What is Doctor Faustus About and Why Should I Care? Then get back to Shmoop to give us the skinny. So dig in to Doctor Faustus, and tackle the big questions. Are they right? That's a question only you can answer, because Marlowe is annoyingly coy. All along characters like the Good Angel and the Old Man try to convince Faustus that he does have a choice they insist that he can repent and turn to God again. The way he handles this belief is the subject of the rest of the play. It raised questions about exactly how much control a person had over his or her own salvation.įaustus grapples with this same question at the beginning of the play, and eventually arrives at the shaky conclusion that he's damned no matter what he does.

This theory said that each human being was fated from the beginning of his or her life to be damned or saved. Doctor Faustus stood out from the crowd by combining things we associate with medieval drama (like allegory) to explore what we now think of as modern questions: What form should knowledge take? What is the nature of true power? Should we believe in fate or free will?Īt the time that Marlowe was writing, a Protestant church reformer named John Calvin had developed a theory about human salvation called Predestination. That might have something to do with its uniqueness. Apparently Doctor Faustus struck a chord or two in the hearts and minds of its renaissance audience. That's something that only happened if people were really clamoring for a printed version of their favorite play. We know Doctor Faustus was immediately popular with audiences because it was actually published in 1604. It had been making the rounds as a folktale in Germany since the early 1500s, and was translated into English and published in England in the 1590s as a chapbook (that's the Renaissance version of a pulp paperback) entitled 'The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death, of Doctor Iohn Faustus.' So Marlowe had all kinds of sources to draw from when it came to bringing the devil to life.Īnd boy did he ever bring him to life. The legend of Faustus was already well-known in Europe by the time Christopher Marlowe turned it into a play in 1594. The catch? He has to sign his soul over to the devil in order to get that mojo workin'. Doctor Faustusis the story of a great scholar who decides a little magical mojo will cure his ennui. This one's got it all, folks: devils, damsels, and dastardly deeds.

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