Doctor Faustus in Our Everyday Lives

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Christopher Marlowe's play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus is his most well known work. The tragedy is commonly known as just Doctor Faustus. The play was written somewhere between 1588 and 1593. The play was not published until 1604 and is still referred to as one of the greatest plays of the Elizabethan Age. There has been many adaptations of the play into a book as well as a 1967 famous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton movie. Marlowe produced seven plays throughout his life, all of which were immensely popular. Like the mystery plays that came before his, he used God and the devil in their never ending battle. It is interesting now to see how the play still has meaning in our everyday lives today. Over and over we always find ourselves being put up against an eternal battle of what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do. Should I go this way or should I go that way? Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as William Shakespeare, he was an actor, poet, and playwright during the reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I rule from 1558–1603. In Doctor Faustus Marlowe may be using plays within a play to help us the audience be more involved in Faustus’ struggle between good and evil, like many other playwrights of his time. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. Writing this play could have been dangerous for Marlowe. Faustus is looked at as a hero in the play that strove to achieve masterful things by his Elizabethan audience. Some also looked at Marlowe in such a way. Faustus is bored in his life and was looking for knowledge that he thought he could find though magic. Although there had been literary representations of Faust prior to Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus is the first famous version of the story. There are two versions of the
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