Summary: Scene 10
Faustus, meanwhile, meets a horse-courser and sells him
his horse. Faustus gives the horse-courser a good price but warns
him not to ride the horse into the water. Faustus begins to reflect
on the pending expiration of his contract with Lucifer and falls
asleep. The horse-courser reappears, sopping wet, complaining that
when he rode his horse into a stream it turned into a heap of straw.
He decides to get his money back and tries to wake Faustus by hollering
in his ear. He then pulls on Faustus’s leg when Faustus will not
wake. The leg breaks off, and Faustus wakes up, screaming bloody
murder. The horse-courser takes the leg and runs off. Meanwhile,
Faustus’s leg is immediately restored, and he laughs at the joke
that he has played. Wagner then enters and tells Faustus that the
Duke of Vanholt has summoned him. Faustus agrees to go, and they
depart together.
Note: The following scene does
not appear in the A text of Doctor Faustus. The summary below corresponds
to Act IV, scene vi, in the B text.
Robin and Rafe have stopped for a drink in a tavern. They
listen as a carter, or wagon-driver, and the horse-courser discuss
Faustus. The carter explains that Faustus stopped him on the road
and asked to buy some hay to eat. The carter agreed to sell him
all he could eat for three farthings, and Faustus proceeded to eat
the entire wagonload of hay. The horse-courser tells his own story,
adding that he took Faustus’s leg as revenge and that he is keeping
it at his home. Robin declares that he intends to seek out Faustus,
but only after he has a few more drinks.
Summary: Scene 11
At the court of the Duke of Vanholt, Faustus’s skill at
conjuring up beautiful illusions wins the duke’s favor. Faustus
comments that the duchess has not seemed to enjoy the show and asks
her what she would like. She tells him she would like a dish of
ripe grapes, and Faustus has Mephastophilis bring her some grapes.
(In the B text of Doctor Faustus, Robin, Dick,
the carter, the horse-courser, and the hostess from the tavern burst
in at this moment. They confront Faustus, and the horse-courser
begins making jokes about what he assumes is Faustus’s wooden leg.
Faustus then shows them his leg, which is whole and healthy, and
they are amazed. Each then launches into a complaint about Faustus’s
treatment of him, but Faustus uses magical charms to make them silent,
and they depart.) The duke and duchess are much pleased with Faustus’s
display, and they promise to reward Faustus greatly.
Analysis: Scenes 10–11
Faustus’s downward spiral, from tragic greatness to self-indulgent mediocrity,
continues in these scenes. He continues his journey from court to
court, arriving this time at Vanholt, a minor German duchy, to visit
the duke and duchess. Over the course of the play we see Faustus
go from the seat of the pope to the court of the emperor to the
court of a minor nobleman. The power and importance of his hosts
decreases from scene to scene, just as Faustus’s feats of magic grow
ever more unimpressive. Just after he seals his pact with Mephastophilis,
Faustus soars through the heavens on a chariot pulled by dragons
to learn the secrets of astronomy; now, however, he is reduced to
playing pointless tricks on the horse-courser and fetching out-of-season
grapes to impress a bored noblewoman. Even his antagonists have
grown increasingly ridiculous. In Rome, he faces the curses of the
pope and his monks, which are strong enough to give even Mephastophilis
pause; at the emperor’s court, Faustus is opposed by a
collection of noblemen who are brave, if unintelligent. At Vanholt,
though, he faces down an absurd collection of comical rogues, and
the worst of it is that Faustus seems to have become one of them,
a clown among clowns, taking pleasure in using his unlimited power
to perform practical jokes and cast simple charms.
Selling one’s soul for power and glory may be foolish
or wicked, but at least there is grandeur to the idea of it. Marlowe’s
Faustus, however, has lost his hold on that doomed grandeur and
has become pathetic. The meaning of his decline is ambiguous: perhaps
part of the nature of a pact with Lucifer is that one cannot gain
all that one hopes to gain from it. Or perhaps Marlowe is criticizing
worldly ambition and, by extension, the entire modern project of
the Renaissance, which pushed God to one side and sought
mastery over nature and society. Along the lines of this interpretation,
it seems that in Marlowe’s worldview the desire for complete knowledge
about the world and power over it can ultimately be reduced to fetching
grapes for the Duchess of Vanholt—in other words, to nothing.
Earlier in the play, when Faustus queries Mephastophilis
about the nature of the world, Faustus sees his desire for knowledge
reach a dead end at God, whose power he denies in favor of Lucifer. Knowledge
of God is against Lucifer’s kingdom, according to Mephastophilis.
But if the pursuit of knowledge leads inexorably to God, Marlowe
suggests, then a man like Faustus, who tries to live without God,
can ultimately go nowhere but down, into mediocrity.
