With his yearning for knowledge, he proceeds to study necromancy.

Faustus wanted to support his own plot to make his own decision. Marlow achieves distinction by infusing the Renaissance spirit in his tragic hero. He utters such blasphemous words:īy him I’ll be great emperor for the world”. His fate is settled when he signs the contact. He denounces God, blasphemes the Trinity and Christian doctrines and sells his soul to the Devil to gain superhuman power and to live a life of voluptuousness for twenty four years. But he is great because of his scholarship. For example, Faustus is of an ordinary German parent who goes to Wittenberg for higher studies mainly supported by his kinsmen. Marlow’s tragic heroes do not abide by all those conditions detailed out by Aristotle. He decides to make decisions but mostly the decision making would lead to weakness or his own downfall. He wants to be the master of his own fate. The tragic hero stands against his fate or the gods to demonstrate his power of free will. Such a hero, who is of noble birth, suffers from a change of happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice which is led by his hamartia (error of judgment). Faustus who sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange of twenty four years of knowledge ought to have some special features in order to be considered as a tragic hero.Īccording to Aristotle, the tragic hero evokes both our pity and terror because he is neither good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is better than we are. Faustus the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's great tragedy can be considered as a tragic hero similar to the other tragic characters such as Oedipus or Hamlet.

Course hero dr faustus