Goethe, who marveled at Marlowe’s dramatic construction-“How greatly it is all planned!”-would take up the story of Faustus for his own masterwork. The Faust figure has become the archetype of all human striving to reach beyond the human more particularly, he has become the personification of that postmedieval phenomenon we call individualism.” The descendants of Faustus include Byron’s romantic outlaws, Shelley’s Prometheus, Melville’s Ahab, Brontë’s Heathcliff, and Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen. Indeed, he shaped it into a myth that usurped the place in the Western imagination hitherto enjoyed by the myths of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve. McAlindon observes, ‘What makes the play most remarkable is the fact that in composing it Marlowe so elicited the latent meanings of the devil compact-a type of story that had been familiar in the West for centuries-that he gave it the force and status of myth. Faustus’s bargain with the devil, his ambitious rise and terrifying fall, encapsulate and typify the dilemma of the modem tragic hero. Like Oedipus, Faustus, who exchanges damnation for knowledge and power, has become a resonating tragic archetype, epitomizing the doomed but daring overreacher whose rebellion and defeat enact a struggle for transcendence against the gravitational pull of the human condition.
Bartlett Giamatti, “Marlowe: The Arts of Illusion”Ĭhristopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, one of the earliest and the most famous non-Shakespearean Elizabethan tragedies, manages not only to bridge the gap between the medieval morality plays and the secular, classically influenced dramas of the Renaissance but to produce one of the core myths of Western civilization. Else, like his hero, we will be deformed by the servant we abuse. Marlowe is a magus too, all poets are, but one who tells us in this play to use that awesome power of words to fashion ourselves in God’s image. He knows too much about the shaping power of words to be a Faustus. More than any other play, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus celebrates that God-like power of language, and shows us how words can soar, and tempts us to dizzying heights within our heads. Analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
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