Themes and Style in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
Chapter One
Purpose of study
The aim of this study is to explain the themes and styles employed in the play Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. There exists a detailed study of styles in the text in relation to the themes.
CHAPTER TWO –
LITERATURE REVIEW
INTRODUCTION
In any tragic or serious play, the dramatist always endeavors to give relief to the audience by introducing comic scenes or episodes. The literary term for such comic interludes is known as tragic relief. Tragedy or a serious play is bound to create tension in the mind of the audience; and if this tension is not relaxed from time to time it generates some sort of emotional weakness or lassitude in mind of the audience. Hence, comic interludes are a necessity to ease the tension and refresh the mind of the audience. The chief purpose of the introduction of the comic episodes is to offer a temporary relaxation of tension engendered by the serious scenes. Another point is that there was also a pressing demand from the side of Elizabethan audience for such interludes. Hence, playwrights had to introduce such scenes as the producers also demanded it for a successful run of the play. Then the comic interlude may have an appropriate emotional connection in the development of the tragic play or it may be a formal burlesque of a tragic scenes. The art of tragic relief, especially in its former aspect, found its supreme artistic excellence in the dramas of Shakespeare, and this art of tragic relief was also followed by Marlowe as to achieve the same purpose.
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is recognized as one of the masterpieces of English drama. This play undoubtedly belongs to the tragic play, especially the tragic history of Faustus himself, whose soul is carried off to his eternal damnation by devils at the end of the play. At the beginning of the play, Faustus is seen already at the peak of his worldly career. He is already master of all the existing knowledge and skills. After getting his degree of Doctorate, and studying all the important branches of learning like Philosophy, Physics, Law, and Divinity realizes that he is ‘still but Faustus and a man’. He feels that all are inadequate and none of the subjects can help him to become as powerful ‘on earth, as Jove in the sky’. Faustus’ dream is to gain super-human power, and he would attain this power at any cost even by selling his soul to the Devil. Hence, in the end, Faustus, with his limitless lust for power and pelf, ultimately finds with horror how the flush and glory of his temporary success bring about his doom and eternal damnation.
However, in this play Marlow also presents some comic or farcical episodes which have been much adversely criticized by many critics who claim that the comic elements in the scenes are low and vulgar, full of coarse buffoonery and cannot be accepted as organic parts of the tragic play. But, there are also eminent critics like Swinburne, Clifford Leech, J.C. Maxwell and even T.S. Eliot who asserted that Marlow was not devoid of a highly developed sense of humour and that Marlowe should not be judged by Shakespearean standard in this respect. Marlow had to introduce crude buffoonery as it was a common trend of the Elizabethan dramatists and the demands of the audience in that age.
When one reads The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the interpretations can vary from person to person, like every other text in English Literature. With the passage of time, and the documentation of various works of an era, one begins to analyze the connections between the work, and the societal situation at that point of time. Hence, when one learned of the Renaissance that spread across Europe during the 14th and 15th Century, the text found a new forte of interpretation in itself. Faustus, became the textual embodiment of ‘The Renaissance man’.
The man’s sole purpose in life, is to gain enlightenment, power through wisdom, and to frame his own ‘destiny’. Doctor Faustus is a scholar who in the thirst of knowledge, sells his soul to the ‘Devil’, spirals out of control and falls at the end. A tragedy that is underlined with allegories and raises pertinent questions, Marlowe exercises his lyrical abilities to the best of his power to create a text that opens itself to all interpretation.
RENAISSANCE HUMANISM
A firm element of this text, Renaissance Humanism is the very foundation upon which Faustus’ character stands. ‘The Renaissance man’ was fascinated by new learning and knowledge. He took all knowledge to be his province. He regarded knowledge to be power. He developed an insatiable thirst for further curiosity, knowledge, power, beauty, riches, worldly pleasures and the like. The writer of this age represented their age in their work. Marlowe is the greatest and truest representative of his age. So the Renaissance influence is seen in every one of his plays. Dr. Faustus represents the Renaissance spirit in various ways throughout the trajectory of the text.
