The Theater of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe

My subject is damnation in the tragedy of Christopher Marlowe. Or, more specifically, the relationship between his markedly damned protagonists and the audience that pays to watch them brought low. The peculiar attrac- tion held for the patrons of the Elizabethan playhouse absorbs critics: certainly the scholarship of no other early modern playwright is so focused upon audience response. What Leah Marcus calls the Marlowe effect has been variously characterized but in general it could be said that Marlowe's tragic energy consists largely in unsettling his viewers (42). He probes and provokes, and offers tragic heroes who both fascinate and repel, repeatedly catching the audience between moralistic censure and enthralled titillation. If there is catharsis, it is a disrupted one, with a sting in the tail: resolution is frustrated, and doubts are multiplied rather than expunged. And yet it is not simply that Marlowe's villain-heroes appall the spectators with their overreaching audacity, their insatiable appe- tites, or their strangeness. I contend that the response that these exotic malefactors provoke is ultimately and unexpectedly self-critical, forcing us to question our presumed superiority to them. 1 To achieve this response works in a specifically religious register, playing upon religious difference, inflaming religious antagonism, and complicating the polari- ties and expectations of mainstream Protestant society. 2 Marlowe's protagonists undertake their various crimes and sins with purposeful, open-eyed ardor, but throughout a given play our instinct to judge and reject them is undermined and the tragedies pivot on the rev- elation of unexpected affinity. In the case of Doctor Faustus, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and power may draw the magus into the outer dark- ness, far from the familiar world of Wittenberg (or London). Nevertheless, the final image of Faustus pleading, as the last moments of his twenty-four years slip away, for the horses of the night to run slowly, for the mercy of Christ to cover even his terrible sins, undercuts the complacent moralism of the epilogue. His desperate hunger for the forgiveness that everyone in