07 September 2021 Rope Es} Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: A Renaissance Tragedy http://freehelpstoenglishliteratur e.blogspot.com/2007/11/on- doctor-faustus.html?m=1 November 08, 2007 By transplanting the Faust-myth into the English AW toyeetiiay framework, Marlow tapped the hidden potentials of both the myth and dramatic form. But Doctor Faustus was to be overdetermined thematically by its SLED wOLEveKeubets4 culture. This culture found in the myth of Icarus and seaxoyaenccideCcueytvel archetype of betrayal, that is, human aspirations repeatedly colliding with some implacable and impersonal forces, social, political, natural or divine, and consequently pe() (eb betemne) frustration, common to human psyche. The I ReserN Ror N Lee solani CoyreyoyenvarcveCemr-vus highlighted the joey yoylereneres juxtaposition of the angelic human being, a creature of reason under the ee lc werd 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, is sbColem=s ents ua nates from Ficino’s neo- Platonism and Pico Della Mirandola’s O ration suggest that human being can exalt themselves by reason and love into something like eras bevin yam Oyemusl= other side there were the documents of counter- Renaissance, such as Machiavelli’s The Prince which studiously avoids transcendental renee: Bake Geen favour of pragmatic political tactics. This disparate I oveeebcicrat se struggles to inqesnon emu ss 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 aculture, and less to opinion than to conflict. Faustus rejects the traditional structural system of TAU ham sem AU enCeeT ‘Divinity’ was TucreaUue (cers dete Lt 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 PISO eee 1 a (00m 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 Peer te mm ee 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 AuConoue emerelelexas 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 OKOsOOMUNCeMAUIIMO)INKUNLMOy astronomy, in the Act III, Faustus turns to cosmography, a subject Sucre Vuelcrem-TeRU etl MUD ON Coats 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 oO Rolie) astronomy Graven in the book of Jove’s high mountain Did mount him up to scale Olympius’s coe we seem still to be elcreU beta vslae | 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 lemon deCcms Cay Of rarest things, and eel ECeuunKeye Lane He stayed his court, and so uclmee watered home.” He even dabbles in the statecraft of Rome, by rescuing the anti-pope, Bruno, and humiliating the pope and his Friars. MW abicecic om iKeyiel 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 Xo sO Term Alec elem Thus Faustus lives out his twenty-four years doing nothing great things as he ot Kmoyuoveevierem-lmaele beginning. When the dream of power is lost, the gift of entertainment remains his sole solace. His libro lore ley em Konre Helen is of course expressive of the IR eEDEscreNLGe 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 stTATem Veer DkemonneCoel more moved by the Eee GeLMmATLWN LAY 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 (ofoyevaneoueTeyeLmn Ke) ead Oe “Oh, I'll leap upto my god, who pulls me down?” The image affirming the svesveneia meme y im Testament also declares its unreachable uss NNO] K ot eh Ice “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 ideCemi(acmeye overwhelming cataclysm. But it is not an attitude peculiar to that of the ISCcsor-UicystseCeccreer DULG MUD TSE 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 lole-atevevbelememrllmelueton knowledge, into a spurious kind of learning. In this Faustus eet hMO lee: Duc eet Da.e- le ay 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 ina changing world.