Theme of time and its dramatic presentation in Doctor Faustus
The soliloquy sums up in fifty-nine lines the minutiae of the last hour of Faustus life. This ultimate soliloquy affectively does justice to the play in its respective twin interpretative proportions the morality and heroic tragedy. The purposed individuality and the intention are dually confirmed and the message of each relayed, with a self-contained design of the languishing Faustus and the inevitability that he has incurred on himself.
It elaborates in a more general aspect the futility of human truculence and any mortal contestation with the incontrovertible faculty of time. Time is the essence, and also the substance, of this soliloquy. Its underlying contrast between eternity and ephemera is heavily enforced in the above lines, by a slow succession of monosyllables leading up to the rapid adverb, with the hypermetrical syllable, perpetually, ever-lasting abound throughout.
It is fittin g that the pride of knowledge should be finally purged and bowdlerized or expurgated with Faustuss offer Ill burn my books, and the fellowship of sin propagated with Ah, Mephistopheles! Faustus is denied and abjured of Gods eternal mercy at his own doing and transgression. In an explicit dialogue with the scholars, the morality faction brandishes itself in a complex but quaint analogical form compared to Faustus importunate damnation.
This is the point when the morality play actually presents the full bastion of its didactic nature, by suggesting the grisly, ominous ramifications that may imminently befall those who were to transgress or abandon the objective moral code. The scenes of helplessness, vulnerability, aggrieved remorse but still no reconciliation with god, the congealing of Faustuss blood, the repentance and the damnable compunction, trepidation setting in to confront the ireful brows/ wrath of God, the impulsively abrupt realization of his eternal soul, th e maddening fiasco that Faustus conveys with a terse change in the mood of the monologue, and finally, to culminate the design of passionate didacticism, the very last lines consummate
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise
Only to wonder at the unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits,
To practice more than heavenly power permits.
Faustuss continual allusions to the quick recession of time are posed to illumine his sudden epiphany, again exploited to add fabric to the didactic motif of the morality play. Faustus says: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. In the earlier acts, Faustus is exhibited to be relishing and elating over his usurping of superlative knowledge whichs besotted pursuit and ensnaring is divulged as tempting and illustrious, his unassailable yoking of Mephistopheles in his servitude, his travels and imperv ious invulnerability are rendered in their primary conception as alluring and manifestly fascinating.
However, but depicting the insufferable, austere consequences, the vain-gloriousness of such an appealing and titillating temptation is debunked, and that very particular time span of radically tremendous susceptibility overwhelms, as Faustus is shown to admit himself, numerous years of being an insurgent to death. In his agony, he deplores the fact that he has a soul and that his soul is immortal. This is a coup de grace, as the Renaissance period unnecessarily aggrandized the soul in theoretical humanism, and of course, the whole religiosity besieging it made it indispensable for human salvation.
The final scene really extends integrally out of the play. Faustus is here obsessed with the clock and with the fact of the time moving on relentlessly and pushing him swiftly to eternal damnation. The pained yet undeterred clock-watching matches perfectly the legalism which dominates Faustus from the onset of the play. Hes beset and beside himself, tormented and yet dreadfully awaiting the coming of the hour of twelve.
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Author:: Tushar Jain
Keywords:: Doctor faustus, Christopher Marlowe, Literature
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