The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidney's Defence of

Poesie and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

1. Noam Reisner

1. reisnern@post.tau.ac.il

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Abstract
The article explores the paradoxical tensions underlying the concept of artistic mimesis and
verisimilitude in the English Renaissance by submitting to close analysis, side by side, the
rhetorical positions of Sidney's Defence of Poesie and the dramatic spectacle of Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus. Sidney's Defence, with its contradictory ethical oscillations, reveals the many
irreconcilable pressures that the Aristotelian idea of mimesis had to contend with in the early
modern period. Marlowe's tragic farce, on the other hand, goes beyond theory and fully exploits
these pressures for their most absurd and literally spectacular dramatic possibilities.

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WESTERN PHILOSOPHY HAS ALWAYS framed the question of mimetic art, and by extension of
aesthetics, in relation to epistemology. Whether it is Plato who worries in Book X of the Republic
about the remoteness of the mimetic copy from the ideal Forms, or Kant in The Critique of
Judgement who puts the thing-in-itself outside the realms of empirical cognition and therefore
beyond representation, the ontological premise of a ‘reality’, elusive and inexpressible though it
may be, has always dominated the debate about the truth-value of art. In Western Renaissance
Europe, notwithstanding the slow recovery of Aristotle's Poetics through several influential Italian
commentaries, Plato's pejorative definition of mimesis in the Republic dominated. For Plato and
his Christian heirs, the singular Idea or idealised object is profaned through mimetic
representation simply because it ceases to be singular; it devolves from a universal absolute to
an imperfect, reproducible impression. The marked artistic obsession in the Renaissance with
meta-art and verisimilitude is in turn symptomatic of a larger intellectual struggle to reconcile
the Platonic-Christian desire to assimilate oneself into the oneness of God with the desire – itself
potentially hubristic – to celebrate the created world through a reverse process of populating
nature with artificial copies which nevertheless delight the observer by supposedly outdoing
nature. The idea of artistic mimesis was thus always rooted in the artist's often troubled
relationship with an absolute, though merely shadowed, reality of the idealised spiritual realm.

The most intriguing theoretical exploration of these ideas in relation to poetry in the English
Renaissance landscape remains that of Sidney's Defence of Poesy, and its most visceral artistic-
dramatic exploration in relation to both poetry and theatre that of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
Sidney's rhetorical oscillations in his Defence create an impression of confusion and even
inconsistency which has led some critics even to question the success of its argument, but
persuasion, not logical clarity, is its aim.1 Writing in a humanist tradition of affective persuasion,
Sidney appeals to his implied reader's sense of history and moral intuition, not logical proof.
Nevertheless, the conflict in Sidney's Defence between logical clarity and rhetorical display is
itself instructive. It sheds light on a conceptual problem which extends beyond the Defence to
the practice of all mimetic art and especially drama in the period (though Sidney of course fails to
address drama coherently in his exposition). A comparative examination of Marlowe's The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, side by side with Sidney's theory, reveals just how startling
some of the implications of this theory could be when pursued to their ultimate logical
conclusion. Whereas Sidney's text reveals the many pressures which the Aristotelian idea of
mimesis had to contend with in the early modern period, Marlowe's tragic farce fully exploits
these pressures for their most absurd and literally spectacular dramatic possibilities.

When Sidney felt he had to defend poetry as an art form he was well aware that those whom he
had to persuade of poetry's antique merit had God on their side and, as it happened in Sidney's
particular case, a Calvinist God at that. In defending the edifying moral qualities of poetry, the
Protestant Sidney had to react against a religious climate which condemned all vain literary and
artistic production to the dung heap of hell. It is not simply that Calvin taught his followers that
man is a fallen creature whose will is fatally polluted by Original Sin, but also that all created
nature is equally tainted by the Fall, so that a poet, by wilfully creating verisimilitudes of this
fallen, sinful world, could only ever reproduce sin.2 Man may very well be, as the Italian
Neoplatonists argued and Montaigne believed, at the centre of God's creation, but that only
meant for Calvin that man was therefore the focal point of the world's corrupted sinfulness.
Sidney, however, turns this Calvinist argument on its head – yes, the world is indeed ‘brazen’, but
the poet can make it ‘golden’. Unlike a metaphysician who ‘doth … indeed build upon the depth
of nature’, Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of
his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature
bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods,
Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed
within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither so pleasant
rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved
earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.3 Sidney's theory of the
inspired poet's ability to create ‘another nature’ is a calculated affront to Calvinism. Moreover,
the affront is not just to Calvin, but chiefly to Plato, and it proceeds by exploiting an ambiguity in
the very idea of ‘nature’ which goes to the heart of humanist ethics and of Reformation theology
as well

