Jennystopheles on Mephistopheles Act II Scene III 29/09/2011

Sorry for the title, I'm all out of inspiration for today's blogging sesh. I'm only going to do one blog for both of Thursday's lessons as they were both focused on the same scene [2.3] .
Today, I'm going to blog about Mephistopheles again, in a kind of gathering-my-thoughts kind of way in preparation for the essay writing we're going to do on Thursday.

It was raised, last Thursday, that the relationship between Faustus and Mephistopheles may have in part a homoerotic tension between them,

(Mephi) "I tell thee, 'tis not hald so fair as thou"

I can see why some people might think this if you take what Mephistopheles says on a literal level. That said, I think he is actually being quite sarcastic and droll with Faustus. Once Faustus has sold his soul to the devil in [2.1] Mephistopheles starts to change the way that he treats Faustus. No longer is he the sympathetic little devil warning Faustus 'oh how horrible' hell is. Instead, he is dry, "Think'st though heaven is such a glorious thing?", and unaccommodating, "Move me not, for I will not tell thee". As a result in this character shift and Mephistopheles perhaps feeling he can actually show his real attitude to Faustus I would say that he is taking the opportunity to mock the stupid man who thought selling his soul was a good thing.

This lead me nicely on to another observation about Mephistopheles. He patronises Faustus because in fact he is smarter than Faustus. The man who claims that his "common talk" is "sound aphorisms"[1.1] must ask Mephistopheles about things he wants greater knowledge of, "But tell me, have they all one motion, both situ et tempore?"[2.3]. Moreoever, Mephistopheles has the power to deny Faustus the knoweledge he craves and knows just how divert Faustus wishes into Mephistopheles' wishes for example exchanging the idea of a wife with the idea of concubines. The language of intelligence, latin, has often been used as evidence to illustrate Faustus' amazing brain power yet Mephistopheles uses the language too, "Per inaequalem motum respectu totius"[2.3] Yet Mephistopheles doesn't use latin to show off as Faustus does, he doesn't use the language flamboyantly in order to make the audience feel belittled in fact his matter of fact use of the language in some sense belittles Faustus for making so much fuss about it. Ultimately, the gist of what I've been trying to get at in this blog post is that whilst Mephistopheles might not be that sweet little devil he was in act one, in scene two it is definitely Mephi who is pulling the strings.