Christopher Marlowe: The Condemnation Of Dr. Faustus

In 1922, Oswald Spengler has coined a term ‘Faustian culture’, which he used to describe the Western European culture of XII-XX centuries. Spengler has chosen the term ‘Faustian’ because, according to him, of the special place that technology has occupied in the life of the Western world. He saw it as the heir of the Faustian spirit, a spirit of an inventive genius, who is full of thirst for knowledge and has a strong desire to dominate over the nature (Spengler ). Dr. Faustus, indeed, had it all.

The first time a story about Dr. Faustus has appeared in print was in 1587, when a legend about a doctor who sold his soul to the Devil was published in Frankfurt. The original text was full of condemnations of Faustus’s folly and his blasphemous desires (Morozov 165). But already two years after that, the image of Dr. Faustus started evolving as the English writer Christopher Marlowe used the story of the legend in his Tragical history of Dr. Faustus (1589) and added new meaning into it. In Marlowe’s texts the condemnation of Dr. Faustus gradually weakened, giving place to the justification of Dr. Faustus’s heroic side. The play was a vivid example of the staging of duality: Faustus was already an exalted and, one might say, brave scientist, though he was still terrible, as in "people 's book” from Frankfurt, and in the

Faustus is dragged into the hell by the devils. Unlike in the folk story, published in Frankfurt, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus has cried out for the time to stop not because the very moment was so beautiful, but because the next one would be awful. And it indeed has turned so, allowing one to speak about the justice of the heavens prevailing in the end. Interestingly enough, in Goethe’s Faustus, instead of the tragic idea of reckoning (and triumph of heavenly justice) we see the idea of a completely different genre — that, so to say, ”the fullness of existence” will write all the sins off: Goethe’s Faustus is pardoned by the heavens at the