Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe (1604)
“A brilliant scholar sells his soul for twenty-four years of unlimited power — then spends most of them on party tricks.”
Character Analysis
The greatest scholar in Wittenberg — and that is precisely his problem. Faustus's intellect is vast enough to master every human discipline but not wise enough to accept the limits of human knowledge. He sells his soul not for wealth or pleasure (though he settles for both) but for the illusion of transcendence. His tragedy is structural: the qualities that make him brilliant (ambition, restlessness, refusal to accept boundaries) are the same qualities that damn him. He is Marlowe's portrait of the Renaissance mind at its most magnificent and most self-destructive.
Latinate, rhetorical, commanding — long periodic sentences in the opening, fragmenting into desperate exclamations at the end. Heavy use of classical allusion (Icarus, Helen, Pythagoras, Alexander).