Christopher Marlowe, in his Doctor Faustus, his master piece, draws an
excellent character before us. This character can be regarded as a strong
individual, an embodiment of Renaissance and a tragic hero. Indeed, each and
every man possesses two forces going on in him.one is social that abides by the
set up rules of his surroundings. Another is individual that thinks things in
his mind particularly from his own demand, dream and thought. In Dr. Faustus’s
case, it is the second one- he has a firm individuality, that’s why he is
called an individualistic hero
As an embodiment
of Renaissance, Dr. Faustus, having attained
knowledge, power and fame, wants more and more, unparalleled possession. He has
achieved knowledge of all branches. Yet he wants to do whatever he pleases. So
he would like to practice necromancy.
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please
……….
I will have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
Thus he will compel them to build a wall
of brass around Germany and to make the river Rine divert its course to flow
round the lovely city of Wittenberg; will be able to supply plenty of silk
garments to the public school; will drive Prince of Parma form his country and
become the supreme monarch of all the provinces; and will have wonderful and
powerful weapons of war.
But before and
after attaining the black art, there runs a conflict in him between the good
and evil, between the good and bad which is at the beginning symbolized by good
angel and evil angle. (Act 1, Scene 1)
In order to attain
his purpose, Dr. Faustus racks the name of God ……………………….
Faustus is an
individual tragic hero. He is the maker of his own tragedy, his fate, good or
bad. He falls, not by the fickleness of fortune or the decree of fate, or
because he has been corrupted by Mephistopheles, the agent of Lucifer, the
devil, but all things happen to him because of his own will. He commits sin by
wanting like God or to exceed God and by rejecting God and accepting Beelzebub,
the devil. So he must suffer in fine.
Faustus always experiences
a conflict between his consciousness and free will which is also found in great
tragic heroes of Shakespeare, namely Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.
Faustus is a
tragic hero, individual in character. But through his death he proves the
loftiness of God, Almighty. O.P. Broclbent says-
“Faustus’s passion for knowledge and power is in
itself a virtue, but diverted from the service of God it
threatens to become totally negative and self- destroying’’.
However, if we go
through the depth of Faustas’s tragedy, we observe that Faustus stands not for
a character, not for a single man, but for man, for every man. His tragedy is
not a personal tragedy, but a tragedy that overtakes all those who dare “practice
more than heavenly power permits” In this way, Faustus’s individualistic
tragedy turns to a universal too.
To sum up, we
must say that Dr. Faustus is an embodiment of Renaissance, a tragic hero,
individual and forceful. At the same time, he represents us too. but the only
difference is that we dare hardly avoid the established concepts of society,
religion, but Faustus boldly went ahead to his individual demand. However in
religious point of view, he committed a great sin and suffered a lot - that is,
it is a morality play too.
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Renaissance elements in Dr. Faustus
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