2 - The Intermediating Self in Doctor Faustus

Summary

Abstract

This chapter reassesses identity crisis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, showing how the play points toward and resists a new conception of the human. Faustus presents as something of a divided or fragmenting hero, a subject trapped between competing notions of personhood. The interplay of individual and communal interests defines the Faustian struggle for identity and likewise holds significance for understanding the potentialities of the eco-self. Ultimately, Marlowe’s play encourages a phenomenological approach, one that acknowledges the interpenetration of self and world but likewise admits of a craving—a uniquely human need—for meaning and purpose. In so doing, Doctor Faustus lays the foundation for understanding the reluctant ecology at work in early modern tragedy.

Keywords: Ecocriticism; ecopsychology; indistinction; Faustus; Marlowe; phenomenology

Early modern tragedy proves central to understanding the eco-self, so this chapter takes up the story by focusing on the theme of identity-in-crisis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92). The dictates of drama can make sustained moments of introspection more challenging to pull off than their counterparts in the lyric mode, but formal elements such as the soliloquy offered playwrights particular strategies for delineating the self (or multiple selves). Marlowe exploits drama’s capacity for intimate depictions of the self, as evidenced in the architecture of the play. Specifically, after the Chorus’s opening prologue, Faustus appears alone on stage, declaiming a speech that goes on for sixty-five lines and concludes with the arrival of Wagner. Each subsequent act likewise begins by featuring a “solus” character, as the stage directions indicate, or with a summative statement by the Chorus, all of whose disclosures focus on Faustus. Moreover, Faustus faces death by himself, delivering his final fifty-five lines on an otherwise deserted stage. This pattern of isolation or aloneness points to a developing apprehension of the self, one that aligns with Clifford Geertz’s description of “the [Western] person as … a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background” (31).

Of course, this version of the human is not transhistorical, even when narrowing the focus to Western apprehensions of identity.