#goingbacktohogwarts

Hello there @goingbacktohogwarts! I’m sorry to hear you’re not enjoying Doctor Faustus! Let me see if I can help you…

Marlowe is a very different kind of writer to Shakespeare, so my first suggestion is that you don’t compare the two too much. There’s a benefit to seeing differences and similarities (I did a post on that here, which you might find interesting), but if you expect to find a Shakespearean play in Marlowe, then you will be disappointed. It’s no different to comparing two modern authors and expecting them to have the same writing style.

I think that you can benefit a lot from situating Doctor Faustus historically. So, for instance, the idea of the good angel and the bad angel, or the Seven Deadly Sins as characters draws strongly on the allegorical tradition and the Medieval morality play. If you read something like Everyman or Mankind (or even The Castle of Perseverance) and then come back to Doctor Faustus, you’ll get an idea of what Marlowe is doing to that tradition.

The other thing the play does is engage with contemporary debates about religion. So if you study the Reformation, you’ll get a lot more from the religious factioning going on in the play, and why Faustus goes about wreaking havoc in the Vatican, given that he’s a scholar from Wittenberg. It can also help you to think about Faustus’ attitude to his soul (depending on whether or not he believes in predestination) and so on. Again, it’s a matter of expanding your knowledge of context to make you aware of the complexity of the play.

I think the most interesting question is the representation of Faustus: is he a hero for refusing to be bullied by the idea of hell? Does he make God look vengeful? Is he a proud fool who should know better? Is he admirable in his courage in spite of his pride? Traditionally, the Faust figure is obviously a bad example, not a sympathetic protagonist. So even if the ending is a conventional restatement of the status quo, I think Marlowe does something significant by making him essentially sympathetic, because it raises questions about individuality and human freedom.

The comic scenes are harder to get into, but it’s worth thinking about how they reflect the main plot or comment on the action.

My last and probably most important suggestion: read it out loud. Enjoy the language; it often works better dramatised. If nothing else, Marlowe has a knack for writing beautiful long monologues (and there are a fair few of those). Faustus’ final speech, for instance, is a work of intense beauty. Maybe get together a reading group. It’s hard work, but really worthwhile to try and voice it out loud: after all, it is a play.

Failing all that, if you really can’t get into it, I would say that the study of literature is an objective act, which is what differentiates it from reading for pleasure. That means that you don’t need to enjoy something to analyse it! In fact, it should remove any inhibitions you might have about tearing it to pieces… I hope that helps!