ABSTRACT
The movement of Christopher Marlowe’s poetry in Faustus’s opening lines suggests that he was using Ramist logical concepts in a radical rejection of traditional logic itself as the highway towards the new knowledge he dreams of: live and die in Aristotles works. Marlowe offers no explicitly named alternative authorities, but his rejection of Galen clearly invokes Paracelsian concepts of magical healing, linking Faustus to an already developed, if semi-underground, English school of 'alternative' medicine and alchemical enquiry. One of the 'high places' frequented by both Thomas Harriot and Marlowe was the household of Ralegh, whom the Jesuit Parsons had accused of forming a 'School of Atheism' and whose religious views would be the subject of an official investigation shortly after Marlowe's death. The pessimism of Marlowe’s final tragic vision is only partially qualified by the brief comments of the different scholars who discover Faustus’s dead body.
