No Mercy at Midnight: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Damnation Ending

Christopher Marlowe is one of the two most famous authors to retell the Faust legend, alongside the 1587 Faustbuch that fixed its core shape. Marlowe's own play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, first performed around 1592, follows the Faustbuch's bargain closely: Faustus signs away his soul to the devil Mephistophilis for twenty-four years of knowledge and power, and spends most of those years on tricks and spectacle rather than on anything resembling the wisdom he originally sought. What the play adds that the Faustbuch states more flatly is the anguish of the final hour. As midnight approaches on the last night of the pact, Faustus is given an extended soliloquy addressed directly to the audience, begging time to slow, calling on Christ's blood to save him, and recognizing his own damnation even as he speaks. He is not permitted a change of heart to undo the bargain; devils drag him off at the stroke of midnight, and the play's closing chorus draws the moral explicitly, warning the audience against forbidden knowledge pursued too far. Marlowe gives Faustus real, dramatized regret and grants him none of the mercy that regret might elsewhere have purchased.