Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Background

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on german stories about the title character Faust. It was written sometime between 1589 and 1592 and may have been performed between 1592 and Marlowe's death in 1593. Two different versions of the play were published in the Jacobean era, several years later. 

Doctor Faustus is based on an older tale.  It is believed to be the first dramatization of the Faust legend. Some scholars believe that Marlowe developed the story from a popular 1592 translation, commonly called The English Faust Book. There is thought to have been an earlier, lost German edition of 1587, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, which itself may have been influenced by even earlier, equally ill-preserved pamphlets in Latin (such as those that likely inspired Jacob Bidermann's treatment of the damnation of the doctor of Paris, Cenodoxus (1602)).

The play is in blank verse and prose in thirteen scenes (1604) or twenty scenes (1616). Blank verse is largely reserved for the main scenes while prose is used in the comic scenes. Modern texts divide the play into five acts; act 5 being the shortest. As in many Elizabethan plays, there is a chorus (which functions as a narrator), that does not interact with the other characters but rather provides an introduction and conclusion to the play and, at the beginning of some Acts, introduces events that have unfolded. Along with its history and language style, scholars have critiqued and analyzed the structure of the play. Leonard H. Frey wrote a document entitled In the Opening and Close of Doctor Faustus, which mainly focuses on Faustus's opening and closing soliloquies. He stresses the importance of the soliloquies in the play, saying: "the soliloquy, perhaps more than any other dramatic device, involved the audience in an imaginative concern with the happenings on stage". [21] By having Doctor Faustus deliver these soliloquies at the beginning and end of the play, the focus is drawn to his inner thoughts and feelings about succumbing to the devil. The soliloquies also have parallel concepts. In the introductory soliloquy, Faustus begins by pondering the fate of his life and what he wants his career to be. He ends his soliloquy with the solution and decision to give his soul to the devil. Similarly in the closing soliloquy, Faustus begins pondering and finally comes to terms with the fate he created for himself. Frey also explains: "The whole pattern of this final soliloquy is thus a grim parody of the opening one, where the decision is reached after, not prior to, the survey".

About Writer

Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was one of the most famous Elizabethan playwrights and based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine they consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptized in the same year as Marlowe and later became the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical notoriety for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his catering to the taste of his Elizabethan audiences for generous displays of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.

Christopher Marlowe was born to Canterbury shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Katherine, daughter of William Arthur of Dover. He was baptized on 26 February 1564 at St. George's Church, Canterbury. At the age of 14, Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury on scholarship  and two years later Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he also studied on scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584. In 1587, the university hesitated to award his Master of Arts degree because of a rumor that he intended to go to the English seminary at Rheims in northern France, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. If true, such an action on his part would have been a direct violation of the royal edict issued by Queen Elizabeth I in 1585 criminalizing any attempt by an English citizen to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

Six dramas have been attributed to the authorship of Christopher Marlowe either alone or in collaboration with other writers, with varying degrees of evidence. The writing sequence or chronology of these plays is mostly unknown and is offered here with any dates and evidence known. Among the little available information we have, Dido is believed to be the first Marlowe play performed, while it was Tamburlaine that was first to be performed on a regular commercial stage in London in 1587. Believed by many scholars to be Marlowe's greatest success, Tamburlaine was the first English play written in blank verse and, with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is generally considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre. His Works are

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1585–1587

Tamburlaine; Part I ( 1587), Part II (c. 1587–1588

The Jew of Malta (1589–1590)

Doctor Faustus (1588–1592)

The Massacre at Paris  

Marlowe is alleged to have been a government spy. Park Honan and Charles Nicholl speculate that this was the case and suggest that Marlowe's recruitment took place when he was at Cambridge. In 1587, when the Privy Council ordered the University of Cambridge to award Marlowe his degree as Master of Arts, it denied rumors that he intended to go to the English Catholic college in Rheims, saying instead that he had been engaged in unspecified "affairs" on "matters touching the benefit of his country". Surviving college records from the period also indicate that in the academic year 1584–1585, Marlowe had had a series of unusually lengthy absences from the university which violated university regulations. Surviving college buttery accounts, which record student purchases for personal provisions show that Marlowe began spending lavishly on food and drink during the periods he was in attendance; the amount was more than he could have afforded on his known scholarship income.  Marlowe was reputed to be an atheist, which held the dangerous implication of being an enemy of God and the state, by association. With the rise of public fears concerning The School of Night, or "School of Atheism" in the late 16th century, accusations of atheism were closely associated with disloyalty to the Protestant monarchy of England.

