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Doctor Faustus as a Morality Play Drama

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Evaluate Christopher Marlowe's  Doctor Faustus as a Morality Play?
What is definition and characteristics of morality play?

“The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” is a play by Christopher Marlowe based on the “Faust story”, in which a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange of power and knowledge. The play starts, like classic tragedy, with the protagonist at the zenith of his achievement and ends with his fall into misery, death and damnation from which we get a solemn moral. Now we are going discuss the play as a morality play.

To discuss Doctor Faustus as a morality play, we are to, at first, know what the morality play is. Actually it an allegorical drama in which the characters personify moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or abstraction (such as death and youth) and in which moral lessons are taught. Morality plays are essentially dramatized Sermons (ধর্মোপদেশ), usually based on a subject of repentance; typically, an Everyman figure will begin in innocence, and then will be led into temptation by others, to be finally redeemed. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe uses the structure of morality plays intensively most notably in Faustus’s character.





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