A Central Preoccupation of English Renaissance Drama Is the Tension Between Individual Free Will and the Workings of Fate. Compare the Treatment of This Theme in Dr Faustus and Hamlet Respectively.
A central preoccupation of English Renaissance Drama is the tension between individual free will and the workings of fate. Compare the treatment of this theme in Dr Faustus and Hamlet respectively.
In the Elizabethan period in which both Dr Faustus and Hamlet were written ambition and greed was a big element of society as people tried to gain favour and power with Elizabeth and her court, often resorting to murder in order to move further up the social ladder and gain more status, or in some cases, to stay at the status they had managed to achieve for themselves. The Tudor monarchies had made some progress in controlling lawlessness but Robert Watson claims that there must have been some basis for the “persistent jokes about incompetent constables and watchers in Elizabethan comedies” (ed. McEachern, 2002, pg.160). With so many crimes committed by un-punishable criminals and many crimes against women, the poor and even different religious minorities, not even considered to be crimes there is little wonder why people developed such an appetite for revenge stories such as Hamlet which was written after Thomas Kyd had such a huge commercial success with The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, whose plot looks very similar to that of the plot in Hamlet as the main character feigns madness in order to get revenge on the people who had killed his son and were socially higher up than him.
The themes of fate and freewill within the story of Hamlet are based around the idea as to whether or not he was fated to kill his uncle in revenge for his father’s death or if he is culpable for his actions and the many deaths he is responsible for within the play as he tries to gain revenge and if he was acting of his own free will or whether or not it is fate that Ophelia kills herself within the play or again she was acting of her own free will and could have changed her fate . In contrast, Dr Faustus written by Christopher Marlowe is a tragedy with an end that the main character
In the Elizabethan period in which both Dr Faustus and Hamlet were written ambition and greed was a big element of society as people tried to gain favour and power with Elizabeth and her court, often resorting to murder in order to move further up the social ladder and gain more status, or in some cases, to stay at the status they had managed to achieve for themselves. The Tudor monarchies had made some progress in controlling lawlessness but Robert Watson claims that there must have been some basis for the “persistent jokes about incompetent constables and watchers in Elizabethan comedies” (ed. McEachern, 2002, pg.160). With so many crimes committed by un-punishable criminals and many crimes against women, the poor and even different religious minorities, not even considered to be crimes there is little wonder why people developed such an appetite for revenge stories such as Hamlet which was written after Thomas Kyd had such a huge commercial success with The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, whose plot looks very similar to that of the plot in Hamlet as the main character feigns madness in order to get revenge on the people who had killed his son and were socially higher up than him.
The themes of fate and freewill within the story of Hamlet are based around the idea as to whether or not he was fated to kill his uncle in revenge for his father’s death or if he is culpable for his actions and the many deaths he is responsible for within the play as he tries to gain revenge and if he was acting of his own free will or whether or not it is fate that Ophelia kills herself within the play or again she was acting of her own free will and could have changed her fate . In contrast, Dr Faustus written by Christopher Marlowe is a tragedy with an end that the main character