Morality Elements in Doctor Faustus

“Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot from a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning, and the climactic confrontation with death.”  - M. H. Abrams (224)

Doctor Faustus is the magnum opus of the central Sun of the University Wits, Christopher Marlowe. In the great Elizabethan drama, Marlowe has rightly been called the morning star. This play has been treated as a link between the miracle and morality plays and the illustrious drama of  Elizabethan period. A  morality play is a form of allegorical drama in which the protagonist, representing everyman, is persuaded by personified virtues to choose a divine way of life and shun evil. Marlowe constructed the character of Faustus as an Aristotelian tragedy intended to inspire pity and fear.

Christopher Marlowe
 (Picture Credit- wikipedia.org)

Throughout the sixteenth century morality plays were continued to be performed. The tradition remained strong in Marlowe’s lifetime, and he profited by it in writing Doctor Faustus. Morality features are frequent in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In so far as he felt himself to belong to the new age, he endorsed the aspirations of this representative Renaissance man and devoted some of his most eloquent and elated verse to expressing them; in so far as he retained, or had recovered, an orthodox abhorrence of presumption or pride, he considered Faustus’ course of action to be impious and finally self-defeating and employed the morality form to convey his judgement of it. John D. Jump remarks:

"Faustus is flanked by his Good and Bad Angels, like Humanum Genus in The Castle of Perseverance; he leagues himself with allegorical representatives of the forces of evil, he delights in a show of the Seven Deadly Sins; and he comes close to repentance when exhorted by an Old Man who might well be the personified abstraction Good Counsel." (25)

Doctor Faustus’s main action divides conveniently into three parts. Firstly, Faustus makes his decision and after some hesitation and backward glances, commits himself to evil. The second part introduces by Chorus, in which Faustus exploits his dearly-bought power in Rome, in Germany, and in Vanholt. The third part of the play shows Faustus’ behaviour as his end approaches and, as far as is practicable, it shows that end itself. Of these three parts, the second seems to contain very little writing by Marlowe; but the first and the third appear to be principally his. According to Erich Heller:

"...speaking about Dr. Faustus means to speak about the exceptionalness, in at least one respect, of the last three-hundred, or even four-hundred years." (2)

Though we find the elements of mystery and miracle primarily, mainly we find the elements of morality in Doctor Faustus. The main concern of the morality plays was to teach the moral lessons to the people of that time. In Doctor Faustus we can see constant contradiction between good and evil, crime and punishment, personification of abstract ideas, unbound desire of human being and downfall of protagonist as a result of the disobedience of the orders of God.

In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Faustus grows bored with life, believing he has learned all he can of this world. Faustus uses Mephistophilis as a messenger; he summons Mephistophilis to make a deal with Lucifer to sell his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of service from Lucifer's demon. This deal is to be sealed in the form of a contract written in Faustus' own blood. Then Faustus cutted his arm, the wound is divinely healed and the Latin words Homo, fuge! then appear upon it. Faustus tells Mephistophilis:

"I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live,

To do whatever Faustus shall command..."(Marlowe 12)

All of such qualities we find in Faustus when he was making a comparison among medicine, logic, philosophy and law. Faustus found all these branches of knowledge fruitless. According to Faustus:

"Too  servile and illiberal for me.

When all is done, divinity is best." (Marlowe 5)

The good side of his soul emphasized him to learn the knowledge related to God, related to eternity, but the bad side of his soul did not let him to go with divinity. And shortly after when he started reading from the Bible, he saw that if someone commits sin, he will be definitely punished in Hell through death, and it seemed very difficult to him.

The moralities impress us by their simple, grave enunciation of important general truths. They can also exhibit a remarkable psychological subtlety. This does not manifest itself in the portrayal of individual real characters of great complexity, such as many of those of Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen, but in the presentation of general human experience by the interaction of personified abstractions. 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. Faustus states, 

“My heart’s so harden’d, 

 I cannot repent” (Marlowe 23)

Faustus ultimately surrenders to the allurements of The Evil Angle, thereby paving his way for external damnation. At the end of the play, we can relate it with the beginning of the play by Gill’s words. According to Roma Gill:

"The play ends where it began, in the solitude of Faustus’ study, and it is here that Faustus finally damns himself, although for a moment, just after the Old Man’s speech, he comes very close to repentance and salvation." (15)

To sum up, we can say that Doctor Faustus is truly an extraordinary morality play. Faustus, who was at center of the play, tells us a moral story of a man throughout the play, who was seeking for knowledge pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance. Moreover, the subject of the play is the central morality subject, the struggle between the forces of good and evil for the soul of man - in this case, of Renaissance man. Faustus’ exaggerated ambitions not only made him a sufferer in this world, but also damned him eternally in the world.

Works Cited: 

1. Abrams, M.H., Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms.  New Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2013. Print.

2. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Ed. John D. Jump. New York: Routledge, 1965. Print.

3. Marlowe, Christopher. New Mermaids: Dr Faustus. Ed. Roma Gill. London: A & C Black (Publishers) Limited, 1989. Print.

4. Heller, Erich. “Faust's Damnation: The Morality of Knowledge.” Chicago Review 15 (1962): 1-26. Web.

5. Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Ed. C. Bhaskara Menon. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976. Print.

University of North Bengal,

Siliguri