EXCERPTS FROM PLAYS

Sophocles’ Antigone

KREON Do you grasp—are you saying right—the things you

speak?

GUARD Yes! I saw her burying the corpse against

Your orders. Now is what I'm saying clear and plain?

KREON How was she spotted and then seized while doing it?

GUARD Well, what happened was, when we went back there— 450

After those awful threats you made—we brushed

Off all the dust that was on the corpse, we did

ANTIGON E [409-442 ]

A good job of uncovering the body,

Which was slimy; and then upwind, on top

Of a hill, we sat, to keep ourselves away

From the stink, so that it wouldn't hit us. Each man

Helped by keeping another awake and warning

Him loudly if he seemed to shirk the task.

This lasted till the time when the blazing circle

Of the sun had put itself at the midpoint 460

Of the sky and we were melting in the heat.

Then suddenly a whirlwind raised a pillar

Of dust from the ground, a storm of trouble high

As heaven, it spread across the lowland, it tore

Away the leaves of the trees and it filled up

The whole huge sky. We shut our eyes and endured

This supernatural plague.

After a long while

The thing died down and this wailing child is seen . . .

The way a bird will give sharp cries when she finds

That her nest and bed are empty and her babies 470

Are gone —it was like that when this girl sees

The corpse all bare, she moaned with wailing grief,

She cursed those who had done this, and at once

She carries in her hands the thirsty dust

And holds up high a fine bronze pitcher and then

She pours libations three times round the corpse.

When we see this, we rush to hunt her down

But she was not afraid, and we accused her

Of what she'd done, before, and what she now

Was doing. She did not at all deny it— 480

Which to me brought both satisfaction and pain,

Because to flee bad things yourself feels good,

But it is painful to lead one of your own

To something bad.

Of course, all of these things

Are less to me than safety for myself.

KREON To ANTIGONE.

You! You turning your head away, to the ground—

Do you admit or deny that you did this?
CHORUS LEADER To KREON.

It's clear this fierce child is the offspring of her fierce

Father! She does not know to bend amidst her

troubles. 520

KREON To CHORUS LEADER.

Understand that rigid wills are those

Most apt to fall, and that the hardest iron,

Forged in fire for greatest strength, you'll see

Is often broken, shattered. And with only

A small sharp bit, I've noticed, spirited

Horses are disciplined. For grand ideas

Are not allowed in someone who's the slave

Of others. . .

First, this girl knew very well

How to be insolent and break the laws

That have been set. And then her second outrage 530

Was that she gloried in what she did and then

She laughed at having done it. I must be

No man at all, in fact, and she must be

The man, if power like this can rest in her

And go unpunished. But no matter if

She is my sister's child, or closer blood

Relation to me than my whole family

Along with our household shrine to Zeus himself,

 She and her sister by blood will not escape

The worst of fates—yes, I accuse her sister 540

Of conspiring in this burial, as much

As she.

To his men.

Go get her!

A few of KREON'S men go into the royal house

to find ISMENE.
ANTIGON E [49 1 -513 ]

To CHORUS LEADER.

Earlier I saw her

Inside, raving, out of her wits. The mind

Of those who plan in the dark what is not right

Will often find itself caught as a thief.

But I hate even more those who when captured

In evil acts then want to make them noble.

ANTIGONE Now you've caught me, do you want something more

than my death?

 CHORUS
 Quote: “When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands! / When the laws are
broken, what of his city then? / Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth, /
Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts.” (Ode 1, lines 21-24).
 Analysis: The chorus fulfils one of its roles by declaring an important Thebean value,
in this example, obedience to the law. This statement can be interpreted in two ways:
(1) the chorus agrees with Creon and calls for the death of the individual who buried
Polyneices; (2) the chorus condemns Creon for his anarchic treatment of the gods’ laws.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOW’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS
Enter Chorus.
CHO. Not marching in the fields of Trasimene
Where Mars did mate the warlike Carthagens,
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love
In courts of kings where state is overturn’d,
Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds
Intends our muse to vaunt his heavenly verse:
Only this, gentles—we must now perform
The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad:
And now to patient judgements we appeal,
And speak for Faustus in his infancy. 10
Now is he born, of parents base of stock,
In Germany, within a town call’d Rhode;
At riper years to Wittenberg he went,
Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up.
So much he profits in divinity,
The fruitful plot of scholarism grac’d,
That shortly he was grac’d with doctor’s name,
Excelling all, and sweetly can dispute
In th’ heavenly matters of theology;
Till, swollen with cunning of a self-conceit, 20
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss:
And this the man that in his study sits. Exit.

