The Theater of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe

My subject is damnation in the tragedy of Christopher Marlowe. Or, more specifically, the relationship between his markedly damned protagonists and the audience that pays to watch them brought low. The peculiar attraction Marlowe held for the patrons of the Elizabethan playhouse absorbs critics: certainly the scholarship of no other early modern playwright is so focused upon audience response. What Leah Marcus calls the "Marlowe effect" has been variously characterized but in general it could be said that Marlowe's tragic energy consists largely in unsettling his viewers (42). He probes and provokes, and offers tragic heroes who both fascinate and repel, repeatedly catching the audience between moralistic censure and enthralled titillation. If there is catharsis, it is a disrupted one, with a sting in the tail: resolution is frustrated, and doubts are multiplied rather than expunged. And yet it is not simply that Marlowe's villain-heroes appall the spectators with their "overreaching" audacity, their insatiable appetites, or their strangeness. I contend that the response that these exotic malefactors provoke is ultimately and unexpectedly self-critical, forcing us to question our presumed superiority to them.¹ To achieve this response Marlowe works in a specifically religious register, playing upon religious difference, inflaming religious antagonism, and complicating the polarities and expectations of mainstream Protestant society.²

Marlowe's protagonists undertake their various crimes and sins with purposeful, open-eyed ardor, but throughout a given play our instinct to judge and reject them is undermined and the tragedies pivot on the revelation of unexpected affinity. In the case of Doctor Faustus, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and power may draw the magus into the outer darkness, far from the familiar world of Wittenberg (or London). Nevertheless, the final image of Faustus pleading, as the last moments of his twenty-four years slip away, for the horses of the night to run slowly, for the mercy of Christ to cover even his terrible sins, undercuts the complacent moralism of the epilogue. His desperate hunger for the forgiveness that everyone in Christendom, whatever their soteriological frameworks, is told they have only to ask for in faith exposes the differences between Faustus and the members of the audience as superficial or even illusory.³ What alarms us about Faustus, in the end, is not that he is so far from us but so close. The border between what we are and what we condemn, Marlowe asserts, is unnervingly porous.

In the story of Faustus Marlowe literalizes a dynamic that pervades his drama generally. In the last scene Faustus is dragged off by devils to eternal punishment, the consequence of his desire for forbidden things. No doubt power and knowledge were as alluring to an early modern audience as they are to us, but Faustus has willingly chosen the fate he now bemoans, chosen to subtract himself from the community of the blessed, and has taken his place among the lost. Before the eyes of the audience Faustus deliberately pledges himself to hell, in spite of the explicit warnings of no less an authority than the fallen angel Mephistopheles. But he is no less damnable for his contractual agreement than are a number of Marlowe's other heroes, in particular Barabas from The Jew of Malta, the cruel, rapacious, and sublimely treacherous Jew. In Barabas and Faustus Marlowe presents potent enemies of mainstream Elizabethan religious culture, enemies respectively of Christendom and of God himself. And they are, at the same time, unique portraits of reprobation, commiting their spectacular sins with relish and fully aware of the prohibitions they flout.

Marlowe's dramatic effect demanded of him a perceptive understanding of the religious culture that shaped his audience and the currents which moved beneath its surface. The damned were everywhere in Renaissance England. To be sure, the category had always been important, but a century of religious upheaval had raised pressing questions about the eternal fate of the man or woman across the street, or across the table. Steven Mullaney, in a paper that considers how Reformation religious upheavals affected people on the emotional level...