Hamlin - Casting Doubt in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, 2001

Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

by William M. Hamlin

He that casts all doubts shall never be resolved.

English Renaissance proverb

It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and has been deemed a skeptical play. [1] More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with superstition." [2] Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature." [3] And the varied testimony of Marlowe's contemporaries--Robert Greene, Richard Baines, Thomas Kyd, and Richard Cholmeley among them--strongly suggests that both the man and his writings could be considered iconoclastic and profoundly irreverent: both susceptible to charges of "monstruous opinions," "vile hereticall conceipts," even "diabolical atheism." [4] True, the circumstances in which these allegations were sometimes made force us to question their accuracy; y et, there still exists an extraordinary congruence of contemporary attitude about Marlowe--about what we might call his skepticism. But what in fact are we saying when we say an early modern writer is skeptical? In what senses does this word carry meaning with respect to the dramatic compositions of Marlowe or his contemporaries? How can we allege, without being utterly vapid, that Doctor Faustus exhibits a pervasive skepticism? How, if at all, may we infer skeptical tenets from dramatic texts? What, if any, are the skeptical paradigms inherent in Marlowe's great tragedy?

These are the questions I wish to consider. And, as a means of approaching them, I would like first of all briefly to examine the enabling premises and methodological strategies of the best-known current commentator on skepticism and English Renaissance tragedy: Stanley Cavell. Cavell has not written on Marlowe--indeed his dramatic criticism has focused almost exclusively on Shakespeare--but it is nonetheless worth our while to attend to his programmatic statements regarding what he calls the "skeptical problematic." [5] He claims, for instance, that Shakespeare "engage[s] the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture," and he adds that his guiding "intuition" about Shakespeare is that "the advent of skepticism as manifested in [Rene] Descartes's Meditations is already in full existence" in "the great tragedies" of the early seventeenth century. [6] But these two statements would appear to be incompatible, for while it may be true that Shakespeare anticipates the hyperbolic doubt of Descartes, it is clearly anachronistic to characterize that doubt as a "philosophical preoccupation" of the first decade of Britain's seventeenth century. Not that doubt did not exist, or that epistemological questions were not asked--far from it. But the forms of philosophical skepticism to which Shakespeare and Marlowe could have been exposed were principally those derived from the Pyrrhonian and Academic paradigms of antiquity. [7] Indeed, Marlowe quotes, in the 1604 quarto of Doctor Faustus, a phrase lifted directly from Sextus Empiricus's Adversus Mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians), a work readily available at Cambridge during Marlowe's student days, and undoubtedly also circulating in London at that time. [8] And Sextus's principal champion in the late sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne, was indisputably read by Shakespeare. [9] Hence Cavell's implicit diminution of the influence of Montaigne--not to mention his complete neglect of many other contemporary writers through whose works classical skepticis m was channeled into early modern intellectual life--is fundamentally ahistorical. [10]

Cavell writes that "the skeptical problematic I have in mind is given its philosophical refinement in Descartes's way of raising the questions of God's existence and of the immortality of the soul," and he goes on to assert that the "issue" posed in Shakespeare's tragedies is not, "as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire." [11] Several responses are in order here. First, while Cavell's characterizations of Pyrrhonian and modern skepticism are essentially accurate, it remains true that Descartes is ultimately less remarkable for his doubt than for the edifice of certainty his doubt enables him to build. That is, Descartes embraces "a groundless world" only to reject it; his skepticism, however radical, is always already an instrument in the discovery of truth, and, when coupled with an appropriate method of investigation, allows for the perpetuation of dogmatic philosophy. [12] Second, Pyrrhonian skepticism has the potential to be as radical a form of doubt as that employed by Descartes: witness, for instance, Sextus's trenchant interrogation of the existence of gods in book 3 of his Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism). [13] While no one in pre-Cartesian Europe fully exploits Pyrrhonism's inherent potential for doubt, this in itself does not invalidate the possibility. Montaigne, for instance, implicitly questions the existence of the external world in a passage late in his Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1580, 1588)--and this despite Cavell's claim that such questioning in philosophical tracts begins only with Descartes. [14] Moreover, the comments on philosophical skepticism in Philippe du Plessis-Mornay's De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne (1581) indicate the extent to which Pyrrhonism's potential for rendering uncertain the existence of the Judeo-Christian God could trouble late-sixteenth-century intellectuals. Mornay writes, in the 158 7 English translation prepared by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding, that in antiquity.

