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Mephistophilis & Iago

From one point of view, Christopher Marlowe's Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus can be looked upon as an allegorical and didactic morality play in which the central character, fettered by his medieval magic and beliefs, foolishly aspires beyond his God-given place in the world to become a true "Renaissance man."

The most perverse, ingenious, and still astonishing

novelty of Marlowe was to show the Renaissance scholar

as a spectator of the old morality play in which the

medieval warlock, torn between good and evil angels,

is tempted by the devils on his road to the grave.

What a challenge for the directors; this alienated

hell in the parody and reenactment of the medieval

mystery play by the devil. (Kott, p.8)

Much of what is recognized as good and evil is painted here in black and white, and there is little room for ambiguity.

Shakespeare, however, is all about ambiguity. Much of what can be painted in the whites of angelic good and the blacks of devilish evil is often presented in shades of gray. Instead of a catechismal morality play, Shakespeare's tragedies provide deeper drama in which audiences are offered less in simple answers of right or wrong and more in complex questions of ethics and motivation. And the ethics of villainy, as has been pointed out, has always been popular:

Iago at once captures the attention of the spectator.

He is the personification of the villain that

Elizabethans had come to expect from Italian short

stories and from Machiavellian commentarya From the

days of the mystery and morality plays, the charact-

ers personifying evil invariably had gripped the

attention of audiences, for inequity always stirs

more popular excitement than virtue. (Wright, viii)

Marlowe's chief villain, the devil Mephistophilis, is an evil with a sole purpose: The preservation of Faustus' promise to give hi...

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Mephistophilis & Iago. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:49, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695148.html