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Dr. Faustus as a Morality Play Analysis

The document discusses how Christopher Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus" can be considered a late morality play. Morality plays featured personified abstractions of virtues and vices struggling for a person's soul. Similarly, "Dr. Faustus" includes Good and Evil angels influencing Faustus. The play also deals with Faustus rejecting God to gain knowledge and power through magic, only to be damned in the end. While it has a tragic ending unlike morality plays, "Dr. Faustus" shares their didactic message and use of a chorus, so it carries on the morality play tradition in many ways.

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Shahnawaz Hussain
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195 views2 pages

Dr. Faustus as a Morality Play Analysis

The document discusses how Christopher Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus" can be considered a late morality play. Morality plays featured personified abstractions of virtues and vices struggling for a person's soul. Similarly, "Dr. Faustus" includes Good and Evil angels influencing Faustus. The play also deals with Faustus rejecting God to gain knowledge and power through magic, only to be damned in the end. While it has a tragic ending unlike morality plays, "Dr. Faustus" shares their didactic message and use of a chorus, so it carries on the morality play tradition in many ways.

Uploaded by

Shahnawaz Hussain
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Doctor Faustus' 

as a M Play 

The morality play is really a fusion of allegory and the


religious drama of the miracle plays. In this play the
characters were personified abstractions of vice or virtues
such as Good deeds, Faith, Mercy, Anger, Truth, Pride etc.
The theme of the moralities was the struggle between the good
and evil powers for capturing the man’s soul and good always
won. The morality play often ended with a solemn moral. In
the light of these points we may call Marlowe’s “Dr.
Faustus” a belated morality play in spite of its tragic ending.

In morality plays the characters were


personified abstractions of vice or virtues. In “Dr. Faustus”
also we find the Good and Evil angels, the former stand for
the path of virtue and the latter for sin and damnation, one for
conscience and the other for desires. He symbolizes the forces
of righteousness and morality. The seven deadly sins are also
there in a grand spectacle to cheer up the despairing soul of
Faustus. If the, general theme of morality plays was
theological dealing with the struggle of forces of good and
evil for man’s soul, then “Dr. Faustus” may be called a
religious or morality play to a very great extent. 

We find Marlowe’s hero, Faustus, abjuring the scriptures, the


Trinity and Christ. He surrenders his soul to the Devil out of
his inordinate ambition to gain: “-----a world of profit and
delight’ Of power, of honour, of omnipotence.” Through
knowledge by mastering the unholy art of magic. About the
books of magic, he declares: 
“These metaphysics of magicians, And necromantic books
are heavenly.” 
By selling his soul to the Devil he lives a blasphemous life
full of vain and sensual pleasures just for only twenty-four
years. There is struggle between his overwhelming ambition
and conscience which are externalized by good angel and evil
angel. But Faustus has already accepted the opinion of Evil Angel,
who says: “Be thou on earth as Jove in the sky.” Faustus is
also fascinated by the thought: “A sound magician is a mighty
god, Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.” When the
final hours approaches, Faustus find himself at the edge of eternal
damnation and cries with deep sorrow: “My God, my God, look
not so fierce to me!” 

Through this story Marlowe gives the lesson that the man,
who desires to be God, is doomed to eternal damnation. The
chief aim of morality play was didactic. It was a dramatized
guide to Christian living and Christian dying. Whosoever
discards the path of virtue and faith in God and Christ is
destined to despair and eternal damnation--- this is also the
message of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. 

The tradition of chorus is also maintained. We find the chorus


introducing the story just before the beginning of the first
scene and subsequently filling in the gaps in the narrative and
announcing the end of the play with a very solemn moral. The
appearance of seven deadly sins shows that Marlowe in “Dr.
Faustus” adopted some of the conventions of the old Morality
plays.

We may conclude in the words of a critic: "Dr. Faustus" is


both the consummation of the English Morality, tradition and
the last and the finest of Marlowe’s heroic plays.

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