SOURCE: "The Theology of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus," in Renaissance Drama, New Series Vol. III, 1970, pp. 51-78.

In the following essay, Hattaway examines the Christian iconography in Doctor Faustus and concludes that the drama moves "inevitably towards orthodoxy rather than iconoclasm."

Oh men most braine-sick and miserable, that endevour to be worse than they can!

Montaigne, Essays, II.xii

(trans. Florio)

Ever since Eliot described The Jew of Malta as a "tragic farce," critics have been trying hard to define the particular conjunctions of contradictory impulses in Marlowe's works. It is difficult now to regard Doctor Faustus simply as a great soul struggling to free himself from the fetters of his age, an interpretation incidentally that dates only from about the time of Byron's Manfred, nor do most of us want to follow the severely moralistic interpretations of the play that destroy it as a tragedy. Yet the more...