Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
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with his magical mentor, on signing Faustus immediately asks (after first enquiring about the location of hell) to be married. He deflects his desire for a mate by claiming, “I am wanton and lascivious” (2.1.142), but this earthly request arguably tips his hand in betraying longing not for empyreal power but for union, precisely what the contract with Mephastophilis offers. Through marriage, as through magic, he seeks companionship on earth, to be overcome by relationship even as he also constructs a metaphysical union. The necromantic contract thus doubly satisfies Faustus, by offering him earthly company and spiritual merger: he enjoys Mephastophilis’s company for twenty-four years and then joins Lucifer, who elevates Faustus’s soul in claiming it as his own.69 For a character so ostensibly preoccupied with his own glory, Faustus proves surprisingly eager to lose himself in his field of study and devotion to the field’s masters. He seeks to be ravished, consumed, and overcome by the study of magic and the companionship of its practitioners. The contract’s terms thus illuminate the paradox of Faustus’s devotion: he is choosing to give up choice; he is exercising his right to surrender himself. Rather than seeking legal protection and securing his own claims, Faustus uses the contract to voice his loyalty, his surrender, and his willingness to give of himself to magic. Through the contract, in other words, Faustus attempts to announce, and secure, his addiction.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Faustus takes the contract more seriously than anyone might reasonably expect. The legal scholar Richard Posner puzzles over Faustus’s “sanctity of contract,” exploring the numerous ways Faustus might have wiggled out of his obligation. First, the contract does not involve an immediate exchange but instead relies on Mephastophilis serving Faustus for twenty-four years before Faustus delivers his soul. “Such a contract,” Posner argues, “establishes a long-term relationship; and since not every contingency that might arise over a long period of time can be foreseen, it is understood that the parties will act in good faith to resolve problems as they arise rather than stand on the letter of the contract.”70 Even if Mephastophilis does exercise a “good faith” effort to fulfill every request, the contract remains riven with other weaknesses. As Posner writes, “The law refuses to enforce contracts that are against public policy, and a contract with the devil fits the bill.”71 If challenging the contract at the last moment would seem an unfair gain for Faustus, even here he could have nullified the bargain by offering restitution to the devil in the form of his body, his estate, and his service for the remaining years of his life, as the legal scholar Daniel Yeager argues in his analysis of the play.72 Faustus’s repudiation of the contract would be all the easier given the weakness of Mephastophilis’s position. The legal insistence of Mephastophilis that Faustus sign a contract in the first place might alert audiences—if not Faustus himself, who dismisses law as “too servile and illiberal” (1.1.36)—to the illegitimacy of his argument. “Mephostophilis’s insistence on formalities,” Yeager writes, “reveals his doubt about the validity of the contract.”73 Posner, too, concludes, “The devil could not argue either that he didn’t know that contracts with him were illegal or that the primary wrongdoer was not himself but Faustus…. So Faustus might have wiggled out of his contract after all.”74
Faustus does not seek, of course, to wiggle out of the contract. The question then becomes why Faustus upholds what Posner deems the “sanctity of contract” at all. Why believe the contract is, as Yeager writes of Faustus, “inviolable,” especially when Faustus has studied law and might recognize the legitimate challenges he could mount against Mephastophilis? He upholds the contract, this chapter answers, because this unmistakably legal exchange demonstrates the eagerness with which Faustus seeks—and perceives himself—to be bound. The issue is not, as Posner puts it, the “irrevocability of Faustus’s contract,” but rather Faustus’s perception and desire that his choice should be irrevocable. Once committed, Faustus remains convinced of the legitimacy of this commitment and strains to maintain his half of the bargain.75
If Faustus’s addiction were secure, surely neither he nor Mephastophilis would need a document signed in blood. But Faustus and Mephastophilis turn to these legal measures, one realizes as the play continues, because Faustus’s initial efforts to pursue addiction through willpower and resolve failed. At the start he repeatedly tells himself, “Be resolute” (1.3.14), reassuring Cornelius and Valdes of his commitment. When questioned by Valdes, who tells Faustus he can be a magician only “if learnèd Faustus be resolute,” Faustus responds, “Valdes, as resolute am I in this / As thou to live. Therefore object it not” (1.1.134, 135–36). Resolution to study and life go hand in hand for Faustus. As he conjures for the first time he again repeats: “Fear not, Faustus, but be resolute” (1.3.14). But resolve is not enough. Willpower alone cannot sustain Faustus in his commitment to magic. The contract represents, therefore, his second-order attempt to bind himself, offering more of himself than Mephastophilis demands. He designs a deed that will keep him dedicated to magic and overcome his hesitations. Logic ravished Faustus, as he admits at the opening of the play, and yet the scholar rejects this field anyway. He was resolved on divinity, until he was not.76 In embracing magic, in allowing himself to be ravished again, Faustus attempts to ensure his commitment through firmer means than he had exercised with his earlier devotions—hence, the contract’s specificity, and its insurance of his merger with Lucifer and Mephastophilis, not twenty-four years in the future but from the very moment of signing. And he must ensure (or at least attempt to secure) this continued obligation contractually because he knows what Seneca, Calvin, Foxe, and Perkins have illuminated before him: devotion is difficult.
If to some viewers Faustus’s failure to challenge the contract signals his reprobation (he literally cannot see what the audience is able to recognize—he’s making a terrible bargain in selling his soul to the devil), this chapter suggests how the play offers a more complex portrait of the hero than this answer allows. Faustus is not merely an emblem of Icarus, even if the Chorus might frame him this way. What makes Faustus’s situation at all sympathetic is his drive to devote himself to his studies, and through the contract he attempts to demonstrate—indeed, bloodily performs—precisely this devotion. Despite challenges to logic and reason, despite isolation from friends and distance from the heavens, Faustus binds himself to his field of study. The dilemma he faces—whether to commit himself to his path despite all of this evidence against it—is a compelling and inherently dramatic one not because it involves summoning the devil and being devoured by a hellmouth, but because it mirrors the travails of all aspiring addicts. Faustus wants to be bound, compelled, reshaped, and overcome by a metaphysical force. He seeks, as he repeatedly states, ravishment. While Faustus’s commitment to his contract might be, as Yeager calls it, “numbingly self-defeating,” Marlowe’s play illuminates, in this drama of self-defeat, the nature of attempted devotion.77 “Self” defeating might, in another context, be the precisely desirable outcome of devotion. The dissolution of the self in the supernatural is what the Christian faithful pray for and what the addict seeks. Indeed, even the bodily inscription warning Faustus away from the contract serves, arguably, to remind him of his desire for merger. When Faustus finds “Homo fuge” inscribed on his arm, he responds, “Whither shall I fly?” (2.1.77). This phrase of course refers to the biblical invocation, “man of god, flye,” from 1 Timothy 6:11.78 But one might also read “fuge” in its musical sense, which originated in the sixteenth century. A fugue, or fuga (out of fugere), is a form of composition weaving together two distinct threads contrapuntally. In this case, “fuge” resonates with Faustus’s broader desire to be subsumed or ravished by a greater power. Man, were he “fuge,” might turn into the music of the spheres. The word teasingly evokes an ideal, nonviolent form of union: just as the music emerges out of intertwining two strands of sound, producing harmony and depth, so too might Faustus be taken up into a relationship greater than himself.
Yet, tragically, in attempting union through a legal contract, Marlowe exposes Faustus’s desired but ultimately failed addiction. Like the Roman slave contractually bound to a master, Faustus becomes an addict through the law. But the addiction celebrated from Seneca to Calvin is not legal but vocational. It involves a calling. A contract upholds Faustus’s rights, even if they seem paltry. A contract can be negotiated and annulled, as Posner and Yeager note. One does not, by contrast, “wiggle out of” addiction. Thus, Faustus’s attempt