‘Nature’ is both a scientifically descriptive term and a morally prescriptive one. In its descriptive
sense, ‘nature’ alludes to the ordered state of the world as it is, based on the consensus of
human observation and tradition. In such a scheme, any perceived prodigy, monstrosity, or
anomaly which appears to go against the received ‘law of nature’ is deemed super-natural.
However, in its morally prescriptive sense, ‘nature’ alludes to the state of moral human behaviour
as it ought to be, where any deviant act, say of incest or cannibalism, is deemed unnatural
according to a moral law of nature. The distinction between the two possible senses of ‘nature’ is
a fine one, but it was sufficiently unstable in Western theological discourse to have allowed
completely opposed interpretations of what is deemed natural in human existence. So, for
example, by appealing to the same idea of ‘natural law’ (variously interpreted) religious moralists
can attack the apparent immorality of experimental science, and atheists can deny, as Hobbes
did, the basis of morality altogether. Sidney also exploits this ambiguity by arguing that the
mimetic imagination allows a poet to rise above the natural constraints of what is by creating
‘forms such as never were in nature’, but with the explicit aim of upholding and even improving
on how the moral law of nature ought to be. Indeed, Sidney's mimetic ‘another nature’ is one
where the tension between the two possible senses of the word dissolves, as the poet moves
from the probable to the desirable and the ideal. It is not merely a matter of copying corrupt
reality, but of improving on it so that others, delighting in such polished verisimilitudes, might
seek to better themselves in the process of aesthetic enjoyment.

To bolster his idealistic reinterpretation of mimetic poetry, Sidney next appeals to Aristotle's
equally anti-Platonic reassessment of mimesis: Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so
Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis – that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or
figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end, to teach and delight.
(p. 217) While one would indeed expect Sidney to invoke Aristotle at this stage of his argument,
it is all too often missed just how misleading this reference to the Poetics actually is. Bearing in
mind that Sidney most likely never read the Poetics first hand, but only a summary of its ideas in
a number of possible Italian sources, we have to be cautious here, but the notion that poetic
mimesis can both teach and delight is not genuinely Aristotelian.4 Unlike Plato, Aristotle openly
asserts in the Poetics that human beings are naturally prone to engage and delight in mimesis –
whether in painting, poetry, or music – and that this natural propensity itself renders the whole
activity worthy of analysis, but he never once says, as Sidney hopes, that poetry is a fit and
necessary companion to philosophy in its capacity ‘to draw with [its] charming sweetness the
wild untamed wits’ of even the most barbarous nations ‘to an admiration of knowledge’ (p. 213).
Moreover, Sidney is writing in the Italian tradition of Scaliger, Minturno, and probably Castelvetro
as well, which fused the moral didacticism of Horace's Ars Poetica with Aristotelian classifications
and Platonic idealism. In this typically Renaissance scheme, Aristotle's famous remark that
mimesis deals with one of three things – ‘reality past or present; things as they are said or seem
to be; or things as they ought to be’ (60b 8–11) – is read through Horace to arrive, ironically, at a
Platonic ideal. Where for Aristotle ‘ought to be’ refers narrowly to causal probability (what in
reality, or ‘nature’, ought to happen given the right sequence of events, in mimetic art often does
happen), for Sidney and the Italian commentators at the back of his mind ‘ought’ is understood
ethically: the world is bad and corrupt, but mimetic art can produce ideal exempla which can help
improve it. Sidney thus elevates the art of poetry to the height of biblical prophecy: like the
Roman vates of old, or David in his psalms, the inspired poet can see, as it were, into the mind of
God, into the immutable and fixed realm of Platonic Forms, and create such imaginary characters
of virtue that can no longer exist in the natural mutable world. When handled under such
conditions, mimetic art does not produce ephemeral copies of a corrupt reality, but substantial
truths of the highest divine and moral order.

Ingeniously, therefore, having attacked the Platonic suspicion of poetry, Sidney in effect uses
Plato against Plato by invoking the theory of the idealised Form to defend the truth value of
mimetic art in general. The ‘understanding’, he argues, ‘knoweth the skill of each artificer
standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’ (p. 216). However,
Sidney cannot make such radical claims without being deeply embarrassed about them from a
religious point of view. His anxiety in the next paragraph is palpable: Neither let it be deemed
too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature; but
rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own
likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which is nothing he
showeth so much as in poetry, then with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth
surpassing her doings – with no small arguments to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of
Adam, since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth
us from reaching unto it. (p. 217) An argument which started hand in hand with Pico's dignified
human, willing himself into a state of divine perfection, now suddenly veers to the depths of
Calvinistic despair. Sidney placates the implied Calvinist reader by reaffirming the grim realities
of Original Sin and reducing the inspired vatic poet from the status of active co-creator with God
to the passive mouthpiece of a divine breath merely flowing through him. Sidney shrewdly and
playfully exploits in these lines the Reformed belief in the righteousness of inspired readers and
hopes that no one will notice that he is in fact still speaking here not about readers, but about
writers.

