I Grok Spok.
THEMES
Hypocrisy
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus also uses clever ironic dialogue to point out the hypocrisy of others.
Doctor Faustus, the criticism of the baseness of religion versus the “higher” form of learning, which is education and knowledge for Faustus, and is further is expounded upon when Faustus goes to visit the Pope. When he gets the Pope’s men rowdy, he begins taunting them with what he sees as their own hypocrisy. “How! Bell, book, and candle; candle book and bell, / Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell” (Marlowe 78). This lone alone is evidence for Faustus’/Marlowe’s view on the rituals of the Catholic religion and he uses their rituals against them to point out how meaningless he thinks they are. It seems as though Marlowe as an author inserts his views on religious hypocrisy as well, since he writes the these clergymen as saying nonsense and ironic chants to refute Faustus, “Cursed be he that struck his holiness a blow to the face. Maledictat Dominus.” This ironic, satirical use of “papal” language here to illustrate the church’s petty response allows us to glimpse Marlowe’s own views of religious hypocrisy.
At the same time however, there seems to be another layer of hypocrisy at play in this text. While on the one, more surface level, we have Faustus pointing out the hypocrisy of the church, he himself is guilty of hypocrisy, since he spent a majority of the text thinking about what he would do with his new-found powers. It seemed at first that he didn’t want to be a petty magician, but we find him “performing” for both the Pope and later the Emperor. Irony and hypocrisy seem intertwined in both texts. While in The Importance of Being Earnest, it was more on the level of dialogue, in Doctor Faustus, the emphasis was more on the actions of both the main character and the author himself. Even though these texts are separated by several centuries, no matter what the literary devices and means of attaining the revelation of hypocrisy, it still seems to be a valid theme to explore in literature.
Good and Evil
One of the most important and prominent themes in Doctor Faustus is by far the conflict between good and evil in the world and the human soul.
In the play, Doctor Faustus is frequently accompanied by two angels, one good and one evil. Both spirits try to advise him on a course of action, with the evil one usually being more influential over his mind. These two angels embody the internal battle that is raging inside of Faustus. On one hand, he has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and supreme power; on the other hand, Faustus realizes that it is folly to relinquish heavenly pleasures for fleeting mortal happiness.
In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe shows the reader that everything in the mortal world is a double-edged sword. In his never-ending quest for knowledge, Faustus exemplifies how even scholarly life can have evil undertones when studies are used for unholy purposes. Doctor Faustus’s miserable defeat against the forces of evil within and without enlighten the reader to beware a surfeit of anything.
Greed
Like many of Marlowe’s heroes, Faustus was self-driven by greed and ambition. In this case, the Doctor tries to satiate his appetite for knowledge and power. These heroes forget their responsibilities to God and their fellow creatures.
While Faustus is amused by the seven deadly sins, he does not realize that he is guilty of every single one, namely avarice and jealousy.
In effect, Marlowe presents to the reader a good soul gone bad-a brilliant scholar who squanders his time with necromancy and is later courted by the devil himself. Although he is frequently surrounded by powerful heads of state, beautiful women and servile devils, Faustus is never truly happy. He tries to bury his unrest with luxury and debauchery, to no avail. What Faustus does not realize is that he craves happiness and salvation, not wealth and damnation. Instead, in a tragic cycle of greed and despair, Faustus sadly wallows in riches up to the time of his miserable death.
Salvation through Prayer
While Doctor Faustus is an example of what happens to a wayward soul, the old man represents the devout Christian soul. The old man begs Faustus to repent, regardless of the tortures that the devils inflict on him for this. He clings to his faith to the very end and even Mephostophilis is wary of harming him because of his good soul. Thus, the old man serves as a foil to Faustus’s misery and damnation.
Tragic Hero
Despite his unholy soul, Faustus is often viewed by audiences with pity and compassion. A tragic hero is a character that the audience sympathizes with despite his/her actions that would indicate the contrary. Faustus is not the mere shell of a man in the play, existing only to represent the evil in the world. He is a veritable human being with a range of emotions and thoughts. He displays pride, joy, contrition and self-doubt quite frequently. At many times, Faustus alternately displays his cowardice and foolish strength against the devils. Thus, Faustus’s one saving grace with the audience is his identifiable character.
Sin and Damnation
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.
Medievel vs. Rennaisance Values
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.
The Divided Nature of Man
