Doctor Faustus Group

Topic: If I were Dr. Faustus. Comment?

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1

cstbyngexcz

why dr faustus neglect all other fields and chose magic?

2

The dramatisation of the Faust story by Marlowe in Dr.Faustus is to show man's inordinate craving for power & knowledge. Faustus, an exemplary scholar, strikes a deal with Devil for twenty-four years of all voluptuousness and supreme power, on termination of which his soul would be taken away to hell. Faustus embraces the study of necromancy to gather power through the conquest of the whole world of knowledge.

All the major plays of Marlowe--Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Dr.Faustus--deal with exceptional personages hankering for world-conquest. Tamburlaine slaughtering his way to military conquest of the world; Barabas, the jew, aiming for a world-conquest through amassing fabulous riches; Faustus runs after the same conquest through the mastery of knowledge. All the Marlovian protagonists suggest the irony of human greed, greed activated by hubris, grred to possess enormous power, political or monetary or intellectual.

Black magic claims to perform anything, the most fantastic & the most impossible. Faustus chooses magic driven by the delusion that he can achieve anything. He barters away his soul('the eternal jewel') to Devil(the common enemy of man'). Marlowe's play deals with the problematic of sin/evil. Satanism, Sinfulness, Salvation are the main motifs involved in Faustus's choice and the ironically destructive outcome of the choice. Black magic is Devil's knowledge, and Faustus's choice of it allegorises the Fall of Man, and even prior to that, Satan's own fall from Heaven.

If I were Faustus, perhaps I would have made the same choice, for that is the basic irony of being Faustus.

3

kplhardison

As the above post explains in such great detail, Dr. Faustus did not all other fields of academic knowledge. On the contrary, he was a great scholar and has actually exhausted all the knowledge that the methods of research in the 1580s (the time in which the play is set) could reveal to Faustus. He chose to explore magic because it was all that was left to conquer and because it led to knowledge outside the bounds of academic research. He chose magic because he thirsted for the immortality of having attained exhaustive knowledge.

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