Marlowe is believed to have been homosexual. Some scholars argue that the identification of an Elizabethan as gay or homosexual in a modern sense is "anachronistic," claiming that for the Elizabethans the terms were more likely to have been applied to sexual acts rather than to what we understand to be exclusive sexual orientations and identities. Other scholars argue that the evidence is inconclusive and that the reports of Marlowe's homosexuality maybe rumors produced after his death. Richard Baines reported Marlowe as saying: "All they that love, not Tobacco & Boies were fools". David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen describes Baines's evidence as "unreliable testimony" and "These and other testimonials need to be discounted for their exaggeration and for their having been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witchhunt". 

In early May 1593, several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel", written in rhymed iambic pentameter, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed, "Tamburlaine".  On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested, his lodgings were searched and a three-page fragment of a heretical tract was found. In a letter to Sir John Puckering, Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been writing "in one chamber" some two years earlier. In a second letter, Kyd described Marlowe as blasphemous, disorderly, holding treasonous opinions, being an irreligious reprobate, and "intemperate & of a cruel heart". [91] They had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A warrant for Marlowe's arrest was issued on 18 May, when the Privy Council apparently knew that he might be found staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580s and a man more deeply involved in state Sexuality Arrest and death Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford. This modern plaque is on the east wall of the churchyard. Title page to the 1598 edition of Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres, which contains one of the earliest descriptions of Marlowe's death. espionage than any other member of the Privy Council.  Marlowe duly presented himself on 20 May but there apparently being no Privy Council meeting on that day was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary". On Wednesday, 30 May, Marlowe was killed. 

Various accounts of Marlowe's death was current over the next few years. In his Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for his "epicurism and atheism"

Others have come up with a variety of murder theories. 

1. Jealous of her husband Thomas's relationship with Marlowe, Audrey Walsingham arranged for the playwright to be murdered. 
2. Sir Walter Raleigh arranged the murder, fearing that under torture Marlowe might incriminate him.
3. With Skeres the main player, the murder resulted from attempts by the Earl of Essex to use Marlowe to incriminate Sir Walter Raleigh. 
4. He was killed on the orders of father and son Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, who thought that his plays contained Catholic propaganda.
5. He was accidentally killed while Frizer and Skeres were pressuring him to pay back the money he owed them.
6. Marlowe was murdered at the behest of several members of the Privy Council who feared that he might reveal them to be atheists.
7. The Queen ordered his assassination because of his subversive atheistic behavior. 
8. Frizer murdered him because he envied Marlowe's close relationship with his master Thomas Walsingham and feared the effect that Marlowe's behavior might have on Walsingham's reputation. Marlowe's death was faked to save him from trial and execution for subversive atheism. 

Since there are only written documents on which to base any conclusions and since it is probable that the most crucial information about his death was never committed to paper, it is unlikely that the full circumstances of Marlowe's death will ever be known

For his contemporaries in the literary world, Marlowe was above all an admired and influential artist. Within weeks of his death, George Peele remembered him as "Marley, the Muses' darling"; Michael Drayton noted that he "Had in him those brave translunary things / That the first poets had" and Ben Jonson wrote of "Marlowe's mighty line". Thomas Nashe wrote warmly of his friend, "poor deceased Kit Marlowe," as did the publisher Edward Blount in his dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham. Among the few contemporary dramatists to say anything negative about Marlowe was the anonymous author of the Cambridge University play The Return from Parnassus (1598) who wrote, "Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, / Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell". The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander ("Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, 'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?' ") but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room". [118] This appears to be a reference to Marlowe's murder which involved a fight over the "reckoning", the bill, as well as to a line in Marlowe's Jew of Malta; "Infinite riches in a little room".Shakespeare was much influenced by Marlowe in his work, as can be seen in the use of Marlovian themes in Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II and Macbeth (Dido, Jew of Malta, Edward II and Doctor Faustus, respectively). In Hamlet, after meeting with the traveling actors, Hamlet requests the Player perform a speech about the Trojan War, which at 2.2.429–32 has an echo of Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage. In Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare brings on a character "Marcade" (three syllables) in conscious acknowledgment of Marlowe's character "Mercury", also attending the King of Navarre, in Massacre at Paris. The significance, to those of Shakespeare's audience who were familiar with Hero and Leander was Marlowe's identification of himself with the god Mercury

