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Unit 10: Doctor Faustus: Morality Play

theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus Notes
considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene
12—both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience,
or both.
Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework,
this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life
does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is
too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of
being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic
power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his
final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where
certain sins cannot be forgiven.

The Divided Nature of Man

Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to
follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of
wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power
that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s
shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels
may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustus’s divided
will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment
continually.

10.2.2 The Conflict between Medieval and Renaissance Values

Scholars remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the
medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one
of the play’s central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging
Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and
the natural world.

The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon
spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical
learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy,
theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center
stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth
century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through
every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology,
quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor
Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not
individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way
of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in
his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous.
Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic
hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet
Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers

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