题目：
院（系）：外国语言文学系专业：英语学生姓名：学号：指导教师：
2010年10月30日
Summary
Faustus was the tragical hero in the Renaiance time.His tragedy was the tragedy typical of a humanist at that age.His spirrit embodied Renaiance man’s pursuit of new knowledge, worldly power and wealth, and the resistance of medieral spirit as well had been given corresponding interpretations.There were also the matic studies concerning his fall and redemption from the perspective of archetypal theory and christian.Key words:tragical hero; Renaiance;
Main body
1．Introduction of major characters
Faustus is a brilliant sixteenth century scholar from Wittenberg Germany, and well-respected by people.He is diatisfied with the limits of traditional forms of knowledge—logic, medicine, low, and religion, then he decides to learn to practice magic.His ambition for knowledge, wealth and worldly mignt makes him willing to pay the ultimate price—his soul—to Lucifer in exchange for supernatural powers.Mephastophilis—A devil whom Faustus sommons with his initial magical experiments.Mephastophilis’s motivations are gueing because on the one hand, his oft-expreed goal is to catch Faustus’s soul and carry it off to the hell; on the other hand, he attempts to persuade Faustus not to make a feal with Lucifer and warns him about the horrors of hell.
2.Plot overview
Faustus renounces henven and God, swears allegiance to hell, and demands that Mephastophilis rise to serve him.Lucifer is the master of Mephastophilis, what’s more, he is owner of the hell and the opposition to God.Faustus is willing to pay his soul for 24 years’ service of Mephastophilis.All of these Faustus did just because he wants to conquer the German by using supernatural powers.
In fact, Lucifer and Mephastophilis never forced Faustus to pay his soul, Faustus himself makes the first move.At first, Faustus begins to waver in his conviction to sell his soul.After the fiercely discuion between good angel and devil angel, Fausts finally decides to make the bargain and write the deed in blood.It is meaning that Faustus can never go back on his word.In Faustus’s mind, the hell is a fable, if it exists, it cannot be any worse.This thought makes Faustus cheat himself all the time, as the play progrees, his fear to the hell is decreacing gragually, and he did many practical jokes by magic that suggests he has forgotten initial ambition.
The degradation of Faustus’s initially heroic aims continues as the play proceeds, with Faustus coming to resemble a clown more and more.When Faustus goes to call on the emperor Charles V, he came true the emperor’s fulfill that to see Alexander tha Great and his lover.Now there is a question that Faustus cannot create the actual bodies but instead of spirits resembling them.It is obviously that all of Mephastophilis’s power can, in Faustus’s hands, produce only impreive illutions.In other words, nothing of substance emerges from Faustus’s magic, in this sence or anywhere in the play.Faustus’s downward spiral, from tragic greatne to selfindulgent mediocrity, continues in 10-11 scenes.Selling one’s soul for power and glory may be foolish or wicked, but at least there is grandeur to the idea of it.Marlowe’s Faustus, however, has lost his hold on that doomed grandeur and has become pathetic.The final night of Faustus’s life has come, and he tells the scholars
of the deal he has made with Lucifer, and they are horrified.When the clock strikes eleven, Faustus feels very horrified.As the last one hour paed, the devils enter and carry Faustus away as he screams,“Ugly hell gape not! Come not, Lucifer!/I’ll burn my books—ah, Mephastophilis!”
3.Conclusion
The author Christopher Marlowe wrote this book in early 1590s in England.Faustus of Marlowe’s play is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impreed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him.He represents the spirit of the Renaiance, with its rejection of the medieval, Godcentered universe, and its embrace of human poibility.Faustus, at least, early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of poibility.
Notes 1.2.3.4.
References 〔1〕
