[The clock strikes twelve.
It strikes! It strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
O soul, be changed into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
[Thunder. Enter Devils.
Oh, mercy, Heaven! Look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books. O Mephistophilis!
[Exeunt Devils with Faustus. Enter Chorus.
Chorus: Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learnéd man.
Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.
FOOTNOTES:
[X] Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury in February, 1564, the year of Shakespeare's birth. From the King's School he went to Cambridge, at Corpus, and took his degree in 1583. For the next ten years, he lived in London; a tavern brawl ended his career on June 1, 1593. During those ten years, when Greene and Nashe and Peele were beginning to shape the nascent drama, and Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, most of the young authors were living wild enough lives, and none, according to tradition, wilder than Kit Marlowe; who, nevertheless, was doing mightier work, work more pregnant with promise than any of them, and infinitely greater in achievement; for Shakespeare's tragedies were still to come. That "Tamburlaine the Great," the first play of a lad of twenty-three, should have been crude and bombastic is not surprising; that "The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus" should have been produced by an author aged probably less than twenty-five is amazing. The story is traditional; two hundred years after Marlowe, Goethe gave it its most familiar setting (see Vol. XVI, p. 362). But although some part of Marlowe's play is grotesque, there is no epithet which can fitly characterise its greatest scenes except "tremendous." What may not that tavern brawl have cost the world!