732 Marlowe, Christopher
logo from Hobbs’s bat into a patch they wear on
their sleeves. Baseball players can be a superstitious
lot and the bolt symbol becomes a good luck charm.
At the peak of his abilities, Hobbs begins an
affair with Memo Paris, a noted gambler’s girl-
friend. Even the name Paris evokes the Trojan War
hero and rival of Achilles. As Hobbs enjoys the
romance, his playing skills suffer, and he enters a
protracted batting slump. Just as Samson was laid
low by Delilah (and Hobbs himself was done in
earlier by Harriet Bird), a woman proves his undo-
ing. In Hobbs’s myth, he also endures temptation.
The club’s owner, the gambler, and Paris, all pres-
sure him to throw a championship game for money.
The lure of easy money and lust for a woman turn
him from his heart’s desire to be known as the
greatest player ever.
At the end of the novel, he has a chance for
redemption in the climactic game. In his final at bat,
he realizes that he cannot compromise himself any
further. Unlike the spectacular home run so well-
known from the film version, Hobbs strikes out in
the novel. The rumors of his having been involved in
a potential fix of the game leak to the papers. Just as
the real-life Shoeless Joe Jackson was immortalized
in infamy by the child’s phrase, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,”
Hobbs is also made into a tragic antihero with the
remark “Say it ain’t true, Roy.”
Ronald C. Thomas, Jr.
marLoWE, CHriSToPHEr Doctor
Faustus (1592)
Doctor Faustus, undoubtedly Marlowe’s best-known
play, is the story of a brilliant man who sells his
soul to the devil. In return for an eternity in hell,
Mephistopheles, the devil’s right-hand man, agrees
to serve him for 24 years. Although the story was
already familiar from European folklore and a
recently translated German work, Marlowe’s ver-
sion is the earliest known dramatization. Written
in 1591 and performed the following year, Doctor
Faustus was not published until 1604, 11 years after
Marlowe’s untimely death. Full of devils, fools, and
magic tricks, the play demonstrates Marlowe’s mas-
tery of stage spectacle as well as the powerful verse
and imagery that made him a rival to Shakespeare.
The success of Marlowe’s version may have been
due in part to the fact that England had been under-
going religious turmoil for more than 50 years, and
Faustus questions many of the same religious doc-
trines that had been under attack since the start of
the Reformation. In addition, the expanding middle
class in England was experiencing a period of great
prosperity and opportunity in which a talented man
like Faustus—or like Marlowe himself—could real-
istically hope to move up in the world. Additionally,
the playwright’s reputation intrigued the public; he
was under investigation for atheism when he was
stabbed in a tavern quarrel, and speculation contin-
ues that his work as a government spy or counter-
spy led to his murder. Doctor Faustus addresses the
themes of ambition, religion, pride, and educa-
tion, themes as relevant today as they were in late
16th-century London.
Deborah Montouriambition in Doctor Faustus
In the prologue to Doctor Faustus, Marlowe clearly
announces ambition as a major theme. The chorus
tells us that the play will focus on Faustus’s fortunes
and, using a familiar allusion, likens him to Icarus,
a mythological youth who stole the wax wings his
father devised but made the mistake of flying too
close to the sun; the wings melted and Icarus fell to
his death. The figure of Icarus has long been used
to represent overreaching ambition, a fault revealed
in Faustus’s first soliloquy. Considering his occu-
pational choices, he reviews and rejects medicine,
the law, and divinity because none can bring him
the power and lasting fame that he desires. While
a physician may earn wealth and fame for his cures,
ultimately, Faustus argues, he cannot make men live
forever. He reduces a lawyer’s work to mere drudg-
ery and finds divinity useless, as all men must sin,
die, and be eternally damned. It is not surprising
that Faustus, believing that “A sound magician is a
mighty god,” settles on black magic, for who but a
god has the ultimate power over life and death?
Before Faustus sells his soul to the devil and
secures the services of Mephistopheles, his ambi-
tions—aside from pleasing his own craving for
wealth, exotic foods, and beautiful women—are
relatively noble. He expresses nationalism and a