III. THE MORALITY FIGURE
The Historia is a prose morality largely compiled
from sixteenth-century books of travel description,
magic, demonology, theological discussion, religious-
moral edification, proverb lore, and humorous anec-
dote. Its central action, more concentrated on a single
protagonist (and a single antagonist) than earlier magus
stories, had dramatic possibilities that Christopher
Marlowe and others immediately recognized and ex-
ploited. (A late fifteenth-century Faust play performed
at Liège is mentioned in the article “Jesuit Drama,”
Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. P. Hartnoll, p.
416; the account of a Nuremberg carnival procession
of 1588 reports that Venus was attended by the girl
“whom Doctor Faust in the play abducted.”) In his
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (ca. 1590; 1st ed.,
1604; 2nd ed., with important textual variants, 1616),
Marlowe largely follows the morality-play tradition,
though treating his hero, who is certainly a glorious,
at times gloriously lyrical, Renaissance malefactor, with
an empathy lacking in the Faust-book. (V. Errante has
suggested that Faustus has traits of Giordano Bruno,
who was well received in London in the early 1580's.)
More wilfully wicked than his German model,
Marlowe's Faustus rebels with obviously youthful
arrogance against conventional modes of thought and
feeling. Sated with traditional learning and having
turned to necromancy as the potential source “Of
power, of honor, of omnipotence,” he offers his soul
through Mephistophilis [sic]—appearing at his sum-
mons only because it has involved blasphemy—to
Lucifer “So he will spare him four and twenty years,/
Letting him live in all voluptuousness.” Mephistophilis
is thus the agent of the sin of Luciferian pride that,
together with insufficient faith in divine mercy, will
ensure Faustus' ultimate damnation, despite repeated
warnings from Mephistophilis and the morality figures
of his Good and Evil Angels, and despite a repulsive
masque-like parade of the Seven Deadly Sins shown
him as a “pastime” by Lucifer, Belzebub [sic], Mephis-
tophilis. Unlike the protagonist of the Historia, Faustus
shows no intellectual curiosity once he has signed his
blood-pact, chiefly occupying himself with demon-
strations of his magical powers (largely pranks) that
culminate in the showing of Helen of Troy to student
admirers. A last warning to repent momentarily re-
duces him to the thought of suicide, but despairing
of mercy he reaffirms the blood-pact on condition he
have Helen as paramour, and soon he is borne off by
Devils through the hell-mouth of medieval art and
stage. (In the 1616—perhaps partly earlier—text, his
mangled limbs are returned to his chambers so that
they may be discovered, as in the
Historia, by the
horrified students.)
Through traveling actors Marlowe's play soon
reached Germany and became the source of a long
series of sensational dramas (including, with the eight-
eenth century, puppet shows). It thus directly or in-
directly inspired both English and German popular
stage spectacles (harlequinades, operettas, ballets) until
well into the later eighteenth century. Broadsides from
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (including
English sheet music) generously testify to the continu-
ing familiarity of the story of the heretic or villain who
is damned because he has preferred evil to good.
In the age of Enlightenment, however, damnation
was no longer a matter of wide vital concern. Evil,
for Luther the instrument of God, had become an
obscuring of truth by passion (Descartes) or even, with
Leibniz, a sensed deprival of perfection grounded in
awareness of a discrepancy between any part and the
whole. (Ugliness and incongruity were to be integral
to the visual and literary arts in G. E. Lessing's aes-
thetics, and the essential function of dissonance had
long been recognized by musical theorists.) To relativ-
istic and materialistic thinkers, evil was but a necessary
concomitant of the good; an obdurate sinner like the
traditional Faust no longer seemed to have serious
human significance.
In the 1750's Lessing, seeking indigenous themes that
might aid the liberation of German drama from a
stifling French neo-classicism, began a “Faust”—its
central action apparently was to be a dream—whose
hero gains redemption because a genuine thirst for
knowledge and truth cancel out ambition and self-
seeking. Lessing later repudiated the conception of
drama as a moral-didactic medium, and the play was
never completed.
