Doctor Faustus - Essay

Comment on the significance of the first and the last soliloquys by Doctor Faustus .Examine and detail how these two soliloquys by Faustus provide the basic structural framework for Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus,probably written and performed around 1588, was the first great tragedy in the English language, a powerful drama that ushered in 30 years of unparalleled dramatic creativity on the English stage. In his The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe used the structure of the medieval morality play to reinterpret the nearly century-old legend of Faust, a man who sacrifices his immortal soul in exchange for knowledge and power. Marlowe presented a mythic, archetypal tale of human pride, sin, and fall from grace that has appealed to readers and audiences through the humanist aspirations of the Renaissance, the spiritual explorations of Romanticism, and the skepticism of modernity. According to Wolfgang Clemen “Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus signalizes a new stage in the history of English drama so far as here for the first time a playwright embodied in dramatic form a symbolic representation of his own spiritual wrestlings.”
Literally soliloquy means talking to himself aloud when a person is alone or is supposed to be alone. In a play it means the talking on the part of the character regardless of the presence of hearers. As in the case of Faustus’ first soliloquy, it nicely sums up his life and growth of his ideas that took place before the actions that are going to occur on the stage. Sometimes a soliloquy enables us to understand the motives of a character. And one of the most significant uses of the soliloquy is to reveal a deep experience or a typical state of mind with all its waverings and inner conflict. Sometimes a soliloquy may reveal the moral underlying a play as we find in the case of the soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Othello and that of Marlowe’s Faustus in the last scene.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus contextually