Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Key:
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F = Faustus
M = Mephistopheles
OM = Old Man
V = Valdes
C = Cornelius

Morality
o Castle of Perseverance 15thC- mankind figure is sinful- debate between daughters of God
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 Insight into powers of God’s mercy
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o Everyman figure- no distinguishing features
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o Old man figure
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Tragedy
o First addition- ‘Tragical history of Dr Faustus’- presented as a tragedy
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o Is F a great man?
 Ambiguity- claims exhausted every art- only magic will take him beyond human abilities yet servants revealed
to be able to perform magic
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 Everyman figure- parents of base stock
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o F’s downfall:
 Increasingly degraded state- slapstick comic scenes- morality plays- socially lower characters
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 Humbled e
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Emperor scene ‘far inferior to the report men have published’
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 Yet chorus- Wagner describes F going to ‘Olympus’ (although- just to emphasises F’s decline?)
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 Great chain of being- 16thC audience not see F as great but meddling with divine order
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o Hamartia
 Lucifer’s deadly sin- pride/hubris
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o Can F feel faith?
 Calvinist point of view- F one of the reprobates
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 Old man’s unattractive message- how difficult it is for sinner to confront full horror of your sin
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 ‘I will be Paris’- sees himself as a hero
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 ‘Hell’s just a fable’- can you be truly heroic if you don’t understand consequences of your actions?
o Anagnorisis- recognition of some universal truth about humanity
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 Towards end- repentance on his mind- ‘I do repent yet I do despair’- evokes sympathy
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 Last soliloquy methods- enhance dramatic atmos monosyllabic words ‘now hast thou’- mirroring striking of
clock
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 Christian narrative inadequate- binary categorisation good/evil- places god on trial
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• Malignity of heavens- just cruel? ‘heavens conspired his overthrow’- universe governed by capricious
deities?
• Unsettling end- creative/imaginative mind pleading- left questioning F’s fate
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Mephistopheles
o Tragic figure:
 Falls from heaven
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 Fate- appalling? - eternity in hell- nothing quite merits that
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 Epistrophy ‘with Lucifer’- Marlowe encouraging our sympathy?
• First appears more human- moral complexity- begging F to ‘leave these frivolous demands’
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• Just doing his job? - more to M than just evil figure
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o Tempter/trickster figure
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o Limits of the terms- ambiguous concepts
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 Excited anticipations of magic at start of play
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- ‘new-found world’- America
- Old limits dissolving- world expanding for people
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g
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- Reality is changing
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- Repetition ‘I’ll have them
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 M’s underwhelmingly response to F’s questions of the heavens
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 ‘four and twenty years’- sounds incredible to F as human but in context of universe
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 At heart- quite innocent- thinks he wants riches and power/lascivious desires
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 Binary nature works in morality play with everyman figure but F is complex figure
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49 delusional speech
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 Christian- polarised narrative doesn’t do justice for F’s complexity here
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 Disputation- F conflates winning the argument with being right
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 Ivory tower mentality

Forces of good
o Good and evil binary
 Play challenges- suggests is part of Christian narrative- outcome is salvation or damnation
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o Good and evil angel
 Conflict between hope and despair
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 Evil angel offers all pleasures of the flesh in graphic terms- contradicts the good angel’s assertion that F can
still be forgiven
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o Old man
 Brings F warnings from a Christian perspective
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 ‘God shall try my faith’- OM’s suffering part of God’s plan?- Marlowe draws attention to an omnipotent god
who allows suffering
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 Allusion to martyrs of the streets of London dying for their faith- cruelty was commonplace
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 Ugly language- F has to acknowledge the ugliness of his sins in order to repent
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 Beautiful illusion v OM’s ugly truth- suggests something unattractive about OM’s message contrasted with
attractiveness of sin- easy to live a sinful life than a virtuous one
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o Luther- god inscrutable
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o Mephistopheles- steering F towards hell- e
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in Rome- making fun of the pope
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 But also representative of religion- encouraged to side with M/devil- uncomfortable
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 Kastan- ‘malignity of the heavens’- gods of classical tragedy are more ambiguous
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o ‘see Christ’s blood streaming’- just out of reach- god taunting F
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 Heavy wrath of god- old testament god- vengeful
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 ‘Apollo’s laurel bough’- god of poetry
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 Is beauty not a form of goodness?
 F is tempted by his imagination- punished for this
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 Up to torturing of OM- instinct good?- wants a wife not courtesan/motivated by intellectual curiosity and
even after OM tries to protect scholars ‘save yourselves’
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 But is he actually driven by evil or are these actions driven by his desire to confirm his fate- by committing evil
act no longer wavering
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• Needing some clarity not evil
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Despair = complete loss of hope/pain
o Faustus denies himself the grace and mercy of God
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‘I will renounce this magic and repent’- his decision is not irrevocable
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‘I do repent; and yet I do despair’- wavering in his allegiance to the devil
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 Despair isn’t a definitive way of thinking about F- shouldn’t necessarily be the things that defines him
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 Manic depressive
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 Psychological perspective- classical tragedy influence
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 Binary solution Christianity presents- salvation or damnation- inadequate
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 Defined in Christian doctrine as losing one’s belief in God’s capacity to forgive
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 Suicide seen as result of despair- indicted loss of faith in God and wish to take decisions about one’s life and
death out of God’s control
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 A version of Lucifer’s rebellious pride
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Mephistopheles offers Faustus a dagger- tempting him to despair
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 Accepting fatalism?