Whether or not Sidney conceived of his defence as a casual and very seductive bit of Castiglionian
sprezzatura, the humanist principle of serious playfulness, or playful seriousness as the case
may be (serio ludere), shines through in the daring intellectual risks Sidney takes throughout his
implied argument with the Platonic-Calvinist consensus of his day. For example, the paradox of a
passive inspired writer which Sidney seems to be leaning towards at this stage of his argument is
a commonplace of Reformed thought; it lies at the heart of Luther's idea of the apostolic
authorship of the Bible and would re-emerge more forcefully in the paradoxical equivocations of
Milton's invocation of the heavenly muse in Paradise Lost. In Sidney's Defence, however, the
appeal to such ideas seems a half-hearted, not to say ironic, rhetorical posture. A Calvinist
reader would certainly not be impressed with the way in which Sidney concedes Original Sin but
then effectively releases man's ‘erected wit’ from its share of sinfulness. Had we but the will to
do good without the grace of God, runs Sidney's implied argument, perhaps we could undo the
Fall altogether since our ‘erected wit’ can still grasp the world's prelapsarian integrity. By
submitting himself to the will of God, the supreme Maker or poet, Sidney's merely inspired
human poet effectively assumes God's creative powers. Such inspired poets, argues Sidney,
‘imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be;
but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and
should be’ (p. 218). In Plato's Timaeus (37d), Socrates' eponymous interlocutor explains that the
maker of the universe (the demiurge) conceived of time as a mimetic representation of eternity.
The state of becoming, of perpetual mutability and movement, is forever distinct from, but
contained in a mimetic relationship with, the state of being which is static, infinite, and eternal.
‘Was’, and ‘shall be’ suppose the movement of becoming, but ‘is’ alone belongs to being: ‘Was’
and ‘Shall be’ are generated forms of Time, although we apply them wrongly, without noticing, to
Eternal Being. For we say that it ‘is’ or ‘was’ or ‘will be,’ whereas, in truth of speech, ‘is’ alone is
the appropriate term; ‘was’ and ‘will be,’ on the other hand, are terms properly applicable to the
Becoming which proceeds in Time, since both of these are motions.5

In Sidney's corresponding scheme, inspired mimetic poetry allows the imagination to realise
perfected being in the movement of becoming. However, unlike Plato in the Timaeus, Sidney
distinguishes between ‘shall be’ and ‘should be’. For Lutherans and Calvinists, the absolute God
– whose very name, Yahweh, was believed to inscribe the idea of eternal being in that ‘which is,
hath been, or shall be’ – stands outside time and is far removed from created man's sinfulness.
According to such beliefs, God only reveals himself in time, through his hidden immanence in the
created world, or as English Protestants in the sixteenth century understood it, through the
acting out of divine providence. But providential causality is precisely that which Sidney's poet
finally outgrows as he moves outside time to the divine mind itself where he may portray not
what shall be (that would, of course, be impossible within the fallen constraints of causality), but
the potential ‘is’ in ‘what may be and should be’. For Sidney, it appears, there can be no ‘is’ in
present time, but only in imagined time.
Sidney's theory of mimesis is remarkably original and theologically bold, therefore, since it places
its ethical emphasis not on the truth-value of the mimetic object itself, but on the otherwise
unrealistic but quite imaginable truth-value of abstract moral ideas which art can convey,
apparently absolutely. What might have begun as an attempt to poke harmless fun at Stephen
Gosson's anti-poetic righteousness seems to have taken on a life of its own once Sidney realised
his real adversary was not Gosson, but Plato. For a brief and entirely serious few paragraphs in
his Defence, Sidney astounds with the proposition that it is only through mimetic art that the
truth of such abstract virtues as courage, wisdom, love, or piety (and their sinful antonyms) can
be made in any sense real in the mutable world of sin. However, such a compelling anti-Platonic
move finally undermines Sidney's overall theory of poetry since it calls into question the very
conclusions he elsewhere seeks to draw from this argument. After all, as Milton was also to
discover, Sidney can only ever address fallen readers. The morally edifying mimetic creation
Sidney envisions can only function by projecting into the mind's eye of suitably moral spectators
and readers an ideal state which must depend on said readers to translate such ideas into action
in the fallen world. However, as Sidney concedes, since fallen man's will is ‘infected’ by sin such
acts of moral redemption through art must depend on the greater grace of God. And so we find
ourselves back where we started: mimetic poetry is a suspect art, and the movement in Sidney's
argument from Plato to Aristotle and back to Plato can only create a large gap which allows
Calvin's God to reassert his numinous presence in a savage way. Sidney gives idealised
Aristotelian mimetic probability air to breathe and plays with the potentially heretical notions
such probability opens up, but then instantly recoils from his own presumptuousness by
reducing such probability to mere potentiality. After all, we must always confront the possibility
that the poet's projected ability to allow his ‘erected’ wit to range freely is itself little more than
the expression of an infected will. Realising that perhaps he has conceded too much, Sidney then
makes another sharp turn in the argument and hastens to add, ‘But these arguments will by few
be understood, and by fewer granted’ (p. 217). Quickly moving on, he then promptly changes the
subject and goes on to categorise in the spirit of Aristotle the different types of edifying mimetic
creations a poet might produce – prophetic/mystical, philosophical, and moral. However, what is
so startling about the shaky new ground Sidney is now treading is that the noble attempt to save
mimetic poetry from Calvinist-Platonic opprobrium has required a move to save it from the
mutable causality of reality itself. The transcendental reality which the earthly sign attaches itself
to is one which, as Sidney grants, can only be experienced, like God's majesty, ‘by the eyes of the
mind, only cleared by faith’ (p. 215). After all the rhetorical dust is allowed to settle, it appears
Sidney's shaky ground remains a firmly Protestant one: he must depend on faith for the clarity of
his mimetic vision, where, to quote the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘faith is the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Heb. 11: 1, my emphasis).

