SOURCE: "'Within the massy entrailes of the earth': Faustus's Relation to Women," in "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, edited by Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama, pp. 203-219, AMS Press, Inc., 1988.

In the following essay, Stockholder explores the erotic element of Faustus's magic and offers a psychological discussion of imagery pertaining to Faustus's desires for and simultaneous fear of women."

All images or portrayals of extrahuman figures, gods and devils, ghosts and witches, are necessarily extensions and exaggerations of human characteristics, for human characteristics are all that we know. To isolate a human characteristic and portray it as belonging to a devil, or an angel, is to express an attitude toward that characteristic; to tell, or to dramatize, a story involving supernatural happenings necessarily involves allegorizing human affairs, whether or not the author believes in the literal truth of the...