There were in deede a kinde of Philosophers called Scepticks (that is to say Dowters) which did rather suspend their Judgement concerning the Godhead, then call it in question. But yet it ought to suffize us, that they be the selfsame which deny al Sciences, yea even those which consist in Demonstration; and which professe themselves to doubt of the things which they see and feele; in so much that they doubt whether they themselves have any beeing or no. But yet for all that, let us see after what maner these kind of people do reason, Against the thing which the world preacheth, which Nations worship, and which wise men wonder at; these folke say at a worde for all, how shall wee beleeve that there is a God, sith we see him not? [15] Mornay attempts to render skepticism innocuous by suggesting that its interrogation of God's existence amounts merely to what we might call the doubting Thomas topos: that we forgo belief until we see, that we demand "ocular proof." But he does this only by deliberately occluding Pyrrhonism's potent considerations of the criteria by which judgments are leveled, considerations widely dispersed through Sextus's Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes and sharply noted, for example, by Montaigne. [16] And Mornay's frequent reliance, elsewhere in the book, on standard tactics of skeptical argumentation suggests the extent to which his customary habits of thought are inflected by familiarity with Pyrrhonism's fundamental attitudes. [17] Indeed, Mornay explicitly acknowledges the value of open-minded inquiry when he writes, in his "Preface to the Reader," that "foredeemings and foresetled opinions doo bring in bondage the reason of them that have best wits; wheras notwithstanding, it belongeth not to the will to overrule the wit, but to the wit to guide the will." [18]

Mornay's position vis-a-vis skepticism is thus complex: like most devout sixteenth-century Christians, Protestant or Catholic, he sees radical Pyrrhonian attitudes as misguided, even laughable, but he is simultaneously aware of the inherent potency of skeptical objections. Indeed, the considerable time he devotes to rejecting and ridiculing them (and even, occasionally, to deploying them) indicates their formative power in his outlook as a religious polemicist. And Mornay was widely read in England: the Sidney-Golding translation was reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617, and many contemporary writers appear to have studied it carefully, among them John Florio Fulke Greville Sir John Davies, Lucius Cary, William Chillingworth, John Earle, and Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon--each of whom played a role in the complex history of ancient skepticism's reception in Tudor and Stuart Britain.

In short, allegations such as that of Cavell about Pyrrhonism's intrinsic weakness as a means of investigating metaphysical questions have tended toward exaggeration; they have had more to do with explicit early modern deployments of skeptical thought than with the implicit unease about skepticism we may infer from the incessant stream of early modern refutations. From 1562 forward, after all, European intellectuals had ready access--thanks to Henri Estienne's lucid and scholarly Latin translation of the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes--to Sextus's concise presentation of Pyrrhonian thought, where, among other things, skepticism is defined as "an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence (isostheneia) in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement (epoche) and afterwards to tranquillity (ataraxta)." [19] They had access, in other words, to a closely argued treatise offering the position that all mental apprehensions--perceptions, ratiocinations, memories, judgments, beliefs--are subject to doubt, and specifically to the sort of doubt generated by the technique of opposition, which, according to Sextus, leads to the impasse of equal persuasiveness. Thus, despite Pyrrhonism's advocacy of judgmental suspension and subsequent nescience, the rupture between ancient and modern skepticism is not as severe as it is sometimes made out to be--a fact which indirectly strengthens Cavell's case, though it diminishes his sense of Shakespeare's prescience. [20] But when Cavell adds that "skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire," he severs himself inecoverably from classical skepticism. Desire is presupposed here--it serves as a given in this essentially Freudian formulation--and a "groundless world," a world deprived of the "assurance" of God's existence and providential supervision, allows desire to be "illimitable." Skepticism, then, becomes a "function or expression" of desire, a consequ ence of a prior discovery: and it manifests itself as a "banishment of the world." [21] Moreover, skepticism for Cavell is not merely doubt, but doubt coupled with denial and disappointment--a supposition of the worst. [22]

Yet, if there is anything we can say with accuracy about epistemological discussion in Marlowe and Shakespeare's day, it is that doubt is sharply distinguished from both assent and dissent. As John Donne writes in the early 1590s, "the Sceptique which doubts all is more contentious then eyther the Dogmatique which affirmes, or Academique which denyes all." [23] In the anonymous treatise The Scepticlc, composed around 1590 and sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, we read that "The Sceptick doth neither affirm nor deny any position, but doubteth of it, and opposeth his reasons against that which is affirmed or denied to justify his not consenting." [24] And, in the 1593 "Note" on Marlowe's "damnable judgment of religion," Richard Baines claims that Marlowe quoted "contrarieties out of the Scripture"--an allegation which, even if false, shows that Baines knew the subversive potential of the Pyrrhonian tactic of establishing a clash of authoritative opinion. [25] Clearly, the skepticism which Marlowe and S hakespeare can reasonably be supposed to have encountered- skepticism derived from Pyrrhonism and its Academic incarnations, thoroughly laid out by Sextus and Cicero, and channeled through Diogenes Laertius, Galen, Augustine, Erasmus, Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Montaigne, Francisco Sanches, and others--was committed not only to suspension of judgment in the face of diverse opinion and belief, but to careful discrimination between various states of cognition. It was an antidote rather than a substitute for dogmatism, and it promoted the avoidance of rash judgment and a heightened sensitivity to epistemological questions, distinctions, and anxieties. "The profession of the Phyrrhonians," writes Montaigne in Florio's 1603 translation of the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, "is ever to waver, to doubt and to enquire: never to be assured of any thing, nor to take any warrant of himself." [26]

