Name : Maru Janakkumar J
Paper : 1 [The Renaissance Literature
Semester :
1
Roll
No : 26
Email
id : marujanak17@gmail.com
Submitted to :MK Bhavnagar
University,
Bhavnagar
Doctor Faustus -Renaissance
Hero
Ø Doctor Faustus is the most famous
drama of Christopher Marlowe. Born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as
William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was an actor, poem, and playwright
during the reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603). Marlowe
attended Corpus Christi college at Cambridge university and received degrees in
1584and 1587. Traditionally, the education that he received would have prepared
him to become a clergyman, but Marlowe chose not to join the ministry. For a
time, Cambridge even wanted to withhold his degree, apparently suspecting him
of having converted to Catholicism, a forbidden faith in late-sixteenth-century
England, where Protestantism was the state-supported religion. The classic
discussion of Greek tragedy is Aristotle’s poetics. He defines tragedy as “the
imitation of an action that is serious also as having magnitude, complete in
itself “. He continues, “Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of
pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal
of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it
should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of Artistic expression.
Ø The basic difference Aristotle draws
between tragedy and other genres, such as comedy and the epic, is the “tragic
pleasure of pity and fear” the audience feel watching a tragedy. In order for
the Renaissance hero to arouse these feelings in the audience, he cannot be
either all good or all evil but must be someone the audience can identify with;
however, if he is superior in some way, the tragic pleasure is intensified. His
disastrous End result from a mistaken action, which in turn arises from a
tragic flaw or from a tragic error in judgment. Often the tragic flaw is
hubris, an excessive pride that causes the hero to ignore a divine warning or
to break a moral law. It has been suggested that because the tragic hero’s
suffering is greater than his offense, the audience feels pity; because the
audience members perceive that they could behave similarly, they feel pity.
vBRIEF LIFE-STORY DR. FAUSTUS :
Ø Doctor Faustus could be considered
one of Marlowe’s masterpieces of drama. In it he asks the reader to analyze
what the limits are for human power and knowledge and ponder what would happen
if one man tried to exceed those limits. The play opens up with Faustus, who is
supposedly the most learned man in the world, talking about how he has mastered
every field of knowledge known to man. He is bored with theology, finding that
man is doomed no matter what happens, and he has become a master physician,
curing a whole village of a plague. He feels what there is nothing left for him
to learn, as is frustrated by this; therefore, he decides to delve into the
realm of necromancy and magic. He calls upon two other magicians, Valdes and
Cornelius, to teach him how to conjure. He Learn to do so, and upon his first
private experiment into the black art, Mephistopheles appears to him in the
form of an ugly devil. This repulses Faustus, so he tells this devil to go away
and return as a friar. The Devil Does so, But then explain that it was not his
conjuring That brought forth this devil, but the fact that he conjured and,
therefore, cursed the trinity that made him appear. Faustus realize the amount
of the power that he can gain from being a necromancer, so he tells Mephistopheles
to return to hell and tell Satan that he will sell his soul to him for
twenty-four years of absolute power. Satan agrees to this, telling Faustus to
sign the bargain in blood. Faustus does so even after a good angel appears to Him
trying to convince him not to do so and several omens appear which warm him not
to make the bond. For the next twenty –four years Faustus, with Mephistopheles
as his servant, has absolute power. However, in spite of this, he spends his
time going to several different important places to display his power in the
form of petty tricks. In Rome, Faustus turns himself invisible and, along with Mephistopheles,
pokes fun at the pope and some friars. He also goes to the German court where
he shows of his power to emperor Carolus by conjuring the ghost of Alexander
the great. When one knight is sarcastic with Faustus’ tricks, he places a set
of horns on his head. Later on, Faustus sells his horse to a horse-courser on
the condition that he not take the horse into water. Soon thereafter, the horse-courser
returns, furious that his horse turned into a bundle of in the middle of the
lake. Finally, later on in the play, Faustus conjures up Helen of troy for some
fellow scholars for their viewing pleasure. As the play drew to its climax,
Faustus being to realize what he has done and that death, which he once thought
didn’t exist, is indeed his ultimate destiny. Several times he is given the
hint that he should repent to god. For example, an old man enters towards the
end of the play and informs Faustus that it isn’t too late to repent because he
himself was once a sinner but repented. Faustus still doesn’t listen. Finally,
as the clock strikes twelve upon his hour of destiny, many ugly devils appear
and drag him off as he finally screams for mercy.
vThemes,
Motifs & Symbols
Ø Themes
“Themes are
the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.”
Ø Sin, Redemption, and Damnation
Ø Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes
at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world. First, there is the
idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In
making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate
sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly
renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil.
In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through
the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to Christian
belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible Faustus’s
pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him.
All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers
countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the
good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—both of whom can be
seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or
both.
vThe Conflict Between Medieval and Renaissance Values:
Ø Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously
remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to
pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this
quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash
between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The
medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and
the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the
fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new
emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry
into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of
the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage.
vFaustus is a
nature of man :
Ø Faustus is constantly undecided about
whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with
Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of
wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems)
lusts after the power that Mephistopheles promises. The good angel and the evil
angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him in
different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be
intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent
Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephistopheles but
also to question this commitment continually.
vFaustus’s Rejection of the Ancient Authorities
Ø In scene 1, Faustus goes through a
list of the major fields of human knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and theology—and
cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and Jerome’s
Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of these figures in favor of magic.
This rejection symbolizes Faustus’s break with the medieval world, which prized
authority above all else, in favor of a more modern spirit of free inquiry, in
which experimentation and innovation trump the assertions of Greek philosophers
and the Bible.
vConclusion :
Faustus
was indeed a renaissance hero. Many scholar and literary experts may debate
that, because this play was written in renaissance, Christopher Marlowe
intended that doctor Faustus be seen as a martyr tying to attain that which was
forbidden to man in a time when doing so was the noble thing to do. This is not
true, however. Doctor Faustus was a tragic hero through and through, and the
way that he presents himself in the play is solid evidence for this. To begin
with, he feels that he can justify his turning to witchcraft and necromancy by
his gaining of all other Knowledges. The irony here is that he never did, or he
would have realized that even after he had committed blasphemy by conjuring
spirits, he could have turned back to god. Faustus could have become an example
for all of mankind and proven that if he could be forgiven, then all could be
forgiven. However, become he was stubborn, ignorant, and blind, he refused to
see that he was never truly damned until he was drug by the devils into the
heart of hell itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment