ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the overreaching imaginative fantasies Faustus entertains and indulges from one moment to the next. It investigates the degree to which Faustus' art, magic, is identified with his own imagination and the imaginative impulses of his author. Magic and imagination are posited as similar forces, thrusting beyond the normal restrictions of time and space. Faustus, like Marlowe, summons up illusions, unreal imitations of substance, that is, puts on magic shows. Yet all these overreaching efforts dissolve: by the conclusion of the play, the leveller "at the end of every art," Faustus the magician-playwright, discovers that magic inevitably collapses in "idle fantasies, To over-reach the Divell" The chapter discusses the relationship between Faustus' damnation and Marlowe's estimate of imaginative art and argues that Marlowe, by simultaneously underwriting and denigrating the overreaching fantasies of magicians and artists, confirms the unresolvable contradictions at which Greene and Peele only hint, and which make Marlowe's play great tragedy.
