Essays on Doctor Faustus

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...