Keefer I More, perhaps, than any other part of Doctor Faustus, the third scene of Act I (which begins with Faustus's invocation of Mephastophilis) 1 illustrates the difference between the experience of reading a play and of seeing it performed. The extraordinary image of grotesque macrocosmic appetite with which the scene opens is striking to the ear, and repays a reader's meditative pause: Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, Longing to view Orions drisling looke, Leapes from th'antartike world unto the skie, And dimmes the welkin with her pitchy breath: 1 I have used this spelling of the spirit's name throughout this essay (except in quotations where other spellings occur). “Mephastophilis” is the most common spelling in the 1604 quarto (the most frequently occurring spelling in the 1616 quarto is “Mephostophilis”). 2 Faustus, begin thine incantations.... (A: 244-48) 2 It is followed by an equally resonant image, of which only the members of an audience will be fully aware—that of Faustus standing in his magic circle. The sequence of these images is by no means accidental. The lines Faustus speaks as he enters convey a sense of astronomical immensity suffused with perverse energy, and the magic circle into which he steps is both a microcosmic symbol of the celestial macrocosm suggested by these lines, and also a means of appropriating its powers. For the circle contains, along with the names of saints and cabalistic permutations of the name of God, “Figures of every adjunct to the heavens, / And characters of signes and erring starres” (A: 254-55). Faustus's first lines to Mephastophilis, once the demon has returned to him in the habit of “an old Franciscan Frier” (A: 269), are an apocalyptic return to the level of the macrocosm: I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live, To do whatever Faustus shall commaund, Be it to make the Moone drop from her spheare, Or the Ocean to overwhelme the world. (A: 281-84) He is quickly disabused of the belief that he can exercise such power. But this scene has established connections between the magic circle and the celestial macrocosm that deserve exploration. As will shortly become evident, Doctor Faustus is to a significant degree organized around patterns of constriction and cyclic rhythms of repetition and return that are related to the images of the magic circle and its macrocosmic counterparts. II 2 All quotations from the play are from W. W. Greg, ed., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616 (1950; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Quotations are identified by Greg's line numbers, with A and B referring to the 1604 and 1616 texts respectively; u/v/ and i/j have been silently normalized. My quotations from Doctor Faustus are chosen on the principle that while in parallel passages both quartos seems at different times to provide a superior text, the 1604 version of the play is preferable to the 1616 version (the last three acts of which are disfigured by the additions made by Rowley and Birde in 1602). See Fredson Bowers, “Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The 1602 Additions,” Studies in Bibliography 26 (1973): 1-18; and Constance Brown Kuriyama, “Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text,” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 171-97. 3 Faustus, within his circle, is strictly enclosed, and he has drawn this line around himself. He is at the same time projecting his will out of the circle with what seems, initially, to be complete success: “Who would not be proficient in this art? / How pliant is this Mephastophilis?” (A: 272-73). The purpose of a magic circle is in part protective: it is a barrier through which hostile spirits supposedly cannot penetrate. 3 Faustus has already produced analogous defensive images in the notions of “wall[ing] all Germany with Brasse,” and making the “swift Rhine, circle faire Wittenberge” (B: 115-16); and although he has planned aggressively to “chase the Prince of Parma from our land” (A: 125, B: 120), it is only at the end of scene three, as he steps from his magic circle, that his military imaginings become decisively projective: “Ile be great Emprour of the world, / And make a bridge through the mooving ayre, / To passe the Ocean with a band of men” (A: 34951). This shift seems appropriate, for a magic circle is also an inverse microcosm of the power structure of the macrocosm, and Faustus imagines that his use of it can give him quasi-divine powers of intervention in that macrocosm. Although this understanding of the magic circle may seem extravagant, there is a parallel to it in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's explanation, in his Heptaplus, of the analogical significance of the structure of Moses' tabernacle: the outer courtyard, open to the weather and containing men and sacrificial animals, figured the sublunary world with its elemental nature and alternations of life and death; the inner sanctuary, with its sevenbranched candelabra, figured the celestial world, the spheres of the fixed stars and the planets; and the Holy