The Work
Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus was probably written around 1592 and first performed by the Admiral's Men, though the exact date of composition and the relationship between the two extant texts (the A-text of 1604 and the B-text of 1616, the latter approximately one-third longer) remain subjects of scholarly controversy. It is the first English dramatic treatment of the Faust legend, predating Goethe's Faust by two centuries, and the foundational work of the Faust literary tradition.
The play draws on the German chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), which Marlowe or his source translated into English as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1592). The chapbook version is moralistic and Protestant in its theology: Faustus signs a pact with the devil, receives twenty-four years of magical power and knowledge, and is damned at the end. Marlowe preserves this structure while completely transforming its meaning: his Faustus is not a cautionary tale about the dangers of curiosity but a tragedy about the nature of human freedom, divine grace, and the theology of despair.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 3:5 ('For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil') is the serpent's temptation that Faustus accepts as his governing principle. His famous opening soliloquy - in which he surveys and dismisses philosophy, medicine, law, and divinity in turn - reaches its climax in the dismissal of Scripture. He quotes Romans 6:23 ('The wages of sin is death') but stops there, omitting the second half of the verse ('but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord'). This selective quotation is Marlowe's most theologically precise stroke: Faustus's damnation is enacted in the misquotation - in the choice to read only the law and not the gospel.
Matthew 12:31 ('Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men') introduces the doctrine of the unforgivable sin, which haunts the play. As Faustus approaches the end of his twenty-four years, the Good Angel repeatedly urges him to repent - 'Faustus, repent! Yet God will pity thee' - but Faustus believes himself past the possibility of forgiveness. Whether this belief is correct is the play's central theological question. The devils tell him he cannot repent; the Good Angel tells him he can. The drama turns on whether Faustus has committed the unforgivable sin or whether his conviction that he has is itself a diabolical deception.
John 1:14 ('And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us') is the verse Faustus addresses with desperate longing in the final soliloquy: 'See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah my Christ!' The Incarnation - 'the Word made flesh' - is simultaneously the promise Faustus reaches toward and the promise he cannot grasp, because the clock is striking twelve and there is no time. The final inversion of John 1:14 - Christ becoming flesh to save, but Faustus unable to accept the salvation - is Marlowe's most devastating theological reversal.
Author and Context
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was born in Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, and educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he received both a BA (1584) and an MA (1587). He was involved in government intelligence work and was accused of atheism, blasphemy, and various heresies in documents prepared shortly before his death. He died in a tavern brawl in Deptford in 1593, at the age of twenty-nine, possibly murdered in circumstances that had political dimensions.
Marlowe's relationship to Christianity was complex. The accusations of atheism in the 'Baines Note' (1593) included claims that he said Moses was merely a magician, that Christ was a bastard and Mary a whore, and that 'the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe.' These accusations may be exaggerated or entirely fabricated by an informer, but they indicate that Marlowe was associated with a circle of intellectuals who discussed religious skepticism openly.
Yet Doctor Faustus is simultaneously one of the most theologically serious works of the English Renaissance and potentially an atheist's critique of Christian theology. The play's treatment of Calvinist predestination theology - the question of whether Faustus was damned from the start or whether his own choices condemned him - is so careful and so unsettling that it can be read as either orthodox Calvinist drama or as a devastating critique of the doctrine of election.
Themes
The play's central theological theme is the nature of Faustus's inability to repent. Is it a free choice, a compulsive bondage, or a divinely decreed fate? Calvinist theology, dominant in Elizabethan England, taught that the reprobate could not genuinely repent because their wills were bound by divine decree to their damnation. If this is true, then Faustus's inability to repent is not a failure of his own will but the working out of an eternal divine decision - which raises the question of whether Faustus is genuinely responsible for his damnation or whether God is.
The play also meditates on the relationship between knowledge and power. Faustus's bargain is for 'a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honor, of omnipotence.' But what he actually does with his twenty-four years of magical power is trivial: conjuring tricks, practical jokes, petty revenge on a knight. The gap between the grandeur of his ambition and the poverty of his achievement is one of the play's darkest ironies.
Reception
The play was enormously popular in its day - a combination of terrifying spectacle (the final damnation scene required spectacular stage effects) and genuine theological seriousness. It was performed frequently in the 1590s and revived throughout the seventeenth century. Modern productions have ranged from expressionist stagings to intimate psychological dramas.
Legacy
Doctor Faustus established the Faust narrative as the primary Western myth of intellectual ambition and diabolical bargaining. Its direct descendants include Goethe's Faust (1808/1832), Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947), and countless subsequent versions. Its theological seriousness - its sustained engagement with repentance, damnation, and divine grace - makes it the most important work in the English Renaissance tradition of biblical drama and the foundation of English tragic theology.