Characters

1. Doctor Faustus
2. Chorus
3. Wagner
4. Good Angel
5. Bad Angel
6. Valdes
7. Cornelius
8. Three scholars
9. Lucifer
10. Mephistophilis
11. Robin
12. Belzebub
13. Seven Deadly Sins
14. Pope Adrian VI
15. Raymond, King of Hungary
16. Bruno
17. Two Cardinals
18. Archbishop of Rheims
19. Friars
20. Vintner
21. Martino
22. Frederick
23. Benvolio
24. Charles V
25. Duke of Saxony
26. Two soldiers
27. Horse courser
28. Carter
29. The hostess of a tavern
30. Duke and Duchess of Vanholt
31. Servant
32. Old man

Summary

Dr. Faustus a German Scholar developed with the limits of traditional knowledge of logic, law, religion, and medicine. He decided to learn and practice magic. His friend's Valves and Cornelious instruct him in the black arts and he started a new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Mephastophilis warned him about the consequences of the horrors of hell.

Important Questions & Answers

Question No 1- Why Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe to be considered as Miracle Play?

Christopher Marlowe is considered one of the greatest dramatists of the medieval period. His career as a dramatist must have begun soon after his career as an actor. Marlowe has been undoubtedly called the most prominent figure of the great Elizabethan period. It was Marlowe who raised the matter and manner of the English drama to a high level. Some of the characteristics of medieval miracle & morality plays are quite evident in the plays of Marlowe. He may be considered a connecting link between the miracle &morality plays comprising of mystery, miracle, and morality. What we understand with the term Miracle? It is an unbelievable incident that happens from extraordinary religious persons who have extra positive powers. Miracle Play is a Medieval drama portraying events in the lives of Saints and Martyrs. It based on a biblical story of the life of religious persons. The mystery is from “Mysterium” and its meaning is a craft, a play performed by craft guilds is called mystery plays. Miracle plays known as saint’s plays also. They specially re-enacted miraculous interventions by the Saints, particularly St.Nicholas or St.Mary, into the lives of ordinary people rather than biblical events. The mystery is from “Mysterium” and its meaning is a craft, a play performed by craft guilds is called mystery plays. The term Miracle is definitely associated by Matthew Paris (English Chroniclers) and FitzStephen with Saints’ Plays, its use was quickly extended to Mysteries, or Bible Plays, which in England soon eclipsed the Miracles. The Heroes of the Old and New Testamentsappealed more strongly to the national taste in Engla nd, and so it came about that the Saints’ plays were early allowed to lapse. The early authors of Miracles and Mysteries were Anglo-Normans, and we assume them to have been clerics. Their authorities, the canonical and apocryphal Scriptures, were not accessible to laymen, and in the age of constant strife, the church was the only assurance of leisure and learned hours. What began as a religious performance by the clergy extended itself to include lay performers. As the performances gradually became buoyant during the festivals, the clergy came to be excluded from participating in such joyous celebrations. Tlie exclusion of clergy entailed the relaxation of cht~rcli control over such performances, leading to the secular growth of, what is essential, a Christian drama. This religious ~radition of the theatre became popular in England by the fourteenth century as Mystery and Miracle plays, the former dealing with biblical stories and the' latter with the lives of the Christian saints. In course of time, cycles of plays evolved presenting various stories but with a singular theme. Tliougli composed by the clergy, with a certain secular disposition, in iambic verse, the theatrical organization well into the Islands of social and trade guilds associated like York, Chester, Coventry, Wakefield and Lincoln. These cycles, largely bereft of any lasting literary value, facilitated the replacement of Latin by the vernacular media of religion, the shift of theatrical activity from cathedrals to open pi~blic places, arid in the theatrical experience, a change from a sense of religious solemnity to the pursuit of popular taste. A significant development for the later Elizabethan drama with the mixing up of the solemn religious practices with the comic frivolities inherent in day to clay life.

Question No 2- Why Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe to be considered as Morality Play?

The morality play in the form of the play flourished in the fifteenth century. Its general themes revolved around the struggle between good and evil for the salvation of the human spirit. The style of moral play was usually metaphorical or allegorical, the actors embody the qualities of some personalities such as virtue, vice, riches, poverty, knowledge, ignorance, beauty, and the seven deadly sins. The play was about a figurative character sometimes called human beings or humanity. 