of Holies, which was occupied by winged Cherubim, figured the supercelestial world, the eternal dwelling place of the angels, the heavenly kingdom of God.4 3 In the further additions which appear in the much later 1663 quarto of Doctor Faustus, Faustus learns, in open contradiction to what is elsewhere assumed, that spirits can indeed “venter on a man in his circle”: Mephostophilis attacks and carries off a magician of the Sultan of Babylon. See C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed., The Works of Christopher Marlowe (1910; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 201-02. A basic source of information on magic circles and their supposed properties is the spurious fourth book of Agrippa's De occulta philosophia. See R. H. Popkin, ed., Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim: Opera (2 vols.; c. 1600; facsimile rpt Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), vol. 1, De occulta philosophia, seu de ceremoniis magicis, liber quartus, esp. pp. 451-61. 4 Heptaplus, “Ad Lectorem Praefatio”: “... Sed quid remotiores has similitudines prosequimur? Nam si postrema pars tabernaculi erat hominibus & brutis communis, secundam, quae tota auri splendore 4 Faustus's circle could be described as a blasphemous imitation of the inner parts of this structure, the Holy of Holies and the sanctuary. From his position in the circle, he hopes to make use of the powers of the supercelestial and celestial worlds: Within this circle is Jehova's Name, Forward, and backward, Anagramatis'd: Th'abreviated names of holy Saints, Figures of every adjunct to the heavens, And Characters of Signes, and [erring] Starres, By which the spirits are inforc'd to rise.... (B: 234-39) 5 The defensive purpose of the magic circle acquires resonance when one remembers the Calvinistic undertones of Marlowe's opening scene. 6 Faustus has turned to magic in desperation, as a response to the promise of eternal death which he found in the scriptures: he is trying to defend himself against the power of God. Since the circle represents an attempt to appropriate that very power for his own use, Faustus's position is paradoxical. So, indeed, are the words of his invocation. The first sentence of this invocation—“Sint mihi dei acherontis propitii, valeat numen triplex Iehovae” (A: 259)7—signals a recognition that the dominion stretching “as farre as doth the minde of man” (A: 91) to which Faustus aspires as a desperate answer to everlasting death cannot be attained except by employing the existing structure of spiritual forces. Feeling himself excluded from the kingdom of heaven, he will make use fulgebat, candelabrum illuminabat septem lucernis distinctum, quae ut dicunt omnes interpretes Latini, Graeci & Hebraei septem Planetas significant: In tertia parte omnium sacratissima, alata cherubin erant, nonne nostris tres mundos oculis subjiciunt? & hunc quem & bruta & homines incolunt, & coelestem in quo planetae coruscant & supercoelestem habitaculum angelorum.” Cesare Vasoli, ed., Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gian Francesco Pico: Opera Omnia (2 vols.; Basel, 1557-1573; facsimile rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), vol. 1, sig. A3v. (Here and elsewhere I have expanded abbreviations in Latin texts.) 5 I have altered “euening” in B: 238 to the reading of A: 255: “erring”. 6 See Pauline Honderich, “John Calvin and Doctor Faustus,” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 8-10. 7 “May the gods of Acheron be favourable to me! Away with the triple divinity of Jehovah!” This translation of “valeat numen triplex Iehovae” follows F. S. Boas and J. D. Jump. A. W. Ward translated these words as “May the threefold deity of Jehovah prevail!”; Robert H. West has recently argued for “The three-fold power of Jehovah aid me!” (“The Impatient Magic of Doctor Faustus,” English Literary Renaissance 4 [1974], 231). The versions of Ward and West, though possible, are absurd in the context of this play. For although the verb “valeo” has a wide range of meanings, the form “valeat,” used in this way, can only be a forceful gesture of dismissal. Compare Cicero, De nature deorum I. 124: “si talis est deus, ut nulla hominum caritate teneatur, valeat” (Arthur Stanley Pease, ed., M. Tulli Ciceronis De Natura deorum [2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955-58], vol. 1, p. 536). 5 of the kingdom of hell. But the fact that Faustus's invocation springs out of despair makes it contradictory in tone, and distinguishes it from the practices of actual magicians. Medieval magicians, confident in their piety, had used sacred things, ceremonies, and holy names as a means of compelling spirits to their service. 