"The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape." So Hamlet decided in the second act of the eponymous play, meditating upon the reappearance of his father's tormented spirit. Yet whether or not the diabolical lies at the heart of Hamlet, it is certainly present in Christopher Marlowe's earlier play, Doctor Faustus, in which its protagonist bargains away his soul to Lucifer in exchange for 24 years in which he is, supposedly, granted his heart's desires. It is an amusing coincidence that both Hamlet and Faustus are students of the University of Wittenberg, the crucible of Renaissance humanism and intellectual prowess. Put bluntly, their education is not worth it. Both of them act in foolish ways at various points in their respective dramas, and end up paying the price in brutal fashion.
Hamlet has been written about ad nauseam, but Doctor Faustus remains a strange anomaly in the field of drama and literature. Virtually everyone knows the expression "Faustian pact"; as Ed Simon writes early on in Devil's Contract, "There are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil." Simon even cites Jeffrey Burton Russell's edict that "the figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary and the Devil—the single most popular figure in the history of Western Christian culture." This might be going it some, but the idea of gaining forbidden knowledge and pleasures in exchange for parting with your immortal soul is a richly seductive and—indeed—universally tempting idea. So why is Doctor Faustus a play that is barely revived, with few if any extant productions of it?
If Simon had tackled this head-on, Devil's Bargain would have been an extremely engaging book. He has a waspish, at times witty, literary style that often amuses, and if he had taken the history and legacy of Marlowe's drama as his central theme, this could have been a superb meta-theatrical biography, with diabolic leanings. Unfortunately, whether through his own volition or that of his editor's, Simon has instead attempted to expand his thesis into a much wider and less focused account of other examples of Faustian pacts through the ages, beginning with Simon Magus, an obscure figure from the gnostic gospels who was said to have supernatural powers, and concluding nearly two millennia later, with the so-called Faustoscene, or the way in which we have all entered into such diabolic bargains "not in blood, but in silicon," and that we have exchanged the sorcerer's black mirror for similarly smooth and seductive surfaces of mobile phones and computer screens.
Chapter by chapter, Simon is a suitably Mephistophelean guide to the ways in which, historically, our fascination with selling that most elemental part of ourselves—our soul—has been translated into cultural and social capital. There's an engaging vignette on Faust in cinema, which begins with the theft of the deceased German film director F.W. Murnau's head—he directed a 1926 version of Faust that is widely held to be one of the great triumphs of German Expressionism on film—and then goes on to encompass everything from Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby to Robert Eggers's The Witch, via a caustic drive-by on the Al Pacino black comedy Devil's Advocate, of which Simon writes, "[It is] a supposedly serious horror film which reads as an extended lawyer joke." Lawyers, as we all know, are supposed to be experts at contracts. What if the most crucial one you ever sign—whether in blood, silicon, or ink—ends up depriving you not just of financial substance, but your very essence?
Yet the disappointing thing about Devil's Bargain is that, having established its provocative and even disturbing concept, it flits about, sprite-like, without ever settling on a central thesis, other, I suppose, than to suggest that allying yourself with the devil for all eternity has to be viewed as A Bad Thing. There are two strong chapters early on dealing with, respectively, the real-life inspirations for Faustus and then Marlowe's life and career, which gets into the deep lit-crit that a reader would long for, although even here, there are weaknesses. Simon's literary style tends to the aphoristic when he feels most confident, but some might suggest that lines such as "Nothing of genuine treasure is gained, however, without selling your soul, or at least an aspect of it" and "Now the imagined Faust is the real Faust … if you search for him, then he is already here" are less profound insights into the human and literary condition and more the kinds of things you might find in a Hallmark greeting card. If, that is, Hallmark were to be taken over by a group of suspiciously well-funded devil worshippers.
Devil's Bargain is not a long book, but it feels overstretched, even at a brisk 300-odd pages. I am unsure that yet another retread of the 17th-century mania for persecuting eccentric or lonely women as witches, as Simon offers in chapter six, is especially enlightening, and he is notably less fluent and incisive on Goethe's version of the Faustian story than he is on the Marlovian one, taking refuge in clichés such as "Goethe's Faust is a maximalist enterprise, a work containing its own cosmos." At times, I could have done with more straightforward black humor about our own statuses as low-rent Faustus figures, forever signing away our birthright, personal details, and privacy to Big Business for some pathetic little bonus or privilege that will probably fall apart in moments anyway.
Yet for all its faults, Simon's book does at least entertain and divert, and at times it does more than that, too. When Hamlet mused about the seductive qualities of the diabolic, he was echoing what we've all thought at one time or another, and ever since Eve was beguiled by the serpent, the idea of obtaining infinite knowledge and wisdom in exchange for something insubstantial is one that we keep returning to. This may not be a great book, but it's an undeniably zeitgeisty one, and if Simon has sold his own soul to get it published, then he can at least take pride in having struck a fair—if not entirely generous—deal in the process.
Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain
by Ed Simon
Melville House, 312 pp., $28.99
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s Press).