Doctor Faustus as a morality play

I examine the way in which Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be seen as a conventional morality play.

There are two of Shakespeare's characters in particular, Richard of Gloucester and Philip the Bastard, who are overtly unhistorical, theatrical and consistently break down the fourth wall. Commentators have drawn parallels between Shakespeare’s portrayal of these characters and the Vice, a stock figure of medieval morality plays who continued to appear in Interludes between 1550-80. This undergraduate essay will suggest that Shakespeare chose to theatricalise Richard and the Bastard because, although marginalised by the play world, they can be given more important roles on the stage where they are allowed to exist as equals with their fellow characters.

2021

This study focuses on a word or line that is identified as satire in a drama entitled The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The data was taken in the form of dialogues from the characters. Demon as a satirical expression means that the words or line identified as satire was built by several elements that are attached with demon characteristics (demonic). Demon is a creature who has clear characteristics as a bad set. The bad character of the demon is representative of satire. The character demon is a representation of ugliness or evil of the object criticized in the drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Researchers used the descriptive analysis method by Ratna (2004) in conducting this research. Descriptive analysis is a method used to analyze data and facts in the text and then interpret them. The researcher used two theories in seeing the story. Inter-relationship principle and semiotic. The results of this research found three important elements in accordance with the t...

English literature owes a great debt to Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) for identifying a certain type of classical tragic hero in the works of Sophocles and making him intelligible in English cultural terms. Harry Levin called this type "the over-reacher" after rhetorician George Puttenham's attempt to find a close English synonym for the Greek word 'hyperbole' (in The Arte of English Poesie, 1589). Marlowe's characters have an exaggerated appetite for achievement, whether it's knowledge as power (Doctor Faustus), world conquest (Tamburlaine), or revenge and the acquisition of riches (Barabus). Marlowe's heroes were popular then, and remain fascinating now, as portraits of English imperial ambitions dressed in the appearances of a German scholar, an Asian warlord, and a wealthy Maltese Jew. Their exotic appearances and settings gave Marlowe an opportunity to dazzle us with some of the most elaborate and extended set speeches in English drama.

CALL

This study focuses on a word or line that is identified as satire in a drama entitled The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The data was taken in the form of dialogues from the characters. Demon as a satirical expression means that the words or line identified as satire was built by several elements that are attached with demon characteristics (demonic). Demon is a creature who has clear characteristics as a bad set. The bad character of the demon is representative of satire. The character demon is a representation of ugliness or evil of the object criticized in the drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Researchers used the descriptive analysis method by Ratna (2004) in conducting this research. Descriptive analysis is a method used to analyze data and facts in the text and then interpret them. The researcher used two theories in seeing the story. Inter-relationship principle and semiotic. The results of this research found three important elements in accordance with the...

Shakespeare Bulletin, 2010

If we needed another reminder of the divorcing interests of those who profess and those who perform Shakespeare-and we probably don't-the opening sentence of this ambitious collection will serve. "Character has made a comeback," the editors write, an instantly legible pronouncement to any academic but a true head scratcher for a working actor (1). For most performers, character never went away. Indeed, one of the more startling discoveries for an academic who strays into the rehearsal room is that actors are the Last Bradleyites. It can feel a bit like meeting those mythical Japanese soldiers who hid out in Pacific jungles, unaware that the war was lost. Depending upon your perspective, it is either a frustrating or a delicious irony-or both-that one of the most energetically discredited modes of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism has arguably exerted the greatest academic influence upon the presentation of Shakespeare on stage over the last century. Of course, this biased account positions actors as the deluded others who hold fast to a lost cause, or, at least, take a quaint angle of address to the challenge of representing imaginary persons on stage. In fact, the essays in Shakespeare and Character advance a collectively convincing argument that it is the academy that has lost out by turning away from "character" as a locus of connected "political, ethical, historical, literary, and performative aspects of early modern theatre" (1). In the introduction, then, the editors leverage both theatrical and "vernacular" intuition that character is central to Shakespeare's art to resuscitate academic interest in the topic (3). The book's central claim, in sum, is that "character is the organizing principle of Shakespeare's plays-it organizes both the formal and ideological dimensions of the drama and is not organized by them" (7). (If the collection invites pushback, it will be against claims like the final clause, which flips a central plank in the poststructuralist platform.) With theoretical sophistication and practical address, these twelve essays take up this maddeningly elusive topic to mount a persuasive argument that character deserves the academic spotlight once more. Given character criticism's checkered history, this collection takes a systematic approach to building what it calls, in the inevitable locution, the "new character criticism" (1). While many essay collections reward scattershot reading, Shake

2011

Mártonnak és Marikának God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however, for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselves with two dimensions so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper. Alfred Jarry: Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician CONTENTS Contents Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Shakespeare's dialectical tragedyand the crumbling code ofrepresentation .... 1.1 The question of epistemological crisis 1.2 Dialectical Tragedy: epistemic change in theatre 1.3 "If a code is crumbling..." 1.4 Representational crisis in Shakespeare Haphazardly Ambidextrous: the Vice-Family 2.1 Problems of definition "You will learn to playe the vice": problems of interpretation 2.2 Vices Merry Report

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2020

This study focused on the error of judgment of the characters in selected Shakespeare's major plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra. It analyzed the tragic flaw found in the events, theme, setting, and characterization. The error of judgment of the characters as the cause of their downfall are identified by the use of the literary device Hamartia as outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics. This presented its implications in teaching literature. This is a qualitative descriptive-analytical anchored by textual analysis. It utilized analytical description in the concept of errors found in Shakespeare's tragic plays. The plays of Shakespeare are indisputably the greatest tragedian in the field of writing because of his overreaching protagonists which also are tragic heroes. It stipulates some flaws which led to their destruction. It was determined that the protagonists in the plays show some flaws in the events, how the plays change from happiness to misery because of errors; setting, the time and place in which the action of the tragedy occurred; theme, which represents the kind of tragedy and lastly the characterization, by pointing out the qualities and their deeds.

THE FEATURES OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 2023

The Elizabethan era is part of the English Renaissance. It refers to the period of the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1. The period started around 1558 and continued until 1603. This period signifies the rebirth of literature. Many historians considered this era to be the Golden Age in English Literary History. The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. This paper, therefore, attempts an exhaustive analysis of the Elizabethan Drama, the features of the drama as explicated in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The analysis reveals the importance of the period and it also portrays the contribution of the era to the English Literary History. The conclusion is hinged on the fact that the Elizabethan Era is characterized by vigorous intellectual thinking, adventure, discovery, new ideas and new experiences. The period revolutionized many aspects of English life, most significantly literature. This is reflected in Christopher Marlow's Doctor Faustus.