Doctor Faustus

As a morality play

The morality play is really a fusion of allegory and

the religious drama of the miracle plays. In this
play the characters were personified abstractions
of vice or virtues such as Good deeds, Faith,
Mercy, Anger, Truth, Pride etc. The theme of the
moralities was the struggle between the good and
evil powers for capturing the man’s soul and good
always won. The morality play often ended with a
solemn moral. In the light of these points we may
call Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” a belated morality
play in spite of its tragic ending.

In morality plays the characters were personified

abstractions of vice or virtues. In “Dr. Faustus”
also we find the Good and Evil angels, the former
stand for the path of virtue and the latter for sin
and damnation, one for conscience and the other
for desires. He symbolizes the forces of
righteousness and morality. The seven deadly sins
are also there in a grand spectacle to cheer up
the despairing soul of Faustus. If the, general
theme of morality plays was theological dealing
with the struggle of forces of good and evil for
man’s soul, then “Dr. Faustus” may be called a
religious or morality play to a very great extent.

We find Marlowe’s hero, Faustus, abjuring the

scriptures, the Trinity and Christ. He surrenders
his soul to the Devil out of his inordinate ambition
to gain: “-----a world of profit and delight’ Of
power, of honour, of omnipotence.” Through
knowledge by mastering the unholy art of magic.
About the books of magic, he declares:

“These metaphysics of magicians, And

necromantic books are heavenly.”

By selling his soul to the Devil he lives a

blasphemous life full of vain and sensual
pleasures just for only twenty-four years. There is
struggle between his overwhelming ambition and
conscience which are externalized by good angel
and evil angel. But Faustus has already accepted
the opinion of Evil Angel, who says: “Be thou on
earth as Jove in the sky.” Faustus is also
fascinated by the thought: “A sound magician is a
mighty god, Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain
a deity.” When the final hours approaches,
Faustus find himself at the edge of eternal
damnation and cries with deep sorrow: “My God,
my God, look not so fierce to me!”

Through this story Marlowe gives the lesson that

the man, who desires to be God, is doomed to
eternal damnation. The chief aim of morality play
was didactic. It was a dramatized guide to
Christian living and Christian dying. Whosoever
discards the path of virtue and faith in God and
Christ is destined to despair and eternal
damnation--- this is also the message of
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

The tradition of chorus is also maintained. We find

the chorus introducing the story just before the
beginning of the first scene and subsequently
filling in the gaps in the narrative and announcing
the end of the play with a very solemn moral. The
appearance of seven deadly sins shows that
Marlowe in “Dr. Faustus” adopted some of the
conventions of the old Morality plays. Thus it can
be concluded in the words of a critic: "Dr. Faustus"
is both the consummation of the English Morality,
tradition and the last and the finest of Marlowe’s
heroic plays."

Faustus as a tragic hero

Dr. Faustus the protagonist of Christopher

Marlowe's great tragedy can be considered as a
tragic hero similar to the other tragic characters
such as Oedipus or Hamlet. Dr. Faustus who sells
his soul to Lucifer in exchange of twenty four
years of knowledge ought to have some special
features in order to be considered as a tragic
hero. But first of all let me present Aristotle's
definition of a "Tragic hero" and then I will
elaborate on each element in relation to the
tragedy of "Dr. Faustus".

According to Aristotle, "the tragic hero evokes

both our pity and terror because he is neither
good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both;
this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is
better than we are. Such a hero suffers from a
change of happiness to misery because of his
mistaken choice which is led by his hamarcia
(error of judgment). The tragic hero stands
against his fate or the gods to demonstrate his
power of free will. He wants to be the master of
his own fate. He decides to make decisions but
mostly the decision making would lead to
weakness or his own downfall."

Now according to Aristotle's definition of a "tragic

hero" it is time to elaborate on the clues in details
in order to conclude that Dr. Faustus can also be a
tragic hero according to following reasons:

Firstly because Dr. Faustus as a tragic hero evokes

our pity. We feel some form of connection with
him because he has a sense of realism. Dr.
Faustus makes mistakes which can be also all
human condition. He wants to gain more
knowledge that is also another part of human
condition to learn and understand more. We
sympathize with Dr. Faustus because his feelings
are similar to other human beings at the end we
really want him to repent in order to change his
fate radically. We sympathize with him at the end
of the drama when it is time for a farewell to his
soul. Although he has done many faults but we
really want God not to be so fierce towards a
human being. He desires:

O soul, be changed to little water drops

And fall into the ocean. Ne're be found.

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!

( Act V, Scene ii: lines 180-182)

Secondly because Dr. Faustus is a well-known and

prosperous character, so the reader notices to his
reputation as a well-respected scholar inevitably.
In Act I, Scene i ; he calls for his servants and
students in his speech about various fields of
scholar ship which suggests him to be a
prosperous intellectual.

Philosophy is odious and obscure,

Both law and physic are for petty wits,

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile;

'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.

( Act I, Scene i: lines 107-111 )

His reputation as a scholar has been mentioned

both in the beginning and at the end. It is one of
the clues to present Dr. Faustus as a tragic hero
so that the readers would be able to sympathize
with him throughout the whole drama. In the
closing lines the scholars put emphasis on this
aspect more when they lament about their
respectful professor's death.

Yet for he was a scholar once admired

For wondrous knowledge in our German schools,

We'll give his mangled limbs due burial;

And all the students, clothed in mourning black,

Shall wait upon his heavy funeral.

(Act V, Scene iii: Lines 14-19)

Thirdly because Dr. Faustus' mistaken choice,

exchange of his soul to Lucifer, results in his
downfall. His agreement with the devil blinds him
in choosing between right and wrong. In the
opening speech, in Act I, Faustus tells that he is
skillful in different sciences but he wants to know
more.

FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Witttenberg;
I'll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp-bridge,
I'll make my servile spirits to invent. ( Act I, scene
i: lines 79-98 )
Actually the desire for learning is part of human
nature but he chooses the wrong way without
some sense of guilt. His hasty desire for power
and honor did not allow him to repent. He was so
confused that he couldn't decide on following the
ways of God or the path of Lucifer.

Fourthly because Dr. Faustus wanted to support

his own plot to make his own decision. This aspect
of his character was as a result of the
Renaissance period, unlike the medieval period,
the dominance of fate upon human life became as
a matter of ignorance. It was time for secular
matters. Therefore, the dominance of science
shadowed upon individuals thought . Dr. Faustus
wanted to take destiny in his own hands to
demonstrate the power of free will against fate. A
case in point is when he passionately demanded
Mephistophilis to:
Go, bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove's deity,
Say, he surrenders up to him his soul,
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness;
Having thee ever to attend on me,
To give me whatsoever I shall ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will.
Go, and return to mighty Lucifer,
And meet me in my study at midnight,
And then resolve me of thy master's mind.
( Act I, Scene iii: lines 91-104 )
He did not want to be a puppet dancing to the
strings of destiny, despite the fact that tragedy
functions paradoxical towards human destiny.

Hence according to the aspects which I elaborated

on, I can describe Dr. Faustus as a tragic hero.
Although he devoted himself completely to
Lucifer, never choosing right and making a
tragedy out of his own downfall, but I found the
drama as an optimistic and didactic one. I believe
that Marlowe wanted to teach Christian faith
besides a chance for salvation. Marlowe uses the
tragic irony of Dr. Faustus as his ultimate intention
to illustrate the downfall of a tragic hero.
Renaissance Tragedy
By transplanting the Faust-myth into the English
Morality framework, Marlow tapped the hidden
potentials of both the myth and dramatic form.
But Doctor Faustus was to be overdetermined
thematically by its surrounding culture. This
culture found in the myth of Icarus and
Prometheusian archetype of betrayal, that is,
human aspirations repeatedly colliding with some
implacable and impersonal forces, social, political,
natural or divine, and consequently yielding to
frustration, common to human psyche.
The Renaissance philosophy and art highlighted
the perplexing juxtaposition of the angelic human
being, a creature of reason under the paternal
benevolence of God side by side with a human
being as a beast of appetite subject to God’s
terrible wrath. In philosophy, on the one side were
the spiritual reconstructions, which emerging from
Ficino’s neo-Platonism and Pico Della Mirandola’s
Oration suggest that human being can exalt
themselves by reason and love into something
like divinity. On the other side there were the
documents of counter-Renaissance, such as
Machiavelli’s The Prince which studiously avoids
transcendental moral reference in favour of
pragmatic political tactics. This disparate
Renaissance struggles to reconcile the beautiful
aspirations of the mind with the fierce demands of
the body corresponds to the battle which
Nietzsche much later identified as the essence of
tragedy between Apollo, the God of civilization,
rationality and daylight and Dionysus, the God of
frenzy, passion and midnight. Again in the
Hegelian model, the renaissance tragedy like Dr.
Faustus or Macbeth shows that tragedy is finally
answerable less to an individual than to a culture,
and less to opinion than to conflict.

