Why Faustus Refuses to Repent: A Secular Reading of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus

• Main Authors: CHIN, YING-CHUN, 金映君
• Other Authors: WANG, MING-YUEH
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/t276tj

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 107 === Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus has seemed to many modern readers an intriguing yet perplexing play about life and death. The protagonist’s understanding of redemption is much related to the Protestant Reformation in Marlowe’s England. I propose to explain why Doctor Faustus refuses to repent from a non-Christian perspective. I suggest that the damnation of Faustus should be questioned from a more popular, worldly, and secular aspect inherited from the medieval times. The first part examines the causes of the fall of Doctor Faustus. I divide Faustus’s damnation into five stages. The first and second stages show how and why the protagonist degrades himself from a scholar of noble studies to a trickster of dark magic with a special attention to his contract with the devil. The second part explores the protagonist’s magic tricks as staging props, one of the important staging techniques in Elizabethan drama, to highlight the third and fourth stages of Doctor Faustus’s damnation. Finally, I conclude Doctor Faustus’s secular concept of life and death with a focus on Faustus’s tragic death in the final scene. The tragic death of Faustus gives a profound meaning about humanity. With all its distinct capabilities, talents, worries, problems, and possibilities, humanity was, I conclude, the center of Marlowe’s interest in a tragic character like Doctor Faustus.