ABSTRACT
In the final moments of both texts of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the plays' protagonist reaffirms his commitment to the diabolical contract he composed at the start of the action. In 'Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference', Leah Marcus aptly summarizes the anxiety caused by the two texts of Doctor Faustus. Both texts of Doctor Faustus are inscribed with the anxiety that writing may not be able to retain a fixed and repeatable meaning over time. Revealing the anxiety that writing may not be able to remember itself, Marlowe's plays of Doctor Faustus dramatize a concern with inscriptional erasure which also preoccupied other Renaissance writers. Contrary to Freud's use of the Mystic Writing Pad as a metaphor for memory retrieval, Derrida deploys the machine as a metaphor for inscriptional instability. Ultimately deceived both by the instability of his initial readings and the impermanence of his eventual writings, Faustus is appropriately preoccupied with the issue of perpetuity in his final soliloquy.