Still, in spite of all this, it would seem that Cavell's understanding of skepticism might be remarkably fruitful for a reading of Doctor Faustus--more fruitful, perhaps, than for most of Shakespeare's tragedies. For what character in English Renaissance drama better exemplifies desire and appetitiveness than Faustus? What character more thoroughly banishes the world in order to replace it with the solipsistic trappings of his fantasy-a fantasy that "will receive no object," but "ruminates on necromantic skill" (I.i. 106-7)? Nonetheless, I argue that despite this apparent consonance of Marlowe's play and Cavell's skepticism, in fact Doctor Faustus reveals a more complex interaction of doubt and desire, a paradoxical reciprocity between the two that hints, in my view, at genuine "philosophical preoccupations" of the culture in which Marlowe and Shakespeare lived. For common to the quartos of 1604 (the A-text) and 1616 (the B-text)--and despite their significant differences-is a series of cyclical trajectories wherein Faustus's habit of casting doubt is preempted by an experience of euphoric ravishment--ravishment that yields in turn to new casting of doubt. [27] Faustus's desire to be resolved "of all ambiguities" is frequently expressed and frequently satisfied during the play, its representation often marked by sexual metaphor (I.i.82); but, appropriately enough, the resolution figured as sexual consummation only engenders new ambiguities. [28] Like the planets about which Faustus inquires, doubt and desire exhibit a "double motion" (II.iii.51); their forward and backward movements serve as a means of depicting Faustus's psychomachia. Indeed, to draw upon another of the play's astronomical metaphors, desire and doubt are "mutually folded in each others' orb," locked in a symbiotic but incestuous embrace (II.iii.39). And Marlowe thereby explores both the genesis of doubt and the relation of doubt to belief, two cynosures of epistemological investigation in early modern Europe, and authentic preoccupations of int ellectual life in Marlowe and Shakespeare's Britain.

Consider, for example, the ways in which familiar and distinctly Faustian attitudes habitually succeed one another. The cavalier dismissal of conventional truth so prominent early in the play, and embedded in such claims as "This word 'damnation' terrifies not [me]," gives way first to involuntary casting of doubt, as in "Was not that Lucifer an angel once?" and then to ravished contemplation (I.iii.60, I.iii.66): [29]

Now that I have obtained what I desire,

I'll live in speculation of this art

Till Mephistopheles return again.

(I.iii.114-6) [30]

Later in the play, when doubts merge more fully with what the English Faust Book calls "godly motions," and when resolution of ambiguity becomes almost indistinguishable from presumption of damnation, Faustus undergoes still more rapid shifts of mind. [31] "What art thou," he asks himself when the Horse-Courser leaves, "but a man condemned to die?" (IV.i. 139). Yet within four lines he adds, "Tush! Christ did call the thief upon the cross; / Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit" (IV.i.143-4). In this latter and astonishingly suggestive line, the "conceit" to which Faustus proposes to yield is the converse of the "speculation" to which he earlier inclined--yet still a mental state tinged with sexual innuendo. Indeed, the "unjust presumption" of which Faustus later accuses himself is presumption only from the demonic perspective (V.i.71). We thus witness a series of Satanic inversions as the play progresses--inversions that steer our attention toward the sharp distinctions among Faustus's mental dispositio ns. [32]

If Faustus's cavalier rejection of dogma is concentrated in the play's first two acts, and his presumptuous (though sympathetic) self-condemnation in the last three, his wavering is distributed throughout. Often expressed interrogatively, it serves as the basis of some of the play's most memorable passages: "What might the staying of my blood portend?" (II.i.64); "Why streams it not, that I may write afresh?" (II.i.66); "Be I a devil, yet God may pity me" (II.iii.15); "See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, haifa drop" (V.ii.78-9). Indeed, the very presence of the Good and Evil Angels can be read not only as an externalization of Faustus's cerebral discord, but as a manifestation of the skeptic's experience of opposition -- of mutually exclusive testimony -- so heavily stressed in Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, and other sources. [33] And, if Faustus's customary response to such opposition is not to suspend judgment in Pyrrhonian fashion, but to "extinguish clean / These thoughts" and "glut the longing of [his] heart's desire," he is scarcely alone in early modem Europe (V.i.83-6). [34] From the strict Pyrrhonian perspective, in fact, his choice appears no more aberrant than Montaigne's fideistic embrace of the Roman church. [35] Fictional character and historical personage both participate in a key vector of the standard Pyrrhonian trajectory, only to abandon it in what serves, during the sixteenth century, as a principal paradigm of the reception and appropriation of ancient skepticism: a rush to judgment reconfigured as the inevitable outcome of an experience of conflicting opinion. [36]

But perhaps the best example of the succession and inter-penetration of characteristic Faustian attitudes may be found in the soliloquy that begins act II:

Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned,

And canst thou not be saved.

What boots it then to think of God or heaven?

Away with such vain fancies and despair!

Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub.

Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute.

Why waverest thou? O, something soundeth in mine ears:

"Abjure this magic, turn to God again!"

Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again.

To God? He loves thee not.

The God thou servest is thine own appetite,

Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub.

To him I'll build an altar and a church,

And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.

