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They were in the heart of their mirth, when the butler made his appearance, and began to cry thieves with all his might. The doctor at once conjured him, so that he could neither speak nor move. There he was obliged to sit, while Faustus and his companions tapped every vat in the cellar. They then carried him along with them in triumph.
Here is a rogue quite as worthless as that one at Shrewsbury the other day, when the Interlude of Doctor Faustus was being played, amidst all manner of most wanton and lascivious revelries, and where many things were going on conducive to the welfare of your realm; when they were busiest, the devil himself appeared to play his part, and so drove all away from pleasure to prayers.
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.... O soul, be changed into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found! Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery.
Caesar attempted to re-establish the ties of affinity which fate had severed; he asked for himself the hand of the only daughter of Pompeius, and offered Octavia, his sister's grand-daughter, who was now his nearest relative, in marriage to his fellow-regent; but Pompeius left his daughter to her existing husband Faustus Sulla the son of the regent, and he himself married the daughter of Quintus Metellus Scipio.
He afterward had a famous controversy with this Faustus, and wrote against him thirty-three books.
In many scenes the action stands quite still, and they consist wholly of long soliloquies, or conversations, delineating Faustus' internal conditions and dispositions, and the development of his reflections on the insufficiency of human knowledge, and the unsatisfactory lot of human nature; other scenes, though in themselves extremely ingenious and significant, nevertheless, in regard to the progress of the action, possess an accidental appearance; many again, while they are in the conception theatrically effective, are but slightly sketched, rhapsodical fragments without beginning or end, in which the poet opens for a moment a surprising prospect, and then immediately drops the curtain again: whereas in the truly dramatic poem, intended to carry the spectators along with it, the separate parts must be fashioned after the figure of the whole, so that we may say, each scene may have its exposition, its intrigue, and winding up.
Faustus show in the superlative degree the love of conquest, of wealth, and of knowledge. Everything that Marlowe wrote is stamped with a love of beauty and of the impossible. Tamburlaine speaks like one of the young Elizabethans "That in conceit bear empires on our spears, Affecting thoughts co-equal with the clouds." Marlowe voices the new sense of worth of enfranchised man:
To some of these requisitions the spirit could not consent, without authority from his master, the chief of devils. At length all these concessions were adjusted. The devil on his part also prescribed his conditions. It was further appointed by Faustus that the devil should usually attend him in the habit of cordelier, with a pleasing countenance and an insinuating demeanour.
To such a moment as that Faustus himself would have cried 'Stay! though the price of satisfied desire were his soul. And there had been many such moments in Cordova's life. They satisfied something much deeper than greedy vanity and stronger than hungry ambition.
Personified, but we dare scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present, little better than a spectre.
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