42 pages • 1 hour read
Christopher MarloweDoctor Faustus
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1589A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Scenes 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 13 Summary: “A Room in the House of Faustus”
Wagner is puzzled because Faustus “hath given to [him] all his goods” (49), yet he carouses as if he isn’t about to die. Faustus entertains members of the university—who, after a long discussion, have decided that Helen of Troy is history’s most wonderful woman. They ask Faustus to produce her for them to admire. He does so, and the men are awed by her perfect beauty.
After the party, an old man appears and begs Faustus to seek repentance before his time is up. Faustus, meaning to honor his bargain with Lucifer, receives a dagger from Mephistophilis. The old man says he can see an angel hovering above Faustus. The scholar agrees to think about it.
Mephistophilis accuses Faustus of breaking his pact and threatens to tear him apart. Faustus relents, slits his arm with the dagger, and writes in blood on a piece of paper. He makes a last request, to enjoy an intimate encounter with Helen of Troy. Mephistophilis indulges the request, and Helen reappears. She’s so beautiful that Faustus moans, “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships” (52). He promises to defend her as did her Trojan lover Paris.
The old man watches Faustus depart and swears that, unlike Faustus, he will place his faith in God, defy hell, and escape to heaven, which laughs at demons.
Scene 14 Summary: “The Same”
Three scholars visit Faustus. They worry because Faustus is carrying on about dying and going to hell. They tell Faustus to ask God’s forgiveness, but Faustus insists that his sins are too great to ever be forgiven. They then suggest that he beg God for mercy, and Faustus says he would do so, but his hands are held back by Lucifer and Mephistophilis.
He tells them of his bargain with Lucifer and how his time has run out. They ask why he didn’t tell them sooner, and he says the demons would have torn him apart. He warns them that staying with him will be too dangerous. The scholars go into the next room and pray for him.
The clock strikes 11. At midnight, the devil will come to claim Faustus. He wishes that time would stop, or that the mountains would fall on him, or that the Earth would swallow him whole, so that he might escape the wrath of God.
The clock strikes 12, and Faustus prays that his soul might turn to drops of water and fall into the sea so that Lucifer can’t find them. Demons appear and grab Faustus; even as they drag him off to hell, he still tries to bargain with them.
The chorus appears and intones that Faustus, who misused his great mental gifts for selfish gain, now burns in hell for daring to possess more power than humans are meant to have.
Scenes 13-14 Analysis
Twentieth-century author Steven Vincent Benét wrote a short story, “By the Waters of Babylon,” in which human technology leads to the destruction of civilization; one of the survivors looks back at the disaster and muses that “they ate knowledge too fast.” In Doctor Faustus the scholar’s obsession with the power of magical lore exceeds his grasp and dooms him as well. The play’s warnings about such pride and arrogance echo across the centuries and remain relevant today.
In the last two scenes Faustus realizes his time is up and he must pay the final, terrible price for his 24 years of demon-powered success. As with many of Shakespeare’s plays, in which the main character is evil, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus explores the life of an antihero. Most stories with villains have heroes to oppose them, but Faustus is opposed by no one, not even God, who never appears in the play. The enemy of Faustus is Faustus, and he is ultimately defeated by himself.
Like the Good and Evil Angels who represent the two sides of Faustus’s mind, the old man who visits Faustus—urging him to repent and dying at about the same time as Faustus—symbolizes a Faustus wise enough to back away from the devil before it’s too late.
His long adventure over, Faustus quails at the prospect of spending eternity in hell, and he tries to wriggle out of his bargain. Stalling, he requests an intimate moment with Helen of Troy, and Mephistophilis obliges. Gazing on her intense beauty, Faustus wonders, “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships” (52), which has become the most famous line in all of Marlowe’s plays.
According to ancient legend, Helen marries Menelaus, a Greek Spartan. Paris, a Trojan who helps a goddess win a beauty contest, receives Helen as his prize. Paris seduces her and carries her off to Troy; Menelaus and his brother, King Agamemnon, launch an armada to attack Troy and take Helen back. A 10-year war ensues; Troy is sacked, Paris dies in battle, and Helen returns to her husband. Archeological evidence points to a lengthy war around 1200 BCE at a site on the northwest coast of modern-day Turkey, where Troy must have stood.
This captivating story and other ancient tales were resurrected during the Renaissance, and Helen’s fame was reborn. Her presence in Marlowe’s play, as a kind of mythical guest star, would have increased the audience’s interest and the play’s entertainment value. Helen’s perfection symbolizes the heavenly pleasures people sometimes pine after to the point of foolishness. As such, Helen becomes the perfect distraction for Faustus as he tries to forget his terrible fate.
There are parallels between Helen’s story and another literary allusion in the play: Doctor Faustus has a famous antecedent in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically “The Friar’s Tale,” in which a court official joins forces with a demon to extort a woman over a false charge of adultery. The woman damns the official to hell; the demon obliges and drags the official to the underworld.
The devil holds Faustus to his bargain by restraining him from reaching up to God for forgiveness. God, in turn, doesn’t reach down to Faustus, since the rogue scholar long ago cursed God and turned away from him. Faustus’s pleas for salvation are as selfish as his original bargain.
Doctor Faustus warns against the pride and arrogance that disdains religious duty, but the warning also applies to societies that become overly pleased with themselves. Today, as technology improves exponentially, people have begun to dream of immortality, endless intelligence, and effortless wealth. At some point in the near future, people may have a chance to bargain away their freedom or their very identity as humans for a chance at limitless power. Super-intelligent computers, for example, could give us everything we want, but at a price we come to regret. People may yet acquire wealth and ageless beauty but, in the process, become enslaved or worse.
There’s a saying: “Never solve a puzzle that opens the gates of hell.” Faustus, who solves his intellectual puzzles by breaking the rules, might well agree.
Related Titles
By Christopher Marlowe
