Christopher Marlowe is one of those dramatists whose works, being rooted in the universality of the human ontological predicament, never go out of relevance. Marlowe features in the contemporary syllabi of most universities even today in both the undergraduate as well as postgraduate levels. This book takes up Doctor Faustus as part of what is intended as a series of discussions on the Marlovian texts to make critiquing Marlowe easier, especially for students.
Prof. Dr. Aparajita Hazra, Gold Medallist and a National Scholar, is Professor in the Department of English in Diamond Harbour Women's University, West Bengal, India. She has written four more books The Terrible Beauty, Her Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Brontes: A Sorority of Passion and The Art of Articulation from Macmillan Publishers.
My specialization in the sense of research for my doctoral degree has been on the Gothic genre and the Brontë sisters, the topic of my thesis being 'The Elements of the Gothic in the Brontës. But spending a lifetime teaching in various colleges and universities in India, and handling a spectrum of topics as well as genres to teach, I had to somewhat slip into the ubiquitous role of the proverbial Jack of all trades. My long 23 years of teaching has found me lecturing and discussing a boggling range of topics ranging from Renaissance literature to Victorian Literature to American Literature to Indian English Literature to Literary Theory. In this variegated oeuvre of topics that I have done during classroom teaching, one text that I loved teaching every year was DoctorFaustus. Having talked DoctorFaustus for quite a few years, I read, studied, thought, deliberated and discussed the text extensively. In the process, a methodology of looking at DoctorFaustus slowly shaped itself in my mind. The need to document those thoughts is what gave birth to this book.
Hoping to begin a series on Marlowe's works with this book, I have tried to pen my thoughts and ideas about the text of DoctorFaustus to the best of my intentions. In the process, discussion about Christopher Marlowe has inevitably come in, as a lot of the signification of the text does leech in from the context of the dramatist's own life.
Long after Marlowe was dead and gone, George Peele in his Honour of the Garter, or rather, 'The honour of the garter Displaied in a peomegratulatorie: entitled to the worthie and renowned Earle of Northumberland.', dedicated to the Earl of Northumberland in 1593, paid his tribute to Christopher Marlowe by calling him 'Marley the Muses darling', in what could be called the earliest epitaph:
And after thee
Why hie they not, vnhappy in thine end,
Marley, the Muses darling for thy verse;
Fitte to write passions for the soules below,
If any wretched soules in passion speake? (Ad Maecaenatem Prologus)
I found it apt to call this book Marlowe, the Muse's Darling as my own tribute to Christopher Marlowe the man whose life and works both were capable of standing out as a face in the crowd with alacrity and élan.
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a text that is one of those seminal works of literature that never failed to create ripples within the collective reader-consciousness because of its merit. Written way back in the Renaissance era, the text creates a singular amalgamation of the socio-historical influences of the contemporary turn of modernity with abstract motifs that are somewhat relevant even today.
When one tries to study a text, the first introduction to it as a reader is through the title. In Marlowe's play, in fact in most of Marlowe's plays, the title is fashioned after the name of the central protagonist. Doctor Faustus is no exception either. But unlike the other plays like Tamburlaine or Edward II or Dido, Queen of Carthage, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is named after a man who is not a king or a prince or an aristocrat for that matter, but a down-to-earth Doctor of Divinity. The title is quite intriguing as it stokes the curiosity of the reader/audience as to how the life of a common man could be uncommon enough to weave a play around it.
Excitement and curiosity heightens as the Chorus introduces Doctor Faustus as a man who came up from very nondescript background to gather enough knowledge from the university he went to in Wittenberg, to earn himself the accolade of a Doctor of Divinity.
Theorists have debated about whether the context that underlies a text should be given importance in the understanding and critiquing of a text. Barthes has talked at length about how the author dies, making way for the reader to be born. The text is, without a shred of doubt, a fabric woven out of criss. crosses of intertextual references that in turn, are informed by myriad socio-cultural signifiers. The work becomes a text when the readers participate in it actively. Innumerable meanings can be read into a text by as many readers, from innumerable socio-religio-cultural perspectives, thereby giving rise to the open-ended repertoire of Derridean Differance.
However, the understanding of the text of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus necessitates some plumbing into the social, cultural and political milieu of the age. That is because a lot of incidents, underlying insinuations and suggestive signifiers in the play are informed by what was happening around Europe and also in the dramatist's own life at the time.
Europe at the time of Renaissance was witnessing enormous changes on many levels of life. Humanism was the buzzword of the day. Humanism encouraged human beings to reach out for the skies. Impossibility had become an abstraction to be challenged. On the other hand, there were thinkers like Pico Della Mirandola and St Thomas Aquinas who were talking about how life should be ordered out in the decency of a cosmic hierarchy, thereby bringing the microcosm in synchronization with the macrocosm.
On the other hand, Christopher Marlowe in his own life, was a person with a pretty chequered careergraph. The son of a Kent Shoemaker, Christopher Marlowe did not really come from a family that was very well off. His entire student life, be it his schooling in King's School, Canterbury or his higher studies in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, was entirely on scholarship.
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