1. mate: ally himself with.

 2. state: government.
3. our muse: our poet.
4. vaunt: display proudly.
5. gentles: gentlefolk.
6. Whereas: where.

Activity

Christopher Marlow’s Doctor Faustus

We can begin to answer those questions by looking at the Prologue. Please reread the speech
now, and then write a brief summary of it, no more than four or five sentences. What main
points would you say the Chorus is making here?

Answer:

Here is what I've come up with:

1.The Chorus spends several lines telling the audience what the play is not about – war or love
or martial heroism – before he tells us what it is about: ‘Faustus' fortunes, good or bad’ (l. 8).

2. Then he tells us about Faustus's childhood, specifically that although he was born to ‘parents
base of stock’ (l. 12), he went on when he was older to study divinity at the University of
Wittenberg, where his intellectual brilliance led swiftly to his being awarded a doctorate.

3. In line 20, the tone of the speech seems to change, as the Chorus speaks of Faustus's ‘cunning
of a self-conceit’, which has been explained as ‘intellectual pride engendered by arrogance’.

4.The Chorus goes on to explain that his intellectual pride led Faustus to take up the study of
magic, or ‘cursèd necromancy’, despite the fact that it jeopardizes ‘his chiefest bliss’ (l. 27);
that is, his chance of being granted eternal salvation when he dies.

The Chorus, then, is kicking things off by giving us a brief biography of the play's protagonist.
I hope you agree that the picture of Faustus it offers us is a mixed one. The Chorus undoubtedly
condemns Faustus's study of magic and encourages us to disapprove of it too. But the speech
also registers the greatness of a man who, through his own merit, overcame the considerable
disadvantage of lowly birth to rise to the pinnacle of his profession.

Let's look a little more closely now at the last eight lines of the Prologue. When the tone of the
speech changes in line 20, the Chorus says not just that Faustus is full of intellectual pride and
arrogance, but that he is ‘swollen’ with it. This is easy for us to understand, for we still use the
expression ‘swollen head’ to describe someone who thinks too highly of himself. We also
understand that the Chorus is not using the adjective ‘swoll'n’ literally; it is not that Faustus is
actually swollen up, but that he has an inflated opinion of himself. In other words, ‘swoll'n’ is
used in a figurative rather than a literal way. Figurative language describes one thing by
comparing it with something else. The two most well-known types of figurative language are
similes and metaphors. Similes make a direct comparison by using the word ‘like’ or ‘as’. If
Marlowe had written ‘Till, swoll'n like a balloon with cunning of a self-conceit’, he would have
made a direct comparison between Faustus's pride and an inflated balloon. But he chose to use
not a simile but a metaphor, with the result that rather than being likened to a particular inflated
object, pride is identified more broadly with the condition of being swollen.

This metaphor is followed by the lines: ‘His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And
melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (ll. 21–2). This is an allusion to the ancient Greek
myth of Icarus, who attempted to escape from Crete with a pair of waxen wings but flew too
near the sun and plunged to his death when the sun melted the wax (see Figures 2 and 3). He
became the symbol of the ‘overreacher’, of the man who tries to exceed his own limitations
and comes to grief as a result.

Like Icarus, in the Chorus's view, Faustus tried to ‘mount above his reach’ and was punished
for his presumption: ‘heavens conspired his overthrow’ (l. 22). This is an intriguing twist on
the Icarus myth; for whereas Icarus's pride seems to be self-destructive, Faustus's sparks the
intervention of a deity who ‘conspires’ to destroy him.

What happens to the language when the Chorus starts to talk about Faustus's study of magic?
In the two lines ‘And glutted more with learning's golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursèd
necromancy’ (ll. 24–5), ‘glutted’ means ‘overfull’, or ‘stuffed’, and ‘surfeits’ means ‘to eat too
much’, ‘to gorge oneself’. Why is the Chorus referring to eating, specifically to eating too
much? It seems that once again the language is not working literally; instead, it is drawing
metaphorical links between Faustus's intellectual curiosity and a kind of greedy self-
indulgence. He is portrayed as a glutton who, stuffed full of ‘learning's golden gifts’, turns to
magic and gorges himself on that as well.

