The Enigma of Political Self-Destruction in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

Abstract

 Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is typically recognized as a play which represents orthodox beliefs in early modern England. Concurrently, the vestiges of subversion in the play have not been unheeded. There have, as such, been attempts to demonstrate how certain incidents in the play may have destabilized the dominant ethical values in Elizabethan England. In this essay, I intend to re-examine the socio-political undertones of the play and to demonstrate how our reconfiguration of the protagonist’s death in Doctor Faustus may afford us a novel reading of this play. Essentially, I underline the possibility of construing Faustus’s self-destruction by drawing upon politico-theological, other than, eschatological conceptions. I argue that Faustus’s death, on two grounds, is political; first, it demonstrates the subject’s audacious claim of sovereign authority to decide on his own life; second, the protagonist’s declaration of potentially destabilizing intentions for socio-political reform precedes his decision for self-destruction via a demonic pact. I explain how our reconceptualization of Faustus’s death can not only shed light on certain facets of the enigma of self-destruction in the play, but underscore the play’s pertinence to our contemporary world where the question of suicide and its significations have afforded momentum to various discourses on the subject’s political agency.