The conceit that mimetic art can offer the evidence of things ‘not seen’ haunted the imagination
of early modern, especially Protestant, poets and theorists, but for dramatists, who must rely on
their audiences' active suspension of disbelief, such notions bore directly on theatrical practice.
In its very nature as ephemeral spectacle and illusion, mimetic drama naturally lent itself in the
period to elaborate theatrical explorations of the tensions which Sidney explores in theory in his
Defence. The plays within plays, the often improbable telescoping of events and disregard of the
so-called three unities (whether deliberately or out of ignorance), the heightened degree of
metatheatricality, the increasingly sophisticated use of asides, the ubiquitous delight in the
absurdity of impenetrable disguises or in masked avengers delivering their justice behind the
false show of friendship – these are all familiar features of the period's most celebrated dramas,
none of which observe either Aristotle's rules of mimesis or Sidney's morally edifying
reinterpretation of those rules. In most cases the resulting tension between the evanescence of
the dramatic illusion itself and the eternal truths it might point to raises difficult questions about
the moral validity of mimetic drama – questions which Sidney's widely read rhetorical exposition
only complicated, but did not resolve. No statement of this tension in contemporary drama, other
perhaps than Shakespeare's The Tempest, is arguably more daring and mimetically confusing
than Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the Tempest's elder evil sibling. It is to the tragic
farce of Doctor Faustus that we must turn next if the paradoxical tensions underlying the idea of
mimesis explored in Sidney's Defence are to be exposed at their most extreme.

Similarly to Sidney's Defence, Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus offers a very
serious and daring intellectual statement about poetic mimesis which nevertheless constantly
hovers on the edge of the absurd and the playful. Based on an English translation of the German
Faust book, Marlowe's wild romp into the world of forbidden magic was sold to contemporary
audiences as a tragedy. Ostensibly it is the tragedy of the hubristic, self-obsessed magus,
‘swoll'n with the cunning of a self-conceit’ (Prologue, 20),6 paying the ultimate price for his
Promethean vanity and insatiable thirst for supernatural power. Yet critics have long noticed that
there is something very odd about this alleged tragedy where the overtly Calvinist religious
framework displaces the burden of tragic effect from Faustus's wilful actions to the inevitability
of his doom. Put simply, is Faustus acting the way he is because he is already damned, or is he
damned because of the way he acts?7 The battle between Neoplatonic optimism and Calvinist
despair so central to Sidney's theological and moral dilemma in his Defence of Poesy in many
ways defines the tragic dynamics of what emerges as Marlowe's most intellectually honest
dramatic engagement with the dominant religious consensus of his age. The Faustus who cries in
defiance ‘A sound magician is a mighty god’ (I. i. 64) typifies – indeed caricatures – the Giordano
Brunos and John Dees of the Renaissance world who firmly believed in man's limitless potential
for self-improvement and ability to become one with the angelic intelligences. Viewed in this
way, one can imagine a putative Calvinist nodding his head in knowing approval when, driven by
such ambition, Faustus sells his soul to the Devil and so damns himself. On the other hand, if the
Calvinist in question is nodding knowingly, said Calvinist is also aware that Faustus's actions by
definition single him out as one of the predestined reprobates consigned to damnation from all
eternity. And if Faustus is numbered among those denied salvation by supralapsarian decree then
the tragedy does not lie in Faustus's overreaching ambition but in his futile attempts to sue for
grace once it is revealed that God has hardened his reprobate heart. Faustus's truly moving cry
towards the end of the play, ‘O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?’ (V. ii. 77)
encapsulates this theological paradox in a dramatic heartbeat. Faustus cannot fly to God because
he is pulled down by the same metaphorical ‘waxen wings’ with which he ‘did mount above his
reach’ but which the ‘melting heavens’, not his ambition, ‘conspired’ (Prologue, 21–2) against in
bringing about his downfall. As the Prologue clearly indicates through a wonderful bit of
mythological prolepsis, the forces arrayed against Faustus's Icarian presumption are not merely
those of internal strife and a defeated conscience, literalised in the play in the morality figures of
the Good and Evil Angels, but real devils pulling at his legs and a very real God who ‘Stretches
out his arm and bends his ireful brows!’ (V. ii. 83), causing the wings to melt in the first place.

As numerous critics have therefore noted, and I have no cause to repeat at length, the vision of
humanity and divine justice at the heart of the play is ambiguous.8 Marlowe's promethean
protagonist, very similar to Sidney's putative poet-maker in the Defence, makes a mockery of the
merely human by laying claim to supernatural as well as unnatural powers, only to be crushed by
the infinite and timeless powers he so earnestly mocks. In Sidney's Defence this results in
contradiction in the initial anti-Platonic argument, which slowly deflates the treatise's opening
bravado, but in Marlowe's play it results at least notionally in outright damnation and eternal
torment for the protagonist. The poetic energy of the play's mockery is driven by gratuitous
blasphemy – Faustus's ‘Consummatum est’ (II. i. 74) makes a mockery not just of Christ's
sacrifice on the cross, but specifically of a Christian-Calvinist frame of mind driven by a self-
annihilating insistence on the need to imitate Christ in all things, even in death.9 However, while
the idea of mimesis is indeed central to the play, it extends far beyond the immediate
ramifications of Faustus's perverse anti-Christian self-fashioning. It extends, again, to the
Platonic paradox of mimetic eternity Sidney grapples with in his treatise, and more generally to
an emerging statement on the processes by which the early modern mind conceived of reality
and its relation to timeless art. Faustus wishes to ‘be eternised’ (I. i. 15), and to achieve his goal
he appeals, as a Renaissance poet or painter would, to the timeless quality of art. But Faustus's
magical art, unlike the art of poetry and painting, is not timeless; it is entirely time-bound, to
‘four-and-twenty years’ (I. iii. 93) to be exact, which time quickly expires in the play before us
over a period of five short theatrical acts.