 ‘despair doth drive distrust unto my thoughts’
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 Must face up to the true horror of your sins
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 ‘Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die!’
• Realising the full horror of what he has done- acknowledging sin
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 Dynamic between M and OM- psychomachia
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 M ‘I arrest thy soul for disobedience to my sovereign lord’
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Structure
 Comic scenes
o Employ stock/ lower class characters e
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cheeky servant
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o Parallelism (thematic parallels) between comic/serious- illuminates F’s intentions
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o Bawdy humour- sexual humour/ Innuendo
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▪ ‘He devils have horns’ Act 1 Scene 4
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▪ R ‘Intolerable’- incompatible- Act 2 Scene 2
o The carnivalesque pg168- bawdy humour- bodily appetites
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 Accelerating time
o The passage of time moves at different speeds within narrative of play
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o Subtly F’s time accelerates- by end of sc 1 decides to go to dinner- during sc 2 he has finished his meal and
learnt all there is to know about magic
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o Key scenes take place in enclosed priv world of ‘his study’ or at night- dark/claustrophobic Gothic-type space
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o Marlowe’s doomed hero- embodying aspects of tormented yet romantic Gothic hero that emerged in works
of early 19C
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 Morality plays
o Genre popular from early 1400s to 1580s- common basic narrative structure:
▪ Central character ordinary person- representative character- mankind figure
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▪ Mankind figure goes rapidly downhill- forgetting work and consorting with low company
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• Elizabethans- suicide = sin- Michael Dalton 1564-1644, prominent barrister wrote ‘it is an
offence against God, against the king, and against Nature’
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• Happy ending- whether or not character dies- audience confident he will go to heaven
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▪ F can be seen as mankind figure- attracts our sympathy for his individualistic tragic situation
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▪ Striking departure- central character is not saved in end but damned
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▪ Telling- Chorus/W
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▪ F’s monologues- details his thoughts and feeling
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Ironic/paradoxical language- tension sustained between what is said and what is believed
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▪ A narrative of the changing condition of the sole- linked with F’s display of an ambivalent state of mind
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▪ Essential the audience is carried away by distractions e
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seven sins and should be persuaded to find
humour in the low comedy- interaction of sins with audience
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▪ Exotic language- V + C use encourages audience to be seduced by magic/swept along by imagery and
poetry
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o Use of proper names- in particular elaborate and polysyllabic ones e
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‘Mephistopheles’- sustains that sense
of dignity ad does his highly controlled habit of repetition
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Ominous feeling
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o Epistrophy- rhetorical technique- language of persuasion- repetition of ‘with Lucifer’ Act 1, Sc 3
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 Dr Faustus was written in approximately 1592
 16thC- Protestantism v Roman Catholicism struggling for supremacy in England- religious uncertainty
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o Transubstantiation= bread and wine of Mass literally body and blood of Christ
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 Protestants:
o Royal power- queen ruled by grace of God
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o Consubstantiation = communion celebrate in memory of Christ
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o Predestination- God knows which soul will be saved
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Europe
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 Elements of this conflict present in Dr F:
o In selling soul to Devil- F supposedly committing worst sin
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o Progresses from not believing anything will come of his pact with devil to believing he cannot be saved
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Elizabeth 1558
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o War with Catholic Spain accompanying fear of invasion intensified hostility towards Catholicism
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o Uneducated people regularly presented on Elizabethan stage as retaining many of old (Catholic) traditionseither attempt to imitate language of ordinary people/deliberately mock Catholicism
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 Religious climate-considerable relevance- Marlowe chose to place F in uni town of Wittenberg- where Luther studied
and taught- suggests Protestant connection
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 F’s use of Latin phrases to perform conjuring- audience associate with the Latin of the catholic mass- play supporting
Elizabethan orthodoxy that Catholicism was a devilish trick
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o Simon Shepherd interprets F as struggling between an ideal of individualism as a Puritan free speaker and
need for conformity to external rules
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 Martin Luther
o Against corruption of church and sale of indulgences
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o Likely to be deliberate parallels- Marlowe mocking founder of Protestantism himself
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o Elect or reprobate
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o Religious story- charting the progress of the soul
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o Serious scenes interspersed with bawdy comic scenes
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• Characteristics of classical tragedy: Hamartia- error of judgement, reversal of fortune, hubris, and
catharsis, responsible for own fate
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 Renaissance- 15+16C- thinking about writers before Christian era
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o Movement-challenge to Christian narrative- intellectual explosion
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g
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 Great chain of Being- how people thought of the universe- fixed hierarchy
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o Marlowe- model of social mobility- his life is a challenge to the idea of a fixed social hierarchy by God
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F ‘the historic of the damnable life and deserved death of Dr John Faustus’
o Contains semi-mythical tales built around real-life German scholar and travelling magician Faustus
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• Miraculous travels and displays of conjuring
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