Rewriting Idolatry: Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet

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• Rewriting Idolatry: Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet
• Tom Rutter (bio)

FAUSTUS Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin again.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ¹

The lines quoted above accompany what may be the two most famous kisses in Elizabethan drama: the one between Doctor Faustus and Helen of Troy in the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s play, just before the harrowing depiction of Faustus’s final terror in the face of damnation, and the one that occurs towards the end of act one of Romeo and Juliet during the first meeting of the lovers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the four most famous kisses,” since both of these speeches are delivered in between an initial kiss, which Faustus says sucks forth his soul and by which Romeo says his “sin is purged” (1.5.106), and a second that is imagined as restoring what has been taken away. The follow-up kisses are preceded by two very similar phrases: “Give me my soul again” from Faustus, “Give me my sin again” from Romeo. The combination of verbal and structural similarity is so striking as to suggest direct influence, all the more so given that in this scene Shakespeare departs from his principal source, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke. In the equivalent episode in Brooke’s poem, the lovers’ eye-beams are “ymingled,” and they hold hands and offer expressions of devotion, but no actual kiss takes place: what seems to the modern reader or theatregoer an inevitable and inextricable part of their first meeting appears only when the story transfers to the stage. ² [End Page 341]

Some critics have noted the similarity between these two episodes. In his 2016 handbook Doctor Faustus, James N. Loehlin notes that “the line ‘give me my soul again’ . . . seems to have been remembered by Shakespeare in writing the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet,” while in a 2011 article on Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus Matthew Ramirez suggests that Faustus’s speech offered “some terms [that] Shakespeare later borrowed and reconfigured for a rather different dramatic situation.” ³ However, it is generally passed over in more substantial critical discussions of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare (surveyed later in this essay), while the editors of the Arden Second Series, Arden Third Series, Oxford World’s Classics and New Cambridge editions of Romeo and Juliet, who highlight numerous Marlovian parallels, omit this one. ⁴ It may be significant that both Loehlin and Ramirez are particularly concerned with how the two plays might work in performance, something that perhaps makes them especially alert to the interplay between word and gesture. However, neither Loehlin nor Ramirez has Shakespeare’s relationship with Marlowe as his prime concern, and this means that in both cases the discussion of the parallel between the two scenes is brief, with no real analysis of its wider implications.

The current essay attempts to do two things. First, it argues that the initial encounter between Romeo and Juliet is not an isolated moment of imitation, but that it is typical of a broader tendency in Shakespeare’s play to rewrite as erotic moments that in Doctor Faustus are associated with spiritual transgression or terror. Identifying this tendency provides an insight into Shakespeare’s creative process and into the place of Marlowe in his development as a tragedian. Second, this essay offers the more speculative suggestion that the reason Shakespeare found in Marlowe’s tragic morality play materials suitable for rewriting in a tragedy of doomed love is because of the plays’ mutual concern with the theme of idolatry, and the related question of value. However, where Marlowe shows his protagonist to be guilty of a series of idolatrous, and disastrous, misvaluations, Shakespeare appropriates Marlowe’s terms in profoundly ambivalent fashion, distancing his lovers from the concept of idolatry while simultaneously exploiting its blasphemous energy. Romeo and Juliet create their own scale of values in a way that is at once touching, defiant, and dangerous, helping to...