The character represented the common people and their lives. The human's enemy was usually the vice character, which sometimes appeared in the form of a demon or under other names. Often, the vice was a comic character with many tricks and deception. But in spite of this comedic aspect of the vice character, it was representing a human being who is so stupid as the vice deceives him. Morality plays are performed by professional actors. More defines the morality play as a kind of symbolism in a dramatic shape, prevalent at the end of medieval as well as the beginning of the Renaissance age. The hero, as all human beings, is surrounded by the embodiment of virtues, vices, angels, demons, and death, i.e. all good and evil powers, who are struggling to possess the hero's spirit. The major protagonist in this type of play is not an individual as a character. He often owns a name that sets him apart from others in the same play. Yet, this name is not personal. The reader typically does not know anything concerning his communal or societal condition, tendencies, or personality. The mere thing which is clear here is that the protagonist stands for the whole Christians. The chief protagonist should face various powers embodied by figurative characters. Figurative characters represent different ethical issues. They are fighting for the protagonist's spirit. The combat for possessing man's spirit is possibly considered the key theme and notion of morality play. Usually, the chief protagonist lives in virtue and purity and then evil powers lead him to temptation, whereas good powers attempt to direct him towards the holy course. This conflict results in the protagonist's fall. The significant side of the morality play is the protagonist's repentance, i.e. a situation where the protagonist regrets his erroneous behavior, which is regarded as an essential event. God or other good powers often substitute or replace the protagonist and his forgiveness . Another significant side of the morality play plot is the existence of elements of comedy. By 16th century, a number of morality plays recognized a great deal of sober and realistic material to make them start the convention of English comedy. The purposes of comedian and funny scenes in the dramas that dealt with crucial ethical and religious questions may take them in various ways. Perhaps, they were to predict the upcoming incidents or address temporal segments. Furthermore, they are imaginable to be a satire and a distortion of the central plot. The morality play was assumed to bear a moral finale, concerning the conventional laws and regulations of good and evil conduct at that period. The objective of such play was centered on teaching and edifying some moral and ethical lessons such as religious compliance to the peoples. The play can be largely called a morality play. By selling his soul to the devil, Faustus lives a blasphemous life full of sterile and sensual pleasures for only 24 years. He insults the Pope with the Holy Fathers of Rome. There is a sharp conflict in his soul between his ambition and conscience, between the good angel and the evil angel who breaks out of this internal struggle. Yet, at the end Faustus yields to the temptations of Evil angel, thus paving the way of eternal curse . As the last hour approaches, Faustus realizes, with the utmost pain and horror, that his sins cannot be ignored and nothing can save him from eternal curse. Before the demons grab his soul into the burning hell, the scourges of the very tormented soul find the most effective expression in his last soliloquy "My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!.....". The main goal of the morality play was educational ethics. It was a dramatic guide to Christian life and Christian death. Whoever ignores the path of virtue and renounces faith in God and Christ is destined to despair and eternal curse. This is the message of Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus", too. The most palpable expression has been found in the sad choir in the final lines (Bevington, 1998: 50). In moral plays, abstract figures of vices or virtues were embodied. Thus in Dr. Faustus, we also find the good angel and the evil angel, the first symbolizing the path of virtue and the last of sin and curse. Then, the old man symbolizes the forces of righteousness and morality. The comic scenes of Dr. Faustus belong to the tradition of miraculous plays and ancient morals, especially the first scene of the third chapter, where we found Faustus playing despicable tricks on the Pope and the fourth scene of the fourth act, where the entire horse player was overwhelmed by shock and deceived by Faustus. These are the characteristics taken to prove that Dr. Faustus is a morality play with the justification of humbleness, belief and compliance to the law of God. In the first act, Faustus had the opportunity to inquire from Mephostophilis about everything he wanted to have information about such as hell. At the moment the play begins, he has no fear of death and tells Mephostophilis afterwards that he thinks hell fable. We may assume too that he thinks the solitary place we go to post death is paradise. At the end, it is believed that paradise and hell exist and that one may be and stay there forever. Faustus can also be considered an atheist because during some acts he denies the existence of God and believes that the religion is a fake rite, so he says to God that he wants to weep but his tears are depleted by the devil. As he, at last, asks for mercy and wishes to repent to his creator, he is forbidden and obliged to be eternally in hell. In this play, we are familiarized with Faustus' sacred beliefs and in what way they are related to cultural studies. The play was made during the era of Shakespeare and what was known about heaven and hell might differ from what we think today.

Question No 3- Critically Analyze Dr. Faustus as a Renaissance Hero

Question No 4- Comment on Dr Faustus as Tragic Hero 

Dr Faustus was very ameitus and optimistic about himself. Faustus comments that he has mastered every subject he has studied. He depreciates Logic as merely being a tool for arguing; Medicine as being unvalued unless it allowed raising the dead and immortality; Law as being mercenary and beneath him; and Divinity as useless because he feels that all humans commit sin, and thus to have sins punishable by death complicates the logic of Divinity. Faustus instructs his servant Wagner to summon Valdes and Cornelius, a famous witchcrafter and a famous magician, respectively. Two angels, called the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, appear to Faustus and dispense their own perspectives of his interest in magic and necromancy. Though Faustus seems momentarily dissuaded, he is apparently won over by the Bad Angel, proclaiming, "How am I glutted with conceit of this" ("conceit" meaning the possibilities magic offers to him). Valdes and Cornnelius declare that if Faustus devotes himself to magic, great things are indeed possible with someone of Faustus' learning and intelligence. Faustus' absence is noted by two scholars who are less accomplished than Faustus himself. They request that Wagner reveal Faustus' present location, a request which Wagner at first haughtily denies, then bombastically reveals. The two scholars worry about Faustus being corrupted by the art of Magic and leave to inform the rector of the university. That night, Faustus begins his attempt to summon a devil in the presence of Lucifer and other devils (although Faustus is unaware of their presence). After he creates a magic circle and speaks an incantation through which he revokes his baptism, a demon (a representative of the devil himself) named Mephistophilis appears before him, but Faustus is unable to tolerate the hideous looks of the demon and commands it to change its appearance. Faustus, seeing the obedience of the demon in changing its form, takes pride in his skill. He tries to bind the demon to his service, but is unable to because Mephistophilis already serves Lucifer, who is also called the Prince of Devils. Mephistophilis also reveals that it was not Faustus' power that summoned him but rather his abjuration of scriptures that results in the Devil coming in the hope of claiming Faustus' soul. Mephistophilis introduces the history of Lucifer and the other devils while indirectly telling Faustus that Hell has no circumference nor limit and is more of a state of mind than a physical location. Faustus' inquiries into the nature of hell lead to Mephistophilis saying: "Oh, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, which strikes a terror to my fainting soul".

Dr Faustus was very optimistic about himslef. We have seen horrible ending of his life when he has choosen go to hell following his killing by Lucifer. He is considered as a tragic hero.  A tragic hero is an individual who evokes people’s pity as well as their terror because he has both good and bad characteristics. The first instance, which portrays Dr. Faustus as a tragic hero is that he evokes the listeners and the readers’ pity. It creates some form of connection between the audience and the character. Before joining Lucifer, he was working as a normal individual doing his studies in law, medicine, and theology. 

The mistakes that he does are just the same as those that any other person can make. Like any other normal human being, he is optimistic and ambitious in life aspiring to gain more knowledge. As human beings, people sympathize with the doctor because he had made the wrong decision in life by choosing Lucifer instead of God. 

Therefore, people wish that he finds the truth and accepts to repent his sins and come back to God. His fate is dreadful and hence the people’s pity for him. At the end of the play, he is destined to lose his life and taken to hell because of his decisions that they made. Even though Faustus has committed many evils, people pity him and want God to forgive him rather than being so fierce to him. 

Therefore, the tragic hero character is manifested at the end of the play where Faustus pleads with God to forgive him and liberate him from the hand of the devil. He says, “My God, my God, look not so fierce on me . The fact that Faustus is a scholar is stated twice, first, in the opening and then at the end of the play. This clue demonstrates the scholar as a tragic hero for the readers and the audiences to sympathize with him throughout the play. For instance, at the beginning of the play, Faustus is a person who is prosperous and well known. 

