Synopsis
What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die? With his famous play Doctor Faustus (1592), Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) brilliantly staged the story of a renowned scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for magical powers. Marlowe's Faustus is the classic character who shuns God's graces and the prospect of heavenly bliss in order to pass his mortal years "in all voluptuousness" - only to suffer harrowing despair at the threshold of eternal damnation. As T. McAlindon shows in this beautifully written and exceptionally well versed study, Marlowe's masterwork so vividly articulates the Christian fear of Hell, the human struggle against earthly temptation, and the longing for God's mercy, that it inspired new Faustus stories by Lessing, Goethe, and Mann, and influenced writers from Shakespeare to Conrad. Marlowe's drama has also taken a significant place in Western popular thought: as McAlindon leads us through its five acts, we see that many now-familiar ideas - the devil-pact signed in blood, the conflicting voices of Good and Bad Angels, God's exile of Lucifer, the treachery of Satan's agent Mephistopheles, and the inexorable ruin of a soul gone astray - were first brought to life in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. McAlindon delves into the mind of Marlowe - an arrogantly rebellious freethinker who might have been imprisoned for atheism if he hadn't first been killed in a barroom brawl - and explores the playwright's fascination with the ambition, godlessness, and final despair of his hero. Both Marlowe and Faustus, McAlindon reveals, are caught in the turbulent cross-currents of the Reformation: both paid the Medieval price of spiritual terror forliving by the Renaissance ideals of humanism and high aspiration. Following McAlindon through Marlowe's rich weave of emotion, poetry, drama, irony, and symbolism, we explore such pivotal scenes as Faustus's first summoning of Mephistopheles, his travels with Mephistopheles through
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