For Marlowe, then, Helen is implicated in an economy within which she both represents a notional limit as a singularly superlative beauty and at the same time exceeds that limit, incomparable to any other prize bought for the price of Faustus’ soul. In Dr Faustus, Helen’s excessive beauty is one reward among the powers and pleasures unbounded in scale or scope and limited only by time-the twenty-four years stipulated in the contract with Lucifer-for which Faustus forfeits his soul. The only sense of scale the third scholar can offer is the expansive effort to win her back.

Not even metaphor, the last refuge of that which exceeds ordinary description, can convey beauty that literally “passeth all compare”. No marvel tho the angry Greekes pursude with tenne yeares warre the rape of such a queene, whose heavenly beauty passeth all compare. Too simple is my wit to tell her praise, whom all the world admires for majestie The hyperbolic language of what seems at first to be a scale thus indicates the ultimate incommensurability of the beauty of Helen’s god-like face, a “peareless” beauty that earlier in the same scene prompts a failure of descriptive language (scene 12, lines 16-20): A reader of Homer’s Catalogue of Ships as literal-minded as Thucydides might quantify this beauty precisely in terms of the scale of this effort, deriving the formula 1 face = 1,000 ships.įor Marlowe and the tradition on which he draws, “a thousand” is less a precise quantity than a hyperbolic figure that suggests a number past counting, matching the immeasurable height of towers without tops.

Helen’s extraordinary beauty motivates an equally extraordinary effort to reclaim it once she has been abducted by Paris. Such is Christopher Marlowe’s calculus of Helen’s beauty in Dr Faustus, a scale by which to measure a face that Homer can only compare to divinity.

Was this the face that lancht a thousand shippes? And burnt the toplesse Towres of Ilium?

Marvel the iliad