Faust & Yankees

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus originates from the late 16th century. In the play by Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, a scholar, sells his soul to the Devil in the belief he will discover knowledge more than other men and knowledge is power to Faustus. The play has continued to be successful until our own era, spawning the commonly used phrase a "Faustian bargain." This phrase generally implies that someone has profited by selling their soul, akin to Faustus. It is a phrase that perfectly suits another literary work, Douglass Wallop's Damn Yankees, originally titled The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. In this novel, later a popular Broadway play, like Dr. Faustus fifty-year-old real-estate salesman Joe Boyd sells his soul to the Devil. Joe's incentive is not knowledge and power but to become a young star baseball player for the Washington Senators, Joe Hardy, in an attempt to keep the despised and powerful Yankees from winning the pennant. In both works the heroes are torn by longings that the authors seem to empathize with, though both remain a morality tale in the end: each advising the wise to heed the fate of those who sell their soul to the Devil. A comparison and contrast of the two works will focus on characterization and how these works help us to understand the societies and eras in which they were produced.

Characterization is very important to both of these works. Both Dr. Faustu

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me he would always like, but he knew he could never again qualify as an avid fan. Perhaps because he had given the game so much. Perhaps because now he realized there were things more important�a woman's sacrifice, Lola's�and the way Bess' eyes had looked that day when she said perhaps she owed it to her husband to become a baseball fan because it was a sore point between them" (Wallop 249). The characterization of the Devil in each work is also similar in that the spokesman for Hell is quite charming and makes valid appeals to the heroes in each. However, they are only able to do so because the heroes make themselves vulnerable through their longing for what the tempter in each story has to offer. However, both Mephostophilis and Applegate are accused by their contractees of ensnaring them. Faustus claims it was Mephostophilis temptation that robbed him of eternal happiness, but Mephostophilis replies, "I do confess it Faustus, and rejoice./�Twas I, that when thou wert I' the way to heaven/Dammed up they passage. When thou took'st the book/To view the Scriptures, then I turned the leaves/And led thine eye" (Marlowe 97). This shows that Mephostophilis may have willingly ensnared Faustus, but it was Faustus' own pursuits

Category: History - F