8 And Renaissance Hermetists who were interested in spiritual magic believed, with a still more insistent piety, that their knowledge of Cabala explained the spiritual structure of the universe, and that the regeneration which they sought would give them an immediate power over spirits.9 In neither case is there any element of Satanism (something very much more serious than mere blasphemy). Faustus, in contrast, once he has dismissed “the triple divinity of Jehovah,” marries heaven and hell in a quite different mixture of compulsion and prayer: “... per Iehovam [G]ehennam & consecratam aquam quam nunc spargo, signúmque crucis quod nunc facio, & per vota nostra ipse nunc surgat nobis dic[a]tis Mephastophilis” (A: 26265).10 Renaissance demonologists argued that devils only pretended to obey the commands of magicians in order to seduce them into further impieties; this is the view taken in the prose Faustbooks.11 Faustus, however, is praying to the devils as well as attempting to compel them; he is approaching the stereotype of the witch. Yet although Faustus thus deviates from the documented practices of magicians, it 8 Norman Cohn writes: “Whether the [medieval] magician was trying to scale the heights of scholarship in a flash or whether he was trying to make men kill one another, he set about it in a most pious fashion. Nowhere, in the surviving books of magic, is there a hint of Satanism. Nowhere is it suggested that the magician should ally himself with the demonic hosts....” Europe's Inner Demons (1975; rpt. London: Paladin, 1976), p. 169. 9 A representative and important text is Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, III. 36 (“De homine quomodo creatus ad imaginem Dei”); it is reprinted, with introduction and notes by Paola Zambelli, in E. Garin et al., eds., Testi umanistici su l'ermetismo (Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1955). More generally, see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), and F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 10 “By Jehovah, hell, and the holy water which I now sprinkle, and the sign of the cross which I now make, and by our prayers, may Mephastophilis himself now rise, dedicated to our service.” Mephastophilis informs Faustus that “the shortest cut for conjuring / Is stoutly to abjure the Trinitie, / And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.” He replies: “So Faustus hath already done...” (A: 297-300). The invocation is itself a kind of Satanic prayer, but perhaps other prayers can be understood to have preceded it. 11 See Hans Henning, ed., Historia von D. Johann Fausten: Neudruck des Faust-Buches von 1587 (Halle: Verlag Sprache und Literatur, 1963), ch. 2, pp. 14-16; and The Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus, ch. 2, in P. M. Palmer and R. P. More., eds., The Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 137-38. 6 is possible that Marlowe found a hint for this Satanism in a well-known Hermetic work that he may well have read: Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia.12 In the preface to this text, Agrippa warned off hostile readers in language that can hardly have failed to give rise to doubts about the piety expressed elsewhere in it: “the gate of Acheron is in this book; it speaks stones; let them beware lest it beat out their brains.” 13 Striking though the verbal confusion of Faustus's invocation may be, the spatial and psychological paradox of Faustus's situation is perhaps more helpful to us in interpreting the structure of the play. I say “psychological” as well as “spatial” because Pico also describes in his Heptaplus a fourth world, in which there appears everything that can be found in all the other three. This fourth world is of course man, the microcosm.14 Like Moses' tabernacle, man is a topologically inverted image of the cosmos; and Renaissance Neoplatonists and Hermetists speak with a single voice in counselling men to look within themselves for God, to escape from their corruptible bodies and corrupting passions into their inner celestial and divine selves. 15 Faustus's problem is that when he turns inward, he finds at the centre of his being what he can only understand as a God of wrath.16 And so (one might say, in the 12 Marlowe's Faustus aspires to be “as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadowes made all Europe honor him” (A: 150-51). Moreover, certain passages in Doctor Faustus are strongly reminiscent of passages in De occulta philosophia: compare, for example, A: 83-94 (B: 76-89) with De occulta philosophia, III. 6 (Popkin, ed., Opera, vol. 1, p. 321). It seems probable that Marlowe was also familiar with Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio: Faustus's first soliloquy is a declamatio invectiva rather in the manner of this work. 13 De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), “Ad Lectorem”: “... Credo ego istos tam pertinacis supercilii censores Sibyllis & sanctis magis, vel ipso evangelio prius sibi interdicturos, quam ipsum magias nomen recepturi sint in gratiam, adeo conscientiae suae consulentes, ut nec Apollo, nec Musae omnes, neque angelus de caelo me ab illorum execratione vendicare queant. Quibus & ego nunc consulo ne nostra scripta legant, nec intelligant, nec meminerint: nam noxia sunt, venenosa sunt, Acherontis ostium est in hac libro, lapides loquitur, caveant ne cerebrum illis excutiat” (sig. Aa ii). 