• Rewriting Idolatry: Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet
• Tom Rutter (bio)

FAUSTUS Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin again.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ¹

The lines quoted above accompany what may be the two most famous kisses in Elizabethan drama: the one between Doctor Faustus and Helen of Troy in the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s play, just before the harrowing depiction of Faustus’s final terror in the face of damnation, and the one that occurs towards the end of act one of Romeo and Juliet during the first meeting of the lovers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the four most famous kisses,” since both of these speeches are delivered in between an initial kiss, which Faustus says sucks forth his soul and by which Romeo says his “sin is purged” (1.5.106), and a second that is imagined as restoring what has been taken away. The follow-up kisses are preceded by two very similar phrases: “Give me my soul again” from Faustus, “Give me my sin again” from Romeo. The combination of verbal and structural similarity is so striking as to suggest direct influence, all the more so given that in this scene Shakespeare departs from his principal source, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke. In the equivalent episode in Brooke’s poem, the lovers’ eye-beams are “ymingled,” and they hold hands and offer expressions of devotion, but no actual kiss takes place: what seems to the modern reader or theatregoer an inevitable and inextricable part of their first meeting appears only when the story transfers to the stage. ² [End Page 341]

Some critics have noted the similarity between these two episodes. In his 2016 handbook Doctor Faustus, James N. Loehlin notes that “the line ‘give me my soul again’ . . . seems to have been remembered by Shakespeare in writing the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet,” while in a 2011 article on Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus Matthew Ramirez suggests that Faustus’s speech offered “some terms [that] Shakespeare later borrowed and reconfigured for a rather different dramatic situation.” ³ However, it is generally passed over in more substantial critical discussions of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare (surveyed later in this essay), while the editors of the Arden Second Series, Arden Third Series, Oxford World’s Classics and New Cambridge editions of Romeo and Juliet, who highlight numerous Marlovian parallels, omit this one. ⁴ It may be significant that both Loehlin and Ramirez are particularly concerned with how the two plays might work in performance, something that perhaps makes them especially alert to the interplay between word and gesture. However, neither Loehlin nor Ramirez has Shakespeare’s relationship with Marlowe as his prime concern, and this means that in both cases the discussion of the parallel between the two scenes is brief, with no real analysis of its wider implications.

The current essay attempts to do two things. First, it argues that the initial encounter between Romeo and Juliet is not an isolated moment of imitation, but that it is typical of a broader tendency in Shakespeare’s play to rewrite as erotic moments that in Doctor Faustus are associated with spiritual transgression or terror. Identifying this tendency provides an insight into Shakespeare’s creative process and into the place of Marlowe in his development as a tragedian. Second, this essay offers the more speculative suggestion that the reason Shakespeare found in Marlowe’s tragic morality play materials suitable for rewriting in a tragedy of doomed love is because of the plays’ mutual concern with the theme of idolatry, and the related question of value. However, where Marlowe shows his protagonist to be guilty of a series of idolatrous, and disastrous, misvaluations, Shakespeare appropriates Marlowe’s terms in profoundly ambivalent fashion, distancing his lovers from the concept of idolatry while simultaneously exploiting its blasphemous energy. Romeo and Juliet create their own scale of values in a way that is at once touching, defiant, and dangerous, helping to...

• 
  重写偶像崇拜：浮士德博士与罗密欧与朱丽叶
•  汤姆·鲁特（简介）

浮士德 她的嘴唇吸走了我的灵魂。看看它飞向哪里！

来吧，海伦，来吧，再次给我我的灵魂。

马洛《浮士德博士》

罗密欧 我的嘴里有罪吗？哦，甜蜜地催促你的侵犯！

再把我的罪孽还给我吧。

莎士比亚、罗密欧与朱丽叶¹

上面引用的台词可能是伊丽莎白时代戏剧中最著名的两个吻：马洛戏剧倒数第二个场景中浮士德博士和特洛伊的海伦之间的吻，就在浮士德面对诅咒的最后恐惧的悲惨描述之前，以及《罗密欧与朱丽叶》第一幕结尾时恋人第一次见面时发生的事情。或者也许说“最著名的四个吻”会更准确，因为这两个演讲都是在最初的吻之间进行的，浮士德说这个吻吸走了他的灵魂，罗密欧说他的“罪孽被净化了”（1.5） .106），第二个被想象为恢复被拿走的东西。接下来的吻之前有两个非常相似的短语：浮士德的“再次给我我的灵魂”和罗密欧的“再次给我我的罪”。语言和结构上的相似性相结合是如此惊人，以至于表明了直接影响，尤其是在这个场景中，莎士比亚背离了他的主要来源，亚瑟·布鲁克的《罗密欧与朱丽叶的悲剧史》 。在布鲁克诗中的相应情节中，恋人的目光“混合在一起”，他们握着手，表达忠诚，但没有发生真正的吻：在现代读者或戏剧爱好者看来，这是不可避免的、不可分割的一部分。他们的第一次见面只有在故事转移到舞台上时才会出现。 ² [第341页结束]

一些评论家指出了这两集之间的相似之处。詹姆斯·N·洛林 (James N. Loehlin) 在其 2016 年出版的《浮士德博士》手册中指出，“‘再次赐予我灵魂’这句话。 。 。莎士比亚在写《罗密欧与朱丽叶》的第一次会面时似乎就记住了这一点”，而在 2011 年一篇关于莎士比亚使用交叉的文章中，马修·拉米雷斯 (Matthew Ramirez) 表示，浮士德的演讲提供了“莎士比亚后来借用并重新配置为一个相当不同的术语”。戏剧性的情况。” ³然而，在有关马洛对莎士比亚的影响的更实质性的批判性讨论中（本文稍后进行了调查），它通常被忽略，而《雅顿第二辑》、《雅顿第三辑》、《牛津世界经典》和《罗密欧与朱丽叶》新剑桥版的编辑们则通常忽略了这一点。 ，他强调了许多马洛夫的相似之处，省略了这一点。 ⁴可能很重要的是，洛林和拉米雷斯都特别关心这两部剧在表演中的表现，这也许让他们对文字和手势之间的相互作用特别警惕。然而，洛林和拉米雷斯都没有将莎士比亚与马洛的关系作为主要关注点，这意味着在这两种情况下，对两个场景之间的相似性的讨论都很简短，没有对其更广泛的含义进行真正的分析。

当前的文章试图做两件事。首先，它认为罗密欧与朱丽叶之间的初次相遇并不是一个孤立的模仿时刻，而是莎士比亚戏剧中一种更广泛的倾向的典型，即重写为《浮士德博士》中与精神越轨或恐怖相关的情色时刻。识别这种趋势可以帮助我们深入了解莎士比亚的创作过程以及马洛在他作为悲剧作家的发展过程中的地位。其次，本文提出了更具推测性的建议，即莎士比亚之所以认为马洛的悲剧道德剧素材适合改写为注定爱情的悲剧，是因为这些剧目都关注偶像崇拜的主题，以及相关的价值问题。然而，当马洛表现出他的主人公犯下了一系列偶像崇拜和灾难性的错误评价时，莎士比亚以极其矛盾的方式挪用了马洛的术语，使他的恋人远离偶像崇拜的概念，同时利用了其亵渎的能量。罗密欧与朱丽叶以一种既感人、挑衅又危险的方式创造了自己的价值观，帮助……