Felix E. Schelling

Abstract

[Doctor Faustus] has come down to us unhappily in a fragmentary and imperfect text. Faustus tells the world-story of the man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come. The motive, like much of the conduct of this tragedy, is that of the old moralities, witness the alternate promptings of the good and bad angel and the dance of the seven deadly sins. More important is the typical character of Faustus who is any man and every man. But Faustus is, none the less, an individual in whose pathetic plight we are interested for himself, and the appeal of the work is primarily artistic. Doctor Faustus is a better play on the stage than the careless reader might suppose it; and it is worthy of note that what the old story has gained in other hands in variety of incident, by the infusion of the love story of Margaret for example, it has lost in the singleness of purpose with which Marlowe concentrates attention on his unhappy protagonist. Even the wide allegorical significance, the masterly obliteration of time and space of the second part of Goethe’s Faust with the hero’s redemption, scarcely compensate for this loss.