The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidneys Defence of Poesie and Marlowes Doctor Faustus

Noam Reisner
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WESTERN PHILOSOPHY HAS ALWAYS framed the question of mimetic art, and by extension of aesthetics, in relation to epistemology. Whether it is Plato who worries in Book X of the Republic about the remoteness of the mimetic copy from the ideal Forms, or Kant in The Critique of Judgement who puts the thing-in-itself outside the realms of empirical cognition and therefore beyond representation, the ontological premise of a reality, elusive and inexpressible though it may be, has always dominated the debate about the truth-value of art. In Western Renaissance Europe, notwithstanding the slow recovery of Aristotles Poetics through several inuential Italian commentaries, Platos pejorative denition of mimesis in the Republic dominated. For Plato and his Christian heirs, the singular Idea or idealised object is profaned through mimetic representation simply because it ceases to be singular; it devolves from a universal absolute to an imperfect, reproducible impression. The marked artistic obsession in the Renaissance with meta-art and verisimilitude is in turn symptomatic of a larger intellectual struggle to reconcile the Platonic-Christian desire to assimilate oneself into the oneness of God with the desire itself potentially hubristic to celebrate the created world through a reverse process of populating nature with articial copies which nevertheless delight the observer by supposedly outdoing nature. The idea of artistic mimesis was thus always rooted in the artists often troubled relationship with an absolute, though merely shadowed, reality of the idealised spiritual realm.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfq028 # The Author, 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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The most intriguing theoretical exploration of these ideas in relation to poetry in the English Renaissance landscape remains that of Sidneys Defence of Poesy, and its most visceral artistic-dramatic exploration in relation to both poetry and theatre that of Marlowes Doctor Faustus. Sidneys rhetorical oscillations in his Defence create an impression of confusion and even inconsistency which has led some critics even to question the success of its argument, but persuasion, not logical clarity, is its aim.1 Writing in a humanist tradition of affective persuasion, Sidney appeals to his implied readers sense of history and moral intuition, not logical proof. Nevertheless, the conict in Sidneys Defence between logical clarity and rhetorical display is itself instructive. It sheds light on a conceptual problem which extends beyond the Defence to the practice of all mimetic art and especially drama in the period (though Sidney of course fails to address drama coherently in his exposition). A comparative examination of Marlowes The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, side by side with Sidneys theory, reveals just how startling some of the implications of this theory could be when pursued to their ultimate logical conclusion. Whereas Sidneys text reveals the many pressures which the Aristotelian idea of mimesis had to contend with in the early modern period, Marlowes tragic farce fully exploits these pressures for their most absurd and literally spectacular dramatic possibilities. When Sidney felt he had to defend poetry as an art form he was well aware that those whom he had to persuade of poetrys antique merit had God on their side and, as it happened in Sidneys particular case, a Calvinist God at that. In defending the edifying moral qualities of poetry, the Protestant Sidney had to react against a religious climate which condemned all vain literary and artistic production to the dung heap of hell. It is not simply that Calvin taught his followers that man is a fallen creature whose will is fatally polluted by Original Sin, but also that all created

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There seems to be an overall critical consensus that Sidneys Defence is rhetorically seductive but not persuasive, or at least that it is logically contradictory and difcult to follow argumentatively, especially if it is viewed as an attempt to respond cogently to Stephen Gossons The Schoole of Abuse of 1579, dedicated to Sidney. See for example Catherine Barnes, The Hidden Persuader: The Complex Speaking Voice of Sidneys Defence of Poetry, PMLA 86/3 (1971) pp. 4227; A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge 1977) p. 110; John Hunt, Allusive Coherence in Sidneys Apology for Poetry, SEL 27 (1987) pp. 1 16; Edward Berry, The Poet as Warrior in Sidneys Defence of Poetry, SEL 29 (1989) pp. 21 34. However, for a different perspective see John C. Ulreich Jr., The Poets Only Deliver: Sidneys Conception of Mimesis, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15/1 (1982) pp. 67 84, and Margaret W Ferguson, Trials . of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven 1983) pp. 13762.

