I’ve always liked this play, ever since I studied it for A Level more than half a century ago; I’ve taught it a few times, although it got harder as time went by, with the increasing need to deliver a crash course in theology alongside the text; the same was the case with Milton’s Paradise Lost. It will be a great shame if such texts disappear from study in schools.
Coming to this play having already met Shakespeare, it can feel a bit primitive, with its story-telling through choruses and soliloquies; it’s not helped by Marlowe using hacks to pad out the comic scenes, either. While it can feel much less subtle than Shakespearean tragedy, it can certainly match him in the power of its poetry.
Faustus’ flawed character is at the heart of Marlowe’s drama. His expressed desires are, ultimately, worldly. It is hard to understand how someone, so apparently gifted/talented/knowledgeable already, manages to delude himself so utterly in imagining that he will get the better of his pact with Lucifer. Even his thoughts about magic seem to corrupt his original intentions.
The play focuses on a single character, Faustus; sometimes there are glimpses of characterisation in Mephistopheles. In some ways this feels like a limitation on the power and effectiveness of the drama, and yet when Faustus slips into despair and we feel him teetering on the brink of repentance, there is real dramatic power in the closing scenes.
For me, the main focus is on the limitations of human beings as creatures. Marlowe explored this in a different way in Tamburlaine the Great. There’s certainly our fear of death, the great unknown, and for me it’s a bit of a contradiction that Faustus only negotiates 24 years of power in his pact with the devil. I now know 24 years is not a very long time… The limitations are things we can do nothing about: mortality, obviously, although scientists are now working on this, and the things we do not know and cannot find out; again, we have made progress since Marlowe’s day, and yet there is still so much we do not know or understand.
Is there a moral here, partly about humans’ rebellion against our condition being pointless in the end? Humans’ natural curiosity is obviously at play here: an innate part of us, and part of our tragedy, too. The final chorus is certainly relevant to us today, with its suggestion that there are things as mere humans we ought not to do, even if we can.