14 The masculine term is appropriate, given the insistent misogyny of the Hermetic tradition in which Pico participated. This misogyny is particularly evident in the Hermetic account of the Fall—on which see Yates, Giordano Bruno, pp. 23-24. 15 For examples from Agrippa's works, see De occulta philosophia, III. 36; and De vanitate, “Operis peroratio”: “...iam non in scholis philosophorum & gymnasiis sophistarum, sed ingressi in vosmetipsos cognoscetis omnia...” (Popkin, ed., Opera, vol. 2, p. 311). 16 The first words of Faustus's Good Angel are significant” “O Faustus, lay that damned booke aside, / And gaze not on it lest it tempt thy soule, / And heape Gods heavy wrath upon thy head. / Read, read the Scriptures: that is blasphemy” (B: 97-100). This seems the sort of thing a Good Angel ought to say. But spoken to someone who has already fallen into temptation, who has in fact succumbed to what was known as “the devil's syllogism” (from which the only appeal can be to God's mercy and his grace), it can only tend to confirm his conviction that the second half of Romans 6: 23 does not apply to him. [For commentary on the issues alluded to here, see my edition of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: A 7 terminology of Renaissance psychology) he is driven inexorably out of his inner self, his intellect and rational soul, and into his passions, his distended imagination, and his senses: O something soundeth in mine eares, Abjure this Magicke, turne to God againe, I and Faustus will turne to God againe. To God? He loves thee not, The god thou servest is thine owne appetite, wherein is fixt the love of Belsabub, To him Ile build an altare and a church, And offer luke warme blood of new borne babes. (A: 444-51) It is Faustus's own blood, however, that must be offered; and his own flesh tells him the consequences: “But what is this inscription on mine arme? / Homo fuge, whither should I flie?” (A: 517-18). The episode of the seven deadly sins shows well enough the direction he follows. “O this feedes my soule” (A: 797), he says of this “pastime.” “Tut Faustus,” Lucifer replies, “in hel is al manner of delight” (A: 798). Faustus's magic circle, then, represents a self-containment, undertaken for defence, and as a means of concentrating power in order to escape from the limits he sees pressing on his wilful soul in all the academic disciplines, and especially in theology. But his self-containment quickly leads to to a futile self-imposition of much more alarming limitations. In fleeing outward from his inner self, Faustus is abandoning the central position from which the Renaissance magus hoped, once he had been reborn into his true divine nature, to exercise marvellous powers. He is abandoning all hope of begetting a deity (B: 89), and risks instead becoming something less than human. And in another sense, the magic circle—to take this image now in its relation to Faustus's bargain with Lucifer—is a kind of prison, a local manifestation of that inescapable hell described by Mephastophilis: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd, / In one selfe place: but where we are is hell, / And where hell is there must we ever be” (B: 513-15). Faustus has by this time bound himself to hell by a “Deed of Gift” (B: 423) critical edition of the 1604 version, with a full critical edition of the revised and censored 1616 text and selected source and contextual materials (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), pp. 177-78.] 8 in his own blood; hell is not circumscribed, but he is. The pact appears to be a cheat, for Faustus has not in any noticeable way become a spirit, even though the pact stipulated that he should be “a spirit in forme and substance” (A: 541, B: 488). But is he any the more free to cancel his bargain? He entered into it, in part, as into a sanctuary—a motivation made evident in one of his more notable blasphemies: “when Mephastophilus shal stand by me, / What God can hurt thee Faustus?” (A: 464-65). The answer to this naive boast is painfully obvious. And whenever Faustus thinks to break out of his bargain, he is stopped, either by an inner failing (in which, since he confesses “My heart is hardned, I cannot repent” [B: 589], early audiences might have recognized the working of a Calvinist God on one He has condemned as reprobate),17 or else by the threat of demonic violence. Faustus's bravado is indeed more conspicuous than his bravery. But it is a shock— to the audience as well—when his cry “Ah Christ my Saviour, / seeke to save distressed Faustus soule” (A: 711-12) is followed at once by the appearance of an infernal trinity: Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephastophilis. He shrinks away from them: “O what art thou that look'st so terribly.... O Faustus they are come to fetch thy soule” (B: 657, 659). III In his discussion with Mephastophilis in the second scene of Act II, Faustus is drawn repeatedly from contemplation of the celestial and supercelestial worlds to an awareness of their nature as the proper end of humankind: “When I behold the heavens, 17 As A. D. Nuttall has observed in Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St. John (London: Methuen, 1980), Calvinism was a dominant presence in late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century English culture. Taking their cue from God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart in Exodus 4: 21, 7: 3, 7: 13, and 10: 1, 20, 27, Calvinists understood an impenitent hardness, whether wavering or obdurate, as a condition determined by the will of God. Calvin himself wrote, in commenting on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, that it is “not meet to assign the preparing unto destruction to any thing other than to the secret counsel of God: which also is affirmed ... in the rest of [Paul's] text. That God stirred up Pharaoh [Rom. 9: 17]: Then that he hardeneth whom he will [Rom. 9: 18]. Whereupon followeth that the hidden counsel of God is the cause of hardening.” The Institution of Christian Religion, written in Latine by M. John Calvine, and translated into English according to the Authors last edition ... by Thomas Norton (1561, rpt. London, 1587), III. xxiii. 1, fol. 315. 9 then I repent, / And curse thee wicked Mephastophilus, / Because thou hast depriv'd me of those joyes” (A: 628-30). His impulses of repentance, despair, and renewed curiosity initiate that pattern which C. L. Barber described, of a circular motion from thinking of the joys of heaven, through despairing of ever possessing them, to embracing magical dominion as a blasphemous substitute. The blasphemous pleasures lead back, by an involuntary logic, to a renewed sense of the lost heavenly joys for which blasphemy comes to seem a hollow substitute—like a stolen Host found to be only bread after all. And so the unsatisfied need starts his Ixion's wheel on another cycle.18 The disputation with Mephastophilis makes Faustus more acutely conscious of the purpose of the macrocosm which surrounds him—“If Heaven was made for man, 'twas made for me: / I will renounce this Magicke and repent” (B: 579-80)—and at the same time of his own alienation from this purpose: “My heart is hardned...” (B: 589). The macrocosmic imagery of this disputation on “divine Astrology” (B: 603) is superb— As are the elements, such are the heavens, Even from the Moone unto the Emperiall Orbe, Mutually folded in each others Spheares, And jo[i]ntly move upon one Axle-tree, Whose termine, is tearmed the worlds wide Pole (B: 607-11) —and such words as “mutually folded” and “jointly move” may also convey an odd suggestion of something akin to tenderness. But the concentric structure expounded by Mephastophilis appears to be felt by Faustus as constricting: he responds with irritation to the further explanation of planetary motions which follows: “These slender questions Wagner can decide: / Hath Mephostophilis no greater skill” (B: 618-19). Was he perhaps anticipating an allusion to the theories of Copernicus (as in the English Faustbook),19 or 18 C. L. Barber, “'The form of Faustus' fortunes good or bad',” Tulane Drama Review 8 (1963-64): 99. 19 The Historie of the damnable life, ch. 21 (Palmer and More, p. 172): “... we thinke that the Sunne runneth his course, and that the heavens stand still: no, it is the heavens that move his course, and the Sun abideth perpetually in his place....” It may seem surprising that the astronomy of Marlowe, the advanced thinker, is less advanced than that of his principal source. The reason may be sought in the 10 even to those of Giordano Bruno? The concentric structure which this disputation brings out is not merely spatial, but temporal as well. All of the planetary spheres, Mephastophilis remarks, “Move from East to West in foure and twenty houres, upon the poles of the world, but differ in their motions upon the poles of the Zodiacke” (B: 615-17). It may after all be the lack of novelty that Faustus finds annoying. He proceeds, contemptuously, to list the periods of the planets' revolutions: Who knowes not the double motion of the Planets? That the first is finisht in a naturall day? The second thus, Saturne in 30 yeares; Jupiter in 12, Mars in 4, the Sun, Venus, and Mercury in a yeare; the Moone in twenty eight daies. [Tush these are fresh mens suppositions....] (B: 620-24, A: 685) I would suggest that Marlowe had a definite motive in introducing these interlocking spheres with their different linked periods of rotation into his play. For they could be said to constitute a celestial machinery that provides a macrocosmic counterpart to the rhythms of Faustus's career. The most obvious of these rhythms is the short-term cycle of despair, blasphemous aspiration, complacent pride, and renewed despair that is an undertone in the first act of the play, and becomes prominent in the second. It is enclosed, and after the pageant of the seven deadly sins, almost wholly supplanted for two acts by the larger rhythm of Faustus's ventures from his academic life out into the world and back again. This second rhythm begins in the first two acts with Faustus's dismissal of his scholastic studies, and with his disputations on astronomy, and is completed for the first time in the narration of the chorus that precedes Act III: He viewes the cloudes, the Planets, and the Starres, The Tropick, Zones, and quarters of the skye, From the bright circle of the horned Moone, Even to the height of Primum Mobile: And whirling round with this circumference, exigencies of his dramatic structures. 