, when the years of his pact have expired, and he awaits
midnight, which will give him over to Lucifer, is as thoroughly natural
in the eyes of Marlowe as is in the eyes of Shelley the position of
Beatrice Cenci awaiting the moment of execution. The conversation
between Faustus and the scholars, after he has made his will, is
terribly life-like: they disbelieve at first, pooh-pooh his danger;
then, half-convinced, beg that a priest may be fetched; but Faustus
cannot deal with priests. He bids them, in agony, go pray in the next
room. "Aye, pray for me, pray for me, and what noise soever you hear,
come not unto me, for nothing can save me.... Gentlemen, farewell; if I
live till morning, I'll visit you; if not, Faustus is gone to hell."
Faustus remains alone for the one hour which separates him from his
doom; he clutches at the passing time, he cries to the hours to stop
with no rhetorical figure of speech, but with a terrible reality of
agony:

Let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

Time to repent, time to recoil from the horrible gulf into which he
is being sucked; Christ, will Christ's blood not save him? He would
leap up to heaven and cling fast, but Lucifer drags him down. He would
seek annihilation in nature, be sucked into its senseless, feelingless
mass ... and, meanwhile, the time is passing, the interval of respite is
shrinking and dwindling. Would that he were a soulless brute and might
perish, or that at least eternal hell were finite--a thousand, a hundred
thousand years let him suffer, but not for ever and without end!
Midnight begins striking. With convulsive agony he exclaims as the rain
patters against the window:

O soul, be changed into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found.

But the twelfth stroke sounds; Lucifer and his crew enter; and when next
morning the students, frightened by the horrible tempest and ghastly
noises of the night, enter his study, they find Faustus lying dead, torn
and mangled by the demon. All this is not supernatural in our sense;
such scenes as this were real for Marlowe and his audience. Such cases
were surely not unfrequent; more than one man certainly watched through
such a night in hopeless agony, conscious, like Faustus, of pact with
the fiend--awaiting, with earth and heaven shut and bolted against him,
eternal hell.

In this story of Doctor Faustus, which, t