Matt Fulton | Writer + Filmmaker

Sympathy for the Devil: An Analysis of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

“Enter a devil…”

With this direction, sixteenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe summons to the London stage the demon Mephistopheles, a revolutionary sympathetic portrayal of a satanic character. This dark dramatis personae now reaches across a wide swath of drama and literature, from the chaotic spectacle on Elizabethan playhouses to epic poetry depicting mankind’s original sin, and the final novel of one of America’s greatest writers. Consider Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost or the dashing and beautifully dressed young boy who appears from hell to sow chaos in a medieval Austrian village in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. These anti-heroes have stood the test of time by personifying a genre of seductive evil that is far more recognizable to both modern and Renaissance-era audiences than the old foretelling of fire and brimstone in scripture. Unlike the gruesome ensembles found brushed into medieval diptychs—animalistic abominations with curled horns, gaped jaws, and spoiling flesh—a devil like Mephistopheles, traipsing across the stage in the meager robes of a monk, offers a mirror image of ourselves. It is often with the help of such an affable disguise that an author may present a more complicated and nuanced embodiment of absolute evil, one with a personality, one with thoughts and desires, one capable experiencing the emotions we all share—one that presents far greater danger than the ghoulish stains on a cathedral window. As a demonic figure, Mephistopheles is drawn to damnation like a shark to the scent of blood; he eagerly exploits mankind’s inherent flaws, provides the tools for their inevitable self-destruction, and empowers them to ruin. By closely examining this kind of dramatic devil and the role ascribed to him, we can better understand what has made him a sympathetic character to audiences for centuries and peer inside a young artist’s struggle to make sense of the darkness within us all.

By 1590, Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe developed a body of work brilliantly positioned to reflect the mood of London’s burgeoning cultural industry at the forefront of its journey from medieval to Renaissance thought. The plays he wrote to that point were colored with provocative ideas and iconoclastic subjects that tiptoed right to the threshold of what was deemed acceptable in Elizabethan England. His work was meant to challenge social boundaries and often purposefully sought to make audiences of the time uncomfortable with irreverent stories of regicide and mockery of religious figures. It is in this brand of spectacle that Marlowe wrote his fourth play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which tells the story of “a consummate scholar’s embrace of necromancy to gain a ‘world of profit and delight’” by selling his soul to the devil (Gainor, et al 672). Doctor Faustus itself is an English take on the earlier German adaptation of the Faust legend. At the beginning of the play’s five-act structure, a chorus introduces the eponymous Doctor Faustus, a brilliant scientist and physician born “base of stock” in Wittenberg, Germany, who strives for a higher understanding of the universe and the god-like powers this would entail. We are led to appreciate in the prologue that Faustus’ fate will mirror that of Icarus, a Greek mythological figure whose flight too near to the sun melted his waxen wings and sent him tumbling from the sky to his death. Ultimately Doctor Faustus is a cautionary tale of tragic overreach in the pursuit of knowledge, asking us to consider how much knowledge is too much and if there is something intrinsically damnable for men who seek to attain such power. This is a key theme that rears its head in stories of Faustian bargains, of prideful souls led astray by sympathetic devils.

In the first scene, Faustus enters his study and launches into a lamenting, arrogant soliloquy on how he has mastered every academic subject under the sun. He claims that logic and law are trivial and beneath him, questions the purpose of medicine unless it can raise the dead, and declares divinity pointless as all humans are guilty of sin, adding dismissively, “What doctrine call you this? Que sera, sera, / ‘What will be, shall be?’ Divinity, adieu!” (Marlowe 1.1.49-50). He turns to a book of necromancy and claims that if he were to master this art “All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command” (1.1.58-59). Two angels then appear—Good and Evil, respectively—and argue with him to either lay that “damned book” aside or continue on his quest to harness black magic. This exchange between these “shoulder angels” is the first in a series of warnings to Faustus (and the audience) that he is embarking upon a terrible mistake, although he could scarcely be bothered to listen. Like a child eagerly reciting a Christmas list, he begins to announce all the wonderful things he can do once he summons spirits to his side, boasting that he will dispatch them across the world in search of “princely delicates” and drive occupying Spanish armies from northern Europe, among other promised feats. The audience will very well recognize the risk in following this path, but for Faustus, the temptation is much too strong for him to resist. We see Faustus’ flaws as a character blatantly on display from the opening scene.

Later in Act 1, Faustus reads from a Latin incantation in the book of necromancy, exalting such infamous names as Lucifer, Prince of the East, Beelzebub, monarch of burning hell, and lastly conjures Mephistopheles in his natural form of a hideous devil. Faustus recoils at the sight, telling the demon “Thou art too ugly to attend on me. / Go, and return an old Franciscan friar; / That holy shape becomes a devil best” (1.3.25-27). As commanded, Mephistopheles leaves the stage and quickly returns as a monk. Putting aside Marlowe’s jape at the Catholic clergy (which was certainly meant to appeal to a protestant English audience), the play now reveals its use of this less threatening and perhaps more flattering personification of a satanic figure—none of the explicit grotesqueries associated with the demonic, just a kindly friar draped in fraying robes. Mephistopheles’ is not a classically romantic depiction, but it is nonetheless an unassuming guise donned when one cannot possibly look the bare truth of this unvarnished evil in the face. Here we also first see how Marlowe plants a foot in two distinct interpretations of the nature of hell and damnation, a central motif that will carry on for the remainder of the play.

In Christianity, every demon counted among the pantheon of hell is in some regard a perverted version of a god from pagan religions, the story being that they sided with Lucifer in a rebellion against the Almighty and were forever cast out of heaven. Church doctrine in Marlowe’s time held that pagans who worshiped these gods were damned and thus demons served as a reminder of what would happen to their eternal souls if they, too, strayed from the Church. Providing demons with names and personalities helped early Christians to identify with them and made their cautionary tale more relatable, giving them grotesque and frightful forms perhaps only underscored the horrific fate awaiting the unfaithful. Yet Marlowe did not take this route; Mephistopheles, as he spends the vast majority of the play, is hardly frightful, and his simple costume on stage would have been quite familiar to the audience. He is not a stereotype, but a complex character in his own right, one that is also indicative of humanism in Renaissance theater. In Mephistopheles, we have a demon that eschews all traditional depictions so that audiences may begin to identify with and find him sympathetic while he nonetheless makes it clear that he has come to reap Faustus’ soul, speaking openly of this impending damnation.

Almost immediately after his conjuring, Mephistopheles announces that he is a servant of Lucifer, to which Faustus asks, “Did he not charge thee to appear to me?” and the demon replies, “No, I came now hither of mine own accord” (1.3.44-45). This exchange is crucial to the audience’s understanding of the nature of their relationship. How are we to interpret Mephistopheles’ summons? We may think that Faustus truly commanded him to appear, or, as the following lines indicate, Mephistopheles can almost sense Faustus’ wavering faith and an insatiable appetite for knowledge and power across space and time—a shark to blood. The demon then explains:

For when we hear one rack the name of God, / Abjure the Scriptures and his Savior Christ, / We fly in hope to get his glorious soul, / Nor will we come unless he use such means / Whereby he is in danger to be damned. (1.3.48-53)

Faustus is in danger to be damned. Mephistopheles says this plainly and admits that this is the reason why he appeared, Faustus’ incantations are irrelevant; Mephistopheles has not come to aid Faustus on a quest to master the black arts, he has come to harvest a crop. This speaks to a reading of the play in which Faustus repeatedly fails to repent because his damnation is already sealed despite his actions. Like Mephistopheles, who is bound to serve Lucifer, it is questionable if Faustus possesses the free will to choose his fate.

This exchange now sheds further light on the play’s reformed interpretation of hell as a state of mind rather than a physical place and also reveals Mephistopheles’ view of his own damnation. Faustus in so many words asks how demons came to dwell with Lucifer, and in a striking, moving string of dialogue, Mephistopheles confesses that they are “Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, / Conspired against our God with Lucifer, / And are forever damned with Lucifer” (1.3.72-74). This is one of several lines where Mephistopheles is brutally truthful with Faustus. Here we have a demon, come to reap a man’s soul, who is nothing but honest in his telling of what fate awaits Faustus; Mephistopheles has experienced this damnation as well, and he comes right to the edge of pleading with Faustus to repent, to recognize the error of his ways. This also speaks to the nature of servitude in Doctor Faustus. Despite claiming to seek out damned souls and coming to Faustus “of mind own accord,” Mephistopheles is enchained to Lucifer by strict deontological ethics. He is duty-bound by a categorical imperative to obey Lucifer—Mephistopheles fell from heaven with Lucifer, is forever cleaved off from God’s grace, and now, almost as punishment, he is damned to serve as a thrall Lucifer’s will; Mephistopheles’ own feelings and emotions, as we have shown he has them, can never factor into his actions. While there is room for gray in his thoughts, his service in Lucifer’s conquest to enlarge his kingdom is only ever black and white. Clearly, this aids the interpretation of Mephistopheles as a sympathetic antagonist, and dare we say an anti-hero. Furthermore, when it comes to the reality of hell itself, Faustus asks how it is that Mephistopheles is both “in hell” at this very moment and also standing before him in that study. To this question, Mephistopheles likewise holds nothing back, admitting:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. / Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God / And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, / Am not tormented with ten thousand hells / In being deprived of everlasting bliss? / O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, / Which strike a terror to my fainting soul! (1.3.78-84)

In revealing to Faustus his own experience of dwelling with Lucifer, Marlowe introduces what is perhaps the central conflict churning within Mephistopheles: having experienced “the eternal joys of heaven” and yet being forever “deprived of everlasting bliss.” How could an audience not begin to sympathize with this otherwise demonic, evil figure? Mephistopheles’ characterization is multi-faceted—capable of experiencing sorrow and pain just as he is capable of inflicting it in others; he is profoundly human in this regard. Brilliantly Marlowe is able to, within just a few lines, trick his deeply religious Elizabethan audience into identifying with a character that Church doctrine says is the embodiment of all they must avoid. Moreover, Marlowe rejects the traditional Orthodox perception of hell as a physical place—a burning pit, à la Dante Alighieri—for a more nuanced motif. Hell, if we are to believe Mephistopheles, is a state of mind, wherever God is not, and to be forever separated from God is to be in hell, a point of Christian doctrine which would be all too familiar to an audience in Elizabethan England.

After leaving to confer with Lucifer, Mephistopheles returns to Faustus at the beginning of Act 2 and outlines the following bargain: Mephistopheles will serve at Faustus’ side for twenty-four years, enabling him the ability to use magic as he pleases. However, at the end of this term, Faustus will offer his body and soul to Lucifer and spend the rest of eternity damned in hell. To seal their pact, Faustus is made to write a contract in his own blood that stipulates, among other conditions, that “Mephistopheles shall be his servant, / and at his command” (2.1.97-98). Throughout the play’s ensuing scenes, the audience witnesses how Faustus squanders his newly bestowed powers on frivolities like chasing women and playing practical jokes on the pope. Despite all his earlier boasts on what he would achieve with this god-like omnipotence, Faustus nonetheless reverts to adolescent sideshows and detours—a demonic presence perched at his side like a vulture all the while. His actions are nothing of what we should expect from a consummate scholar who claims to have mastered every earthly subject under the sun. As twenty-four years are whittled away by the end of Act 5, Faustus can see his damnation toll the hour. Mephistopheles then arrives on stage with a host of devils to physically drag Faustus down to hell, now apparently a literal realm of fire and suffering. Faustus tries to repent, cries out for redemption—“Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while! / Ugly hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!” (5.2.18-19)—but there is none to be found. Faustus’ body and soul are swept away to eternal damnation, and “The devils exeunt with him.”

As the Chorus reenters the stage and laments Faustus’ tragic demise, warning the audience to “regard his hellish fall,” we can now see the totality of this deceitful plot laid bare. One could posit the question if Mephistopheles was truly ever Faustus’ servant, or if his every line spoken on stage was in the furtherance of Lucifer’s desire to enlarge his kingdom. For the agents of hell, what was the cost of Mephistopheles spending twenty-four years entertaining Faustus’ childish fantasies? Scarcely anything meaningful at all, and yet for their troubles Lucifer was able to reap one more arrogant, damned soul. Theirs was a lopsided bargain, to say the least, to reap a man’s soul at such a fire-sale price. Yet in Mephistopheles, we see a perfect vessel to execute Faustus’ damnation—a worthy agent of Lucifer—all wrapped in the unassuming guise of a kindly friar. In a way, Mephistopheles’ successfully weaponized sympathy, using this characterization to quicken Faustus’ own flaws and blind him to the much darker plot at hand. It is a tremendous confidence trick played on Faustus and the audience and belies Christopher Marlowe’s skill as a writer to stage this cautionary tale. By the end of Act 5, as a hellish spectacle storm the stage, the audience could be forgiven for thinking that some happy ending awaited Faustus, that he may yet repent for embracing in necromancy, and it is through Mephistopheles that the audience would have been deceived. All the while we would have been led to hold some shred of sympathy for the devil.

Works Cited

Marlowe, Christopher. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.” The Norton Anthology of Drama, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, et al, 2nd ed., vol. 1, W.W. Norton, 2014, pp. 672–714.

Copyright © 2017 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.