(II.i.1-14)

The first six and a half lines of this speech employ the rhetorical technique of second-person self-address -- a technique upon which Marlowe frequently relies in the play, particularly in those speeches where heavy emphasis is placed upon Faustus's inner turmoil. And, while I agree with W.W. Greg, Michael Keefer, David Bevington, Eric Rasmussen, and other editors that the question mark at the end of line 2 in the A-text is probably intended not as an interrogative but as an exclamation point--thereby contributing to the emphatic statement of Faustus's present condition--even if the mark indicates interrogation, the resulting rhetorical question only adds to the development of the speaker's persona. [37] It is a persona characterized by confidence, keen observation, frequent resort to the imperative mood and, above all, presumption. He presumes to know Faustus's state of imminent and irrevocable damnation, and thereby constructs a superficially logical critique of Faustus's tendency to cast doubts, to turn h is thoughts toward God: "What boots it then to think of God or heaven?" This is followed by the peremptory "Away with such vain fancies and despair! / Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub"--a command making it clear that within the implied mental world of this persona, thoughts of God are mere "fantasies" when conceived by an abandoned soul, and should be replaced with acts of "trust" [38]: specifically, trust in demonic beings such as Beelzebub, who, like Mephistopheles and Lucifer--but unlike God and Christ--do in fact appear during the play. Unstated but implicit is the understanding that it does "boot"--it does avail--to think of and trust in demons. Moreover, such thoughts and trust are metaphorically associated with forward movement, unlike the wavering and potential backsliding associated with the mind that turns toward God. [39]

Midway through line 7, and responding to the question, a first-person voice emerges--"O, something soundeth in mine ears"--and in line 8 this "something" is represented in still another voice, a terse, disembodied voice cast in the imperative: "Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" In line 9, the first-person voice returns, this time speaking in the future tense: "Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again" [my emphasis]. As the first indication of resolve and fixed purpose in the soliloquy, this line stands out dramatically, demanding comparison with the second such moment of resolve, that found in lines 13-4. But the line is also tainted. Despite its mood of compliance and humility, despite its presentation of a "godly motion," it also substitutes the protagonist's name for the expected first-person pronoun. The line, in short, has been infiltrated by the second-person voice's habit of self-address, and the stated resolve is thereby subtly undermined. We have a foreshadowing of disaster.

Faustus, then, cannot help but engender "godly motions." And when he assures himself, a moment later, "Thou art safe; / Cast no more doubts," he merely stipulates a condition of psychic stasis that has already been and will continue to be contradicted by his behavior (II.i.25-6). [41] He engages, that is, in magical thinking, assuming a causal relation between speech and reality, hoping thereby to stave off his implicit recognition that from the Satanic point of view, casting doubt is dangerous--it amounts to "unjust presumption." But inseparable from this recognition is the idea that doubting--wavering--is valuable, valuable precisely because it functions as temporary detachment from dogmatic positions, thus enabling the possibility of change, and of growth. One of the best expressions of this idea in early modern English drama may be found in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, composed perhaps a decade and a half after Marlowe's death. There, in the Chorus concluding act II, we encounter a sustained criti que of partiality in judgment:

In line 10, the second-person voice reassumes control, and with characteristic presumption informs the voice of line 9 that God "loves thee not." Lines 11-2 follow up this assertion by transforming, through mere allegation, a partial truth into an unqualified truth: "The God thou servest is thine own appetite, / Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub." The former admonition to "trust in Beelzebub" has now metamorphosed into the affirmation that the first-person Faustus has a fixed "love" of this devil. And the affirmation is tacitly assented to in lines 13-4, even though the lines can be read with equal legitimacy as emanating from the first- or the second-person Faustus. The use of the first-person pronoun in line 13 suggests the former possibility, and certainly this reading is attractive for the additional reason that, as in line 9, here again we encounter the future tense, this time in a defiant and grotesque resolution to "build an altar and a church, / And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes." But i t may be that this is rather the second-person Faustus, appropriating the first-person pronoun in an attempt to achieve a rhetorical integration of the self that is so evidently divided throughout the speech. If this is the case, then the pronoun appropriation we witness here mirrors the infiltration of self-address we witnessed in line 9. Either way, a clear parallel is drawn to line 9, and, in retrospect, we can see that both resolves might be characterized as "vain fancies"--fantasies of future action that cannot possibly ensue as long as Faustus endures the inner conflict here depicted. On the one hand, Faustus desires an intimacy with God that can never be achieved in conjunction with the second-person voice's presumption. On the other hand, he seeks a defiant and definitive rejection of God that can never occur as long as the first-person voice is able to conceive the words of line 8: "Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" Indeed, line 14's grotesque resolve to sacrifice infants may serve, additionally , as a metaphorical attempt to bleed out the vitality of such cunning cerebral births as those of lines 8-9. But the attempt is futile, for as the Prologue has informed us, Faustus is "swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit" (line 20): pregnant, that is, with such cunning, and able--as the play abundantly demonstrates--to conceive this cunning, and deliver it, time and again. [40]

Our ears and hearts are apt to hold for good

That we ourselves do most desire to be:

And then we drown objections in the flood

Of partiality, 'tis that we see

That makes false rumours long with credit pass'd,

Though they like rumours must conclude at last.

The greatest part of us, prejudicate,

With wishing Herod's death do hold it true:

The being once deluded doth not bate

The credit to a better likelihood due.

