ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews· 2026Q1
“Homo, Fuge” And Faustus’s Refusal to Read
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- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus dramatizes Faustus's willful misreading of the blood-written command “Homo, fuge” (Man, flee), transforming the imperative into a self-affirming refusal to escape.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Faustus deliberately misreads the blood-written command "Homo, fuge" (Man, flee).
- He transforms the imperative "flee" into a question about where to flee.
- Faustus replaces the general addressee "Man" with his own name, "Faustus."
- This scene illustrates Faustus's active choice to confirm his identity by recasting warnings.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This article argues that the blood-written command “Homo, fuge” condenses a pattern of willful misreading in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The English Faust Book reports the warning and Faustus’s persistence, but Marlowe dramatizes the interval between them. Faustus turns the imperative “flee” into the question “Whither should I fly?” and then replaces the human addressee named by homo with the self-authored figure “Faustus,” who “shall not” flee. Read alongside his truncated use of Scripture and his dismissal of Mephistophilis’s testimony, the scene shows that Faustus is neither uninformed nor unable to read. He repeatedly recasts intelligible warnings so that they confirm the identity he has chosen.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Classics
ClassicsArts and Humanities