The Comic Scenes of Dr Faustus

A detailed Summary of The Comic Scenes of Dr Faustus

When I first began reading Dr. Faustus I did not even realize that there were comic scenes. Only after being told and after watching the movie did I realize that there were comic scenes. Many critics say that Christopher Marlowe did not even write these scenes, but instead say that they were written later by other playwrights.

After realizing that there was in fact comedy in the play, I began to ponder why it was in the play. My first thought was that they were there to lighten the mood of such a dark and serious play. Any good playwright knows that you can't hold an audience's attention with hours of serious, deep and emotional content without also having something to lighten the mood. With this point of view I realized that it was very possible that Mr. Marlowe did not in fact write the comic sections of this play (I really wanted to believe that he wrote them), maybe a later playwright found that the play was too serious. The fact that I wanted Marlowe to be the author of the whole play (I don't like it when someone comes along a changes a piece of art, or that people say that someone changed it because it is just too good to be true) made me dig deeper to try and find something that sounded more sensible to me.

All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

How did these lines put the comic scenes into perspective for me? It made me look at the whole play in a different light. If everyone that is not in heaven is in hell, then everyone in this play is in hell and has committed some type of sin. The scene in which Lucifer comes with the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Covetousness, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth and Lechery) depicted the ways which people commit sins.

The other comic scenes either showed how everyone in the play had committed some type of sin, or how Faustus used his magic to play childish pranks. Take scene five for example when the Clown and Wagner are talking:

The last five lines that the clown says here are almost exactly like what Pride, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, says in scene five, lines 284-288:

When I went back through the play and looked at after I was enlightened, I noticed that the comic scenes very much reflected the scenes with Dr. Faustus. Take for instance when Wagner conjured up Baliol and Belcher (Scene Four) this is almost exactly what Faustus did in the previous scenes. The comic scenes that seemed to reflect what Faustus did, also seemed to increase the readers knowledge of how powerful Faustus was. In all the scenes that other people tried to conjure up the devil, they could not handle the devils and usually failed in their attempts. Take for instance scene eight, lines twenty to forty-five, when Robin and Rafe conjured up Mephastophilis they could not handle the sight of him and he changed them into an ape and a dog respectively, because they were just playing games. This scene shows how p

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Approximate Word count = 1109
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels