“Homo, Fuge” And Faustus’s Refusal to Read

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.