Page 166 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes • Mephostophilis is a devil of craft and cunning.
• He is the devil who comes at Faustus’ summoning, and the devil who serves Faustus for 24
years.
• He is considered to be a latecomer in the recognized hierarchy of demons.
• Wagner is the servant to Faustus who steals Faustus’ books and learns how to summon demons.
• Good Angel and Evil Angel is the personifications of Faustus’ inner turmoil, who give differing
advice to him at key points.
• Lucifer thought to be another name of Satan originally meant Venus, referring to the planet’s
brilliance.
• Robin learns demon summoning by stealing one of Faustus’ books. He is the chief character
in a number of scenes that provide comic relief from the main story.
• Bruno is a man who would be Pope, selected by the German emperor and representing the
conflicts between Church and state authority.
• Martino, knight in the court of the German Emperor is friend to Benvolio and Frederick.
• Faustus is the central character of the play.
• The attention of the audience is certainly focused upon him. Faustus was born of poor parents
in Rhode in Germany. He was brought up by relatives who sent him to the university at
Wittenberg.
• He excelled in the study of divinity and was awarded his doctorate. He was so outstanding in
scholarship and in learned argument that he grew proud of himself and his powers.
• At the beginning of the play, Doctor Faustus is no longer content with the pursuit of knowledge.
He has studied all the main branches of learning of his time and is satisfied by none of them.
He demands more from logic than the ability it gives one in debate.
• Medicine has brought Doctor Faustus fame and riches but confers upon him only human
powers.
• The study of law is for slaves and leads to nothing significant.
• Divinity is preferable to all of these but cannot get beyond sin and death.
• It is magic that promises to open up new worlds of power and to make man into a god.
• Aristotle stated that the tragic hero is a predominantly good man, whose undoing is brought
about by some error of human frailty.
• The audience sees three such defects in Faustus that lead to his ultimate domination by
Mephistophilis: his pride, his restless intellect and his desire to be more than man.
• In his pride, Doctor Faustus is guilty of hubris, a quality which in Greek tragedy was certain
to arouse the wrath of the gods. His desire to be equated with God is a sin in Christian terms
as well.
• Faustus, on one level, represents the new man emerging from the womb of the middle Ages.
The authority of the Church, which had limited the thought of the middle Ages, was lessening.
There was a movement of power from the Church to the State, which meant, to a limited
extent, the transfer of power to the individual man.
• The classical spirit was certainly a source of influence for Marlowe and his fellow dramatists.
The Greek attitude to their gods was very different from that of the medieval Church.
• Doctor Faustus looks sometimes backwards to the medieval world, and sometimes forward
to the modern world. Above all, he is a Renaissance figure, adventurously surveying a world
whose horizons were widening every day as a result of voyages and exploration. Faustus is
full of excitement for geographical discovery.

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