The Theater of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe

Lukas Erne is entirely right to claim, in a thoughtful piece that encourages critical distance from the Baines note and the "mythographic" Marlowe it creates, that "Marlowe's religious opinions, though they may well have departed from generally accepted beliefs, were the result of intense engagement with, rather than indifference toward, religion" (28, 36).\n The emphasis is put on the individual's responsibility to initiate his own conversion, and God is figured almost as a spectator, desiring something that depends on the will of another-and that is true enough from the congregant's perspective. [...] just as a congregant hearing the prayerbook injunction would have to contextualize it within the predestinarian soteriology of the Elizabethan church,24 so is the audience member forced to understand Faustus's mystifying refusal to heed the warnings of his friends and the misgivings of his own heart, against the implicit sense that the forbidding deity who looms above him in his final minutes is not only the God who punishes sin, but the God who withholds from some the capacity for redemption he gives to others.