His reputation is known as a well-respected professional. For instance, he presents his speech to students and servants in different areas of scholarships. This demonstrates his level of intellect. For example, he says,” philosophy is odious and obscure, both law and physics are for petty wits”. Furthermore, in the closing line of the play, his colleagues lament about their fallen hero and scholar. Get your 100% original paper on any topic done in as little as 3 hours Learn More This lamentation and sorrow show how they lost an individual that had a positive impact on their life’s and the careers of many students. 

They lament,” yet for he was a scholar once admired, for wondrous knowledge in our German schools” (Marlowe Act 5 Scene III Line 18). This happens even after Mephistopheles had made efforts to warn him that his soul was to be damned. Again, this depicts him as a tragic hero rather than a misguided sinner. Tragic hero character is also manifested in Dr. Faustus’ mistaken choice. He decided to exchange his soul with knowledge from Lucifer. This choice is what makes him die. It leads him to downfall. The agreement blinds him. Therefore, he is not able to choose what is wrong or right. For instance, when approached by the good angels, he is blinded and thus goes into the ways of the devil. This decision brings agony to his life when he is taken away by the devil after the elapse of the twenty-four years that they had agreed. He says, “shall I make spirits fetch me what I please…” “I will make my servile spirits to invent”.  

This quest to know more is evident in the first Act where he says that, even though he is skillful in sciences, he still wants to know more. The desire of most human beings usually is to learn and acquire skills and knowledge to the maximum level. However, Faustus desires make him choose wrong ways without feeling guilty, which is depictive of a tragic hero rather than a misguided sinner. He is hasty in his ambitions for honor and power, which makes him rush in the decision. For instance, he says, “…and chase the Prince of Parma for our land and reign sole in of all the provinces”. The quest and desires for power and honor make him refuse to repent his sins and come backlight. 

He fails to decide between the ways of the Lucifer and the path of God making him end his life tragically as a hero. Faustus tried to achieve his goals deciding something on his own. The heroic behaviors illustrate a manifestation of the Renaissance period where science shadowed most of the lives of people. Therefore, he was aspiring to set free of fate and decide his destiny on his own. He makes his own decisions to join Lucifer without anyone compelling him to do so. 

A good illustration of this is when he demands that Mephistopheles goes to inform the devil about his intentions and desires. Mephistopheles is told to, “Go, bear these tidings to great Lucifer, “say he surrenders up to him his soul.” He further says, “So he will spare him for four and twenty years, letting him live in all voluptuousness” (Foster 6). This is the message that Dr. Faustus sent Mephistopheles to tell the Lucifer about his desires and the will of becoming one of his children to be allowed to be his follower. 

Therefore, Dr. Faustus was not the kind of a person that could not live an opportunity, without utilizing it. Therefore, by following the ways of Lucifer, he has contended that he would conquer all and raise his destiny in life. Consequently, he vowed to work for the Lucifer. He, therefore, demonstrates the character of a tragic hero. He was a hero, but because of this decision, he ends up losing his life and even the knowledge and the power and the honor that he looked and aspired to get. Faustus can also be argued to be a misguided sinner in the sense that, he decided to go the ways of Lucifer and yet he knows about the existence of God. It is the work of the devil to mislead him to make him fail to enter heaven. The desires he develops of amassing more knowledge and skills to conquer destiny and to have power are all works of the devil. 

His conscious and the fact that he was knowledgeable, he could have resisted the power of the devil to come into his way and instead stick to his work. However, regardless of this, I contend that I can describe Faustus as a tragic hero. He is devoted to the devil. This devotion hinders him to choose from what is right and wrong and leads to him to his downfall. The drama as presented by Marlowe is optimistic. The character Dr. Faustus is optimistic about life, and this makes him or drives him in the wrong direction. 

Therefore, I can argue that Marlowe teaches Christians how they can build a strong Christian faith and seek salvation. Therefore, a tragic hero is used to depict the downfall of a tragic hero. Dr. Faustus encounters a very stronger tragedy compared to other people or scholars below him. His wrong choices in life make him experience misery after leading a happy life working as a researcher in different fields. It is his error in his judgment, which brings a harrowing ending of his life. 

He decided to go against his fate and decided to follow his own free will by wanting to be the master of his fate. The decision he makes is the basis of his downfall and vanishes. This has been depicted and illustrated by the drama. Hence, I agree that the play has more sufficiently revealed the aspect of a tragic hero than a misguided sinner in Dr. Faustus.

Some Reference of Useful Study Materials Recommended for Further Study

Comment or Give Feedback Here