Essays on Doctor Faustus

A key feature of the Gothic genre in The Bloody Chamber,’ Frankenstein and Dr Faustus is Transgression. Transgression, put simply is the violation of a particular societal, moral or natural law. It is breaking boundaries, or breaking rules of society, which is reflected in all...

Is Doctor Faustus or Enron more successful as a moral play? The playwrights display lessons that the audience are to learn whilst watching the play. However, arguably the playwrights have different aims as to watch they are, Marlowe projects a moral warning about reaching higher...

A play can have power over its audience, whether it simply captivates them with its plot or makes them question their beliefs with its commentary. Though while the actors are the ones directly exercising this power over the audience, it is the writer or director...

Both plays, regardless of their context, are simply about man’s need to control instincts inherently selfish, greedy and lustful. They are not political satires. It is clear that both Pebble and Marlowe are concerned with man’s inherent selfish, greedy and lustful flaws, to portray the...

Throughout Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, the themes of sin, damnation and redemption are presented somewhat ambiguously. The key focus of this ambiguity, is the identification of Faustus’ point of no return with regards to the damnation of his soul. It can be argued that the...

In both plays, Twelfth Night and Doctor Faustus, there exists a high and a low (or comic) plot. This plot division serves as a parallel – the actions and characters in the low plot coincide with the actions and characters in the high plot. The...

Shakespeare’s minor characters are as often as diverse and essential to the plot as their protagonist counterparts, used within his plays to illuminate the main characters’ goals and feelings. The presence of these personages also expands upon the audience’s experience while giving audience members characters...

Throughout both ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Doctor Faustus,’ the authors draw upon the ideas of responsibility, free will, and blame. Marlowe, in ‘Doctor Faustus’, melds the conventional religious ideology of the Middle Ages with the comparatively new Renaissance and Reformation thought, thus creating an effective contrast...

“Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion” (I, ii, 279-280) Religion, as Barabas describes in this quotation from The Jew of Malta, acts as a measure in defending one’s actions as moral or just. Christopher Marlowe presents this use of religion in Doctor Faustus and The...

In the world of theatre, there are many plays in which the central figure is one who harnesses extreme personality traits above all others. For example, Sophocles’ Oedipus is a fatherly king with great ambition and strength; and Shakespeare’s Macbeth is evilly ambitious, while Romeo...

Christopher Marlowe’s play entitled, Doctor Faustus, tells the story of a curious and ambitious man who has grown tired of focusing on all of the traditional areas of study, and wishes to learn something less known by others. Faustus is intrigued by magic, and after...

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s The Tempest present similar definitions of “power” through the differing circumstances of their protagonists. Power, in these plays, can be thought of as “control of the unknown.” If one character has control of something another character has no understanding of,...