So, by looking closely at the language of the Prologue, we can see more clearly what the Chorus
is saying about Faustus – that it associates his intellectual ambition with an immoderate
appetite, with an inflated sense of his own value, and with a dangerous, Icarus-like
overreaching that brings him into conflict with the Christian God. So even though the Prologue
praises Faustus for his intellectual brilliance, it also insists that this brilliance is not an
unqualified good; if it pushes past certain boundaries, it becomes sinful and provokes divine
punishment. The Prologue tells us, in short, that the play's protagonist lives in a Christian
universe that places limits on the pursuit of knowledge.

Faustus's first speech

Scene I

FAUSTUS in his study.

FAU. Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin

To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess;

Having commenc’d, be a divine in show,

Yet level at the end of every art,

And live and die in Aristotle’s works.

Sweet Analytics, ’tis thou hast ravish’d me!

Bene disserere est finis logices.

Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?

Affords this art no greater miracle?

Then read no more, thou hast attain’d that end; 10

A greater subject fitteth Faustus’ wit.

Bid on kai me on farewell, Galen come,

Seeing ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus.

Be a physician, Faustus, heap up gold,

And be eterniz’d for some wondrous cure.

Summum bonum medicinae sanitas,

The end of physic is our body’s health.

Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?

Is not thy common talk sound aphorisms?

Are not thy bills hung up as monuments, 20

Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague

And thousand desperate maladies been cur’d?

Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.

Couldst thou make men to live eternally

Or being dead raise them to life again,

Then this profession were to be esteem’d.

Physic, farewell! Where is Justinian?

Si una eademque res legatur duobus, alter rem, alter valorem

rei, etc.

A petty case of paltry legacies! 30

The Chorus now introduces Faustus, who delivers his first speech of the play. The way the
speech is staged and written serves to emphasize Faustus's position as an eminent scholar. It is
set in his study, and he is surrounded by books, from which he reads in Latin. The works he
consults, written by such great thinkers of classical antiquity as the Greek philosopher Aristotle,
the Greek medical authority Galen, and the Roman emperor Justinian, were central texts in the
sixteenth-century university curriculum. The first impression the speech gives us, then, is of
the breadth of Faustus's learning.

There is no one on stage with Faustus as he delivers these lines, which means that it is a
soliloquy, a speech in which a dramatic character, alone on stage, expresses his or her thoughts,
feelings and motives. The soliloquy is an ideal device for establishing a strong relationship
between a character and an audience, for it seems to give us access to that character's mind at
work. In Faustus's opening soliloquy, we notice right away that he is addressing himself in the
third person – ‘Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin’ (l. 1) – which creates the impression that
he is talking to himself. We listen as he tries to make up his mind, now that he has been awarded
a doctorate in theology, what subject he wants to specialize in. He declares that he will be a
‘divine’ only in appearance (‘in show’), while aiming to achieve expertise in every academic
discipline. Immediately, then, we hear a note of dissatisfaction and restlessness in Faustus's
voice; despite his dazzling academic success, he is impatient for more knowledge.

Yet as he runs through the four main academic disciplines he has studied – philosophy,
medicine, law and theology – he dismisses each of them as an intellectual dead-end. Faustus
feels that he has already achieved everything that the study of philosophy and medicine has to
offer. He then rejects the law as suitable only for a ‘mercenary drudge’ (l. 34). For a moment,
he returns to divinity as the most worthy profession, but then rejects that as well, as the passages
he reads from Jerome's Bible stress only human sinfulness and the damnation that awaits it.

So what is it that Faustus wants that these traditional fields of study fail to supply? When
contemplating his own remarkable achievements in medicine, he laments that although he can
cure illness, he is unable either to give his patients eternal life or to raise them from the dead:
‘Yet art thou still but Faustus and a man’ (l. 23). What he wants, then, is to transcend his human
limitations, to break through the boundaries that place what he sees as artificial restrictions on
human potential. He has gone as far as his human condition will allow him to go, but wants to
go further still, which means transforming himself into a ‘mighty god’, ‘a deity’ (ll. 64, 65), a
goal he feels only magic will enable him to realize.

When Faustus declares that he wants to achieve something that ‘[s]tretcheth as far as doth the
mind of man’ (l. 63), he expresses an intense optimism about human ability that has often been
seen as characteristic of the Renaissance, and as the quality that most distinguishes it from the
more religious Middle Ages. Historical periods are too complex to be boiled down to a single,
defining essence; nor are there clear breaks between them. Nevertheless, there were
developments in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century that, broadly speaking,
encouraged a newly secular view of the world: the growth of scientific investigation into the
structure of the universe and the laws of the physical world; the voyages of exploration,
expansion of trade routes and colonization of the Americas; the new technology of printing,
which allowed for the rapid dissemination of new ideas and discoveries; and the development
of a humanist educational programme, based on the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors,
and dedicated to the restoration of classical ideals of civic virtue and public service. When
Faustus fantasises that ‘All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command’
(ll. 58–9), his speech is inflected with the scientist's and coloniser's desire for control over the
natural world (Hopkins, 2000, p. 62). When he tells Mephistopheles that he is not afraid of
damnation because he believes instead in the classical Greek afterlife (see 1.3.60–1), he voices
a humanist reverence for classical culture.

It is highly unlikely, though, that any sixteenth-century humanist would have countenanced
this kind of explicit challenge to Christian doctrine, so if Faustus represents the secular
aspirations of the Renaissance, he does so in an extreme or exaggerated form. Moreover, the
fact that Doctor Faustus is set in a Christian universe and affirms the reality of hell and
damnation should warn us not to overstate the secular values of Renaissance England. Indeed,
what the play explores – its principal theme – is the conflict between the confidence and
ambition its protagonist embodies, and the Christian faith, which remained a powerful cultural
force when Marlowe was writing and required humility and submission to God's will. The
play's two opening speeches set up an opposition between the Prologue's view of boundless
ambition as sinful presumption and Faustus's implicit claim that the Christian universe places
unjust restrictions on human potential.

Which side in this conflict do you think the play encourages us to take? We saw earlier that the
Prologue seeks to discredit Faustus's interest in necromancy by portraying it in terms of an
intemperate appetite. Is there more evidence in the opening scene to support its claim?

Doctor Faustus’ Soliloquy:

FAU. Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day, 140
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente lente currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!—
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Yet will I call on him. O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ’Tis gone: and see where God 150
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows.

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no:
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me.
You stars that reign’d at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud, 160
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven. The watch strikes.
Ah, half the hour is pass’d: ’twill all be pass’d anon.
O God,
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransom’d me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d. 170
O, no end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me and I be chang’d
Unto some brutish beast: all beasts are happy,
For when they die
Their souls are soon dissolv’d in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu’d in hell.
Curs’d be the parents that engender’d me! 180
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv’d thee of the joys of heaven.
The clock striketh twelve.
O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
Thunder and lightning.
O soul, be chang’d into little water drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found.
Enter Devils.
My God, my God! Look not so fierce on me!

The play draws to a close with Faustus's final soliloquy, which is supposed to mark the last
hour of his life.
Activity
Please reread this speech now, thinking as you read about how Marlowe uses sound effects to
heighten the emotional impact of the soliloquy.

Discussion
The soliloquy represents an attempt to imagine and dramatise what the last hour of life feels
like to a man awaiting certain damnation. Of course, the speech doesn't really take an hour to
deliver, but Marlowe uses the sound of the clock striking to create the illusion that the last hour
of Faustus's life is ticking away and so heightens the sense of impending doom. It strikes eleven
at the start of the speech, then half past the hour 31 lines later, then midnight only twenty lines
after that. Why does the second half hour pass much more quickly than the first? Is this
Marlowe's way of conveying what the passage of time feels like to the terrified Faustus: it
seems to be speeding up as the dreaded end approaches? The thunder and lightning that swiftly
follow the sound of the clock striking midnight announce the final entrance of the devils.

Critics have often commented on how skilfully Marlowe uses rhythm to underline the passage
of time. Look, for example, at the second line: ‘Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’ (l.
67). Because this is a sequence of monosyllabic words, it is not entirely clear which of them
are stressed. It would certainly be possible for an actor to give a more or less equally strong
stress to each word, which is why O'Connor points out that the line seems to echo the striking
clock we have just heard (p. 108). This echo effect is strengthened by the internal rhyme
between ‘Now’ and ‘thou’. The monosyllabic words continue into the next line until the last
word: ‘And then thou must be damned perpetually’ (l. 68). The sudden appearance of a long
five-syllable word focuses our attention on it and alerts us to what it is that Faustus most fears:
an infinity of suffering. This sparks his desperate and futile plea for time to stand still, and
Marlowe underlines the futility through the use of enjambment, or run-on lines:

Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day; or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day … (ll. 71–3)

Faustus wants time to stop or slow down, but the way one line of verse tumbles into the next,
accelerating rather than slowing down the rhythm, seems to signal the inevitable frustration of
that wish. Faustus himself grasps this: ‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; /
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (ll. 76–7).

