Dying Badly: Doctor Faustus and the Parodic Drama of Blasphemy

What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to pin down. Critics have plausibly viewed the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to freethinking iconoclasm. 2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly