Studying English Literature

With Edward II Marlowe seems to have left away the non-English legends and myths with tragic potentialities and melodrama in favour of the native historical themes that have some sort of socio-political relevance for the time without the melodrama. Marlowe drew upon the accounts of Stowe and Holinshed and presented the much debated personality of Edward II in perfect balance with the dynamics of tragedy and the psychology of the audience whose maturity he must have invested his faith in. It may be pointed out here that Marlowe might have been influenced by the Renaissance notion of history as a teacher, a notion reinforced in England by the vogue of the “courtesy books” like the Mirror of the Magistrates . In other words, the tragedy of Edward II was expected to illustrate the ways of life a king should avoid and the kind of the ways the subjects should not take resort to in order to advance personal gains or whims. Again, it must be emphasised here that Marlowe must have been f...

The play Edward II reaches its emotional climax in scene i, Act V. It is in this scene that the king’s image as an irresponsible and weak person undergoes a total transformation, and he emerges before the audience as a tragic figure in his understanding of the worthlessness of a king stripped of power just like the King in King Lear. Historically Edward II might not have shown this kind of tragic understanding of life. It is here that one has to look for the poet in the dramatist who expressed the renaissance anxiety for the helplessness of the human beings before Time. In the context of the drama, however, the understanding of the futility of human endeavour is related to another personal fact of the king; in fact, he lost the desire to live after Gaveston’s death, who was half his self. In other words, the king is under the control of death-instinct. With this he has also lost the desire for pomp and pleasure, and what he cares for now are his sense of honour, betrayal, conspiracy...

“It was a saying of Zoroaster,” in his Oration Pico Della Mirandola recalls, “that the soul is winged and that when the wings drop off she falls again into the body, and then after his wings have grown again sufficiently, she flies back to heaven.” Towards the end, after his headlong fall into the body, Faustus’s wings seem to grow again. But the body proves too heavy for the wings, with his pride and failure to repent, to lift him up to heaven. He has lived out his twenty four years of “prophit and delight/of power, of honour, of omnipotence” in exchange of his soul to Lucifer. Now, the circle in which he conjures has shrunk into the smallest circle in a series of gradual degradation—from astronomy through cosmography and statecraft to finally his private chamber. Yet he is provided with good counselling of the good Angel and the Old Man. But he is trapped by the metaphor of Lucifer as “sovereign Lord” with Mephistophilis as emissary empowered to punish a traitor. He can only conceive...

By transplanting the Faust-myth into the English Morality framework, Marlow tapped the hidden potentials of both the myth and dramatic form. But Doctor Faustus was to be overdetermined thematically by its surrounding culture. This culture found in the myth of Icarus and Prometheusian archetype of betrayal, that is, human aspirations repeatedly colliding with some implacable and impersonal forces, social, political, natural or divine, and consequently yielding to frustration, common to human psyche. The Renaissance philosophy and art highlighted the perplexing juxtaposition of the angelic human being, a creature of reason under the paternal benevolence of God side by side with a human being as a beast of appetite subject to God’s terrible wrath. In philosophy, on the one side were the spiritual reconstructions, which emerging from Ficino’s neo-Platonism and Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration suggest that human being can exalt themselves by reason and love into something like divinity....