A theatrical performance binds the timelessness of poetry to time. A play, whether or not it
adheres to the unities of time and place, is entirely time-bound, but the written poetry and words
which are performed allow the same performance to be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum. The
irony of this emerging paradox was evidently not lost on Marlowe who, like Sidney, knew his
Plato well. Marlowe's predicament as a dramatist seeking eternal fame through the transient
spectacle of the stage is ventilated in Doctor Faustus through the main protagonist's moral-
spiritual predicament. Faustus, like all artists having to operate within a Christian-Platonic
scheme, is a victim not just of time, but of its causal, providential fallacy. Reflecting on the
fatalism inherent in Lutheran and Calvinist theology, Faustus views with disgust the notion that
sinners must ‘die an everlasting death’: ‘What doctrine call you this, Che serà, serà | What will be,
shall be? Divinity, adieu!’ (I. i. 49–50). Like Sidney, Marlowe's Faustus is also suspicious of a
divinity which appeals to logical causality in time, but he misses the point entirely since, unlike
Sidney, he does not recognise that the infinite on which the absolutes of divinity rest is precisely
that which is above causality and time. In other words, what Marlowe has his Faustus
misunderstand is the mimetic relationship between being and becoming; he fails to comprehend
that the irreducibility of the transcendental to mimetic detail is precisely that which proves, on
Platonic terms, the truth of the transcendental absolute. What in Sidney's Defence emerges as the
only criterion for abstract moral truth, in Marlowe's play thus becomes the intellectual crux of the
unfolding tragedy. As Faustus increasingly descends into more meaningless acts of ephemeral,
consummately theatrical conjuration, the ineffable reality which condemns him and his art to hell
tightens its grip.

Doctor Faustus, however, is not a sober morality play. Faustus may be condemned as a man from
a Platonic-Calvinist perspective, but his magical art and the unfolding farce before us reinforces
its own truth – a truth of exuberant, even if trivial, life liberated by art from transcendental
immutability and tyranny. Like Sidney before him, Marlowe latches on to the idea that it is the
mimetic act of imaginative conjuration itself which secures the truth-value of that which it cannot
contain. Moreover, similarly to Sidney, the playful manner in which these ideas are expressed and
referenced artistically in the play lends weight to the bold philosophical and theological
argument Marlowe is insinuating. Faustus's absurd debate with Mephistopheles about the reality
of hell is a wonderful illustration of this:
Faustus. First will I question with thee about hell.

Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

Mephistopheles. Under the heavens.

Faustus. Ay, but whereabouts?

Mephistopheles. Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortured and remain for ever.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place, for where we are is hell,

And where hell is must we ever be.

And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

Faustus. Come, I think hell's a fable.

Mephistopheles. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

Faustus. Why, think'st thou then that Faustus shall be damned?

Mephistopheles. Ay, of necessity, for here's the scroll

Wherein thou hast given thy soul to Lucifer.

Faustus. Ay, and body too. But what of that?

Think'st thou that Faustus is so fond

To imagine that after this life there is any pain?

Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives' tales.

Mephistopheles. But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,

For I am damned and am now in hell.

Faustus. How? Now in hell? Nay, an this be hell,

I'll willingly be damned here.

(II. i. 119–42)
Many critics of the play have wondered about this scene and what it says about Faustus's
delusional state of mind. He is faced by a devil from hell, ‘an instance to prove’ hell's existence,
and yet he dismisses hell as a ‘fable’. Bevington and Rasmussen opine that ‘Mephistopheles's
answers, for all their startling candour, create uncertainty for Faustus because they do seem to
allow a kind of hell that an intellectual might actually enjoy. Hell is evidently a place where one
can dispute with colleagues’.10 In other words, when Faustus agrees to damn himself he does so
because on some level he has convinced himself that hell might not be so bad after all, a sort of
eternal private club for the intellectually daring. However, Faustus's inability to recognise the very
idea of eternal torment in hell is crucial in another way. After all, hell – the terminus of Faustus's
doomed journey – is made all the more real and threatening in the play because it eschews
mimetic detail. We find ourselves back in Sidney's ambiguous ‘another nature’. Faustus frames
his query about hell in ontological terms: if hell exists, it must exist somewhere in relation to the
natural order, and Faustus wants to know where. Mephistopheles' reply, however, slyly shifts
from the ontological to the ethical: what is at first merely ‘Under the heavens’ is soon revealed as
that which ‘hath no limits, nor is circumscribed | In one self place’. Hell according to the
tormented devil before us, likely sweeping his hand over the audience as well, is finally not a
place but an unnatural state of mind emptied of divine truth and absolutes – an infinite space of
deprivation and exclusion defined negatively as all that which, at the end of time, ‘is not heaven’.
Faustus's magical art, like the hell from which it draws its power, is an instance to prove the truth
of theological absolutes which otherwise exceed mimetic representation, but it is a truth Faustus
can never see. Ironically, however, Faustus's inability to see this truth in a sense also liberates
him from it. Instead of embracing the idea that an act of creative mimesis allows for an irruption
of the transcendental within immanence, Marlowe has Faustus fight the implications of this
paradox by gradually emptying his magical arts of any practical or ethical content. Initially,
Faustus has grand schemes for his newly acquired powers. ‘Glutted’ with the conceit of
unimaginable supernatural magical ability, Faustus speculates about all the things he might
achieve, chief of which is the desire to ‘Resolve me of all ambiguities’ (I. ii. 82) and the wish to
exert his will on the political map of Europe:

