Paper:2 charecteristics of Neo- classical Age(Assignment)
Name :Bhaliya Hansa G.
Roll. No. 10
Paper No. : 1 The Renaissance Literature
Class : M. A. Sem - 1
Topic : Doctor faustus As a Morality
Plau
Enrollment No. 206910842090004
College : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of
English
Email ID : hansabhaliya20@gmail.com.
Submitted : Department of English M. K.
University, Bhavnagar
Signture :
Doctor faustus as a Morality play
MThe morality was one of the early forms of drama. It developed out of the mystery and miracle plays and it flourished during the middle ages, attaining much popularity in the first half of the fifteenth century.
“The morality differed from the miracle play in that it was not concerned with presenting a Biblical story with named characters, but rather a play conveying a moral truth or lesson by means of personified abstractions. The morality at bottom dealt with some problem of Good and Evil
The basic benefits of the Christianity are inherent in every line of Doctor Faustus and the doctrine of damnation pervades it. The devil and hell are omnipresent in this play and are terrifying realities. Faustus make a bargain with the devil, and for the sake of earthly learning, earthly power and earthly satisfaction goes down to the to horrible and everlasting perdition. The “Hero” is depicted as a wretched creature who for lover values give up higher ones. Thus, the drama is morality play in which heaven suggested with hell for the soul of Renaissance “Everymen” who the battle on account of his psychological and moral weaknesses.
Marlowe establishes the moral value of this play by varies means: by the Chorus, by Faustus’s own recognition by the GOOD Angle, by the OLD Man, by the action itself and even by Mephistophilis. As an example of the pervasive Christian view point, we also witness the deterioration and the coarsening of Faustus’s character and his indulge
in cheap sadistic fun.
At the very beginning of Faustus‘s temptation, the good angle argues Faustus to lay aside the damned book of the magic and to read the scriptures. The good angle is the voice of the God and the voice of Faustus’s conscience. But Faustus listens to the Evil Angle, who is the emissary of Lucifer and who encourages Faustus to continue his study of magic.
The spirits will bring him “gold”,“orient pearl”, “pleasant fruits”, “princely delicates”, and “silk”. Faustus has intellectual pride to an odious degree, but he is also desirous of moor vainglory. He recalls how he puzzled German priests by his clever expositions, and he hopes to acquire the magic skill of Agrippa. Faustus is wholly egocentric. He speaks disparagingly of his opponents, and relishes the inflates sense of his own abilities. Thus, after Mephistophilis has left the stage in order to re-appear in the shape of a friar, Faustus indulges in a delusion of self importance and says,
How pliant is this
Mephistophilis,
Full of obedience and
humility !
Such of the force of
magic and my soells
Act l, scene lll,
Line 29- 31
" what is a grate
Mephistophilis so passionate ?
Far being deprives of
The joys of heaven?
Learn thou of
Faustus's manly tortitude
And scorn scorn those
Thou never shalt possess.
Act I, scene lll,
Line 83-86
"
Had I as many souls as
there be stars,
Is give them all for
Mephistophilis.
Act. I, scene lll, Line 102-103
The next time we see Faustus, his emotional and intellectual instability is fully revealed.
He wavers between God and the devil. At first he is conscience-stricken: “Now Faustus, must thou needs be damned, and canst thou not is saved.” But in a moment he is ones more the user of egocentric hyperbole.
The god thou servest is thine own appetite,
Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub
To him I will build an altar and a church
And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.
Act ll scene l,
Line 11-14
Home, fugel whither
Shouldfuy
If unto God, he' throw
Me down to hall.
My senses are
deceived, here, nothing writ
Home, fuge: yet shall
not faustu fly
(Act ll, scene l,
Line 77-80)
We can look upon the Good Angle, the Evil Angle, the Old man, and even Helen, Mephistophilis, and Lucifer as part of Faustus. This allegory employs realism as an instrument. Marlowe chooses certain characters that are capable of serving a double purpose: these characters are significant as symbols, by virtue of what they symbolize; but they are significant also as themselves, by virtue of what they are.
The Good Angle, for example, represents the principle of goodness, independent of Faustus in that this principle is not affected by whether is loyal to it or not. Faustus can neither increases nor diminish its perfections; nor can he create or destroy it. At the same time Good Angle is symbolizes a part of Faustus’s nature.
Faustus’s life, though single and indivisible, is both in his own and not his own. In much the way same way, Helen is the lust of the eyes and of the flesh, both as these are objects in an external world, other than Faustus, and as they are his own passions, leading him to seek happiness within those objects; inevitably they are part of his living.
The sole problem, given the Angles are an objected evil and an objective good, is not which of them ought to be followed, but which of them will be followed in fact and what the consequences will be.
