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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21205 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Da Silva Maia, Alexandre. |
| Contributors | Borris, Kenneth (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001655378, proquestno: MQ50508, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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