The Form of Faustus' Fortunes

My name is Professor Lisa Hopkins. I teach English at Sheffield Hallam University.

I'm going to be talking about Marlowe's play. Doctor forced us.

This first section

is called The Form of Forced his fortunes.

I first started working on this play, which is several 100 years ago. Now.

I wanted to know the answers to a great many questions about it.

Sadly, I didn't really discover the answer to most of those questions.

I still don't know whether the A text or the B text is closer to what Marlowe wrote.

I don't know what he meant by a great many of the things that happens in the play,

but I did discover one thing that I'm absolutely certain about and

that that is that this play is not called Doctor Faustus,

though a lot of people think so.

It's called Dr Forced Us.

It always was called that until

Curtis play, Faust became popular in England,

and Faustus is really a back derivation from what Goethe calls his play.

But we don't say that we say forced us,

and that makes that line

very rich in ascendance, the form of Foster's fortunes.

That's what the prologue to the play promises us that we're going to see,

and that is what we get.

And it's worth thinking a bit about what those words mean and how they work together.

The name forced us means well opened or lucky, which is, of course, bitterly ironic,

because forces is not particularly lucky and he's not well starred.

Shakespeare's going to pick up on that irony

in The Tempest,

which is a play that revisits Dr Foster's in a

number of ways when he calls his hero there,

Prospero

and

the difference being that Prospero really is prosperous, he is fortunate.

Foster's is not

fortunate,

but he does have fortunes, even though he's not

the possessor of a good fortune.

But also what was promised specifically is the form

of Foster's fortunes

form first to a number of things.

It refers to the shape of the play

and this particular play.

The form is very important because it's based on a mediaeval form,

a genre which Marlowe's audience would have been aware

of even if they perhaps hadn't seen any recently.

Uh, they would have been aware of morality plays and forced us is a number of ways,

like a morality play It's a play that echoes formal features

of that is a good angel has got a bad angel.

It's got a hero. Uh,

it's all about that particular character,

and it's also got the sense that we are in contact with the supernatural.

Even if we don't actually see God, we only see the devil.

And in that sense,

it's also a bit like not just morality is it's a bit like mediaeval Miracle plays, uh,

again, a genre that Marlow is going to you make use of elsewhere in the Jew of Malta,

for instance.

But form also has another meaning.

A meaning, I think is particularly important for this play.

And that meaning is to do with the nature of the preparation

of an early modern text.

And early modern printing press

is in effect, referred to as a form F o R M E,

and this is a play that is fascinated by printing

by

the technology of producing books by the effects of books

by the relation between people and books.

It starts with forced us in his study,

surrounded by books,

every production I've ever seen, and I have seen quite a lot of stresses that book,

that book element of what happens to forced us but the

nature and importance of the printed word in his life.

That's one of the things that makes this a very distinctively early modern play.

100 years previously,

somebody like Fosters who was born of poor

parents wouldn't have had access to books.

This is a man who has a lot of books.

Books have been instrumental in shaping who he is, how he thinks what he becomes.

And it's one of the most savage ironies of the story of forces that by

the end of the play he is wishing that he had never seen a book.

And as far as he is concerned,

books are part of what has led him astray.

So we

enter into it and we see him

looking at his books.

We see him choosing which of those books speak most loudly to him,

which one represents the study that he most wants to follow.

By the end of the play, he wishes to renounce all books.

Books are no longer any comfort to him,

and that, I think, is partly because of the importance and the status in this play.

of one particular book,

the most important book in the culture, in which fosters lives

And that's the Bible

and a particularly important element almost looks like a detail,

but it's not a detail.

It's something of great significance in the play

is that Fosters has not just the Bible

in

capital letters or scare quotes. He has a specific Bible.

Jerome's Bible forced us view it well.

He has a Bible, in short, But it's not just the work of God

for which he understands in which we understand to have been mediated through a man,

a particular person,

ST Jerome.

And one of the things that the play asks is what is the status of the Bible? I mean it.

Ask deeper questions, too, about what is the status of God?

What is the status of religion?

But I think attaching a name the name of a human

to the Bible helps us to understand that even if we do

wish to believe the Bible to be the work of God,

we also have to acknowledge that it's the work of man

when it comes to us through translation,

through mediation

and in the century, in which Marlowe wrote.

The whole question of whether the Bible could or should be translated

was something of extreme importance. Men could be burnt at the stake

for translating the Bible

into vernacular languages.

So that sense that a book is something that is

extremely important but also something that is not the truth.

That's not something given to us from on high,

but something that represents a partial

and particular truth. A version of the truth, If you like, rather

anything unmediated is,

I think it's something exceptionally important for this play.

And to understand two as invited just to

see the form of fortune of forced his fortunes

is to focus our minds on the extent to which this story has come to us through print.

We do go and see it in the theatre. It's a plane that's very often on.

it's almost up there with Shakespeare for the extent

a number of times to which it gets performed.

But most people read it,

and in some ways that's really not a bad thing, because it is about reading.

It's about encounters with texts,

and reading is still the primary way for most

of us to experience plays in the first instance.

So the form of Foster's fortunes

alerts us to a number of very important things about the character.

The fact that his name has a meaning invites us

to understand him as being like a morality hero.

But it's not a name that tells us the truth about him.

It's actually a name that revealed that tells us something that is not true.

It's an ironic name

to draw attention to his fortunes, raises another set of questions,

which I'll come back to

about whether what happens to force us is his fortune

or whether it's his destiny or whether it's his own doing

To what extent it can be understood is that controlled by

an exterior power to what extent he brings about himself.

Everything that happens to him

and to draw attention to that word form

invites us to understand

the nature and importance of print,

both in our experience of the play and enforced as his experience of the world.

This is a man who reads

when we first see him surrounded by books in his study, he's read a lot of things.

He hasn't read them all very well.

He's got a very good grasp of the first lines of lots of texts,

but he doesn't tend to be so brilliant

about what happens in the rest of them.

But here's a man who's been constructed by literacy,

and in the end it is literacy that he will blame for him.

Even the moment of his damnation,

for the moment of his incipient damnation, perhaps,

is marked by writing when he sees homophobia written on his arm. He is a creature

of print, a creature

of the written word,

and that, I think, is something that is brought home to us by that formulation,

the form of forced his fortunes.