When one tries to write anything about Doctor Faustus, one is inevitably confronted by that monster with three heads, as J. B. Steane puts it,-the problems of date, authorship and text. Consequently most essays on the play are concerned with its theme of damnation, either as a theological problem or as a moral issue. Certainly the play is about a man who is damned through his moral choice, and tends to invite due arguements. But Doctur Faustus is a drama, more than anything else, to be performed on the stage. And as such Doctor Faustus has a lot in common with the moralities. No doubt Marlowe has deliberately made use of the techniques used in morality plays in dramatizing the English Faust Book, but in some important points this play shows radical differences. One is the sense of detachment that arises from noticing the irony which the play presents in almost all of its critical situations. Another is the multiple functions which the apparently simple allegorical characters perform in the play. In this paper some of the notable functions of these minor characters are discussed as an integral part of the play. Supernatural characters such as the Old Man and Lucifer are fairly simple in their import in the play. But Mephostophilis and the Angels deserve careful attention. The functions of the former can be summarized as (1) a supernatural, external being, a symbol of hell whose constant presence ominously reminds us of the doom of the hero even in the moments of his glory; (2) a psychological existence which is brought out by Faustus' blasphemous desire, and implies that the fall of the hero is the result, not of temptation, but of his free choice; (3) a dramatic reality with an individuality acquired in the context of the play by expressing his own emotion as a sufferer of alienation from grace; (4) a machine which, by giving Faustus the power of working wonders and thus helping the play to move on, serves as a magnifying glass, so to speak, to make us see not only the gap between Faustus' original designs and the actual trivialities but also the insurmountable limits of man, flashing back to the significance of his initial moral choice. The Angels share (1) and (2) of Mephostophilis' functions. They are not only the symbols of 'good' and 'bad'; they are the projection of Faustus' inner struggle. Besides, they serve as a chorus when they appear for the last time (B text), underlining and commenting on the state of the hero. As is seen from the fact that this play begins with Faustus contemplating, alone in his study, on the fields of learning, and ends with the hero found dead in the same study, the play concentrates on the spiritual problems of this one main character. In fact it is a tragic satire on man's contradictory state of existence: it is in his very nature to aspire to infinity, while he is precluded from attaining it. It is only by relying on complex functions of minor characters that a playwright can give a dramatic representation of such abstract subjects as man's aspiration growing into hubris and the antinomy of his state of existence leading him to destruction.

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In Shakespeare's sonnet 146, the poet, using the conventional means of distinguishing between soul and body, addresses his "poore soule" and tries to wake it up ("Then soule live thou upon thy servants losse .../Within be fed, without be rich no more"). We may say that this sonnet arises from the 'story' behind The Sonnets, even though it seems to have no direct relationship with it. For some reason he has to say, "Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth/Painting thy outward walls so costlie gay?" (Italics mine) These lines are adapted from the Biblical passage in Matthew 23:27, (according to The Bishops' Bible)" Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, for yee are like unto painted (AV whited) sepulchres, which indeed appeare beautiful outward, but are within ful of dead mens bones, and of all filthinesse (AV uncleanness)." Shakespeare blames his soul emphatically by introducing Christ's denunciation of hypocrisy in his verse. Although sonnet 146 consists in the process of such self-criticism and tragically determined resolution, it is free from any curse upon the body which is found in sonnet 129. The first two quatrains consist of four interrogative sentences and each sentence is shortened one by one (the first is four lines long, the second two, the third one and a half, and the fourth half). At first the poet reasons fully and lastly asks a pointblank question somewhat ironically. The third quatrain is in the imperative mood. Its style is plain, forthright and proverbial and forms an antithesis like "Within be fed, without be rich no more." And Shakespeare concludes the poetic doctrine of 'salvation without the Saviour' by remarking in the last couplet "So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,/And death once dead, ther's no more dying then." Sir Walter Ralegh's "The Lie" is another example of the poetry of resolution based on the Platonic principle. The determination and self-persuastion in the first and last stanzas make the cynical and radical cry of the main part of this poem sound pathetic and real. Moreover, "Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:/What ever fades, but fading pleasure brings," the third and fourth lines of Sir Philip Sidney's Plantonic poem, beginning with "Leave me o Love," are also the expression of the poet who determines to live afresh. (We may point to the verbal similarity between Sidney's poem and Shakespeare's sonnet 146.) Fulke Greville and John Donne write extraordinary poems of determination based on Christian-Platonic doctrine. The poetic elevation generated by the Neoplatonic idea in Milton's early peoms is seen in one of his great epic. Compare "the deep trnsported mind may soare/Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav'ns dore/Look in ...' in "At a Vacation Exercise in the College" with "my adventrous Song,/That with no middle flight intends to soar/Above th' Aonian Mount ..." in Paradise Lost. The latter shows his literary ambition-the writing of the Christianized epic-and is, as is shown, based on the youthful passion for Platonism apparent in the former. A common theme of the antithesis between soul and body was, in short, brought to life by the poetic structure of determination. On the other hand, by Milton and even a poet like Marvell the same poetry of aspiration was written with their variation.

