Two Roads to 2 Hells: And we thought WE were in the age of information
Misusing power is one of the world’s oldest, biggest problems. Literature's Dr. Faustus and Sir Gawain are only two examples.
One man loves getting information. The other admires his own chivalry, parading it. Two men, characters in two stories, use their free wills to get what they want.
One reveres books and travel, the other God and king. Neither gets the final chapter he deserves.
Christopher Marlowe second to Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564 and died probably in 1593. The Elizabethan-era playwright was the first son of John Marlowe, a shoemaker in Canterbury.
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Second to William Shakespeare, Marlowe is the next most famous English writer of tragedies. In Marlowe's “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” someone trades his soul to Satan for the power that knowledge brings.
Who wrote "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"?
The unsigned poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a triumph of Middle English literature. It's a tale of an ambitious knight, sex, and inhospitable wildness. Someone wrote it in Britain's West Midlands area during the final years of the 1300s.
Dr. Faustus, the title character of Christopher Marlowe’s play, is consumed with slurping knowledge from the ever-expanding pool of information available—to privileged--people in his writer’s 16th-century Europe. Think about John Milton, the scholar who read all day and night. So begins “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” play, with Faustus reading, speaking and spewing intelligence.
Their human-ness gets in the way
The other man is Sir Gawain from the unknown poet. Gawain, the young knight at the center this author's story, is much younger and less erudite than Marlowe's Faustus. But his desire is as strong. He aches to be the perfect medieval nobleman, trustworthy and brave. Both Faustus and Gawain permit their goals, focused and omnipotent, to goad them to failure. Both let their humanness interfere with their moral codes.
Faust first appears in the play as an earnest Milton-like scholar, and he seems as though he might turn out like John Milton (b. 1608). He's wise and articulate. His home bulges with books, precious and rare in his time, and two of his early lines are these: “Yet level at the end of every art/And live and die in Aristotle’s works," where he announces his wish to gobble up classic literature and philosophy.
When we first meet Sir Gawain, however, no evidence of bookishness lurks. He lives in an earlier era than Faust, the 14th century and the Alliterative Revival period. But the men’s differences – and similarities – spring not just from their different eras but their personalities.
Gawain is young, Faustus middle-aged. Gawain is childish and untested; Faustus is mature, sophisticated. Gawain says to King Arthur,” I beseech before all here/That this melee be mine” (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Gawain is begging Arthur to let him, Gawain, fight with the mysterious Green Knight, who has come to Arthur’s court to play Christmas games.
It's fun to show off
Gawain is also begging to show off his masculine chivalry. He doesn't give a fresh fig for Faustus’s books and brain cells. Gawain relishes a merry drunken brawl with rackety comrades and affectionate women. Unlike Faustus, Gawain plays down his abilities, trying to look humble. He says to King Arthur: “And the loss of my life would be least of any."
Faustus praises himself and his many accomplishments without a trace of humility: “Are not thy bills (prescriptions from his medical practice) hung up as monuments/Whereby whole cities have escaped the plague." He does lament, though, that he is not medically knowledgeable enough to stave off his patients’ death. This bothers him because he wants to be commanding and obeyed. He marvels to himself about his gleaming future: “O what a world of profit and delight/Of power, of honor, of omnipotence/Is promised to the studious artisan." He wants power.
Turns out it was part of her underwear
Gawain, too, hunts power but of the physical and spiritual types. He is twenty-ish and brawny. Faustus could be his dad. Gawain loves God; Faustus chooses Satan over God. Gawain tarnishes his best quality, his honor, by letting his chivalric code degenerate. His desire to be noble and God-loving is not strong enough to keep him from cheating at a game in order to avoid painful death. By accepting the "green sash" from Lady Bertilak, which is actually part of her underwear, he deceives his host, who happens to be the Lady's hubby.
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Gawain has now broken the rules of an agreement he had made with his host. He also loses self respect because he uses a supernatural trick to save his life. He knows he should, as a medieval knight, embrace death. He should die happily at the edge of the Green Knight’s sword. This is that rule they had agreed on, after all. But Gawain cheats; he relies on the magic even into that green sash. His punishment? He must live with this knowledge for the rest of his life.
Whiling away 24 years of unlimited possibilities
Faustus values erudition as the source of power, and he too fails to live up to his own expectations. He whiles away 24 years of unlimited possibilities – won by selling his soul to the devil -- and resorts to thinking up practical jokes and tricks. When he could be reading, lecturing and examining the world, he is torturing a stranger by making the unfortunate man believe he has inadvertently torn off Faustus’s leg: “O my leg, my leg! Help, Mephistopheles! Call the officers! My leg! My leg!"
Well, you didn't have to lop off his head!
Faustus uses his black magic to humiliate and scare. Gawain uses his youthful strength—unnecessarily—to wound the Green Knight. Faustus could be using his inchoate magic to cure his patients; Gawain could have decided just to graze the Green Knight’s skin, not behead him, for heaven's sake.
These men’s choices, their use of how to spend their free wills, take them to different ends. Faustus is damned to hell, no escaping the lake of fire. The good-natured Green Knight lets Gawain's live, because Gawain, after all, does have good qualities. He must, however, endure the never-healing wound of a damaged self image.
Christian attitudes were pretty harsh back then
Faustus’s sentence is expected, maybe, given Christian attitudes of Marlowe’s era. To abandon belief in God and Christ meant damnation. However, provocative and atheistic ideas were circulating in Europe, and people were wondering who God really was, if He was.
Two whopping bouts of the plague, one in 1348-1349 and another in 1592-1594, had rattled faith in many. And Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1400s enabled dissemination of both radical and traditional thoughts. And now the masses could read.
Today, and probably for many of Marlowe’s contemporaries, Faustus’s damnation seems draconian. He tricked people with seductive images of Helen of Troy, he bragged, he sold horses that dissolved in water. But he never hurt anyone seriously. Just the opposite: during his time as a physician he relieved suffering and saved lives. He was "proud" and "covetous," committing at least these two Seven Deadly Sins, but he didn't massacre people.
Where is hell?
By Alessio Zaccaria, Unsplash
Gawain sure did. Not realizing the Green Knight was impervious to death, Gawain chopped off the Green Knight’s head. You can bet Gawain meant to kill him. Yet he does not go to hell. Or does he? Maybe he makes his own hell, the one Marlowe’s demon Mephistopheles describes: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."
Marlowe was the first person to declare that hell is right here. It's what we make, a state of our own minds. Faustus goes to that hell, and maybe in his own mind so does Gawain. Both men allow their love for their goals to bring them despair. Who hasn’t?