“The reward of sin is death? That’s hard.
Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas.
If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.
Why then belike we must sin,
And so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sarà, sarà:
What will be, shall be! Divinity, adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly!”
These lines, spoken by Faustus himself in the very first scene of the first act epitomize what the character stands for. He believed in asking questions, he believed in holding himself before all: Renaissance Humanism. He became the voice of Marlowe, and spoke of all streams of knowledge and how they had failed to satiate his desire for knowledge. His need for knowledge, lied in the power that came with it. The ‘carpe diem’ attitude that is carried by Faustus is another feature of Renaissance ideals, where one is told to exercise his ‘free will’. The purpose of humanism was to create a universal man whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning in society as a complete and self-aware being. This ideology was referred to as the ‘uomo universale’, an ancient Greco-Roman ideal. Education during the Renaissance was mainly composed of ancient literature and history as it was thought that the classics provided moral instruction and an intensive understanding of human behavior.
CHAPTER THREE
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is hardly alone among would-be literary “heroes who passionately seek power” (Greenblatt) at the expense of wisdom and morality. Faustus is indeed “a morally barren scholar who rejects divinity in favor of the seductive power of Lucifer,” but to stop there would be to miss how brilliantly Marlowe’s problematic hero personifies the “tension between a Medieval scholastic mindset, based upon religious faith, and the new Renaissance humanist ethos, based upon the pursuit of secular knowledge” (Duxfield 2). Faust’s famous plea to Mephistopheles, “Resolve me of all ambiguities,/Perform what desperate enterprise I will?” (Marlowe 1.80) is interpreted by Duxfield as the doctor’s quest for his own unification through acquiring “unequivocal knowledge and a unified understanding of the world” (par. 2).
CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
The comic episodes which are part of Faustus’s conjuring tricks, and include his pranks on the Pope and the ‘baldpated’ friars, the planting of a pair of horns on the head of a Knight and the cheating of a greedy horse-dealer, have a moral significance and do not possess any organic plot-wise significance. They throw light on the nature of the tragedy of Faustus who abjures God and the felicity of heaven and sells his soul to the Devil in his foolish bid to become a deity on the earth. But he actually gained degradation and not exaltation out his damnation. The comic episodes underline the fact that Faustus has sunk to the low level of a sordid, fun-loving sorcerer.
The comic scenes involving Wagner and the Clown in the first half of the play, and Robin and Ralph in the second, form a sort of comic underplot to the tragic main plot, opposing the comic view of life to that proper to tragedy. The two points of view taken together ought to present a balanced picture of life, but the effect is unfortunate in Doctor Faustus. The comic underplot is neither continuous nor is it artistically integrated with the main plot. The tragic motive, the deliberate choice of damnation for superhuman power, is exceptional. It suggests a philosophy of life which is entertained by few persons in the world; while the comic view relates to the masses of common people who are so hard pressed by hunger and poverty and humble cares and desires that they would use magic and raise the Devil for solving their common problems. Thus the comic underplot parodies the action and cast of the main plot, throwing ironical light upon the variety of human pride and aspiration. But, on the whole, the intention is ill-realized, and Doctor Faustus might well have done without the comic interpolations.
REFERENCES
- Chapman, Raymond. 1982. The Language of English Literature. London: Edward Arnold.
- Dr. S. Sen. et. all. 1992. Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. New Delhi: Unique Publishers
- Holt, Rineheart and Winston. 1967. The Experience of Literature. New York.
- Hornby, As. 1989. Oxford Advance Leaner’s Dictionary of Current of English. London: Oxford Universt Press.
- Kennedy, X. J. 1983. Literature Introduction to Fiction Poetry, and Drama. Boston. Macmillan Publishers.
- Lall, Ramji. 1990. Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. New Delhi: Rama Brothers
- Marlow, Christopher. Ed. by Kitty Datta. 1986. Doctor Faustus. New Delhi: Calcutta Oxford University Press.
