Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: «as cunning as Agrippa was»

On the London stage of the late sixteenth century, the name of Agrippa already rang out as that of a model. In Christopher Marlowe's tragedy, Doctor Faustus, resolved to abandon philosophy, medicine, law and theology for magic, promises to become «as cunning as Agrippa was», the magician whose «shadows» had made all Europe honour him. It is one of the clearest testimonies to how the philosopher of Cologne had entered collective memory as the archetype of the necromancer.

A tragedy of uncertain date

Marlowe, born in Canterbury in 1564 and killed at Deptford in 1593, studied at Cambridge and took his plot from the English translation of the Faust Book signed P. F. The date of composition is disputed: some scholars place it around 1588-1589, just after the success of Tamburlaine, others around 1592. The first documented performance dates from 1594, in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe, who recorded the takings of the Admiral's Men.

The text has come down to us in two very different printed versions: the so-called A-text of 1604 and the B-text of 1616, longer and enriched with comic and spectacular scenes. It is unclear how much of each goes back to Marlowe and how much to later revisions, which documents of the period at least partly attest.

Agrippa's «shadows»

The word «shadows» alludes to conjured apparitions. In Elizabethan England stories circulated according to which Agrippa had shown his guests the images of distant or dead people. Thomas Nashe, in his novel The Unfortunate Traveller of 1594, credits him with raising Cicero before Erasmus and Thomas More, and with the vision of a lady in a magic glass. These are literary fictions, but they show what kind of fame surrounded him.

It is perhaps no accident that one of the two magicians who initiate Faustus into the forbidden arts, alongside Valdes, is called Cornelius, Agrippa's own first name. Many commentators have seen in it a deliberate allusion to the philosopher of Cologne, perhaps as an ironic nod to the more learned members of the audience. Marlowe, however, never says so anywhere in the text, and the hypothesis, however suggestive, remains just that.

Knowledge as temptation

Marlowe's Faustus is more complex than the German model. His desire for knowledge has an almost heroic grandeur, and the final scene, in which the protagonist begs time to stand still, is among the most famous in English drama. Magic appears in it as a promise of mastery over the world that proves empty: Faustus uses his powers for pranks, banquets and shows.

This tension between greatness and wretchedness reflects the ambivalent judgement the Elizabethan age passed on occult philosophy. For men like John Dee, adviser to Queen Elizabeth, it was a subject of serious and patient study; for preachers and moralists it was the antechamber of damnation. Agrippa, mentioned in a single line of the tragedy, ends up as the symbol of both positions, and his shadow accompanies Faustus to the very last scene.