The purpose of the study is to establish the critical need for stage action in order to understand fully the theme of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's primary intent is to invert the morality play, illustrating the distortions and ambiguities of a systematized religion and to establish the human dilemma when man is faced with moral choices. To illustrate this inversion, Marlowe uses emblematic action for an effect opposite to that of the traditional moralities: Often this action goes beyond the emblem, becoming a metaphor for Marlowe's theme, man as a victim, conflicting within himself and within the system which governs his morality.Chapter one introduces this theme and the crucial need for staging Marlowe's ideas. The first chapter also establishes a compromise of the textual problems inherent within any study of Doctor Faustus. Since the study argues that audience reaction is important to Marlowe's intent, attention is paid to how audience response governs the play's interpretation.Chapter two is a critical review of the historical staging practices which must be considered when studying the dramatic text. Included are stage size, costuming, and special effects.Chapter three is the advancement of the thesis in a scene by scene analysis of the text with special attention to the action as metaphor. Considered is how audience reaction represents part of Marlowe's purpose; the increasing tension of the audience furthers Marlowe's concept of the ambiguities present when humans are faced with moral choices. This purpose is traced scene by scene with specific attention to how it is metaphorically portrayed on stage.Chapter four is separate as a director's book, with the text reproduced, together with the researcher's marginal notes on specific blocking and with footnotes emplacing and expanding on the metaphorical action as it appears in the text. / Department of English

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In the biographical sketch of Christopher Marlowe which prefaces his 1818 edition of The Jew of Malta, Oxberry wrote: "Of his (Marlowe's) family we know absolutely nothing; their very names are forgotten...Ali the genius or Marlowe...has not had the power to save the records of his life from oblivion." [...]

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität zu Köln, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 79 p. Includes bibliographical references.

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Focusing on the A-text (1604) version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus , this study further assesses biographical information on the poet and intellectual currents of the Counter Reformation, so as to investigate the play's relation to emergent trends of individualism in the Renaissance, recovery of the pagan past, and intellectual aspirations that could readily collide with orthodoxy. Clearly reflecting anxieties of the period about individual deviance from social norms through intellectual overreaching, Doctor Faustus powerfully testifies to the potential dangers of human aspiration and the scholarly spirit of unbounded learning. While thus exploring the exotic temptations of forbidden knowledge, the play resurrects and interrogates traditional taboos which related intellectual appetite to wrongful lust. Marlowe stages an explosive conflict between the conservative tradition of intellectual inquiry, which distrusted the unorthodox scholarship and Neoplatonic magic that some widely influential thinkers promoted in the Italian Renaissance, and Faustus's own creative desires, ambitions, and imagination. The tension between proscribed and prescribed knowledge climaxes in the invocation of Helen of Troy. While Helen's significance is complex, we find that, in relation to the play's concern with dissent from orthodoxy, she focuses the power of intellectual longing to seduce and ravish the mind. Apart from being a superior play, Doctor Faustus encapsulates Marlowe's awareness of his period's uneasy perception of unconventional thinking, and urges the importance of challenging restrictions on how much one is permitted to know.