The Contract in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: Between Law and Religion

By utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that merges the fields of research of “law and literature” and “law and religion,” this work constitutes an attempt to provide new and innovative insights on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In the play, in fact, law and religion are deeply interrelated and their intermingling is embodied by the contract, around which the entire play revolves. The compact stipulated by Faustus and Mephistopheles is utilized by the protagonist as the basis of a personal legal and religious cosmology in which he can act as the sole leader in an attempt to substitute God Himself and reaffirm his autonomy and free will. In this context, on one hand the legal formula of the contract allows the protagonist to secure the foundations of his system, while on the other hand its religious form and contents permit him to render it sacred and inviolable. However, Faustus’s desire to challenge God is destined to fail: the pact, in fact, is actually void, a fact that is forewarned by the parody that Marlowe enacts against Faustus and his cosmology and that appears blatant when the features of the compact are analyzed. The very object of the agreement (i.e. Faustus’s alienation of body and soul) appears in fact absurd and impossible from the very beginning, since it involves the loss of what renders us human. Moreover, by refusing to repent, Faustus exposes a lack of justice, since repentance would constitute an unjust limitation to human autonomy.