Doctor Faustus: Divine in Show (Twayne's Masterwork Studies, Band 134) - Hardcover

McAlindon, T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805744533 ISBN 13: 9780805744538

Verlag: Twayne Publishers Inc.,U.S., 1994

Inhaltsangabe

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die? With his famous play Doctor Faustus (1592), Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) brilliantly staged the story of a renowned scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for magical powers. Marlowe's Faustus is the classic character who shuns God's graces and the prospect of heavenly bliss in order to pass his mortal years "in all voluptuousness" - only to suffer harrowing despair at the threshold of eternal damnation. As T. McAlindon shows in this beautifully written and exceptionally well versed study, Marlowe's masterwork so vividly articulates the Christian fear of Hell, the human struggle against earthly temptation, and the longing for God's mercy, that it inspired new Faustus stories by Lessing, Goethe, and Mann, and influenced writers from Shakespeare to Conrad. Marlowe's drama has also taken a significant place in Western popular thought: as McAlindon leads us through its five acts, we see that many now-familiar ideas - the devil-pact signed in blood, the conflicting voices of Good and Bad Angels, God's exile of Lucifer, the treachery of Satan's agent Mephistopheles, and the inexorable ruin of a soul gone astray - were first brought to life in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
McAlindon delves into the mind of Marlowe - an arrogantly rebellious freethinker who might have been imprisoned for atheism if he hadn't first been killed in a barroom brawl - and explores the playwright's fascination with the ambition, godlessness, and final despair of his hero. Both Marlowe and Faustus, McAlindon reveals, are caught in the turbulent cross-currents of the Reformation: both paid the Medieval price of spiritual terror for living by the Renaissance ideals of humanism and high aspiration. Following McAlindon through Marlowe's rich weave of emotion, poetry, drama, irony, and symbolism, we explore such pivotal scenes as Faustus's first summoning of Mephistopheles, his travels with Mephistopheles through the cosmos and their insult to the Pope, his conjuring of fantastic images to delight the aristocracy and to cheat a common horse-trader, and his magical resurrection of Helen of Troy. Along the way, McAlindon blends new insights with contributions by major critics - from the Romantics to the postmoderns - to consider the play's most powerful questions: Why does Faustus choose necromancy over religion? Could he have been saved? Did Marlowe write his final punishment as a moral lesson or as a human tragedy? The answers, as McAlindon unveils them, enrich not only our appreciation of Marlowe's play but also our understanding of Reformation thought and its legacy over four centuries.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. McAlindon is professor of English at the University of Hull, England.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Twayne Publishers Inc.,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805744533
• ISBN 13: 9780805744538
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 148
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar