I was extremely interested in Turner's detailed explorations into the men of the School of Night, particularly in Marlowe's place and influence among them. It seems as if Marlowe's work perfectly encapsulated the spirit of these men, men who strove to surpass the limiting shackles of religion and politics that permeated their spheres of influence. His character, Faustus, is one whose vice was his need to know all, his need to rise above the extent of human knowledge and learn things man had never conceived of. This trait seemed to be shared by the School of Night, for it's members all appear to have pushed the boundaries of knowledge in their time as far as they could. It was Faustus' drive to know all that led to his downfall, and, it seems, this trait also led many member of the School of Night to the tower or scaffold.
There is a passage in Dr. Faustus that captures this drive perfectly;
Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague,
And thousand desperate maladies been cur’d?
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Faustus is an accomplished man in any sense of the word before his pact with Mephistopheles is made, yet he is still confined by his humanity, he is "still Faustus, and a man," and longs to be more. He yearns for a new world from the perceived nothingness ( or insignificance) of what is known, and this urge is an echoing of what the members of the School of Night felt. As Turner words it, far better then I ever could, their own Faustinian urge was, "to claim from the wilderness of the void, "clean from sight of land," a new world." It is in this new world that Shakespeare stakes his claim, and through his art, managed to push aside his own boundaries of humanity and claimed, from the wilderness of the void, eternity.
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