Dr
Faustus has often been criticized as regards its construction or structure. It
is said that this play has a beginning and an end, but no "middle".
In other words, between the beginning of this play and its end very little of
real importance happens. Very early in the play the learned Doctor makes his
decision to sell his soul to the devil. At the end, the devil comes to take
away Faustus's soul. In the interval between these two events, there seems to
be little for Faustus to do except to fill in the time. If the consequence of
Faustus's bargain is inevitable, and if nothing can be done to alter it, then
it does not much matter how the intervening time is spent. The author may in
that case fill the intervening time with as much comedy and farce as the taste
of the audience and its patience in sitting through the play will permit. If
Doctor Faustus is a play about
knowledge, about the relation of a man's knowledge of the world to his
knowledge of himself, or about knowledge of means and its relation to knowledge
of ends. It is a play that reflects the interests of the Renaissance (and it
even looks forward to the issues of the modern day). Faustus is dissatisfied
and even bored with the study of ethics, divinity, and metaphysics.What has
captured his imagination is magic, the kind of knowledge that brings him power
and that promises a world of profit, delight, and honour. Faustus's experiments
with the knowledge that he acquires through magic bring him, again and again,
up against knowledge of a more ultimate kind. For example, as soon as Faustus
has signed the contract with the devil and has gained his new knowledge, his
first question to Mephistophilis is concerned with the nature of the place to
which he has finally to go. He asks Mephistophilis: "where is the place
that men call hell? "Mephistophilis explodes any notion of a local hell,
and defines hell as a state of mind. Faustus does not believe this information
though it comes from the horse's very mouth. Thus he refuses to accept the
first fruits of his new i knowledge. He had already come to the conclusion that
stories of hell were merely "old wives' tales". Yet when Mephistophilis
says that he is "an instance to prove the contrary" adding that
"T am damned, and am now in hell", Faustus cannot comprehend this
notion and says: "How ? now in hell ! Nay/An this be hell, I'll willingly
be damned".
there is a "middle" in this play (and by a "middle" is meant that part of the play in which the character of Faustus becomes something quite different from the man whom we first meet) then that middle has to be sought in those scenes which reveal Faustus's personal self-examination and his inner conflict. A scrutiny of the play will show that the play does have a sufficient "middle". Faustus constantly re-affirms at deeper and deeper levels his original rash surrender of his soul to Lucifer. He suffers deeply while doing so, but his suffering is not meaningless. This suffering leads to knowledge "knowledge which Adam acquires in Milton's Paradise Lost). Early in the play, in reply to Faustus's remark: "I think hell's a fable", Mephistophilis says: "Think so still, till experience change thy mind" (Act II, Scene I, Lines 123-24). Perhaps the best way to describe the middle of the play is to say that the middle consists of the experiences that bring about a change in Faustus's mind so that in the end he knows what hell is and, finding himself truly damned, he feels genuinely terrified. For next Digit Click Here