Do you think the comic scenes in Doctor Faustus are a deliberate diversion or do they have any substantial significance? Discuss.

Over-solitariness and over eating of Faustus’s tragic ending in horrible doom points towards the gross humour by the brethren of scholars leaving the former to his lifeless melancholia.
Marlowe’s pungent satirical irony is staged by turning the papal court and ridiculing Pope as a mere name. He devalues sovereignty and political activity diminishing the Vicar of Christ from the Emperor to the Duke and eventually descending to private life. It is undoubtedly
comical farce when Pope should be boxed in the ear and exclaim in sinisterish threats of damnation in the papal court palace, “Dam’d be this soul forever for this deed.

Wagner’s conjuring to invoke steward Robin who would not surrender his soul for the paltry prize of a shoulder of mutton unless it was well roasted and flavored by good sauce parallels Faustus’ conjuration of Mephistophilis in servitude of a servant. Wagner chants magical spells to transform Robin into a dog, a cat, or a mouse or rat or anything splendours of clownish comic relief.

Faustus’ casting role of a minor court entertainer or conjurer in the Emperor of Germany allegorises satire of anti papal activities to further extent of Elizabethan Renaissance Miracle and Morality conventions. In the setting of Charles V aspiration to see that famous conqueror Alexander the Great and his Paramour and the Duke of Vaholt’s Duchess’ longing for out of season grapes manifests pageantry. Faustus’ ambivalence with trifling brood of enemies
whether the clowns of Vanholt or Carter the horse courser and the hostess; disbelieving knights of the emperor. Faustus’ life is enmeshed in the trivialities and sunken beneath the
level of the clown and the horse courser.

Lastly Faustus ‘ restoration of dignity and brilliance from being a sadly tarnished magician is the happening of the last act.

“Marlowe brings in all the elements of morality play machinery; but without any of the consolation of morality vision.” Do you agree with the statement? Give reasons for your argument.
Or
Discuss Doctor Faustus as a text which embodies the contradictions of his age.
Elizabethan and Jacobean Marlowe becomes a morning star of the 1890s a harder and more gem-like Oscar Wilde because of his establishment as a religious free thinker and rebel toward
social conventions.
“Leave these frivolous demands that strike terror to my fainting soul” Mephistopheles the agent of the Devil’s disenfranchisement of evil magic and witchcraft necromancy invokes Faustus with indiscriminate self-expression. “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude” To posses or to strive for Helen was the loftiest bliss of chivalry and heroism.

Faustus’s sweet embracing of Helen might work wonder to alleviate his tormenting suffering that do dissuade him from his vow to Lucifer by that Peerless Dame of Greece and classical paragon of beauty. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, Burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss…Thou art fairer than the evening…hapless semele…shalt be my paramour.” Faustus is a strawman or a scapegoat for Marlowe’s demoniac longings and in this sense his character has traits of Machiavellian spirits or in other words subversion through transgression.

Give a comparative analysis of between Faustus’ first soliloquy and his last soliloquy and trace his journey from competence to confidence to damnation. Trace the development of
Faustus from a position of heroic grandeur to damnation.

Faustus as a Witenbergs’ flowering pride changes from Doctor of Divinity to a necromancer pestered by the swarm of infernal bees. He achieves pleasure upon the subjugation of all other beings for his personal gratification. Obsessive preoccupation of power for monarchising enforce his singing of the pact in allegiance with the Lucifer. Humour of monarchising through power over the forces of nature-winds, storms, air amd water, power over national
and international destinies (The Emperor shall not live but by my leave), power over store houses (I’ll have them fly to India for gold/Ransack the ocean for orient pearl); dispositions of
the continental land-masses and movements of the celestial bodies.

Vainglorious ostentations intrigues Faustus to pursue the devilish exercise by aspiring to be the shadow of Agrippa, whose shadows made all Europe honour him. If we consider this of Marlowe’s rhetorical poetic, we are reminded of the quickened impulse, evaluation of a diseased mind or enactment of a kindling or soaring imagination, of a man awestruck before a new universe of meaning
and potentiality: “O, what a world of profit and delight// Of honour, of power, of omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan? All things that move between the quiet poles/ Shall be at my command:”

Faustus renounces medicine and surgery to cure thousand maladies and be eternalized. Even laws to him are expounded to be paltry and petty. Faustus stoops in the divinity of knowledge for the sake of witchcraft: “These metaphysics of magicians/ And necromantic books are heavenly;/Lines, circles, letters and characters: Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires”/ Faustus is thus changed as a damnable Promethean hero of the Enlightenment. “A sound magician is a mighty God” : The deity of Doctor Faustus is not the God of Love, the Good Shepherd, but either the avenging Jehovah of the Old Testament, or his Christian offshoot, the Calvinist tyrant of mass reprobation.

“Ay, you accursed spirit, go to ugly hell” Faustus waves farewell to Mephistophilis abhorred by the repellent face of the latter in the demonic world. The fiend’s abrupt departure and his
subsequent return with Lucifer and Beelzebub at precisely the moment when Faustus calls upon Christ is, as James Smith points out an apt representation of the emotional upheaval
which the very asking of the question provokes in Faustus’s consciousness. The vain trifles of man’s souls and merely old wife’s fables of afterlife springs in the doubt of the reality of
Heaven and Hell.

Faustus as a sound magician and humanist aspirant of power fantasies travel the papal court, kingdom and dukedom to “search all corners of the new-found world” in pursuit of “pleasant
fruits and princely delicacies.” Helen, the resuscitated body of classical antique learning extinguishes clean those thoughts that dissuades Faustus from his vow to Lucifer. This hedonism and epicurean self-indulgence allegorises the Faustus cardinal sins of lechery in satire.

This damnable nature of Faustus’ ambition can be justified in the language of the critic Helen Gardner, “The great reversal from the first scene of Doctor Faustus to the last scene can be defined in many different ways. From presumption to despair, from doubt into the existence of hell to belief in the reality of nothing else. From aspiration and deity, and omnipotence to longing for extinction. At the beginning Faustus rises above his humanity but at the closing he sinks below it to be transformed into the beast or little water drops. At the beginning Faustus attempts usurpation upon God but at the closing he is an usurper upon the devil.”

Faustus estranged and suppressed humanity have risen to demand the due fruits of harvest. His hardness of heart and stiffness of mind –Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub/ the escapist frivolities of pageant of sins becomes dwindled by the cosmic forces. It is the consummation of the Puritan imagination as J. B. Steane points out “lurking sense of damnations precedes the invocation of hell”. The apotheosis of Helen is supposed firmly to be placed as a narcotic which extinguish clear his thoughts that do dissuade Faustus from his vow, nevertheless overflows the moral banks Marlowe is constructing:

“O thou art fairer than the evening’s air/
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,/
Brighter art thou than the flaming Jupiter/
When he appear’d for the hapless Semele;/
More lovely than the monarch of the sky/
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms,/
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.”/

These flames of passion so fiercely flare up is transfigures even so moral epithet as wanton. The conflict is sharp in this scene, for these lines are immediately succeeded by the Old Man:
/“Accursed Faustus, miserable man,/ That from thy soul exclud’st the grace of heaven/ And flies the throne of his tribunal seat/