Doing Power with Words

This article examines Doctor Faustus as a text that constructs persuasion and power through the patterning of pragmatic action, in which characters use words to express desire, seduction, fear, and dread; to secure assent; to establish authority; to create obligation; and to exert moral pressure. It employs a taxonomy of speech acts (directives, commissives, expressives, and representatives) and a set of pragmatic parameters (operationalizing interpersonal force, including directness, mitigation/intensification, forms of address, and stance markers) to map recurrent interactional configurations in a focused subset of key episodes involving conjuration, bargaining, pact-making, moral contestation, and the play’s final crisis. Speech act theory and discursive-pragmatic indicators demonstrate not only the type of action performed by an utterance but also how such action becomes persuasive through dramatic interaction. The analysis shows that Faustus’s persuasive authority is built progressively through rising commissives (vows, pledges, and contractual self-binding), coupled with forceful directives and identity-representing acts that constitute self-authorization. Mephistopheles’s influence is less a matter of command than of offers, conditionals, and implicatures that elicit assent while distributing responsibility. Across scenes, changes in mitigation, vocatives, and intensification recalibrate alignment and coercive force, portraying persuasion as a dynamic negotiation of stance rather than a stable rhetorical mode. By recasting the “mighty line” as a system of pragmatic action, this article provides a replicable model for examining the relationship between literary stylistics and discourse pragmatics and demonstrates how persuasive authority is enacted, contested, and ultimately destabilized at the play’s major turning points.