Time really is the essence of this soliloquy, not only because the clock is ticking for Faustus,
but because, as we have seen, what most horrifies him is the prospect not of suffering but of
endless suffering. After the clock strikes the half hour, Faustus pleads with God to place a limit
on his time in hell – ‘Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at
last be saved’ (ll. 103–04) – only to come back to the awful truth: ‘O, no end is limited to
damnèd souls’ (l. 105).

One of the most striking aspects of the speech is the way it reverses the dreams of power and
glory that Faustus expressed in his first soliloquy. In that speech he declared his desire to be
more than human, to be a ‘mighty god’, but now, as he faces an eternity in hell, he wishes that
he were less than human: he longs to be transformed into ‘some brutish beast’ whose soul
would simply dissolve into the elements when it dies (ll. 109–12), or that his soul might ‘be
changed into little water drops, / And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found’ (ll. 119–20). In his
final soliloquy, Faustus's self-assertive spirit collapses into a desire for extinction; his
aspiration to divinity into a longing for annihilation as he seeks desperately to escape from ‘the
heavy wrath of God’ (l. 86).

Does this final humbling of Faustus encourage a feeling of satisfaction that he has got what he
deserved? That seems to be how the Epilogue sees things. As in the Prologue, the Chorus
begins by acknowledging Faustus's greatness, but in essence it is issuing a warning to the
audience that his terrible fate is what awaits all those ‘forward wits’ who ‘practise more than
heavenly power permits’ (ll. 7–8). Yet it is arguable that the final soliloquy's powerful
evocation of Faustus's agony, coupled with its stress on the horrors of the never-ending
suffering to which he has been sentenced, are designed to make us wonder whether the savage
punishment really fits the crime. Feelings of pity and fear might seem a more appropriate
response to Faustus's end than the Epilogue's moral, as tidy as its concluding rhyming couplet.
SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO
The shape of tragedy

Aristotelian tragedy

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Aristotelian tragedy

In common with most Elizabethan theatre (and all of Shakespeare’s plays), Othello is a play in
five acts which corresponds to the typical structure of a tragedy. Aristotle in his Poetics,
defined the shape of drama as requiring:

1. Exposition – introducing the main characters and the potential areas for future dramatic
conflict

2. Rising action, or complication, in which conflict and relationships are developed

3. Climax or crisis – the conflict reaches its height with perhaps an impasse, but there is
no going back regarding the protagonist’s fortunes

4. Falling action – the catastrophe which engulfs the protagonist, although more positive
action may also be initiated

5. Resolution or (as it was later termed) dénouement, in which everything is untangled

and the action is brought to a close.

Act 1

Exposition - Othello’s noble status is demonstrated; the character and motivation of Iago
(jealous at being overlooked, suspicious of his wife’s relationship with his master) is revealed;
Othello and Desdemona’s love is exposed; Iago encourages Roderigo’s thwarted love; the
context is of likely warfare.

Act 2
Rising action, or complication – Iago engineers Cassio’s drunkenness, demotion and desire for
Desdemona’s help (which will later inflame Othello’s jealousy) and encourages Roderigo to
act as a tool for Iago’s retribution.

Act 3

Climax or crisis – As Desdemona intercedes for Cassio, Iago persuades Othello that she is
being unfaithful to him with Cassio and uses her fallen handkerchief as ‘evidence’ until Othello
vows his betrayers will die. Desdemona’s failure to ‘read’ her husband is contrasted by Bianca
(Cassio’s girlfriend)’s understanding that love is precarious.

Act 4

Falling action – As Iago continues to work on him, using the fault lines in Cassio and Bianca’s
relationship as further ‘evidence’, Othello temporarily loses his wits and the extent of the
breakdown of his trust in Desdemona is witnessed by visitors from Venice as well as his
stunned wife and her maid. However, both Roderigo and Emilia are becoming suspicious of
Iago’s machinations, whose position is becoming less secure. The poignancy of the last scene
prepares us for the tragedy to come.

Act 5

Resolution/dénouement – Roderigo is (apparently) killed and Desdemona suffocated, but then

Iago’s plans unravel: Emilia exposes Iago’s role, Cassio is able to confront Othello and
Roderigo provides incriminating evidence, all leading to the capture and future punishment of
Iago. However, it is too late to avoid the destruction of Desdemona, Emilia and then Othello.