Those few that wish it not, the multitude

Do carry headlong, so they doubts conclude. [42]

Desire, in short, curtails doubt; the wavering that can lead to truth, hence to growth, is usually displaced by the precipitous rush to judgment practiced by what Cary's daughter and biographer calls "too speedy resolvers." [43] And Faustus, of course, is one of these. But Marlowe makes it clear that the ravishment of resolution is always only temporary. Casting doubt is as fundamental to Faustus as resolving ambiguity; it seems a natural outgrowth or consequence of resolution, and perhaps points to the ultimately unsatisfactory stasis of dogmatic conclusion." [44]

Marlowe's tragedy thus offers a skeptical commentary on the human propensity for the static, the human preference for being over becoming. Faustus wants to perform miracles, to do the wondrous, to transcend human frailty, fallibility, uncertainty; he wants to "gain a deity" (I.i.65). And all this is associated with resolving ambiguity. But what he learns is that this intransitive desire of his--desire that takes as its object knowledge or sex, music or travel, but never finds true satisfaction--this desire not only fails to "extinguish clean" his doubts, but breeds them: cannot exist without them. Hence, despite the anatomy of skepticism offered by Cavell, we cannot confidently say that desire precedes doubt in Doctor Faustus. The transgressive dismissal of conventional truth so evident in the play cannot be read simply as a consequence of Faustus's preexistent desire to engage in the occult. Nor, conversely, can the wish to be a powerful magician, a "demigod," be read simply as an outcome of doubt--a solipsi stic refurnishing of a now-vacant space (B.I.i.61). Rather, the two impulses are reciprocal. In much the same way that fantasies become truths for Faustus even as conventional truths metamorphose into fantasies, Faustian doubt and desire coexist and presuppose one another. And, while Marlowe is probably not suggesting that skeptical detachment is the solution to the potentially tragic dilemma of "forward wits" like Faustus, he clearly presents a dramatic scenario wherein his protagonist follows a quasi-Pyrrhonian trajectory in cleansing his mind of dogma only to reinscribe it--compulsively--with the fast-fading signature of his desire (Epiogue.7). The trajectory itself represents one of the principal paradigms of early modern Europe's reception of ancient skepticism: an appropriation--manifest also in Montaigne--in which the vacuum created through doubt invites its own elimination, thereby initiating an endless cycle of evacuation and substitution. There is no question that this skeptical paradigm constitutes a distortion of Pyrrhonian thought as represented by Sextus Empiricus; but equally, there is no question that the Renaissance understands it as a form of skepticism, a basic skeptical paradigm. To contextualize Doctor Faustus within early modem skepticism is thus to discover that its central figure experiences a mental life that corresponds with remarkable fidelity to what is perhaps the major sixteenth-century misconstruction and subsequent deployment of Pyrrhonism.

Doctor Faustus is a skeptical play not in advocacy but in depiction: not in proposing an attitude of detachment but in portraying passionate attachment and the attendant, enormously sympathetic self-destruction it can bring on. And the brilliant irony here is that Faustus's fundamental alternative--the choice he rejects--also constitutes a form of attachment: contentment with a particular shape of resolution, and thus, tacitly, with an abandonment of inquiry. But Faustus recognizes that what modernity might call "normative behavior" in the world always demands a closing down of doubt and desire, a consistent tracking of resolution, an acquiescence that in diminishing one diminishes all. Faustus rejects this capitulation, aware both that it amounts to a falling short of human potential and that in so doing he renders his life incompatible with conventional earthly existence. We might say that for Faustus, despite his recurrent emphasis upon the tangible, the logical, and the here-and-now, believing is seeing precisely as often as seeing is believing.

William M. Hamlin, associate professor of English at Idaho State University and author of The Image of America in Montaigne. Spenser. and Shakespeare (1995). is finishing a book entitled "Fools of Nature: Skepticism and English Renaissance Tragedy."

NOTES

This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at Cambridge University in June 1998 at the Fourth International Conference on Christopher Marlowe. I wish to express my gratitude to David Bevington, Patrick Cheney. David Fuller, R. J. Hankinson, Theresa Jordan, John Kijinski, and Elisabeth Leedham-Green.

(1.) The epigraph is taken from Morris P. Tilley. A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950) D571: see also N268, N276.

(2.) J R. Green. A Short History of the English People, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895), 2:863-4. Quotations from Christopher Marlowe's play are drawn from the new Revels edition: Doctor Faustus, A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993). Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the text of 1604. Hereafter, citations will be made parenthetically within the text.

(3.) Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama, 2d edn. (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 142. In addition to the work of Ellis-Fermor, I have found the following studies of Faustus particularly valuable: Richard Waswo, "Damnation, Protestant Style: Macbeth. Faustus, and Christian Tragedy." JMRS 4, 1 (Winter 1974): 63-99; Constance B. Kuriyama, "Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text." ELR 5 (1975): 171-97; Sara M. Deats, "Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy," EL WIU3 (1976): 3-16: Edward Snow, "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire," in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 70-110: Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978): Michael Warren, "Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," ELR 11, 2 (Spring 1981): 111-47; Michael Keefer, "Verbal Magic and the Problem of the A and B Texts of Doctor Faustus," JEGP 82, 3 (July 1983): 324-46: Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chi cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 109-19: Keefer, "History and the Canon: The Case of Doctor Faustus," UTQ 56, 4 (Summer 1987): 498-522; C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988). pp. 87-130: Leah S. Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus," RenD 20 (1989): 1-29: G. M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus," SEL 33, 2 (Spring 1993): 249-64: and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 190-220.

(4.) For Thomas Kyd's two letters and the Richard Baines note, see Douglas Cole, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (Westport CT: Praeger, 1995), pp. 155-8. For Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and the two informers' reports on Richard Cholmeley, see the excerpts provided in Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), pp. 42-7 and 277-9. See also John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942), vol. 1, chap. 5; Bakeless (albeit rather vaguely) associates Marlowe with skepticism (p. 128). And see Nicholas Davidson, "Christopher Marlowe and Atheism," in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 129-47.

(5.) Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 1, 3.

(6.) Cavell, pp. 2, 3.

(7.) My discussion here is based on the belief that the revival of Greek skepticism in sixteenth-century Europe impinged upon English intellectual life rather more than historians of philosophy have acknowledged, though somewhat less than literary critics often assume--and in highly defined and restricted ways. See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1979); Charles B. Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967); Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972); Schmitt, "The Rediscovery of Ancient Skepticism in Modem Times," in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 225-51; Popkin and Schmitt, eds., Scepticism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987); Luciano Floridi, "The Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus's Works in the Ren aissance," Journal of the History of Ideas 56, 1 (1995): 63-85; Lisa Jardine, "Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic," in Skeptical Tradition, pp. 253-86; Floridi, Sextus Empiricius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Charles Larmore, 'Scepticism," in Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 2:1145-92.

(8.) Faustus A.I.i. 12. The phrase, On kai me on (attributed by Sextus to Gorgias of Leontini), derives from Adversus Logicos 1.66, which corresponds to Adversus Mathematicos 7.66. Adversus Mat hematicos was translated into Latin by Gentian Hervet and published in 1569. Various copies of this folio are known to

have existed in England during the late sixteenth century: the main library at Cambridge held a copy no later than 1583, and Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, also owned a copy at the time of his death in 1589--a copy probably acquired during the 1570s. See Elisabeth LeedhamGreen and David McKitterick, "A Catalogue of Cambridge University Library, 1583," in Books and Collectors 1200-1700, ed. James P. Carley and Cohn G. C. Tite (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 153-235. Dr. John Dee held a copy of the 1569 Sextus folio in his London library by the time he completed his inventory of September 1583; see John Dee's Library Catalogue, ed. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (London: Bibliographical S ociety, 1990], item 1790. I have recently discovered that London's Middle Temple possesses a copy of the 1569 Sextus--a copy inscribed by John Delaberlel, who entered the Temple in 1575/76 and resided there until his death in 1607. The phrase On kal me on was also available in a Greek manuscript of Adversus Logicos that the Oxford scholar John Wolley translated into Latin sometime between 1553 and 1563; see Schmitt, "John Woliey (ca. 1530-96) and the first Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus, adversus logicos I," in The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988). pp. 61-70.

(9.) For Shakespeare's knowledge of Michel de Montaigne -- besides the famous borrowing from "Des cannibales" in The Tempest -- see, for example the Arden editions of Hamlet (1982) and King Lear (1997).

(10.) Other writers include Erasmus (Praise of Folly [1509] and the 1515 letter to Martin Dorp]; Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (whose Examen Vanitatis [1520] was read in England by John Rainolds and John Dee, among others); Henry Cornelius Agrippa (De Incertitudine et Vanitate [1530]); Juan Luls Vives (De Disciplinis [1531]); Omer Talon (Academia [1547]); Peter Ramus (Animadversionum Aristotelicorum [1548]); Guy de Brues (Dialogues contre les Nouveaux Academiciens [1557]); Henri Estienne (preface to Sextus's Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes [1562]); Gentian Hervet (preface to Sextus's Adversus Mathematicos [15691); Pedro de Valencia (Academica [1596]); and Pierre Charron (De la Sagesse [1601]). Cavell's suggestion that Pyrrhonism never considers how to live "in a groundless world" assumes that Pyrrhonism in early modern Europe may be fully equated with Montaigne's typical deployment of Pyrrhonism -- essentially a Christian appropriation of skepticism as presented by Sextus.

(11.) Cavell, p. 3.

(12.) Compare to Larmore, pp. 1164-5.

(13.) See Sextus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 3.2-12. esp. 3.6 ("Even granting that god is indeed conceivable, It is necessary to suspend judgement about whether gods exist or not, so far as the Dogmatists are concerned. For it is not clear that gods exist") and 3.11 ("it is inapprehensible whether there are gods").

{14.) Cavell, pp. 3-4; Larmore, p. 1148; Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, rev. V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 2:601 (for an English rendering see An Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. M. A. Screech [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987] pp. 185-6]. Montaigne in fact shows several indications of envisioning a more Cartesian form of doubt than that with which he is usually credited. He claims in the Apology, for instance, that "We do not doubt much, because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches" (Screech. p. 114; Villey, p. 539). He adds later that "We wake asleep; we sleep awake ... Our rational souls accept notions [fantasies] and opinions produced during sleep, conferring on activities in our dreams the same approbation and authority as on our waking dreams; why should we therefore not doubt whether our thinking and acting are but another dream; our waking some other specie s of sleep?" (Screech, p. 180; Villey, p. 596). This doubt is not as radical as that offered by the Cartesian hypothesis of the malin genie, but one wonders nevertheless whether Descartes may not have been prodded by these passages. It is also worth noting that Joseph Mede, at Cambridge in 1602/3, underwent a skeptical crisis after reading Sextus, and his doubts extended to the existence of the external world. As his contemporary John Worthington later wrote, "not long after his entrance into Philosophical studies he was for some time disquieted with Scepticisme, that troublesome disease of the Pyrrhonian School. For lighting upon a Book in a neighbor-Scholar's Chamber, (whether it were Sextus Empiricus, or some other upon the same Subject, is not now remembered) he began upon the perusal of it to move strange Questions to himself, and even to doubt whether the whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more then a mere Phantasm" ("The Life of the Reverend and most Learned Joseph Mede, B.D." in The Works of Joseph Mede (London, 1664), P. iii; quotation truncated: cf. Popkin, History, pp. 66, 265). Mede soon recovered from his malady, but years later still quizzed his pupils at Christ's College by asking them, "What Doubts have you met in your studies to day?" (Worthington, p. vii).

(15.) Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (London, 1587: Delmar NY: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1976), p. 12.

(16.) For example, Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.21-4, 1.114-7, and 2.14-79; and Montaigne, Apology, e.g., pp. 185-6 (Screech trans.).

(17.) For example, A Woorke, pp. 243, 247-8, 256-7, 357, 475.

(18.) A Woorke. sig. iir.

(19.) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.8:I rely here on the recent English translation by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994]), p. 4. Martha Nussbaum, in a valuable discussion of Pyrrhonism, claims that "the Modes and Tropes, as reported by Sextus, contain no restriction of subject matter, but range very widely over many areas in which pupils can be expected to have beliefs" (The Therapy of Desire [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994], p. 288). And R. J. Hankinson, author of The Sceptics (London: Routledge, 1995), writes that "anything can be a subject for Pyrrhonian scepticism, provided it has a certain theoretical density" (personal communication, 1998). See also Jonathan Barnes, "The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 29 (1982), pp. 2, 12. Thomas Nashe, in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), asserts that the "soule-benummed" unbelievers of his day "followe the Pironicks, whose position and opinion it is tha t there is no Hel or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians are able to shew antiquities thousands before Adam" (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. [London: A. H. Bullen, 1904-10], 2:115-6; also, 1:172). Nashe, one of the Elizabethan readers of the English translation of Sextus, clearly associates Pyrrhonism both with atheism and the pre-Adamite theory; see my essay, "On Continuities between Skepticism and Early Ethnography; Or, Montaigne's Providential Diversity," SCJ 31, 2 (July 2000): 361-79.

(20.) Popkin and Schmitt have both discussed continuities between ancient and modern skepticism. Schmitt, for instance, writes that "it is my belief that the recovery and the reassimilation of the ancient writings were the primary factor in the evolution of the modern skeptical attitude" ("Rediscovery," p. 228).

(21.) Cavell, p. 5. In "Macbeth Appalled" (1993), Cavell writes that over the years he has "addressed the issue of philosophical skepticism as an expression of the human wish to escape the bounds or bonds of the human, if not from above then from below" (The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 203).

(22.) Writing on Othello, for instance, Cavell speaks of the "progress from the completeness of Othello's love to the perfection of his doubt" (Disowning Knowledge, p. 128): later he alludes to Othello's "professions of skepticism over [Desdemona's] faithfulness" when he evidently means something like "Othello's denial of her constancy" (p. 138). In the introduction to the same book, Cavell writes that "tragedy is an interpretation of what skepticism is itself an interpretation of: that, for example, Lear's 'avoidance' of Cordelia is an instance of the annihilation inherent in the skeptical problematic, that skepticism's 'doubt' is motivated not by (not even where it is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial, by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge" (p. 6).

(23.) John Donne, "Paradox #3," in Paradoxes and Problems. ed. Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 5-6. Peters believes the Paradoxes were written early in the 1590s when Donne studied at Thavies and Lincoln's Inns (p. xv).

(24.) The Sceptick ed. William M. Hamlin, in "A Lost Translation Found? An Edition of The Sceptick (c. 1590) Based on Extant Manuscripts," ELR 31, 1 (forthcoming); see also Sir Walter Raleigh's Sceptick, or Speculations (London, 1651), p. 1. As S. E. Sprott has argued, this work may rely upon a lost English translation of Sextus Empiricus to which Thomas Nashe alludes in 1591. And since the evidence seems strong that one manuscript of The Scepticlc existed in Ralegh's library, the date of composition must fall between the appearance of the lost translation (c. 1590) and Ralegh's death (1618). See Sprott, "Raleigh's 'Sceptic' and the Elizabethan Translation of Sextus Empiricus." PQ 42, 2 (1963): 166-75. As for the attribution to Ralegh, I agree with Peter Beal that it is almost certainly spurious (Index of English Literary Manuscripts [London: Mansell, 1980-93], vol. 1, pt. 2. p. 368).

(25.) "Appendix B: Richard Baines' Note," in Cole, p. 158. The implication of Baines's allegation seems to be that Marlowe has compiled a treatise illustrating internal contradictions in the Bible: "He saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of contrarieties out of the Scripture which he hath given to some great men who in convenient time shall be named."