11 Within the concave compasse of the Pole, From East to West his Dragons swiftly glide, And in eight daies did bring him home againe. (B: 783-90) The next lines of this same chorus begin a new cycle, which takes Faustus to Rome; and in the chorus to Act IV, this cycle is completed: “Hee stayde his course, and so returned home, / Where such as beare his absence, but with griefe, / ... Did gratulate his safetie with kinde words” (A: 933-34, 936). In the last lines of this chorus, Faustus moves out once again into the world, this time to the Emperor's court. Anther rhythm of departure and return, larger yet, is apparent in that obscure sense of fitness which, as in Donne's famous conceit of the compasses, draws Faustus's circle just, and makes him end where he began: Now Mephastophilis, the restless course that time doth runne with calme and silent foote, Shortning my dayes and thred of vitall life, Calls for the payment of my latest yeares, Therefore sweet Mephastophilis, let us make haste to W[it]tenberge. (A: 1134-39) On the same scale is the pattern of Faustus's use of verbal magic. In his first soliloquy, he anticipated immense powers: “All things that move betweene the quiet Poles / Shall be at my command” (B: 83-84). However, he quickly learns that it is beyond his power “to make the Moone drop from her Sphere, / Or the Ocean to overwhelme the world” (B: 264-65)—or even to gain the unconditional obedience of the spirit by whom he expected to be able to do such things. His “conjuring speeches” (A: 290) were only per accidens the cause of Mephastophilis' appearance: the spirit makes it quite plain that he sees Faustus as a potential victim rather than a master. Only by surrendering himself to Lucifer can Faustus gain demonic service—and the master-servant relationship which ensues is highly equivocal. As I have shown elsewhere, the superior A-version of Doctor Faustus is consistent in denying any transitive power within the play to verbal magic, which works only upon the mind of Faustus, and the audience's imagination. 20 In the non20 See my article “Verbal Magic and the Problem of the A and B Texts of Doctor Faustus,” forthcoming in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology [published in 1983]. 12 Marlovian additions to the play, it is claimed that Faustus's “Magicke charmes” can “pierce through / The Ebon gates of ever-burning hell, / And hale the stubborne Furies from their caves” (B: 1256-58), but in the A-text Faustus explains in the same imperial court that he operates by the “art and power” (A: 1078) of his familiar spirit. The desperate invocations of his final speech—“Stand still you ever mooving spheres of heaven, / That time may cease, and midnight never come .... Mountaines and hilles, come come, and fall on me...” (A: 1453-54, 1470)—are thus a futile return to the kind of magic that Faustus originally hoped to practise, to a verbal magic that was never more than a mirage. When, in this last soliloquy, we encounter once again the “ever mooving spheres of heaven” of which the play has so often reminded us, we are also presented with a collapsing structure of time intervals which telescopes into the “one bare hower” (A: 1451) that Faustus has to live: Faire Natures eie, rise, rise againe, and make Perpetuall day, or let this houre be but a yeere, A moneth, a weeke, a naturall day, That Faustus may repent, and save his soule, O lente lente cur[r]ite noctis equi: The starres moove still, time runs, the clocke wil strike, The divel wil come, and Faustus must be damned. (A: 1455-61) IV One recognizes, with a certain shock, that the A-version of Doctor Faustus observes a kind of unity of time—not in the Aristotelian sense, but in an analogical manner that provides an equal concentration of the action, and may be imaginatively more exciting. Between the evening of Faustus's first soliloquy (he dines with Valdes and Cornelius, and signs his first pact just after midnight) and his last desperate moments as 13 the clock strikes twelve, twenty-four years have elapsed. We are indeed made to feel this as the greater part of a natural life-span. The papal episode was a young man's mischiefmaking, but at the imperial court Faustus seems to speak with the confidence of maturity (I am referring to the A-version of this act), and in the simple but dignified exchanges between Faustus and the pregnant duchess in the Vanholt scene there is an unexpected autumnal grace. However, as time rushes westward in the final scenes of the play, and the different cyclical movements come into phase for the climactic moments of the speech to Helen, the confession to the scholars, and the last soliloquy, these traces of a life's development fade from view, and the twenty-four years' action comes to seem the fantastically compressed events of a single “naturall day.” The complex rhythms of Faustus's action and suffering in the world “differ in their motions upon the poles of the Zodiacke,” but they “All move from East to West in foure and twenty houres, upon the poles of the world....” If the “double motion of the Planets” in Doctor Faustus insinuates that the twenty-four years which elapse between the signing of the pact and Faustus's death are, in some mysterious manner, no more than twenty-four hours, Marlowe's impetuous presentation has already begun to suggest the same thing. After the disputations on astronomy, which ended with the dangerous question, “now tell me who made the world?” (B: 636), Faustus fed his soul—or rather, was force-fed—upon the pageant of the seven deadly sins. To his request, “O might I see hell, and returne againe safe, how happy were I then,” Lucifer replied: “Faustus, thou shalt, at midnight I will send for thee” (B: 733-35). This promise, which clearly answers only the first half of the request, is not fulfilled until the end of the play. Having, so to speak, breakfasted with the seven deadly sins, Faustus interrupts the Pope's luncheon, is himself “feasted mongst [the Emperor's] noblemen” (A: 945), is woken from his afternoon nap by the horse-courser, and dines with the scholars. He amuses himself with Helen in the evening, and in the gathering darkness confesses to the scholars “a surffet of deadly sinne that hath damnd both body and soule” (A: 1399. Lucifer, as he promised, sends for him at midnight. To the degree that a summary like this makes Faustus sound uncomfortably like 14 another Solomon Grundy,21 it is misleading. But the very fact that such a summary is possible is an indication of Marlowe's attentiveness in this play to the unity of time. The fugitive sense of a strange analogical equivalence of times becomes more nearly explicit in the astonishing acceleration of stage time in the last scene of the play: an hour drains away in less than sixty lines. The effect is of a kind of temporal vertigo. In the English Faustbook, Faustus tells how, descending from one of his flights, “... I looked upon the worlde & the heavens, and me thought that the earth was inclosed in comparison with the firmament, as the yolke of an egge within the white, and me thought that the whole length of the earth was not a span long....” 22 From his perspective “thus nigh the heavens,” on the edge of spatial infinity, the world dwindles. In a similar manner, it would seem that as Marlowe's Faustus draws ever nearer to hell, to being “damned perpetually” (A: 1452), time shrivels up around him. His desperate desire to turn the sun back in its course, to make his final hour stretch into “Perpetuall day,” or even to so short a period as “a naturall day, / That Faustus may repent, and save his soule,” might thus be interpreted as a wish to have his whole time again, to begin once more with a new settling of his studies. Even to his last breath he retains a futile hope that the powers which are about to destroy him—or rather, which are going to subject him to eternal destruction— might perhaps accept the propitiatory gesture of a new beginning: “Ile burne my bookes, ah Mephastophilis” (A: 1508). Faustus's frantic invocation of “Faire Natures eie” (A: 1455), his frail hope that the inexorable westward motion of the heavens might be arrested, can be compared to the imagery of John Donne's promise that “as in the round frame of the World, the farthest West is East, where the West ends, the East begins, So in thee, (who art a world too) thy West and thy East shall joyne, and when thy Sun, thy soule comes to set in thy death-bed, the Son of Grace shall suck it up into glory.” 23 However, the smaller sunsets of Faustus's 21 This nursery rhyme was collected and published by J. O. Halliwell in 1842: “Solomon Grundy, / Born on Monday, / Christened on Tuesday, / Married on Wednesday, / Took ill on Thursday, / Grew worse on Friday, / Died on Saturday, / Buried on Sunday. / That was the end / Of Solomon Grundy.” See I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951; 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 394-95. 22 The Historie of the damnable life, ch. 21 (Palmer and More, pp. 173-74). 23 E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter, eds., The Sermons of John Donne (10 vols.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62), vol. 10, p. 52. 15 repeated cycles of despair and incomplete repentance have ended each time, not with an access of grace, but with a subjective conviction of his hopeless alienation from a loveless God—or else with a more frightening objective revelation of his position: Ah Christ my Saviour, seeke to save distressed Faustus soule. Enter Lucifer, Belsabub, and Mephastophilus. (A: 711-13) Accursed Faustus, where is mercie now? I do repent, and yet I do dispaire: Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast, What shall I do to shun the snares of death? Me[phastophilis]. Thou traitor Faustus, I arrest thy soule.... (A: 1329-33) ... ah my God, I would weepe, but the divel drawes in my teares, gush foorth blood, insteade of teares, yea life and soule, Oh he stayes my tong, I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them. (A: 1416-20) Helen's kiss has already, in Faustus's amorous conceit, sucked forth his soul, and 16 he is certain that his last moment on earth will be an encounter, not with the Son of Grace, but with “Lucifer prince of the East, and his minister Mephastophilis,” to whom he has given himself “both body and soule” (A: 551-52). He cannot go forward in hope and let his own Sun, his soul, set peacefully; he can only pull against the inexorable drift of time with words that themselves consume time, or strain in agony towards the visionary afterglow of Christ's blood streaming in the firmament. The inaccessibility of that vision, and of the salvation it signifies, is confirmed by his fatal inability to refrain from substituting another name for the one he wants to speak: Ah rend not my heart for naming of my Christ, Yet wil I call on him, oh spare me Lucifer! Where is it now? tis gone.... (A: 1465-67) V In his De rerum praenotione, Gianfrancesco Pico told a story about a magician who, some fifty years previously, had promised to an unwise and curious prince that he would show him the siege of Troy, with Achilles and Hector included, “as though on a stage.” The promise was not kept: the unfortunate magician was carried off alive by a devil.24 But like his descendant Faustus, who presented the forms of Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy to Emperor and to the scholars of Wittenberg, this magician was engaging in an embryonic form of specifically theatrical magic. In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the magical display that Faustus puts on is simple enough: Robert Greene suggests that his Friar Bacon could far more. 25 But while the 24 De rerum praenotione, IV. 9, in Vasoli, ed., Giovanni Pico, Gian Francesco Pico: Opera Omnia, vol. 2, sig. TTT: “... A daemone quinquaginta ferme ab hinc annis vivum asportatum nusquam comparuisse: dum curioso cuidam & male sano principi, Troiae oppugnationem repraesentare quasi in scoena pollicitus esset, Achillemque & Hectorem introducere praeliantes, & multis tamen id quaerentibus irritum negocium evenit.” This story was taken up by Johann Weyer, who was probably the direct source through whom it became part of the legend of Faustus. See Weyer's Cinq livres de l'imposture et tromperie des diables, tr. J. Grévin (Paris, 1569; microfiche rpt. Paris: Hachette: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1975), II. 4, fol. 71r-v. 25 Greene's Bacon seems deliberately to go beyond Faustus's notion of walling Germany with brass: he claims that “The work that Ninus rear'd at Babylon, / The brazen walls fram'd by Semiramis, / Carved 17 rudimentary display occupies our eyes, Marlowe, the real theatrical magician, is working on another level. The idea of a close relationship between magic and poetry (most memorably developed, perhaps in the dance of the Graces, “Venus Damzels,” in The Faerie Queene, VI. X. x-xxviii) was one of the fruitful commonplaces of the period. And the notion of dramatic rhetoric as a form of invocation, of transitive psychological magic, was equally widespread. In the prologue to Antonio's Revenge, John Marston seems to be playing with the conceit of an equivalence between the 'wooden O' of the theatre and the magician's circle: If any spirit breathes within this round Uncapable of weighty passion (As from his birth being hugged in the arms And nuzzled 'twixt the breasts of happiness) Who winks and shuts his apprehension up From common sense of what men were, and are, Who would not know what men must be—let such Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows....26 And in The Merry Devill of Edmonton, the speaker of the prologue cries, “We ring this round with our invoking spelles”27—though for no greater purpose than to hush the audience into silence. Marlowe's use of this kind of magic is more subtle: he does not tell us we are being conjured. His rhetoric may also be more powerful, directed as it is out of a complex structure of magic circles, macrocosmic as well as microcosmic, which helps to make the out like to the portal of the sun, / Shall not be such as rings the English strond / From Dover to the market place of Rye” (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer [Regents Renaissance Drama Series, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963], scene ii, 62-66). Bacon subsequently humiliates a German magician, Vandermast, who has been brought to England by the German emperor, and declares to the English King Henry III and to the Emperor that “I come not, monarchs, for to hold dispute / With such a novice as is Vandermast. / I come to have your royalties to dine...” (scene ix, 150-52). Not merely does he outdo all competitors in theatrical magic; he gives hospitality to royalty rather than (like Faustus) receiving it from them. 26 Antonio's Revenge, ed. W. R. Gair (The Revels Plays, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), pp. 54-55. 27 C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed., The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 265. 18 theatre resonate with meaning.