The Renaissance quest for knowledge extended to the use of ceremonial magic as a means to control supernatural powers, whether diabolic or benign. This course compares two plays, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where the central protagonists employ magic to invoke the powers of evil and good respectively.
The eponymous hero of Doctor Faustus makes a pact with Lucifer to satisfy a thirst for further knowledge, but is cheated of what he really seeks and becomes merely a celebrity conjuror. Clearly indebted in form to the late medieval Morality plays, Marlowe’s tragedy of damnation ostensibly uses a Christian framework; yet its final effect is to leave the problem of the limits of human intellectual aspiration unanswered, and to call a just and benign God into question.
Turning to The Tempest we will see how Shakespeare takes the non-naturalistic nature of the Jacobean romance drama further than ever as his Prospero controls the action throughout by mastery of magic and supernatural agency. Thus Shakespeare may be said to be exploring the very nature of drama and theatricality. A central concern will be his return to the themes of his tragedies and history plays: usurpation and legitimacy; nature, nurture, and nobility; parents and children, especially fathers and daughters. Those with a good general knowledge of Shakespeare’s mature plays will see the potential comparisons, but in the final plays potential catastrophe is ultimately avoided. Instead forgiveness and reconciliation are achieved through the passage of time; and particular attention will be given to how the structures of these two plays are different solutions to the problem of dramatizing the working of time. As well as revisiting previous concerns, the play shows Shakespeare breaking new ground, incorporating the allegorical masque as developed by his contemporaries. And in the figure of Caliban, we have the impact upon Shakespeare of reports of the New World and its inhabitants.
