Page 171 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

Unit 14: Doctor Faustus: A Tragedy and all Concepts of Tragedy

Germany is treated as a joke by Faustus and Mephostophilis. The pomp and ceremony of the Notes
Catholic Church is also ridiculed.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
1. Doctor Faustus has elements of
(a) both Christian morality and classical tragedy
(b) Aristotlean tragedy
(c) both classical tragedy and Aristotlean tragedy
(d) only Christian morality.

2. Which of the following is an example of Christian morality?
(a) Men sits on high, though God is the judge of the world
(b) The devils tempting people into sin and the angel urging them to remain true
to God
(c) Faustus allows his soul to be claimed by Lucifer
(d) Avoid temptation and sin and do not repent if indulge in temptation.
Fill in the blanks:

3. Doctor Faustus has elements of both ......... and classical tragedy.
4. In the Elizabethan age there was a strictly dichotomised attitude towards .........
and wrong.
5. The play contains Medieval and Renaissance concepts of ..........

State whether the following statements are true or false:
6. Faustus’s story is a tragedy in Christian terms, because he gives in to temptation
and is damned to hell.
7. Faustus expresses atheistic beliefs and turns his back on the redemptive power of
God.
8. Faustus’s principal sin is his great pride and repent.

14.2 Elements of Classical Tragedy in Doctor Faustus

Despite its pantheon of gods, the classical world believed in humanity. The ancient Greeks extolled
the perfection of the human body and the clarity of human thought. The medieval church held the
opposite view, reason was suspect and flesh was the devil’s snare.
Another concept derived from the classical past, though it was present in the Middle Ages too, was
the literary doctrine of ‘imitation.’
Theoretically, then, it was the task of the writer to translate for present readers the moral vision of
the past, and they were to do this by “imitating” great works, adapting them to a Christian
perspective. Of course Renaissance literature reflects the idea that such “imitation” was to be neither
mechanical nor complete: writers were to capture the spirit of the originals, mastering the best
models, learning from them, and then using them for their own purposes.
Another medieval dramatic form emerged in the 14th century and flourished in the 15th-16th
centuries, a form which has more direct links with Elizabethan drama. This is the morality play,
which differs from the miracle play in that it does not deal with a biblical or pseudo-biblical story
but with personified abstractions of virtues and vices that struggle for man’s soul. Simply put,

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