Faustus rejects the traditional structural system of

study, in which ‘Divinity’ was regarded, at that
time, “the Queen of the sciences” as well as the
discipline which gave meaning to all knowledge
an experience. Therefore, Faustus’s alternative
career is sorcery through which he hopes to gain
“a world prophet, and delight/ of power, of
honour, of omnipotence.” In this way, Doctor
Faustus comes as a parable about the spiritual
loss in a modern world, leading not only to
damnation in the conventional sense, but to the
fatal corruption awaiting all Renaissance
aspiration.
The subsequent story after Faustus sells his soul
away to Lucifer is an illustration of the orthodox
moral, to borrow a rhetorical question from the
gospel of St. Mathew:
“What profits it a man if he should gain the whole
world and lose his own soul.”
Now by a version of the foolish wish motif familiar
from folklore Faustus discovers that purchasing
the ability to violate the rules of nature is
inevitably a bad bargain. The world he is going to
command is a small and flimsy one and so the
quest for transcendence generates only more
claustrophobia. He cries in helplessness

“Ay, Christ, my saviour

Seek to save distressed Faustus’s soul”

But as he is committed to the twin paradigm of

the sins of Adam and Lucifer, he cannot get rid of
the fall. Instead, Lucifer performs before him the
pageant of seven Deadly sins. The sins are visible
on the stage, but more importantly, Faustus,
under the influence of evil, performs them within
himself on the psychological level.
Baulked in the Act III from the full pursuit of
astronomy, in the Act III, Faustus turns to
cosmography, a subject regarded at that time as
a destructively unserious pursuit; in other words
he descends from the heavens to the earth. When
we hear from the chorus that

“…learned Faustus
To find the secrets of astronomy
Graven in the book of Jove’s high mountain
Did mount him up to scale Olympius’s top,”
we seem still to be dealing with a genuine search
after knowledge. But after that, as the chorus at
the beginning of the Act IV informs, the emphasis
is no longer on the search for knowledge, but
“…Faustus had with pleasure ta’en the view
Of rarest things, and royal courts of kings,
He stayed his court, and so returned home.”

He even dabbles in the statecraft of Rome, by

rescuing the anti-pope, Bruno, and humiliating the
pope and his Friars. This step from cosmography
to statecraft is similar to that from astronomy to
cosmography. At the social level, he undergoes a
similar descent—from the court of the Emperor
through the Duke Vanholt to the scholars in
Wittenberg.

Thus Faustus lives out his twenty-four years doing

nothing great things as he has promised at the
beginning. When the dream of power is lost, the
gift of entertainment remains his sole solace. His
fascination to see Helen is of course expressive of
the Renaissance passion for beauty in its perfect
form. But here more importantly Helen is
associated with his failure to enjoy sensual
pleasures and with his fear of losing both his spirit
and physique as the Last Judgement is ensuing. In
the first lines we are much more moved by the
magnificent futility of the human protest against
the inexorable movement of time as it enacts an
inexorable moral law. In the next lines, however,
is ordeal is confinement to earth:

“Oh, I’ll leap upto my god, who pulls me down?”

The image affirming the immensity of Christ’s
Testament also declares its unreachable
remoteness:

“See see where Christ’s blood streams in

firmament.”

As Faustus pleads that “one drop “, then “half a

drop”, would save his soul, he confesses his
barren littleness of life in the vastness of the
moral universe and he discovers the fulfilment of
human pretensions to power and knowledge in
the face of overwhelming cataclysm.

But it is not an attitude peculiar to that of the

Renaissance—and this is one reason why the play
still feels relevant: it is a perennial disease of the
personality, a retreat from self knowledge that
should be the end and beginning of all other
knowledge, into a spurious kind of learning. In this
Faustus may be a remarkably brilliant and errant
scholar, but he is also an Everyman who compels
Renaissance and modern audience as well to
examine the perplexing choices of facing a
creature of desire and doubt in a changing world.