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In a lecture delivered in 1961, "To Criticize the Critic," T. S. Eliot devides his own critical writing roughly into three periods, and says that the first one is of The Egoist, when the influence of Ezra Pound may be detected in references to Remy de Gourmont. And in his article, "Studies in Contemporary Criticism I," published in the Oct. 1918 number of that remarkable monthly, we find him expressing his idea of style and giving a footnote that says, 'All this matter of the cliche and the metaphor has been much more ably put in Remy de Gourmont's Probleme du style (1900). Eliot's idea of style revealed there and in his critical essays collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), such as "The Perfect Critic" and "Philip Massinger," is similar to Gourmont's in the book recommended and in his other critical essays about 1900. Remy de Gourmont Selected Writings translated and edited, with an introduction, by Glenn S. Burne (1966), author of Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas and Influence in England and America (1963) is a useful book for us to consider how Eliot owes to and differs from Gourmont. With this selection and The Sacred Wood in hand, we are allowed to make observations on the critical consciousness in both critics of the problem of personality, of which they are compelled to speak when dealing with the significance of originality in style. After the close reading of the two books as our main texts, we may say that the young critic has accepted from the elder one almost all his requisites to style and originality, and that he has developed them into his own impersonal theory of poetry manifested in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). We can suppose this development in him largely because of his great regard for 'feeling,' which we find in his thesis written in 1916, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and his two articles in the Oct. 1916 number of The Monist. These philosophycal writings suggest that the word 'feeling' employed frequently in The Sacred Wood should have a meaning approximate, at times, to the one that the same word has in the philosophy of Bradley. But Eliot on 'feeling' and 'emotion' remains so close to Gourmont on 'sentiment' and 'sensation,' that he says in admiration, 'Of all modern critics, perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of Aristotle.' What Eliot means by 'the general intelligence' will be explained by the way he, with special regard to the problem of 'feeling,' holds in high estimation the standpoint of Aristotle in De Anima.

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The creative process of S. T. Coleridge's Kubla Khan is not after all an extremely unusual one, because it dramatically exemplifies arbitrariness involved in the creative process of poems in general: it was spontaneous without any scrutiny on the part of the poet; and it was torn short, irrespective of the poet's original scheme, by an intruder, this time, a visitor from Porlock. The element of arbitrariness in the process is well demonstrated by the Japanese medieval song sequence, 'renga' in that each song was composed by each participant extemporaneously to be incorporated harmoniously into one whole body of a song sequence, highly depending upon the flowing atmosphere created by the participants. There each individual poet had to contribute one song each time, so to speak, surrendering a great part of his own poetic emotion to the main stream of others' mutually-affecting and mutually-affected emotions. The only type of English poetry comparable to this would be the traditional ballads in that individuals particpating in the communal creation had to collaborate, often undergoing arbitrary orientation and composition imposed by others. But the presence of collaborators in the creative process is not the only arbitrary factor; poetic prosody and even the language itself are after all embodiments of other people's presence or an accumulation of other people's consensus. This arbitrariness, which seems to wither individual's poetic flourish, however, is actually a necessity for poetic composition, or a clue by which the preverbal and amorphous poetic chaos is crystallized into a cosmos. One negative example is shown in the modern Japanese 'free verse' poem whose composition Japanese poets generally do not find free but haphazard and awkward, simply because, I think, it is free from 'arbitrary' prosody. Lack of prosody in it necessitates Japanese poets to compose lines on the basis of a contextual meaning or of a logical development of images. On the other hand, those poets, English or American, who impart their creative process, candidly and proudly tell that they make the best use of a word-finding 'game' to comply with the rules of rhyme and alliteration, etc. In other words, they willingly surrender themselves to the arbitrariness of word sounds, often at the expense of part of the contextual stream or of a logical growth of poems, only to achieve a glamourous, unexpected poetic creation. From the view-point of arbitrariness of word sounds, many poems can be more fully appreciated. I have chosen a soliloquy of Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, II, i, 10-34 where he justifies his decision to kill the 'tyrant,' to indicate 'ladder,' the central image of the latter half of the soliloquy was whimsically thought of simply as a rhyming word with 'adder,' which is the key word of the first image. I have also cited a poem by Emily Dickinson beginning with the line 'I can wade Grief,' in which the first line of the second stanza was begun, I think, with no definite idea concerning 'power' on the part of the poetess but was developed into a superb achievement of poetry entirely on the basis of sound association of [p] which had already been predominant in the first stanza. It seems to me that the development of a poetic embryo into poetic lines, the crystallization of a poetic chaos into a cosmos, is executed by means of free associations within the confines of prosody. And the illogicality of sound associations or the arbitrariness of language as a sound system turns out to be of great value in forging new combinations out of seemingly incompatible contexts.

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