Paradox of Time: Doctor Faustus

THE PARADOX OF TIME: DOCTOR FAUSTUS As we read in the introduction by Suroopa Mukherjee to Dr. Faustus, one of the many ambiguities of this play written by Christopher Marlowe, is the attempt of establishing an accurate time frame as to when it was written. On grounds founded upon evidence gathered by several critics, it seems to them that the play was written by Marlowe shortly after Tamburlaine, in the year 1588-89. An anonymous play A Taming of the Shrew, apparently plagiarized from Dr. Faustus, and was dated between 1588-93. Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) also emanates a certain ‘Marlowe trait.’ Further it has been speculated that Marlowe wrote this play in the year 1592, twelve months prior to his death in 1593 as the chief source of the play, the English translation of the German Faustbuch titled The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, was written by Thomas Orwin in 1592. Time seems to be a question raised not only of Doctor Faustus, but in it too. The story of Dr. Faustus is thus: DOCTOR FAUSTUS, A WELL-RESPECTED GERMAN scholar, grows discontented with the restrictions of conventional forms of knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and religion—and decides that he wants to learn to apply magic. His friends Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new endeavour as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a servant of the Devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells him to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephastophilis. Faustus’s offer is accepted albeit he experiences some qualms and hesitates on whether he should be penitent and save his soul; in the end, though, he agrees to the deal, signing it with his blood. Armed with his new powers and attended by Mephestophilis, Faustus begins to travel. He goes to the pope’s court in Rome, makes himself invisible, and plays a series of tricks. Upon earning fame, he is invited to the court of the German emperor, Charles V, who asks Faustus to allow him to see Alexander the Great, the famed fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king and conqueror. Faustus conjures up an image of Alexander, and Charles is duly awed. As the twenty-four years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, Faustus begins be anxious of his looming death. Time flies. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-stricken and resolve to pray for him. The night before the expiration of his twenty-four years of power and fame, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He finally begs for mercy from God, but it is too late. At midnight he meets his end, as death over comes his body and his soul forever is eternally damned. Joseph Candido says that in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the last scene (i.e. Act 5, Scene II) in which the tragic protagonist tackles the “terror of God’s judgment against the auditory background of the striking clock, directs our attention to the matter of time.”

Candido observes a play of irony as he notes how the twenty-four years of “pseudo-divinity,” to Faustus in the beginning of the play appears to be of an enormous time frame but which soon melts away and leaves him to realize how those twenty-four years are but just a mere instant “when measured against the open-endedness of eternity.” The play in itself plays with Time. What is depicted onstage in a matter of minutes in this final scene is in fact, as per the story, portraying an hour long dramatic end. Thus one could say that ‘short’ time feels ‘long,’ although it is when this period is over than one could realize it is actually the ‘long’ time that is ‘short.’ Candido does not fail to recognize this in his essay ‘Making time in Doctor Faustus 5.2’ and goes on to reveal to us how Faustus is also a prey to these effects of time as he himself considers the ‘long’ duration of 24-hours (‘short’ when compared to eternity) as a compatible time frame to acquire for himself the image of a demi-God, to present acts of magic that he hopes will immortalize his name and thus allow him to live perpetually. The stage clock is but a callous instrument, striking away as time flows by. It is almost as if the clock scoffs at Faustus by striking 24 times – 11 times, then 1 and finally 12 times - and at his agreement as it condenses the 24-years of Faustus’s deal into but an hour with each stroke. Here, yet again there is the relative outlook of time as 24-years compared to one hour is long, but still compared to eternity is short. The twenty four years of Faustus trapped in the sixty-minute cage of time by the 24 strokes of the clock, simultaneously imply his bargain and his final hour of regret. It is irony at its best. Faustus in his sorrow driven soliloquy, says Joseph Candido, avails a certain “poignancy when we realize that they serve as a dramatic counterpoint to the twenty-four strokes of the clock.” It is as if with every stroke of the clock and its resounding sound, one of his twenty-four years dissipate Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease and midnight never come! Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! O lente, lente currite noctis equi! The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. (65–70; Act V, Scene II) The above lines depict Faustus’s desperation in somehow extending his last short hour of life before he is eternally ensnared to torture. Before the Renaissance, life and death were thought to be predestined. Towards the end of the Renaissance, many began to question parts of this belief, and as an upshot, the significance of life came into question. In Sonnet Ten from The Holy Sonnets, John Donne questions how omnipotent death really is. Donne spoke of "death" as a noun, yet spoke to "Death" as a being, without involving God. To divorce God and Death, and then treat Death as an entity was indeed a new idea. "And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." In the light of this, we can concern ourselves with a certain incessant negotiation that is prevalent in Doctor Faustus between Life and Death. It is almost as if Marlowe through Faustus is bringing to light the questioning of faith and of God which arose during the Renaissance. The negotiations of Faustus’s

mind to repent or not to repent, faith in God or in Himself and death in its literal sense or life in its metaphorical sense seem to play out. Having Faustus repent at last, but all too late makes one realize how the mindset stood at a point midway between medieval beliefs (faith) and the modern scientific attitude (reason) and in balancing between the two, one could tip over to any side. Faustus’s lifetime is running out, and his eternity is coming to life. In the Renaissance era, time stopped being calculated through the periodic turning of the seasons with its’ pattern of Saints’ days and festivities and fasts. Although such a repeating sense of time maybe witnessed in Shakespearean plays, there is no hint of it in Doctor Faustus. In Faustus, time flows in an unalterable and undying manner. Stephen Greenblatt said that the puritans would have liked to see time altogether ‘flattened out,’ into an inexorable flow of six days’ labour and one day’s rest. Candido - “Faustus’s last hopeless wish to transform into the body of a beast in order to escape the prospect of endless damnation gets brutally shortened by the intrusion of the last twelve soundings of the clock. At its twenty-fourth sounding, the point of Faustus’s earthly terminus, the short time of human life merges at last with the long time of eternity.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY:   

http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1237&context=earlytheatre

http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=23483 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=nMI84cMWmRAC&pg=PR20&dq=faustus+time+marlowe&h l=en&sa=X&ei=PjOWT_vCHIbJrQeU0Kn_DQ&ved=0CEEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=faustus%20ti me%20marlowe&f=false