I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring

And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,

And reign sole king of all our provinces

(I. ii. 94–6)

However, none of these plans actually materialises. Faustus gains no real power, nor any
discernible new knowledge from his nefarious bargain; even his ability to conjure devils, as it
happens, is merely incidental. Mephistopheles only obeys the conjuration because he is drawn to
blasphemers. As the devil explains, the conjuration was merely the cause of his arrival ‘ per
accidens’ (I. iii. 47), providing Faustus with more firm proof – this time couched in medieval
scholastic terms – that a higher reality is driving events, for only God, the Prime Mover, is the
sole true efficient cause which drives events in the mutable world. Having suppressed this view of
reality, Faustus has no choice but to embrace the illusory yet entertaining nature of his power.
With Mephistopheles in tow Faustus travels Europe as a conjuring actor, dramatist, and con artist,
indulging in ephemeral spectacle and buffoonery. The result, however, is a sort of purity, for
when mimetic acts point to nothing other than themselves all that remains is the truth of an
illusion enjoyed for its own sake.
In a moment of acute rapture in Act II, having battled it out with the Good and Evil angels,
Faustus points out that he would have taken his own life long ago ‘Had not sweet pleasure
conquered deep despair’ (II. iii. 25). Faustus then immediately qualifies this ‘sweet pleasure’ as
literary pleasure:

Have not I made Homer sing to me

Of Alexander's love and Oenone's death?

And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes

With ravishing sound of his melodious harp

Made music with my Mephistopheles?

Why should I die, then, or basely despair?

I am resolved Faustus shall ne'er repent.

(II.iii.26–32)

Unlike Sidney, who reads Homer for moral edification, Marlowe's Faustus loses himself absolutely
in Homer's imagined world for its own sake. Faustus's wish to play out the part of Paris for his
conjured Helen later in Act V (‘I will be Paris, and for love of thee | Instead of Troy shall
Wittenberg be sacked’, V. i. 98–9) is merely a literalisation of the same idea through a process of
reverse mimesis which allows the conjured image to compete for a claim on truth with the merely
shadowed reality of heaven and hell. When Faustus says ‘all is dross that is not Helena’ (V. i. 97)
the syntactical echo of Mephistopheles' ‘All places shall be hell that is not heaven’ could well be
deliberate: it allows the truth of the conjured Helen to compete with the truth of heaven, and for
a brief moment it is the former, literally seductive, truth which gains the upper hand. Not
surprisingly, therefore, when in the passage above Faustus thinks of Homer he immediately also
thinks of the myth of Amphion, who used the magical lyre given to him by Hermes to sing into
existence the walls of Thebes. In this period, the myth of Amphion often stood side by the side
with the myth of Orpheus as a popular topos through which to explore the demiurgic, but
potentially hubristic, powers of music and by extension of poetry as well. Such is its relevance to
Sidney in his Defence, where the myth of Amphion provides him with yet another metaphor for
the limitless creative potential of poetry that can move men to morally virtuous action: So, as
Amphion was said to move stones with his poetry to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to
by beasts, indeed, stony and beastly people; so among the Romans were Livius Andronicus and
Ennius. So in the Italian language the first that made it aspire to be a treasure-house of science
were the poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. So in our English were Gower and Chaucer, after
whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent fore-going, others have followed, to
beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as in other arts. (p. 213)

Marlowe's Faustus, however, gleefully points out that Amphion made his music in duet with ‘my
Mephistopheles’. Like Sidney, Marlowe also insists that poetry can ‘move stones’, but unlike
Sidney he has no qualms about its devilish nature; it is devilishly unnatural because, in the
immediate context of the dramatic spectacle, poetry and its imaginative creations are more alive
and more real than any ‘natural’ theological proposition which the spectacle can only exclude,
and it is for that reason, not some obscure Calvinist decree, that Faustus ‘shall ne'er repent’.

