Doctor Faustus is an unimpeachable creation by The Central Sun of the University Wits, Christopher Marlow (1564-1593). Marlow has rightly been called The Morning Star of the great Elizabethan drama. Doctor Faustus has been treated as a link between the miracle and morality plays and the illustrious drama of Elizabethan period. William Hazlitt remarks: “His Doctor Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. The character maybe considered a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse.”
In Doctor Faustus, though we find the
elements of mystery and miracle primarily, mainly we find the elements of
morality. Morality plays were influenced by Bible, by religion. The prime
concern of morality plays was to teach moral lessons to the contemporary
people. In such plays we also see constant contradiction between good and evil,
personification of abstract ideas, crime and punishment, unlimited desire of
human being, downfall of human being as a result of the disobedience of the
orders of God. All these elements we profoundly find in this play of Marlow.
According to George Santayana, “Marlow is a martyr to everything that
the Renaissance valued- power, curious knowledge, enterprise, wealth and
beauty. The Evil Angel urges Faustus to think of honor and of wealth.” All
of such qualities we find in Faustus when he was making a comparison among
medicine, law, philosophy and logic. He found all these branches of knowledge
fruitless. Finally he said, “When all is done, divinity is best” (1. 1.
37). The good side of his soul emphasized him to learn the knowledge
related to God, related to eternity. Shortly after when he started reading from
the Bible, he saw that if someone commits sin, he will be punished in Hell
through death. It seemed so difficult to him.
The bad side of his soul did not let him to go with divinity. Then
Faustus compared religious scriptures as “vain trifles” and finally
decided to learn necromancy. From this very point we find a prognosis that what
is going to happen to a man who leaves the path of God and starts to follow the
path of evil. The particular things that intoxicated him to learn this black
art are portrayed in his own voice:
“O what a
world of profit and delight,
Of power, of
honor, of omnipotence,
Is promis’d
to the studious artisan!
All things
that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at
my command:” (1. 1. 51-55).
Morality play is really a fusion of the medieval
allegory. In these plays the characters were personified abstraction of vice or
virtues such as Good Deeds, Faith, Mercy, Anger. Even the outstanding morality
play Everyman has characters like Wealth, Death, Good Deeds
and so on. Very often The Seven Deadly Sins such as Pride, Envy, Greed, Wrath,
Gluttony, Lust and Sloth were found engaged in physical and verbal battle. In
these respects we can call Doctor Faustus a morality play in
spite of its tragic ending. Even Macbeth is not free from its
influence as this play also presents a conflict between the good and evil.
The general theme
of morality play is the struggle of forces of good and evil of
the soul of man, and the aim is to teach doctrines and ethics of
Christianity. In this sense Doctor Faustus is a morality
play to a very great extent. We see Faustus abjuring the scriptures, The
Trinity and Christ. He surrenders his soul to Lucifer for “four and twenty
years” out of his ambition to gain super-human power by mastering the
unholy art of magic: “Divinity adieu! / These metaphysics of magicians, / And
necromantic books are heavenly” (1. 1. 46-48).
By selling his
soul to Lucifer, Faustus lives a blasphemous life full of vain pleasure. There
is a fierce struggle in his soul between his ambition and conscience, between
The Good and Evil Angle that externalize his inner conflict. But Faustus
ultimately surrenders to the allurements of The Evil Angle, thereby paving his
way for external damnation. Because of his crime, he must be punished. When he
wants to rue, his heart becomes stiff and he could not do so, as we find in the
case of The Old Mariner in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We
find Faustus utters, “My heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent” (2. 2. 18).
When the final
hour approached, Faustus to his utmost pain and horror hears a fearful echo: “Faustus,
thou art damn’d!”. And before the devils snatch away his soul to the
burning Hell, the excruciating pangs of a deeply agonized soul find the most
poignant expression in Faustus’s final soliloquy:
“My God, my God, look not so fierce to me! /
Adders and serpents, let me breath a while! /
Ugly hell, gape not: come not Lucifer: /
I’ll burn my books: Ah, Mephistophilis!” (5. 3. 120-123)
After
reaching the marginal extent of the discussion, we can say that Doctor
Faustus is a remarkable morality play. Faustus, who was at center of
the play, tells us a moral story of a man, who seeking for knowledge pledged
his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance. His
exaggerated ambitions not only made him a sufferer in this world, but also
damned him eternally in the world to come.