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nature is equally tainted by the Fall, so that a poet, by wilfully creating verisimilitudes of this fallen, sinful world, could only ever reproduce sin.2 Man may very well be, as the Italian Neoplatonists argued and Montaigne believed, at the centre of Gods creation, but that only meant for Calvin that man was therefore the focal point of the worlds corrupted sinfulness. Sidney, however, turns this Calvinist argument on its head yes, the world is indeed brazen, but the poet can make it golden. Unlike a metaphysician who doth . . . indeed build upon the depth of nature, Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling owers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.3 Sidneys theory of the inspired poets ability to create another nature is a calculated affront to Calvinism. Moreover, the affront is not just to Calvin, but chiey to Plato, and it proceeds by exploiting an ambiguity in the very idea of nature which goes to the heart of humanist ethics and of Reformation theology as well Nature is both a scientically descriptive term and a morally prescriptive one. In its descriptive sense, nature alludes to the ordered state of the world as it is, based on the consensus of human observation and tradition. In such a scheme, any perceived prodigy, monstrosity, or anomaly which appears to go against the received law of nature is deemed
2 This idea ows from Calvins related theory of revelation in nature: God reveals himself in creation which is now tainted by the Fall, so that all men have a natural knowledge of God. This knowledge, however, because tainted by sin, is imperfect and cannot promote salvation, and can only serve to make man inexcusable if he refuses to worship God. Only through the Word of God may the elect be conrmed in grace. For a discussion of Calvins theory of nature and revelation see Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy (1977; Louisville, Ky. 2005) pp. 4250. 3 The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford 1989) p. 216; subsequent references are to this edition.

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super-natural. However, in its morally prescriptive sense, nature alludes to the state of moral human behaviour as it ought to be, where any deviant act, say of incest or cannibalism, is deemed unnatural according to a moral law of nature. The distinction between the two possible senses of nature is a ne one, but it was sufciently unstable in Western theological discourse to have allowed completely opposed interpretations of what is deemed natural in human existence. So, for example, by appealing to the same idea of natural law (variously interpreted) religious moralists can attack the apparent immorality of experimental science, and atheists can deny, as Hobbes did, the basis of morality altogether. Sidney also exploits this ambiguity by arguing that the mimetic imagination allows a poet to rise above the natural constraints of what is by creating forms such as never were in nature, but with the explicit aim of upholding and even improving on how the moral law of nature ought to be. Indeed, Sidneys mimetic another nature is one where the tension between the two possible senses of the word dissolves, as the poet moves from the probable to the desirable and the ideal. It is not merely a matter of copying corrupt reality, but of improving on it so that others, delighting in such polished verisimilitudes, might seek to better themselves in the process of aesthetic enjoyment. To bolster his idealistic reinterpretation of mimetic poetry, Sidney next appeals to Aristotles equally anti-Platonic reassessment of mimesis: Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or guring forth to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight. ( p. 217) While one would indeed expect Sidney to invoke Aristotle at this stage of his argument, it is all too often missed just how misleading this reference to the Poetics actually is. Bearing in mind that Sidney most likely never read the Poetics rst hand, but only a summary of its ideas in a number of possible Italian sources, we have to be cautious here, but the notion that poetic mimesis can both teach and delight is not genuinely Aristotelian.4 Unlike Plato, Aristotle openly asserts in the Poetics that human beings are naturally prone to engage and delight in mimesis whether in painting, poetry, or music and that this natural propensity itself renders the whole activity worthy of analysis, but he never once says, as Sidney hopes,
4 While Sidney read Aristotle at Oxford, perhaps even in the original Greek, he would not have had access there to the Poetics. It is far more likely that he read derivative excerpts from the Poetics in Italian commentaries. See Marvin Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven 1930) pp. 24 6.

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that poetry is a t and necessary companion to philosophy in its capacity to draw with [its] charming sweetness the wild untamed wits of even the most barbarous nations to an admiration of knowledge ( p. 213). Moreover, Sidney is writing in the Italian tradition of Scaliger, Minturno, and probably Castelvetro as well, which fused the moral didacticism of Horaces Ars Poetica with Aristotelian classications and Platonic idealism. In this typically Renaissance scheme, Aristotles famous remark that mimesis deals with one of three things reality past or present; things as they are said or seem to be; or things as they ought to be (60b 8 11) is read through Horace to arrive, ironically, at a Platonic ideal. Where for Aristotle ought to be refers narrowly to causal probability (what in reality, or nature, ought to happen given the right sequence of events, in mimetic art often does happen), for Sidney and the Italian commentators at the back of his mind ought is understood ethically: the world is bad and corrupt, but mimetic art can produce ideal exempla which can help improve it. Sidney thus elevates the art of poetry to the height of biblical prophecy: like the Roman vates of old, or David in his psalms, the inspired poet can see, as it were, into the mind of God, into the immutable and xed realm of Platonic Forms, and create such imaginary characters of virtue that can no longer exist in the natural mutable world. When handled under such conditions, mimetic art does not produce ephemeral copies of a corrupt reality, but substantial truths of the highest divine and moral order. Ingeniously, therefore, having attacked the Platonic suspicion of poetry, Sidney in effect uses Plato against Plato by invoking the theory of the idealised Form to defend the truth value of mimetic art in general. The understanding, he argues, knoweth the skill of each articer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself ( p. 216). However, Sidney cannot make such radical claims without being deeply embarrassed about them from a religious point of view. His anxiety in the next paragraph is palpable: Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of mans wit with the efcacy of nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which is nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, then with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings with no small arguments to the incredulous of that rst accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. ( p. 217)

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An argument which started hand in hand with Picos dignied human, willing himself into a state of divine perfection, now suddenly veers to the depths of Calvinistic despair. Sidney placates the implied Calvinist reader by reafrming the grim realities of Original Sin and reducing the inspired vatic poet from the status of active co-creator with God to the passive mouthpiece of a divine breath merely owing through him. Sidney shrewdly and playfully exploits in these lines the Reformed belief in the righteousness of inspired readers and hopes that no one will notice that he is in fact still speaking here not about readers, but about writers. Whether or not Sidney conceived of his defence as a casual and very seductive bit of Castiglionian sprezzatura, the humanist principle of serious playfulness, or playful seriousness as the case may be (serio ludere), shines through in the daring intellectual risks Sidney takes throughout his implied argument with the Platonic-Calvinist consensus of his day. For example, the paradox of a passive inspired writer which Sidney seems to be leaning towards at this stage of his argument is a commonplace of Reformed thought; it lies at the heart of Luthers idea of the apostolic authorship of the Bible and would re-emerge more forcefully in the paradoxical equivocations of Miltons invocation of the heavenly muse in Paradise Lost. In Sidneys Defence, however, the appeal to such ideas seems a half-hearted, not to say ironic, rhetorical posture. A Calvinist reader would certainly not be impressed with the way in which Sidney concedes Original Sin but then effectively releases mans erected wit from its share of sinfulness. Had we but the will to do good without the grace of God, runs Sidneys implied argument, perhaps we could undo the Fall altogether since our erected wit can still grasp the worlds prelapsarian integrity. By submitting himself to the will of God, the supreme Maker or poet, Sidneys merely inspired human poet effectively assumes Gods creative powers. Such inspired poets, argues Sidney, imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be ( p. 218). In Platos Timaeus (37d), Socrates eponymous interlocutor explains that the maker of the universe (the demiurge) conceived of time as a mimetic representation of eternity. The state of becoming, of perpetual mutability and movement, is forever distinct from, but contained in a mimetic relationship with, the state of being which is static, innite, and eternal. Was, and shall be suppose the movement of becoming, but is alone belongs to being: Was and Shall be are generated forms of Time, although we apply them wrongly, without noticing, to Eternal Being. For we say that it is or was or will be, whereas, in truth of speech, is alone is the

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appropriate term; was and will be, on the other hand, are terms properly applicable to the Becoming which proceeds in Time, since both of these are motions.5 In Sidneys corresponding scheme, inspired mimetic poetry allows the imagination to realise perfected being in the movement of becoming. However, unlike Plato in the Timaeus, Sidney distinguishes between shall be and should be. For Lutherans and Calvinists, the absolute God whose very name, Yahweh, was believed to inscribe the idea of eternal being in that which is, hath been, or shall be stands outside time and is far removed from created mans sinfulness. According to such beliefs, God only reveals himself in time, through his hidden immanence in the created world, or as English Protestants in the sixteenth century understood it, through the acting out of divine providence. But providential causality is precisely that which Sidneys poet nally outgrows as he moves outside time to the divine mind itself where he may portray not what shall be (that would, of course, be impossible within the fallen constraints of causality), but the potential is in what may be and should be. For Sidney, it appears, there can be no is in present time, but only in imagined time. Sidneys theory of mimesis is remarkably original and theologically bold, therefore, since it places its ethical emphasis not on the truth-value of the mimetic object itself, but on the otherwise unrealistic but quite imaginable truth-value of abstract moral ideas which art can convey, apparently absolutely. What might have begun as an attempt to poke harmless fun at Stephen Gossons anti-poetic righteousness seems to have taken on a life of its own once Sidney realised his real adversary was not Gosson, but Plato. For a brief and entirely serious few paragraphs in his Defence, Sidney astounds with the proposition that it is only through mimetic art that the truth of such abstract virtues as courage, wisdom, love, or piety (and their sinful antonyms) can be made in any sense real in the mutable world of sin. However, such a compelling anti-Platonic move nally undermines Sidneys overall theory of poetry since it calls into question the very conclusions he elsewhere seeks to draw from this argument. After all, as Milton was also to discover, Sidney can only ever address fallen readers. The morally edifying mimetic creation Sidney envisions can only function by projecting into the minds eye of suitably moral spectators and readers an ideal state which must depend on said readers to translate such ideas into action in the fallen world. However, as Sidney concedes, since
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Trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library.

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fallen mans will is infected by sin such acts of moral redemption through art must depend on the greater grace of God. And so we nd ourselves back where we started: mimetic poetry is a suspect art, and the movement in Sidneys argument from Plato to Aristotle and back to Plato can only create a large gap which allows Calvins God to reassert his numinous presence in a savage way. Sidney gives idealised Aristotelian mimetic probability air to breathe and plays with the potentially heretical notions such probability opens up, but then instantly recoils from his own presumptuousness by reducing such probability to mere potentiality. After all, we must always confront the possibility that the poets projected ability to allow his erected wit to range freely is itself little more than the expression of an infected will. Realising that perhaps he has conceded too much, Sidney then makes another sharp turn in the argument and hastens to add, But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted ( p. 217). Quickly moving on, he then promptly changes the subject and goes on to categorise in the spirit of Aristotle the different types of edifying mimetic creations a poet might produce prophetic/ mystical, philosophical, and moral. However, what is so startling about the shaky new ground Sidney is now treading is that the noble attempt to save mimetic poetry from Calvinist-Platonic opprobrium has required a move to save it from the mutable causality of reality itself. The transcendental reality which the earthly sign attaches itself to is one which, as Sidney grants, can only be experienced, like Gods majesty, by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith ( p. 215). After all the rhetorical dust is allowed to settle, it appears Sidneys shaky ground remains a rmly Protestant one: he must depend on faith for the clarity of his mimetic vision, where, to quote the Epistle to the Hebrews, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11: 1, my emphasis). The conceit that mimetic art can offer the evidence of things not seen haunted the imagination of early modern, especially Protestant, poets and theorists, but for dramatists, who must rely on their audiences active suspension of disbelief, such notions bore directly on theatrical practice. In its very nature as ephemeral spectacle and illusion, mimetic drama naturally lent itself in the period to elaborate theatrical explorations of the tensions which Sidney explores in theory in his Defence. The plays within plays, the often improbable telescoping of events and disregard of the so-called three unities (whether deliberately or out of ignorance), the heightened degree of metatheatricality, the increasingly sophisticated use of asides, the ubiquitous delight in the absurdity of impenetrable disguises or in masked avengers delivering their justice behind the false show of friendship these are all familiar features of the periods most celebrated

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dramas, none of which observe either Aristotles rules of mimesis or Sidneys morally edifying reinterpretation of those rules. In most cases the resulting tension between the evanescence of the dramatic illusion itself and the eternal truths it might point to raises difcult questions about the moral validity of mimetic drama questions which Sidneys widely read rhetorical exposition only complicated, but did not resolve. No statement of this tension in contemporary drama, other perhaps than Shakespeares The Tempest, is arguably more daring and mimetically confusing than Christopher Marlowes Doctor Faustus, the Tempests elder evil sibling. It is to the tragic farce of Doctor Faustus that we must turn next if the paradoxical tensions underlying the idea of mimesis explored in Sidneys Defence are to be exposed at their most extreme. Similarly to Sidneys Defence, Marlowes The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus offers a very serious and daring intellectual statement about poetic mimesis which nevertheless constantly hovers on the edge of the absurd and the playful. Based on an English translation of the German Faust book, Marlowes wild romp into the world of forbidden magic was sold to contemporary audiences as a tragedy. Ostensibly it is the tragedy of the hubristic, self-obsessed magus, swolln with the cunning of a self-conceit (Prologue, 20),6 paying the ultimate price for his Promethean vanity and insatiable thirst for supernatural power. Yet critics have long noticed that there is something very odd about this alleged tragedy where the overtly Calvinist religious framework displaces the burden of tragic effect from Faustuss wilful actions to the inevitability of his doom. Put simply, is Faustus acting the way he is because he is already damned, or is he damned because of the way he acts?7 The battle between Neoplatonic optimism and Calvinist despair so central to Sidneys theological and moral dilemma in his Defence of Poesy in many ways denes the tragic dynamics of what emerges as Marlowes most intellectually honest dramatic engagement with the dominant religious consensus of his age. The
6 Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester 1993). I have chosen to quote throughout from the earlier 1604 A text, which, though corrupt in many places, is probably (though this is still much debated) much closer to the play penned by Marlowe than the expanded version printed in 1616. As J. B. Steane put it, quoting W. W. Greg, Perhaps to prefer the A text is to suspend historical judgment, but to prefer the B text is to suspend every other form of judgment. J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge 1965) p. 124. 7 See Alan Sineld, Literature in Protestant England, 1560 1660 (London 1983) p. 116. For an especially acute analysis of this paradox see also A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford 1998) pp. 2241.

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Faustus who cries in deance A sound magician is a mighty god (I. i. 64) typies indeed caricatures the Giordano Brunos and John Dees of the Renaissance world who rmly believed in mans limitless potential for self-improvement and ability to become one with the angelic intelligences. Viewed in this way, one can imagine a putative Calvinist nodding his head in knowing approval when, driven by such ambition, Faustus sells his soul to the Devil and so damns himself. On the other hand, if the Calvinist in question is nodding knowingly, said Calvinist is also aware that Faustuss actions by denition single him out as one of the predestined reprobates consigned to damnation from all eternity. And if Faustus is numbered among those denied salvation by supralapsarian decree then the tragedy does not lie in Faustuss overreaching ambition but in his futile attempts to sue for grace once it is revealed that God has hardened his reprobate heart. Faustuss truly moving cry towards the end of the play, O, Ill leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? (V ii. 77) encapsu. lates this theological paradox in a dramatic heartbeat. Faustus cannot y to God because he is pulled down by the same metaphorical waxen wings with which he did mount above his reach but which the melting heavens, not his ambition, conspired (Prologue, 21 2) against in bringing about his downfall. As the Prologue clearly indicates through a wonderful bit of mythological prolepsis, the forces arrayed against Faustuss Icarian presumption are not merely those of internal strife and a defeated conscience, literalised in the play in the morality gures of the Good and Evil Angels, but real devils pulling at his legs and a very real God who Stretches out his arm and bends his ireful brows! (V ii. 83), causing the . wings to melt in the rst place. As numerous critics have therefore noted, and I have no cause to repeat at length, the vision of humanity and divine justice at the heart of the play is ambiguous.8 Marlowes promethean protagonist, very similar to Sidneys putative poet-maker in the Defence, makes a mockery of the merely human by laying claim to supernatural as well as unnatural powers, only to be crushed by the innite and timeless powers he so
8 Bevington and Rasmussens edition ( pp. 15 21) provides a detailed bibliography and summary of the critical debate up to 1993. However, Thomas Healys introductory essay, Doctor Faustus, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge 2004) pp. 17492, represents the newer brand of Marlovian critic who is more inclined to debate the plays dramatic statements and its resulting spectacle than its metaphysical concerns ( p. 174). My reading takes the middle ground since it seeks to establish the corollary between the plays metaphysical concerns and its theatrical, dramatic ones. Contrary to what Healy avers, the plays comic frivolity is not at odds with the metaphysical seriousness of its themes, but is entirely implicated in them.

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earnestly mocks. In Sidneys Defence this results in contradiction in the initial anti-Platonic argument, which slowly deates the treatises opening bravado, but in Marlowes play it results at least notionally in outright damnation and eternal torment for the protagonist. The poetic energy of the plays mockery is driven by gratuitous blasphemy Faustuss Consummatum est (II. i. 74) makes a mockery not just of Christs sacrice on the cross, but specically of a Christian-Calvinist frame of mind driven by a self-annihilating insistence on the need to imitate Christ in all things, even in death.9 However, while the idea of mimesis is indeed central to the play, it extends far beyond the immediate ramications of Faustuss perverse anti-Christian self-fashioning. It extends, again, to the Platonic paradox of mimetic eternity Sidney grapples with in his treatise, and more generally to an emerging statement on the processes by which the early modern mind conceived of reality and its relation to timeless art. Faustus wishes to be eternised (I. i. 15), and to achieve his goal he appeals, as a Renaissance poet or painter would, to the timeless quality of art. But Faustuss magical art, unlike the art of poetry and painting, is not timeless; it is entirely time-bound, to four-and-twenty years (I. iii. 93) to be exact, which time quickly expires in the play before us over a period of ve short theatrical acts. A theatrical performance binds the timelessness of poetry to time. A play, whether or not it adheres to the unities of time and place, is entirely time-bound, but the written poetry and words which are performed allow the same performance to be repeated, theoretically, ad innitum. The irony of this emerging paradox was evidently not lost on Marlowe who, like Sidney, knew his Plato well. Marlowes predicament as a dramatist seeking eternal fame through the transient spectacle of the stage is ventilated in Doctor Faustus through the main protagonists moral-spiritual predicament. Faustus, like all artists having to operate within a ChristianPlatonic scheme, is a victim not just of time, but of its causal, providential fallacy. Reecting on the fatalism inherent in Lutheran and Calvinist theology, Faustus views with disgust the notion that sinners must die an ` ` everlasting death: What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera j What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu! (I. i. 49 50). Like Sidney, Marlowes Faustus is also suspicious of a divinity which appeals to logical causality in time, but he misses the point entirely since, unlike Sidney, he does not recognise that the innite on which the absolutes of divinity rest is precisely that which is above causality and time. In other words, what Marlowe has his

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9 See Adrian Streete, Consummatum est: Calvinist Exegesis, Mimesis and Doctor Faustus, Literature & Theology, 15/2 (2001) pp. 140 54: 151.

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Faustus misunderstand is the mimetic relationship between being and becoming; he fails to comprehend that the irreducibility of the transcendental to mimetic detail is precisely that which proves, on Platonic terms, the truth of the transcendental absolute. What in Sidneys Defence emerges as the only criterion for abstract moral truth, in Marlowes play thus becomes the intellectual crux of the unfolding tragedy. As Faustus increasingly descends into more meaningless acts of ephemeral, consummately theatrical conjuration, the ineffable reality which condemns him and his art to hell tightens its grip. Doctor Faustus, however, is not a sober morality play. Faustus may be condemned as a man from a Platonic-Calvinist perspective, but his magical art and the unfolding farce before us reinforces its own truth a truth of exuberant, even if trivial, life liberated by art from transcendental immutability and tyranny. Like Sidney before him, Marlowe latches on to the idea that it is the mimetic act of imaginative conjuration itself which secures the truth-value of that which it cannot contain. Moreover, similarly to Sidney, the playful manner in which these ideas are expressed and referenced artistically in the play lends weight to the bold philosophical and theological argument Marlowe is insinuating. Faustuss absurd debate with Mephistopheles about the reality of hell is a wonderful illustration of this: Faustus. First will I question with thee about hell. Tell me, where is the place that men call hell? Mephistopheles. Under the heavens. Faustus. Ay, but whereabouts? Mephistopheles. Within the bowels of these elements, Where we are tortured and remain for ever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be. And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be puried, All places shall be hell that is not heaven. Faustus. Come, I think hells a fable. Mephistopheles. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind. Faustus. Why, thinkst thou then that Faustus shall be damned? Mephistopheles. Ay, of necessity, for heres the scroll Wherein thou hast given thy soul to Lucifer. Faustus. Ay, and body too. But what of that? Thinkst thou that Faustus is so fond To imagine that after this life there is any pain?

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Tush, these are tries and mere old wives tales. Mephistopheles. But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary, For I am damned and am now in hell. Faustus. How? Now in hell? Nay, an this be hell, Ill willingly be damned here. (II. i. 119 42) Many critics of the play have wondered about this scene and what it says about Faustuss delusional state of mind. He is faced by a devil from hell, an instance to prove hells existence, and yet he dismisses hell as a fable. Bevington and Rasmussen opine that Mephistopheless answers, for all their startling candour, create uncertainty for Faustus because they do seem to allow a kind of hell that an intellectual might actually enjoy. Hell is evidently a place where one can dispute with colleagues.10 In other words, when Faustus agrees to damn himself he does so because on some level he has convinced himself that hell might not be so bad after all, a sort of eternal private club for the intellectually daring. However, Faustuss inability to recognise the very idea of eternal torment in hell is crucial in another way. After all, hell the terminus of Faustuss doomed journey is made all the more real and threatening in the play because it eschews mimetic detail. We nd ourselves back in Sidneys ambiguous another nature. Faustus frames his query about hell in ontological terms: if hell exists, it must exist somewhere in relation to the natural order, and Faustus wants to know where. Mephistopheles reply, however, slyly shifts from the ontological to the ethical: what is at rst merely Under the heavens is soon revealed as that which hath no limits, nor is circumscribed j In one self place. Hell according to the tormented devil before us, likely sweeping his hand over the audience as well, is nally not a place but an unnatural state of mind emptied of divine truth and absolutes an innite space of deprivation and exclusion dened negatively as all that which, at the end of time, is not heaven. Faustuss magical art, like the hell from which it draws its power, is an instance to prove the truth of theological absolutes which otherwise exceed mimetic representation, but it is a truth Faustus can never see. Ironically, however, Faustuss inability to see this truth in a sense also liberates him from it. Instead of embracing the idea that an act of creative mimesis allows for an irruption of the transcendental within immanence, Marlowe has Faustus ght the implications of this paradox by gradually emptying his magical arts of any practical or ethical content.
10

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Initially, Faustus has grand schemes for his newly acquired powers. Glutted with the conceit of unimaginable supernatural magical ability, Faustus speculates about all the things he might achieve, chief of which is the desire to Resolve me of all ambiguities (I. ii. 82) and the wish to exert his will on the political map of Europe: Ill levy soldiers with the coin they bring And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, And reign sole king of all our provinces (I. ii. 94 6)
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However, none of these plans actually materialises. Faustus gains no real power, nor any discernible new knowledge from his nefarious bargain; even his ability to conjure devils, as it happens, is merely incidental. Mephistopheles only obeys the conjuration because he is drawn to blasphemers. As the devil explains, the conjuration was merely the cause of his arrival per accidens (I. iii. 47), providing Faustus with more rm proof this time couched in medieval scholastic terms that a higher reality is driving events, for only God, the Prime Mover, is the sole true efcient cause which drives events in the mutable world. Having suppressed this view of reality, Faustus has no choice but to embrace the illusory yet entertaining nature of his power. With Mephistopheles in tow Faustus travels Europe as a conjuring actor, dramatist, and con artist, indulging in ephemeral spectacle and buffoonery. The result, however, is a sort of purity, for when mimetic acts point to nothing other than themselves all that remains is the truth of an illusion enjoyed for its own sake. In a moment of acute rapture in Act II, having battled it out with the Good and Evil angels, Faustus points out that he would have taken his own life long ago Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair (II. iii. 25). Faustus then immediately qualies this sweet pleasure as literary pleasure: Have not I made Homer sing to me Of Alexanders love and Oenones death? And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp Made music with my Mephistopheles? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolved Faustus shall neer repent. (II.iii.26 32)

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Unlike Sidney, who reads Homer for moral edication, Marlowes Faustus loses himself absolutely in Homers imagined world for its own sake. Faustuss wish to play out the part of Paris for his conjured Helen later in Act V (I will be Paris, and for love of thee j Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, V i. 98 9) is merely a literalisation of the same . idea through a process of reverse mimesis which allows the conjured image to compete for a claim on truth with the merely shadowed reality of heaven and hell. When Faustus says all is dross that is not Helena (V i. 97) the syntactical echo of Mephistopheles All places shall be hell . that is not heaven could well be deliberate: it allows the truth of the conjured Helen to compete with the truth of heaven, and for a brief moment it is the former, literally seductive, truth which gains the upper hand. Not surprisingly, therefore, when in the passage above Faustus thinks of Homer he immediately also thinks of the myth of Amphion, who used the magical lyre given to him by Hermes to sing into existence the walls of Thebes. In this period, the myth of Amphion often stood side by the side with the myth of Orpheus as a popular topos through which to explore the demiurgic, but potentially hubristic, powers of music and by extension of poetry as well. Such is its relevance to Sidney in his Defence, where the myth of Amphion provides him with yet another metaphor for the limitless creative potential of poetry that can move men to morally virtuous action: So, as Amphion was said to move stones with his poetry to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to by beasts, indeed, stony and beastly people; so among the Romans were Livius Andronicus and Ennius. So in the Italian language the rst that made it aspire to be a treasure-house of science were the poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. So in our English were Gower and Chaucer, after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent fore-going, others have followed, to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as in other arts. ( p. 213) Marlowes Faustus, however, gleefully points out that Amphion made his music in duet with my Mephistopheles. Like Sidney, Marlowe also insists that poetry can move stones, but unlike Sidney he has no qualms about its devilish nature; it is devilishly unnatural because, in the immediate context of the dramatic spectacle, poetry and its imaginative creations are more alive and more real than any natural theological proposition which the spectacle can only exclude, and it is for that reason, not some obscure Calvinist decree, that Faustus shall neer repent.

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The fatalism of Faustuss position is thus not theological, but mimetic. Indeed, mimesis is all that he can cling to. Faustus uses his magical art to fritter away what little time he has, as he indulges in low level trickery and pseudo-humanistic parlour games. As a guest of Emperor Alexander V , for example, he conjures on demand a likeness a mimetic representation of Alexander the Great and his paramour, and later on of course moves from history to mythology by conjuring a similar apparition of Helen of Troy, with whom he subsequently falls in lust. In the plays most memorable scene, Faustus, enamoured with his own Pygmalion-like creation, begs of Helen, make me immortal with a kiss, only to nd that in reality kissing a devil made to look like Helen causes his otherwise immortal soul to y away. Rather than gaining immortality through his art, the conjurer-poet, lost in narcissistic desire, effectively forfeits his immortality and damns himself (or, from the Calvinist perspective, reveals his state of reprobation which was only masked by the illusion of choice). The Christian moralist in the audience would indeed approve of the irony where Alexander and Helen are shown to be merely devils in disguise, but we are constantly reminded that it is a very good and pleasing disguise. Having inspected the apparently very realistic mole on Alexanders paramours neck, the Emperor concludes, despite information to the contrary, that Sure these are no spirits, but the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes (IV i. 72 3). The irony of someone judging . the substantial quality of a body based on its outer shape would not have been lost on an educated contemporary audience, who could laugh at the unfolding comedy. And yet, we are also aware that the Alexander and Helen we watch passing over the stage are in fact actors pretending to be devils, pretending to be historical and mythological characters, so that the Emperors nal incredulity at the improbability of the spectacle is also an afrmation of the actors convincing performance and by implication of the dramatists ingenuity in conjuring such an image to begin with. The meditation in all of these scenes is not, therefore, on the Calvinist irony of the reprobate poet or dramatist damning himself, but on the tragic appeal of mimetic art when it is performed and entertains under Calvinist tyranny. Even the probably corrupt scene with the Duke and pregnant Duchess of Vanholt, in which Faustus commands Mephistopheles to fetch out-of-season grapes from the other side of the world, ties in with the theme of fraudulent mimesis if we recall that the legendary Greek painter Zeuxis was said by Pliny to have deceived birds with his very realistic painting of grapes. However, unlike Zeuxis grapes, which are merely an illusion, the grapes the Duchess enjoys are both real and unnatural for being out of season a product of magical conveyance which diabolically bends the law of nature in both the descriptive and the

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prescriptive sense. As the Duchess remarks, the grapes are simply too good to be true: Believe me, Master Doctor, they be the best grapes j that eer I tasted in my life before (IV ii. 29 30). The devil comically, perhaps . tragically, hides, then, in the mimetic details of a mole or a grape. Verisimilitude in this case initially functions on Sidneys terms in that it effectively creates another nature to compete with Gods original, but its conjured reality is not merely illusory but almost, we might say, too real for our own good. In fact, it is so real, that its power of suggestion is enough to obscure the greater inferred transcendental reality of hell and the promises of eternal life. Faustuss magical counter-world indeed the Renaissance artists world is perversely celebrated, not critiqued, in the play through the very protean nature of the dramatic conjuration unfolding on the stage before us, with its near-endless staging possibilities, its deliberate improbability, and the conceit that the dramatists art which transports us across Europe to show us Faustus sitting in his study is in essence the same damnable art which transports Faustus to the Popes palace in Rome or the court of the Emperor Alexander V in Germany. Mephistophelian art triumphs in Marlowes play because its offer of transitory sweet pleasure is more real, more life-afrming in its illusory character, than the very real but in fact unimaginable, and therefore un-reproducible, transcendental alternative. As the seven deadly sins prance around the stage in their farcical little morality tableau in Act II, we realise that the truth of hell has been temporarily obscured by the truth of theatre. Lucifers exhortation cuts across the mimetic divide to address the audience as well: Talk not of paradise nor creation, but mark this show. Talk of the devil, and nothing else (II. ii. 105 6). Sidney and Marlowe wrote their two generically different but conceptually congruent texts at a time when the dominant world-view indeed condemned them to hell for their art, but Marlowe goes a step further in allowing his art to condemn nally the very idea of hell. An inverse view of this paradox would hold with Sidney that it is precisely this resistance to mimesis which renders the dogmatic truth of hell so powerfully menacing, especially when Faustus is carried away by devils, kicking and screaming, to an off-stage eternity of torment. But if hell is off-stage and heaven is that which at the end of time is not hell, then where does it leave the space that remains empty on stage when the plays time expires and the devils with their disguises have exited? In the Epilogue the Chorus steps into this empty space and calls upon the audience to Regard this hellish fall, Whose endful fortune may exhort the wise Only to wander at unlawful things,

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Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits. (Epilogue, 4 8)

If one had to guess, the most likely reaction to the play was probably an incongruous mixture of enthusiastic applause and cathartic relief, not religious quaking. At the same time, however, if the several anecdotes about the play in performance that have come down to us are a reliable indication of the sort of impact it had on its contemporary audiences, then it seems that it could be quite unsettling to a viewing audience conditioned to believe in the absolute truth of hell. Particularly striking is the anecdote about a performance of the play in Exeter on an unspecied date in which the actors on a sudden were all dashed, every one hearkening other in the ear, for they were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst them.11 Whether or not this anecdote is true, it captures something of the mimetic confusion Marlowes visceral drama deliberately engenders. If the actors were not sure whether real devils walked among them, how was the audience likely to react? It is too easy, and very wrong, to confuse the Elizabethan stage with a pulpit, especially where Marlowe is concerned. Puritans the sort of wise men and women the Epilogue notionally appeals to certainly did not attend the theatre, which in their eyes was the single most reviled source for moral inequity. For Marlowe, his actors, and their audience, the stage is for a brief space of stolen time the only imaginable heaven. However, as the Exeter anecdote also indicates it probably never was a simple case of religious apprehension being overruled by simple fun, but of a deeply unsettling theatrical entertainment and spectacle bordering on very guilty pleasure. The tantalising conceit that art may offer its own truth which triumphs over the absolutes of theological dogma nally runs out on its own steam of ingenuity in Marlowes play, leaving behind, as it does in Sidneys comparable argument in his Defence, only the faint shimmer of playful rhetoric and theatre. However, where Sidney leaves his readers wondering whether or not to take his highly original and potentially heretical argument seriously, Marlowes audience is left with the limitless, even if never entirely guiltfree, licence to wander at unlawful things. Both Sidneys Defence of Poesie and Marlowes Doctor Faustus are celebrated today for their inventiveness, rhetorical air, and dark sense of playful irony, but they should also be
11 The Exeter anecdote is quoted along other anecdotes of similar nature in Bevington and Rasmussen, pp. 50 1.

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celebrated for their entirely serious and daring conceptual challenge to the Christian-Platonic platitudes of eternity and transcendence which dominated the theory of art and mimesis in the period. Sidneys and Marlowes is the triumph not of hard logic or blind religious belief, but of a creative imagination that knows no bounds.

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