The fatalism of Faustus's position is thus not theological, but mimetic. Indeed, mimesis is all that
he can cling to. Faustus uses his magical art to fritter away what little time he has, as he indulges
in low level trickery and pseudo-humanistic parlour games. As a guest of Emperor Alexander V,
for example, he conjures on demand a likeness – a mimetic representation – of Alexander the
Great and his ‘paramour’, and later on of course moves from history to mythology by conjuring a
similar apparition of Helen of Troy, with whom he subsequently falls in lust. In the play's most
memorable scene, Faustus, enamoured with his own Pygmalion-like creation, begs of Helen,
‘make me immortal with a kiss’, only to find that in reality kissing a devil made to look like Helen
causes his otherwise immortal soul to fly away. Rather than gaining immortality through his art,
the conjurer-poet, lost in narcissistic desire, effectively forfeits his immortality and damns
himself (or, from the Calvinist perspective, reveals his state of reprobation which was only
masked by the illusion of choice). The Christian moralist in the audience would indeed approve of
the irony where Alexander and Helen are shown to be merely devils in disguise, but we are
constantly reminded that it is a very good and pleasing disguise. Having inspected the apparently
very realistic mole on Alexander's paramour's neck, the Emperor concludes, despite information
to the contrary, that ‘Sure these are no spirits, but the true substantial bodies of those two
deceased princes’ (IV. i. 72–3). The irony of someone judging the substantial quality of a body
based on its outer shape would not have been lost on an educated contemporary audience, who
could laugh at the unfolding comedy. And yet, we are also aware that the Alexander and Helen
we watch passing over the stage are in fact actors pretending to be devils, pretending to be
historical and mythological characters, so that the Emperor's final incredulity at the improbability
of the spectacle is also an affirmation of the actors' convincing performance and by implication
of the dramatist's ingenuity in conjuring such an image to begin with.

The meditation in all of these scenes is not, therefore, on the Calvinist irony of the reprobate
poet or dramatist damning himself, but on the tragic appeal of mimetic art when it is performed
and entertains under Calvinist tyranny. Even the probably corrupt scene with the Duke and
pregnant Duchess of Vanholt, in which Faustus commands Mephistopheles to fetch out-of-
season grapes from the other side of the world, ties in with the theme of fraudulent mimesis if
we recall that the legendary Greek painter Zeuxis was said by Pliny to have deceived birds with
his very realistic painting of grapes. However, unlike Zeuxis' grapes, which are merely an illusion,
the grapes the Duchess enjoys are both real and unnatural for being out of season – a product of
magical conveyance which diabolically bends the law of nature in both the descriptive and the
prescriptive sense. As the Duchess remarks, the grapes are simply too good to be true: ‘Believe
me, Master Doctor, they be the best grapes | that e'er I tasted in my life before’ (IV. ii. 29–30).
The devil comically, perhaps tragically, hides, then, in the mimetic details of a mole or a grape.
Verisimilitude in this case initially functions on Sidney's terms in that it effectively creates
‘another nature’ to compete with God's original, but its conjured reality is not merely illusory but
almost, we might say, too real for our own good. In fact, it is so real, that its power of suggestion
is enough to obscure the greater inferred transcendental reality of hell and the promises of
eternal life. Faustus's magical counter-world – indeed the Renaissance artist's world – is
perversely celebrated, not critiqued, in the play through the very protean nature of the dramatic
conjuration unfolding on the stage before us, with its near-endless staging possibilities, its
deliberate improbability, and the conceit that the dramatist's art which transports us across
Europe to show us Faustus sitting in his study is in essence the same damnable art which
transports Faustus to the Pope's palace in Rome or the court of the Emperor Alexander V in
Germany. Mephistophelian art triumphs in Marlowe's play because its offer of transitory ‘sweet
pleasure’ is more real, more life-affirming in its illusory character, than the very real but in fact
unimaginable, and therefore un-reproducible, transcendental alternative. As the seven deadly
sins prance around the stage in their farcical little morality tableau in Act II, we realise that the
truth of hell has been temporarily obscured by the truth of theatre. Lucifer's exhortation cuts
across the mimetic divide to address the audience as well: ‘Talk not of paradise nor creation, but
mark this show. Talk of the devil, and nothing else’ (II. ii. 105–6).

Sidney and Marlowe wrote their two generically different but conceptually congruent texts at a
time when the dominant world-view indeed condemned them to hell for their art, but Marlowe
goes a step further in allowing his art to condemn finally the very idea of hell. An inverse view of
this paradox would hold with Sidney that it is precisely this resistance to mimesis which renders
the dogmatic truth of hell so powerfully menacing, especially when Faustus is carried away by
devils, kicking and screaming, to an off-stage eternity of torment. But if hell is off-stage and
heaven is that which at the end of time is not hell, then where does it leave the space that
remains empty on stage when the play's time expires and the devils with their disguises have
exited? In the Epilogue the Chorus steps into this empty space and calls upon the audience to

Regard this hellish fall,

Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise

Only to wander at unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practice more than heavenly power permits.

(Epilogue, 4–8)

If one had to guess, the most likely reaction to the play was probably an incongruous mixture of
enthusiastic applause and cathartic relief, not religious quaking. At the same time, however, if
the several anecdotes about the play in performance that have come down to us are a reliable
indication of the sort of impact it had on its contemporary audiences, then it seems that it could
be quite unsettling to a viewing audience conditioned to believe in the absolute truth of hell.
Particularly striking is the anecdote about a performance of the play in Exeter on an unspecified
date in which the actors on a sudden ‘were all dashed, every one hearkening other in the ear, for
they were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst them’. 11 Whether or not this
anecdote is true, it captures something of the mimetic confusion Marlowe's visceral drama
deliberately engenders. If the actors were not sure whether real devils walked among them, how
was the audience likely to react? It is too easy, and very wrong, to confuse the Elizabethan stage
with a pulpit, especially where Marlowe is concerned. Puritans – the sort of ‘wise’ men and
women the Epilogue notionally appeals to – certainly did not attend the theatre, which in their
eyes was the single most reviled source for moral inequity. For Marlowe, his actors, and their
audience, the stage is for a brief space of stolen time the only imaginable heaven. However, as
the Exeter anecdote also indicates it probably never was a simple case of religious apprehension
being overruled by simple fun, but of a deeply unsettling theatrical entertainment and spectacle
bordering on very guilty pleasure. The tantalising conceit that art may offer its own truth which
triumphs over the absolutes of theological dogma finally runs out on its own steam of ingenuity
in Marlowe's play, leaving behind, as it does in Sidney's comparable argument in his Defence,
only the faint shimmer of playful rhetoric and theatre. However, where Sidney leaves his readers
wondering whether or not to take his highly original and potentially heretical argument seriously,
Marlowe's audience is left with the limitless, even if never entirely guilt-free, licence to ‘wander
at unlawful things’. Both Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus are celebrated
today for their inventiveness, rhetorical flair, and dark sense of playful irony, but they should also
be celebrated for their entirely serious and daring conceptual challenge to the Christian-Platonic
platitudes of eternity and transcendence which dominated the theory of art and mimesis in the
period. Sidney's and Marlowe's is the triumph not of hard logic or blind religious belief, but of a
creative imagination that knows no bounds.

Previous Section

Footnotes
 ↵1 There seems to be an overall critical consensus that Sidney's Defence is
rhetorically seductive but not persuasive, or at least that it is logically
contradictory and difficult to follow argumentatively, especially if it is viewed as an
attempt to respond cogently to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse of 1579,
dedicated to Sidney. See for example Catherine Barnes, ‘The Hidden Persuader:
The Complex Speaking Voice of Sidney's Defence of Poetry’, PMLA 86/3 (1971) pp.
422–7; A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge
1977) p. 110; John Hunt, ‘Allusive Coherence in Sidney's Apology for Poetry’, SEL
27 (1987) pp. 1–16; Edward Berry, ‘The Poet as Warrior in Sidney's Defence of
Poetry’, SEL 29 (1989) pp. 21–34. However, for a different perspective see John C.
Ulreich Jr., ‘“The Poets Only Deliver”: Sidney's Conception of Mimesis’, Studies in
the Literary Imagination, 15/1 (1982) pp. 67–84, and Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials
of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven 1983) pp. 137–62.
 ↵2 This idea flows from Calvin's related theory of revelation in nature: God reveals
himself in creation which is now tainted by the Fall, so that all men have a natural
knowledge of God. This knowledge, however, because tainted by sin, is imperfect
and cannot promote salvation, and can only serve to make man inexcusable if he
refuses to worship God. Only through the Word of God may the elect be confirmed
in grace. For a discussion of Calvin's theory of nature and revelation see Charles
Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy (1977; Louisville, Ky. 2005) pp. 42–50.
 ↵3 The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford
1989) p. 216; subsequent references are to this edition.
 ↵4 While Sidney read Aristotle at Oxford, perhaps even in the original Greek, he
would not have had access there to the Poetics. It is far more likely that he read
derivative excerpts from the Poetics in Italian commentaries. See Marvin Herrick,
The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven 1930) pp. 24–6.
 ↵5 Trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library.
 ↵6 Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David
Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester 1993). I have chosen to quote
throughout from the earlier 1604 A text, which, though corrupt in many places, is
probably (though this is still much debated) much closer to the play penned by
 Marlowe than the expanded version printed in 1616. As J. B. Steane put it, quoting
W. W. Greg, ‘Perhaps to prefer the A text is “to suspend historical judgment”, but
to prefer the B text is to suspend every other form of judgment.’ J. B. Steane,
Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge 1965) p. 124.
 ↵7 See Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 1560–1660 (London 1983) p.
116. For an especially acute analysis of this paradox see also A. D. Nuttall, The
Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford 1998) pp.
22–41.
 ↵8 Bevington and Rasmussen's edition (pp. 15–21) provides a detailed
bibliography and summary of the critical debate up to 1993. However, Thomas
Healy's introductory essay, ‘Doctor Faustus’, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge 2004) pp. 174–92,
represents the newer brand of Marlovian critic who is more inclined to debate the
play's dramatic statements and its resulting spectacle than its ‘metaphysical
concerns’ (p. 174). My reading takes the middle ground since it seeks to establish
the corollary between the play's metaphysical concerns and its theatrical, dramatic
ones. Contrary to what Healy avers, the play's comic frivolity is not at odds with
the metaphysical seriousness of its themes, but is entirely implicated in them.
 ↵9 See Adrian Streete, ‘“Consummatum est”: Calvinist Exegesis, Mimesis and
Doctor Faustus’, Literature & Theology, 15/2 (2001) pp. 140–54: 151.
 ↵10 Doctor Faustus, p. 26.
 ↵11 The Exeter anecdote is quoted along other anecdotes of similar nature in
Bevington and Rasmussen, pp. 50–1.