Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe (1604)
“A brilliant scholar sells his soul for twenty-four years of unlimited power — then spends most of them on party tricks.”
Language Register
High formal — blank verse throughout major scenes, with prose reserved for comic subplots and lower-class characters
Syntax Profile
Marlowe's blank verse is characterized by end-stopped lines, strong caesuras, and a driving forward momentum that Ben Jonson called 'the mighty line.' Unlike Shakespeare's later experiments with enjambment and metrical variation, Marlowe's pentameter is deliberately regular — almost martial in its discipline. This regularity makes the final soliloquy's metrical collapse all the more devastating.
Figurative Language
Moderate — Marlowe prefers direct statement to extended metaphor. His power comes from rhythmic force and rhetorical accumulation rather than figurative complexity. When metaphors appear (Icarus, the branch that might have grown straight), they are structural and recurring rather than decorative.
Era-Specific Language
The practice of communicating with the dead / dark magic — the specific forbidden art Faustus pursues
To summon spirits through ritual magic — the core action of the play
Theology as academic discipline — one of the four fields Faustus rejects
A lover, especially illicit — applied to Helen of Troy as demonic consort
Faustus's dismissal of hell's reality — patronizing, gendered contempt for folk wisdom
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Faustus
Latinate, rhetorical, commanding — long periodic sentences in the opening, fragmenting into desperate exclamations at the end. Heavy use of classical allusion (Icarus, Helen, Pythagoras, Alexander).
A university man performing intellectual mastery. His language reveals both his learning and its limits — he can quote Scripture, Aristotle, and Ovid but cannot pray.
Mephistopheles
Simple, direct, declarative. Short sentences. Almost no figurative language. States facts rather than arguing.
The devil does not need rhetoric. Truth spoken plainly is more terrifying than any ornament. Mephistopheles's linguistic simplicity is the play's most unsettling feature.
Wagner / Robin
Prose, colloquial, bawdy. Malapropisms and crude humor. Parodies Faustus's Latinate vocabulary without understanding it.
The comic characters speak in a different register entirely — their prose mirrors the earthly, bodily desires that Faustus pretends to transcend but actually shares.
The Chorus
Formal, moralistic, measured. Speaks in regular pentameter couplets. Addresses the audience directly.
The voice of orthodox judgment — the morality-play tradition asserting itself within Marlowe's more complex dramatic framework.
Narrator's Voice
The Chorus functions as a quasi-narrator, framing the action with moral commentary. But the Chorus's simple judgments ('Cut is the branch') are complicated by Marlowe's sympathetic treatment of Faustus. The play's voice is split between orthodox condemnation and heterodox fascination.
Tone Progression
Prologue and Scenes 1-2
Ambitious, soaring, confident
Faustus at his most rhetorically powerful. The mighty line at full force. Intellectual arrogance rendered as music.
Scenes 3-5 (The Pact)
Ominous, dramatic, theologically charged
Mephistopheles's honesty creates an undertow of dread beneath Faustus's bravado. The language darkens.
Scenes 6-11 (Middle Acts)
Comic, diminishing, anticlimactic
The verse degrades into prose. Spectacle replaces substance. The tonal deflation IS the argument.
Scene 12 (Helen)
Intoxicating, seductive, catastrophic
The mighty line returns at its most beautiful — and most dangerous. Beauty as damnation.
Scene 13 (Final Soliloquy)
Desperate, fragmenting, sublime
The verse shatters. Time collapses. The most formally disciplined voice in Elizabethan drama breaks apart under the weight of eternity.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Shakespeare — more varied, more psychologically complex, but never surpassed the sustained rhetorical power of Marlowe's set pieces
- Medieval morality plays (Everyman) — Marlowe inherits the structure but replaces allegory with psychological realism
- Goethe's Faust — transforms the legend from tragedy to redemption narrative, with a Mephistopheles who is wittier and less sympathetic
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions