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2. The Satisfactions of Hell: Doctor Faustus and the Descensus Tradition
- Cornell University Press
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Could Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus be a version of the medieval harrowing of hell play, that cycle pageant which displayed Christ’s descent to the underworld where he challenged Satan for the souls of the righteous dead? Of course, Marlowe’s drama, which centers obsessively on the status of the protagonist’s repentance, has long been associated with the morality play.1 But in this chapter I argue that, under the pressure of the period’s reconfiguration of satisfaction, the play’s generic as well as penitential impulses take shape as an underworld journey as much as they do a psychomachia. In other words, the “form of Faustus’ fortunes” has much in common with the cycle drama, or at least the special pageant of Christ’s descent into hell.2 If the substance of that form has been significantly altered, it is the result not only of the secularization of the commercial stage and of Marlowe’s special imaginative powers but also of a particularly vivid contemporary controversy about the meaning of the third article of the Elizabethan church: “As Christ died for us, and was buried: so also it is to be believed that he went down into hel.”3 Chapter 2 The Satisfactions of Hell Doctor Faustus and the Descensus Tradition 40 Chapter 2 According to Peter Marshall, the Descent controversy, in which a range of Elizabethan and Jacobean divines argued over whether or not Christ literally traveled to hell to confront Satan, was part of a comprehensive effort to “dissociate . . . irrevocably from the typologies and language of preReformation ‘geographies of the afterlife.’”4 But, as my discussion of the controversial literature suggests, the most pressing theological concern exposed by the debate was not Protestant “unease with the conception of the afterlife as a series, or even a pair of concatenated localities,”5 but rather an uncertainty about what counted as enough for Christ to do to redeem fallen humanity. The debate, that is—over whether or not it was necessary for Christ to go down to hell or to suffer hell in his soul—rehearses the problem of human satisfaction and redemption that we have chronicled in chapter 1 as a problem for Christ. Faustus, in his fixation on and trafficking with hell, absorbs both sides of the dilemma: he probes not only the limits of his own (in)ability to repent for a life of “all voluptuousness” but also the contours of Christ’s satisfaction to God for human sin.6 In the process his play transforms to tragic effect one of the medieval stage’s most powerful representations of the movement of Jesus from suffering to triumph, from tristia to gaudium.7 In what follows I discuss the economies of satisfaction at work in contemporary understandings of hell. I then turn to the theological as well as literary debates around Christ’s descent to hell to demonstrate how they bleed into Faustus’s own salvific concerns, making him the center of a contorted harrowing of hell play. The Symbolics of Hell Faustus’s fascination with the underworld is not original to Marlowe. It is inherited directly from the play’s source, The Damnable Life, also known as The English Faust Book, hereafter referenced as EFB (1592).8 The magician protagonist of this legendary account, popular with a Renaissance readership on the Continent as well as in England, focuses relentlessly on the shape and place of hell. Having made his pact with the devil, for instance, Faustus “dreamed that he had seen a part of hell, but in what manner it was, or what place he knew not: whereupon he was greatly troubled in mind and called unto him Mephistopheles his spirit, saying to him: ‘My Mephistopheles, I pray thee resolve me in this doubt: what is hell, what substance is it of, in what [44.192.247.185] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:21 GMT) The Satisfactions of Hell 41 place stands it, and when was it made?’”9 Mephistopheles supplies answers— that God ordained hell even before the Fall of Lucifer, that it “is of no substance , but a confused thing,” and that it floats like a bubble moved by the breath of God—but this information only prompts further questions from Faustus about hell’s geography and the nature of its punishments.10 Finally Mephistopheles furnishes him with a baroque description energized by a long tradition of sermonic and catechistical threat: Therefore is hell called the everlasting pain, in which is...