Assignment 1 : Doctor Faustus as a Mythical play.

Name : Makwana Vijay K.
Course name : M.A English
Semester : 1
Roll no : 46
Enrolment no : 2069108420180035
Email : vijaykm7777@gmail.com
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Batch year : 2017-18
Submitted to : department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Paper no : 1 "The Raneissance Literature"
Topic : Doctor Faustus as a Mythical play.


Introduction :

Playwright, poet. Christopher Marlowe was a poet and playwright at the forefront of the 16th-century dramatic renaissance. His works influenced William Shakespeare and generations of writers to follow.He born in Canterbury, England, in 1564. While Christopher Marlowe's literary career lasted less than six years, and his life only 29 years, his achievements, most notably the play The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, ensured his lasting legacy.

Marlowe's major works :

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1586)
Tambourine the Great (1587)
The Jew of Malta (1589)
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1589)
Edward ii (1592)
The Massacre at Paris (1593)

Character of Doctor Faustus :

Faustus :
Faustus is the protagonist and tragic hero of Marlowe’s play. He is a contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn out badly (the Chorus’s introduction, if nothing else, prepares us), there is nonetheless a grandeur to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping the map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.
The protagonist. Faustus is a brilliant sixteenth-century scholar from Wittenberg, Germany, whose ambition for knowledge, wealth, and worldly might makes him willing to pay the ultimate price—his soul—to Lucifer in exchange for supernatural powers. Faustus’s initial tragic grandeur is diminished by the fact that he never seems completely sure of the decision to forfeit his soul and constantly wavers about whether or not to repent. His ambition is admirable and initially awesome, yet he ultimately lacks a certain inner strength. He is unable to embrace his dark path wholeheartedly but is also unwilling to admit his mistake.

Mephastophilis :
A devil whom Faustus summons with his initial magical experiments. Mephastophilis’s motivations are ambiguous: on the one hand, his oft-expressed goal is to catch Faustus’s soul and carry it off to hell; on the other hand, he actively attempts to dissuade Faustus from making a deal with Lucifer by warning him about the horrors of hell. Mephastophilis is ultimately as tragic a figure as Faustus, with his moving, regretful accounts of what the devils have lost in their eternal separation from God and his repeated reflections on the pain that comes with damnation.

Chorus :
A character who stands outside the story, providing narration and commentary. The Chorus was customary in Greek tragedy.

Old Man :
An enigmatic figure who appears in the final scene. The old man urges Faustus to repent and to ask God for mercy. He seems to replace the good and evil angels, who, in the first scene, try to influence Faustus’s behavior.

Good Angel :
A spirit that urges Faustus to repent for his pact with Lucifer and return to God. Along with the old man and the bad angel, the good angel represents, in many ways, Faustus’s conscience and divided will between good and evil.

Evil Angele :
A spirit that serves as the counterpart to the good angel and provides Faustus with reasons not to repent for sins against God. The evil angel represents the evil half of Faustus’s conscience.

Lucifer :

The prince of devils, the ruler of hell, and Mephastophilis’s master.
Wagner :
Faustus’s servant. Wagner uses his master’s books to learn how to summon devils and work magic.

Clown :
A clown who becomes Wagner’s servant. The clown’s antics provide comic relief; he is a ridiculous character, and his absurd behavior initially contrasts with Faustus’s grandeur. As the play goes on, though, Faustus’s behavior comes to resemble that of the clown.

Robin :
An ostler, or innkeeper, who, like the clown, provides a comic contrast to Faustus. Robin and his friend Rafe learn some basic conjuring, demonstrating that even the least scholarly can possess skill in magic. Marlowe includes Robin and Rafe to illustrate Faustus’s degradation as he submits to simple trickery such as theirs.

Rafe :
An ostler, and a friend of Robin. Rafe appears as Dick (Robin’s friend and a clown) in B-text editions of Doctor Faustus.


Doctor Faustus as a mythical play :
The story of Doctor Faustus is a familiar myth, in which the main character sells his soul , makes a deal with the devil, for something he speciously holds more valuable. There are many versions of this story in our culture, and it would take quite a time to make note of them all. Most people will have seen or heard one of the various stories in the for of a book, play, movie, or television show. The original story of Doctor Faustus, as created by Christopher Marlow, was prevalent to society at the time because it spoke to peoples growing dizzy awareness of their possibilities and capabilities at this time.

The classic Marlow play, Doctor Faustus, would also be a hit because in the countries of the world there are many a growing multicultural society, for whom there are continually growing possibilities and capabilities. This is also a similar state of affairs for how one might perceive the womens movement, as women are gaining more equality inside and outside o f the workplace. Also, for society as a whole, one is being exposed to the ever growing world of computers and the world wide web. The largest and most significant change I would make in an attempt to adapt Doctor Faustus so that it would be more engineered towards to todays audience is that I would make Doctor Faustus a Dr. Faustesse. I would make an attempt to portray the main character Faustus, as a women, Faustesse, in an attempt to update the concerns for which the play represents.
A female character fall to the devil to gain power over society it symbolizes and signifies the constant struggle of women, even in todays society, to get past the very patriarchal dominated social structures and ienantiodromia, the reversal of opposites. The psycho-physical law of enantiodromia proclaims that the steep ascent is inevitabily followed by the descent.


Many critics of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus spend too much energy seeing the play solely against its immediate historical background and too little seeing it as a visionary work speaking significantly to the modern condition. Indeed the Medieval and Reformation atmosphere, Faustus' dilemma is easy to see as parallel to that of modern man especially from the twentieth century standpoint of C.G. Jung's psychology of archetypes. Such a method of examination allows for a more fundamental and broader perspective then does more traditional literary analysis.

According to Jung, the death of meaning in the mythic symbols of Christianity was beginning during the Renaissance Reformation period, the age of Dr.Faustus. Mankind then began to lose something which, in one form or another, is necessary for psychic health. Image of Christian mythology no longer work for Faustus when he become to a crisis in his life. They continue to operate only in a strange way, in the nature of the neurotic. But they do not from the basis for anything like a healthy approach toward life.

A chief danger encouraged by Renaissance man with his one sided intellect which values knowledge for the technology, manipulative power it gives over things and other people. Because of the excelling nature of his studies and practice, Faustus is, like Icarus in the ancient myth, place in danger of enantiodromia, the reversal of opposites. The psycho-physical law of enantiodromia proclaims that the steep ascent is inevitabily followed by the descent. According to the prologue, Faustus is 'swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit", "blutted now with learning's golden gifts".

The opening speech dismissed as petty all the disciplines Faustus has spent his life studying. He now seems, as does Goethe's Faust, as well as contemporary man, to be insatiable, desiring more and more, the sensational, the superlative. He claims that, as a physician, he has protected whole cities from the plague but that he is in despair because, nevertheless, he is still Faustus, a man, who has not the power to raise the dead or to induce immortality. Faustus is like modern man in his tendency to let the thought of power cloud his mind. His desire and expectation run wild, causing him to lose rerepresents to see wholes yet making it easy for him to analyze out of existence whatever does not agree with his hubris.

The intellectual process by selecting only those data which substantiate conclusion predetermined by desire. Only the evidence that confirms his preestablished vision. When he looks at a passage in the Gospel of John, he sees only the part dealing with sin and death, ignoring the rest of the passage offering eternal life to those who trust in Christ. His emphasis on the harshness of the doctrines of original sin and predestination, taken out of context of the whole, is his superficial excuse for rejecting Christianity. Faustus' rejection of Christianity, though, like that of modern man, is based really on no single argument or analysis of text, but on deep psychological realities of the times.

The play's clear emphasis of the presence of these confused attitudes indicates their importance to the Faustian psychology. Another concomitant of Faustus's one sidedly inflated ego is the dissociation of the conscious ego both from the repressed material in the personal unconscious and from the archetype components of the collective unconscious. Certainly one way of seeing Faustus experience with figures like Mephistopheles, Lucifer, a Good and Bad Angle, the mythical Helen of Troy, is as fantasy dramatizing conflict within his psyche. The play in modern terms, as containing fantasy surrealistically presented, is helpful for an analysis of Faustus psychological situation.


In general Faustus's experiences involve a journey into the non-integrated, repressed portion of his psyche. The "four and twenty years of voluptuous pleasures" is, of course, the converse of Faustus hard working and studious life up to that point. Mephistopheles in a symbol of what Jung calls the shadow, archetype of the dark, non-integrated, complementary portion of the psyche. On this level, Mephistopheles can be seen as the converse of Faustus a figure representing the psychological qualities repressed in Faustus.
Faustus is the brave, disdainful skeptic and freethinker, the man of pride and intellectual power. At the same time he displays a certain tenseness evidence of the inner turmoil caused by the snapping of psychic energies by the inflation of his ego. Against Faustus, the powerhungry, prideful, caustic, sensation-oriented skeptic-we see Mephistopheles, in some major speeches as, in tone at least, the humble, totally sincere, feelings oriented Christian, albeit a belatedly converted one.

The sentiments were not enough, ironically he pleads with Faustus not to endanger his soul : "O Faustus, level these frivolous demands which strike a terror to my fainting soul". This speech is by mean the only example of the tone in Mephistopheles described above. The author aspect of Mephistopheles as Faustus shadow in the sort of evil sensuality represented by the Christian devil in the Renaissance. That is another element compensatory to the staid intellectual, come to terms with his shadow and is saved at the play's end, Faustus never comes to terms with this devil, the opposite of his ego.

Faustus despair in the later parts of the play seems to be all but universally noted by the critics. Christian guilt is oddly strong in this resolute but neurotic skeptic. Guilt and despair shatter Faustus resolution and his will, already of an indeterminate quality. One example occurs at the point at which he asks Mephistopheles for a wife. The feminine principal, in opposition to the masculine intellect, is one of the non-integrated portion of his psyche with which he needs to come to terms. Faustus bends quite easily to let Mephistopheles browbeat him to the point that he substitutes sensuality of a particularly nonviable kind for psychological relationship to the feminine. Faustus shadow tries to satisfy him with "a Devil dressed like a women, with fireworks".Faustus attraction to the mythical figure of Helen of Troy clearly involves the archetype of the anime. In paragraph in which he mentions Helen as one of the literary embodiment of the anima, Jung point out that the anima represents "the chaotic urge to life" but also "a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom." Faustus desire to escape the result of the one sided life of the intellectual is a compensation partially prompted by the energies of his in integrated anima. Thus his attraction to arcane magic, the occult, seems to be motivated by anima impulses.

Conclusion :
Faustus has never truly integrated the feminine elements of his psyche with his prideful masculine intellectual, never come to terms with what Jung calls the anima or "soul-age". Faustus own image of himself is essentially crude and, in some senses, adolescent with its fascination with showing off heroically.

Work cites :
https://www.kibin.com/essay-examples/updating-the-myth-of-doctor-faustus-64rH0DgJ http://m.sparknotes.com/lit/doctorfaustus/characters.html