Doctor Faustus as a morality play

Doctor Faustus is an unimpeachable creation by The Central Sun of the University Wits, Christopher Marlow (1564-1593). Marlow has rightly been called The Morning Star of the great Elizabethan drama. Doctor Faustus has been treated as a link between the miracle and morality plays and the illustrious drama of Elizabethan period. William Hazlitt remarks: “His Doctor Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. The character maybe considered a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse.”

In Doctor Faustus, though we find the elements of mystery and miracle primarily, mainly we find the elements of morality. Morality plays were influenced by Bible, by religion. The prime concern of morality plays was to teach moral lessons to the contemporary people. In such plays we also see constant contradiction between good and evil, personification of abstract ideas, crime and punishment, unlimited desire of human being, downfall of human being as a result of the disobedience of the orders of God. All these elements we profoundly find in this play of Marlow.

 

According to George Santayana, “Marlow is a martyr to everything that the Renaissance valued- power, curious knowledge, enterprise, wealth and beauty. The Evil Angel urges Faustus to think of honor and of wealth.” All of such qualities we find in Faustus when he was making a comparison among medicine, law, philosophy and logic. He found all these branches of knowledge fruitless. Finally he said, “When all is done, divinity is best” (1. 1. 37). The good side of his soul emphasized him to learn the knowledge related to God, related to eternity. Shortly after when he started reading from the Bible, he saw that if someone commits sin, he will be punished in Hell through death. It seemed so difficult to him.

The bad side of his soul did not let him to go with divinity. Then Faustus compared religious scriptures as “vain trifles” and finally decided to learn necromancy. From this very point we find a prognosis that what is going to happen to a man who leaves the path of God and starts to follow the path of evil. The particular things that intoxicated him to learn this black art are portrayed in his own voice:

“O what a world of profit and delight,   

Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,  

Is promis’d to the studious artisan!

All things that move between the quiet poles  

Shall be at my command:” (1. 1. 51-55).

         

Morality play is really a fusion of the medieval allegory. In these plays the characters were personified abstraction of vice or virtues such as Good Deeds, Faith, Mercy, Anger. Even the outstanding morality play Everyman has characters like Wealth, Death, Good Deeds and so on. Very often The Seven Deadly Sins such as Pride, Envy, Greed, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust and Sloth were found engaged in physical and verbal battle. In these respects we can call Doctor Faustus a morality play in spite of its tragic ending. Even Macbeth is not free from its influence as this play also presents a conflict between the good and evil.

          The general theme of morality play is the struggle of forces of good and evil of the soul of man, and the aim is to teach doctrines and ethics of Christianity. In this sense Doctor Faustus is a morality play to a very great extent. We see Faustus abjuring the scriptures, The Trinity and Christ. He surrenders his soul to Lucifer for “four and twenty years” out of his ambition to gain super-human power by mastering the unholy art of magic: “Divinity adieu! / These metaphysics of magicians, / And necromantic books are heavenly” (1. 1. 46-48).

          By selling his soul to Lucifer, Faustus lives a blasphemous life full of vain pleasure. There is a fierce struggle in his soul between his ambition and conscience, between The Good and Evil Angle that externalize his inner conflict. But Faustus ultimately surrenders to the allurements of The Evil Angle, thereby paving his way for external damnation. Because of his crime, he must be punished. When he wants to rue, his heart becomes stiff and he could not do so, as we find in the case of The Old Mariner in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We find Faustus utters, “My heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent” (2. 2. 18).

          When the final hour approached, Faustus to his utmost pain and horror hears a fearful echo: “Faustus, thou art damn’d!”. And before the devils snatch away his soul to the burning Hell, the excruciating pangs of a deeply agonized soul find the most poignant expression in Faustus’s final soliloquy:

“My God, my God, look not so fierce to me! /

Adders and serpents, let me breath a while! /

Ugly hell, gape not: come not Lucifer: /

I’ll burn my books: Ah, Mephistophilis!” (5. 3. 120-123)

          After reaching the marginal extent of the discussion, we can say that Doctor Faustus is a remarkable morality play. Faustus, who was at center of the play, tells us a moral story of a man, who seeking for knowledge pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance. His exaggerated ambitions not only made him a sufferer in this world, but also damned him eternally in the world to come.