The consequences are for their fuller comprehension, spread over twenty-four years. Faustus is allowed to explore evil with all patience and all diligence. Evil is a new toy, and Faustus cannot resist any invitations to evil that he may receive. Ones Faustus has chosen evil; he has neither eyes nor ears except for the immediate advantage of having done so.
When he asked: “Tell me who made the world” Mephistophilis refuses to answer the whole economy of hell is disturb; Lucifer appears with his companion-prince, Belzebub, and demands obedience. As a substitute for the vision of the God, Lucifer shows him the seven Deadly Sins, and at the end of the parade Faustus says:” O, this feeds my soul”. Then he goes on to express a desire to see hell and return.
The old Man reminds him of this. He is seized with fury against an agent of good, and asks for him to be tormented. He begs Helen to make him immortal with a kiss, meaning thereby not that he himself (for to his misfortune, he is immortal already), but hat what remains of youth, the present moment, shall not pass away By the nature of things, this is impossible. The twenty-four years draw to a close and before the allegory ends the last gift of the Evil Angel (namely, Helen) has already crumbled in his hands.
As the attractiveness of evil gradually declines, that of goodness grows. Accordingly the more prominent role which in the earlier scenes fell to the Evil Angel is in the later assumed by the Good Angel and his associates: the Old Man and Faustus’s own conscience.
It is only Lucifer who drags a reluctant Faustus from thoughts of heaven. Faustus also drags himself. For Lucifer, like the Good Angle, is hear playing a double role: he is devil, but also he is part of Faustus’s nature. Faustus is thus agent as well as victim in his own torment. We should not therefore question Faustus’s moral freedom.
The allegory in this play is, because of its complications, more than an allegory. The temporal allegory is effective in similar way. As he is alive, Faustus has hope and therefore pain of this intensity. But at the same time, he has no hope, for he is already dead.
It should be further noted that the allegories not only provide material and machinery for the body of the play, but shape it. The play begins with a monologue, for example and ends with one. He alone can endure the punishment, and is therefore left alone to meet it. But between these toes point’s stage is crowded with figures that, if they cannot commit an act, may influence the act or if not influence, may be influenced by it. In order more fully to exhibit its nature and its workings.
Pity and fear are the emotions that, according to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, are aroused by the experience of watching a tragedy. At the start of this chapter we asked whether Doctor Faustus is a late sixteenth-century morality play, designed to teach its audience about the spiritual dangers of excessive learning and ambition. When the play was published, first in 1604 and then in 1616, it was called a ‘tragical history’; if we take ‘history’ here to refer not to a particular dramatic genre but more generally to a narrative or story, then the publisher described the play as a tragic tale. So what is a tragedy? In fact, ‘tragedy’ is a notoriously difficult literary term to define, for it seems to take various forms in different historical periods. But for the sake of discussion, we can fall back on the broad strokes of Aristotle's description (in the Poetics) of the tragedies he had seen in Athens in the fourth century BCE: tragedies are plays that represent a central action or plot that is serious and significant. They involve a socially prominent main character who is neither evil nor morally perfect, who moves from a state of happiness to a state of misery because of some frailty or error of judgement: this is the tragic hero, the remarkable individual whose fall stimulates in the spectator intense feelings of pity and fear.
Figure 6 This is the title page of the 1620 edition of the ‘B’ text of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1616: The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. British Library, London. c. 1891–6 C.39.c.26. By permission of the British Library
To what extent does Doctor Faustus conform to this description of a tragic play? Well, it follows the classic tragic trajectory in so far as it starts out with the protagonist at the pinnacle of his achievement and ends with his fall into misery, death and (in this case) damnation. From the beginning the play identifies its protagonist not as ‘everyman’, the morality play hero who ‘stands for’ all of us, but as the exceptional protagonist of tragic drama. Moreover, it is certainly possible to argue that Faustus brings about his own demise through his catastrophically ill-advised decision to embrace black magic. Perhaps most importantly, we have seen in the course of this course that Faustus is consistently presented to us as an intermediate character, neither wholly good nor wholly bad: both brilliant and arrogant, learned and foolish, consumed with intellectual curiosity and possessed of insatiable appetites for worldly pleasure, a conscience-stricken rebel against divine power. We have seen as well how skilfully Marlowe uses the soliloquy to create a powerful illusion of a complex inner life: from Faustus's first proud rejection of the university curriculum and his exuberant daydreams of unlimited power, to his anguished self-questioning and final terrified confrontation with the divine authority he defied, the play gives us access to the thoughts and feelings of a dramatic character whose fall, whether or not we feel it is deserved, seems to call for a fuller emotional response than the Epilogue's moralising can provide.