(26.) The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio [London, 1603: New York: Modern Library, 1933), p. 449: see also Viley ed., 2:502-3. See also the account of early modern skepticism in Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 22-56: Toulmin inaccurately conscripts Erasmus and Montaigne to stand in for all Renaissance humanists, but his discussion of skeptical values is perceptive,

(27.) For example, I.i.6, I.i.112. Faustus's experience with Aristotle's Analytics--ravishment quickly followed by disillusionment-perhaps should have taught him how to regard his subsequent ravishment by magic. The English Faust Book stresses Faustus's ravishment by music: see The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1588, 1592), in The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 100, 119; see also Doctor Faustus A.II.iii.29.

(28.) For examples, see II.iii.62, II.iii.66, III.Chorus.2-7, and IV.Chorus.9-10.

(29.) For reasons of syntactic grace, I have substituted the B-text reading ("terrifies not me": B.I.iii.57) for that of the A-text ("terrifies not him": A.I.iii.60). Other examples of such dismissal: "Come, I think hell's a fable" (II.i. 130); "Think'st thou that Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain? / Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives' tales" (II.i. 136-8).

(30.) The English Faust Book informs us that Faustus was called "the Speculator" and signed himself "Doctor Faustus the insatiable speculator" (pp. 92, 129): see also pp. 93, 98, and 114.

(31.) The English Faust Book, p. 112.

(32.) Another example: "thy drift" (V.i.75).

(33.) See Annas and Barnes's Outlines of Scepticism, pp. 4-5. 11-2, 51-2; and Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond "They [The Pyrrhonians] put forth their propositions, but to contend with those they imagine wee hold in our conceipt. If you take theirs, then will they undertake to maintaine the contrary: all is one to them, nor will they give a penny to chuse" (Florio, Essayes of Montaigne, p. 449; for the French, see the Villey ed. p. 503; see also Florio, pp. 412-3, 460-1, 483-93, 499-503, 522). Francisco Sanches, who does not seem to have read either Sextus or Montaigne before publishing his Quod Nihil Scitur (Lyon, 1581), nonetheless places strong emphasis upon diversity of opinion as a prologue to doubt; see That Nothing is Known, trans. and ed. Elaine Limbrick and Douglas F. S. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 213, 222-3.

(34.) See also Pro.23-5 ("falling to / glutted / surfeits"), I.i.80 ("glutted with conceit"), and V.ii.10-1 ("surfeit") for further images of overconsumption; and see the B-text's "let me be cloyed / With all things that delight the heart of man" (B.III.i.58-9).

(35.) Montaigne might not agree with this claim, since he chooses to do that which is customary in his society, while Faustus does not. But Montaigne's embrace is not merely a passive following but an active endorsing of custom, and therefore an abandonment of Pyrrhonism.

(36.) This may be contrasted with the Cartesian movement to judgment which is designed precisely to preclude such a rush.

(37.) W. W. Greg, ed., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 1604, 1616 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). pp. 320-1; Keefer, ed., Doctor Faustus: a 1604-version edition (Peterborough: Broadview, 1991), p. 29; Bevington and Rasmussen, p. 138n. Roma Gill keeps the question mark in her edition (Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]).

(38.) An idea powerfully reinforced by Mephistopheles's speech at B.V.ii.13-5, a speech not found in the A-text: "his labouring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies / To overreach the devil." "Fancy" and "fantasy" mean essentially the same thing in the late sixteenth century, "fancy" being a contraction of "fantasy" (first used in the fifteenth century), and each employed in verse according to metrical demands. The B-text includes a comma after "fancies," and Bevington and Rasmussen's suggestion that this punctuation makes "despair" anticipate the phrase "Despair in God" (line 5) seems entirely plausible. But their related comment--that the A-text's reading of line 4 suggests "brush aside idle fancies and desperate thoughts" (line 217)--strikes me as unpersuasive; I think that Faustus's despair is being encouraged throughout this speech, and that it is granted attractiveness by being associated with "forward" movement and resolve.

(39.) The play offers a clear association among forward motion, magic, and resolution, and between backward motion and conventional religious belief. Being resolute, resolving ambiguities, living in all voluptuousness, etc., is connected to moving forward (I.i.76), being a "forward wit" (Epilogue. 7), and engaging in magic (B.II.i.14): wavering (II.i.7) and acknowledging uncertainty, fear, and doubt (I.iii.14; II.i.26) are connected to moving backward (II.i.6).

(40.) For detailed discussion of this line, see William M. Hamlin. "'Swolne with cunning of a selfe conceit': Marlowe's Faustus and Self-Conception," ELN 34, 2 (December 1996): 7-12.

(41.) See also "Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute" (I.iii.14).

(42.) Elizabeth Cary. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). II. Chorus. 413-24.

(43.) Cary, p. 233. See also the positive valence attached to the state of being "disengaged on either side" (p. 238).

(44.) Sir John Davies, in Nosce Teipsum (1599), comments on the soul's tendency to seek static resolution: "For why should we the busie Soule beleeve, / When boldly she concludes of that, and this?" (lines 85-6). See Robert Krueger, ed., The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).