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Marlovian Irony In Marlowe's Dr. Faustus

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Douglas Cole sums up the Christian dramatic tradition of Marlowe as “The English morality is staged as a homiletic allegory.” Yet Dr. Faustus holds a balance between the morality and the heroic trains of tragedy. Dramatic irony is an intermediary between the subjectively felt ironies of experience on the part of the dramatist and the objectively found ironies of the world. The new humanist values of material prosperity were opposed to the Christian faith in Marlowe’s time. Marlovian irony makes the human dilemma poignantly tragic. What Marlowe presents in Dr. Faustus are two distinct structures of irony, one based on the theological concepts of sin and damnation and the other on the self-limiting structures of human possibilities. Marlowe gives Faustus both a theological and human motivation. Faustus experiences spiritual pain and intense suffering caused by the nature of both his religious and human impulses. There is an irony implicit in the very combination of …show more content…

umanist scholar who in his essay on ‘Man an Image of God’ focuses on the potential of a man to reach the highest position in the power structure, which is that of god or good angels or to the lowest in the hierarchy, which is that of …show more content…

Therefore the reality dawns upon him that God is the heavenly joy of human limitations and devil, the appetite of human aspirations. But his tragic dilemma is as to whether he be content with the humanly limiting bliss or contend tragically with the magnificence of human possibility, is what is to be talked of. The tragic dilemma is all the more tormenting for there is no truly human resolution of this dilemma. God calls upon him to return to Him but the devil manipulates him to retain his contractual bond with

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