FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! – Who pulls me down? –
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! –
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer! –
Where is it now? ’tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no!
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!
You stars that reign’d at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist.
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud[s],
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!
[The clock strikes the half-hour.]
Ah, half the hour is past! ’twill all be past anon
O God,
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransom’d me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d!
O, no end is limited to damned souls!
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang’d
Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv’d in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu’d in hell.
Curs’d be the parents that engender’d me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv’d thee of the joys of heaven.
[The clock strikes twelve.]
O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
[Thunder and lightning.]
O soul, be chang’d into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!
[Enter DEVILS.]
My God, my god, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books! – Ah, Mephistopheles!
(Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS)

Last week’s poem, Sophie Hannah’s Selling His Soul, set me thinking about both the origins and the modern usage of the phrase. The Labour party’s soul was in the news, after all, post-UK election. Shirley Williams, rising above party politics, claimed democracy had been put up for sale. But I didn’t find any accusations, from right, left or centre, of actual soul-selling, let alone satanic barter. Generally speaking, “selling your soul” in modern usage denotes submission to dull routine or lucrative scam. Deals with the devil are rarely implied, even metaphorically. You can choose wealth and power (and sell democracy) and it’s just about being “aspirational”, right?

Back to basics, then, for the harsh authentic flavour, the ancient hubris, the true terrible price, of soul-selling. This week’s “poem” is the soliloquy from Act V, Scene IV, of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (c 1589), a scene which, in early performances, must have struck pity and terror deep into the audience’s heart. There were reports of real devils appearing onstage during the play. As an aid to imagination, I’ve included stage directions with the extract – which is from the Project Gutenberg online edition based on the 1604 (A) text.

Marlowe’s source was an English translation of Das Faust-Buch, said to be an authenticated account of the life of one Johann Georg Faust, an alchemist, magician and all-round dodgy dealer, ultimately denounced by the church for making a pact with the devil. Goethe most memorably transformed the legend, but there were many others after him, and a few before, who refashioned Faust in the image of their own philosophies or the preoccupations of their age, not necessarily proclaiming their source. I was struck recently by a realisation that Bram Stoker draws on elements of the Faust story for Dracula.

In Marlowe’s play, Faustus is a polymath who, in his deal with the satanic agent Mephistopheles, seeks fame, pleasure and omniscience. He verges on repentance several times during the action, and at one point is brought to heel by Lucifer himself, who drops in and beguiles the young waverer with those delicious reference books that, like Google today, reveal the secrets of the cosmos. But the period of the contract is finite (24 years) – a poor deal, if a good dramatic ploy. Faustus, like a lottery winner dazedly squandering millions, wastes his time and fails to use his knowledge: the deeper narrative thrust of the play is always towards the denouement, when time runs out.

But suspend your disbelief, and enjoy the pace and trenchancy of Marlowe’s terrific blank verse. Never pedestrian, never predictable, the line swings and churns with Faust’s emotions, changes pitch to suit the various objects of his address, becomes as elastic as he wishes time might be. There are many fine, understated touches to notice – the extenuation of the nine syllables of the first full line, for example (“Now hast thou but one bare hour to live”). Marlowe seems to draw out the fabric of that “one bare hour” as far as it will stretch and the unvoiced syllables are spaces of utter dismay. The quotation from Ovid’s Amores (“Lente, lente …) wonderfully decelerates the flow, and at the same time reminds the audience of Faustus’s recent liaison with the shade of Helen of Troy. Truncated lines and caesuras mimic the arrhythmic pulse of hope and anguish as the speech progresses.

Whether Marlowe himself was an atheist is still disputed by scholars of early modern literature. It would be foolish to infer anything about the author’s beliefs from the Faustus text. What is clear is that Faustus, in the end, dearly wishes that both the soul and the Christian afterlife were a myth. He refers yearningly to metempsychosis, and imagines what it must be to die an animal with no soul and only oblivion in prospect. There’s a good deal of imagery connecting death to natural processes, too, as in his sustained wish that the stars would draw him upwards “like a foggy mist”. His last pitiful request is to dissolve into the ocean as dewdrops or rain. Marlowe must have known the ideas of the Greek atomists as well as he knew the Christian theology.

The closing four lines of the speech are extraordinary. The impression, always present, that Faustus is having his greatest vision yet, is intensified by the pace of the syntax. Imploring God not to “look so fierce on me”, Hell not to gape, and the “adders and serpents” to let him breathe, he seems to see God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, simultaneously. In their brilliant abbreviation, these lines portray the consummation of Faust’s quest. He wanted knowledge of everything. And, in his last moments, he attains it, dazzlingly compressed into one experience.

For all that he wishes things were different, Faustus is helplessly unable to repent. He has expressed, in the mirroring soliloquy at the start of the play, his Calvinistic view of predestination. And now he claims it’s the stars which, at his birth, decided his present plight. It was always going to be sin and death. He has no free will now – and never had.

Unredeemed and irredeemable (unlike Goethe’s Faust), Marlowe’s protagonist might seem the very model of modern humanity: almost all knowledge available (or so we imagine), almost all control of it out of reach. And the ultimate tragedy is that knowledge can never be un-learnt. He offers the ultimate sacrifice (“I’ll burn my books”), but, unlike that of Shakespeare’s Prospero, it’s an abjuration too late. As he wildly faces the hell he chose – yet somehow didn’t choose – Faustus is raised to a timelessly existential dimension. His story seems a parable relevant to every age’s acts of hubris, and any ambitious leader’s downfall.

• Note: O lente, lente currite, noctis equi! is sometimes translated as “Run softly, softly, horses of the night.”