VII The Summons to Hell
A F T E R T H E AMBIGUITIES in Tamburlaine, the moral of Doctor Faustus seems painfully clear: "Regard his hellish fall" (Epi.4: 2005) But even here, Marlowe's use of the medieval convention is col ored by his time; Faustus falls prey not only to the devil or to his o w n self conceit but also to a distinctly post Reformation despair. A n d the nature of that despair m a y be as ambiguous as Tamburlaine's presumption. T o view all of Marlowe's flawed protagonists as Renaissance "overreachers," m e n whose aspiring minds are to be admired even as their h u m a n limitations defeat them, m a y be valid, but Faustus's reach so far exceeds his grasp that even his aspirations seem equivocal. A s I have shown elsewhere, he is not only a bad Chris tian but a bad scholar; he is more concerned with publishable information than with widsom, seldom fulfills his heroic boasts, and allows himself to be fobbed off with empty spectacle and prac tical jokes w h e n he should be delving into questions about the nature of the universe the reason, after all, that he gave for selling his soul in the first place. Even his celebrated paean to Helen is an exercise in self deceit; having earlier explained that all such apparitions are "but shadows, not substantial" (xii.55: 1259) he surely knows that the answer to his famous question, " W a s this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?" (xviii.99: 1768) is very simply " N o "