Paper Details

Name: Ankur Sharma
Country: India

Year: 2015
Volume: Volume-2, Issue-2 (July-December)
Page Number: 21-24

In Dr. Faustus Marlowe chooses a religious subject and concentrates on the theoretical side of religion, taking the case to its logical extremes. But unfortunately, down the centuries the play has evoked more controversy than admiration from the critics. To most of the people, it is still a confession on the part of the dramatist, of his atheistic views and bohemian life; and to others a medieval play very much in the tradition of Everyman. Miss Una Ellis-Fermor, however, undertook to discuss the intellectual part and the tragic pattern of the play and her remarks show a great understanding of the nature of tragedy, though not of Marlowe’s tragedy. Nonetheless she accepts Marlowe as a tragic tinker even though she wants to reject him in the conclusion. She writes, “Marlowe, whose tragedy appears at its height and characteristic form in Dr. Faustus, takes up a unique position as a tragic thinker, because of the implacable paradox on which his reading of the universe rests; man’s innate fallibility on the one hand and on the other hand the infallibility demanded by the inflexible law.