Rafe and Robin in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
Rafe and Robin waltz into Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of D. Faustus in scene four and vanish three scenes later. Although they may appear trivial and even intrusive, Rafe and Robin bring much-needed comic relief to this tragic play. Imitating Doctor Faustus’ actions unwittingly, this pair of ostlers illuminates Faustus’ misuse of power. They also reflect Faustus’ character by acting as his parallel self. Behind their clownish antics, Rafe and Robin highlight Faustus’ downfall and evil’s power through comic relief, parody, and parallel.
According to the Neo-Classical view of tragedies, tragic action is the essence of the play; comic relief is often dismissed as mere filler (Tydeman and Thomas 48). To overturn this view, Rafe and Robin successfully render evil harmless with their lowly jests while Doctor Faustus cannot free himself from evil’s bondage with his great learning. When Mephastophilis transforms the two clowns into an ape and a dog in sc.viii, Robin and Rafe only laugh. This nonchalance dampens the severity of the curses. In sc.iv, when Wagner threatens to turn him into a flea, Robin immediately thinks of a flea’s ability to crawl all over the bodies of women. As Cole remarks, “In the long-range divine scheme of things, evil is essentially both impotent and vulnerable; hence the possibility of looking at it as a laughable degradation”(15). By laughing at evil, Robin and Rafe provide moments of relief in a play overflowing with reminders of damnation. Aside from unpolished laughter, puns also provide comic relief. In sc.iv, when Wagner attempts to enslave Robin, the clown plays on the words “guilders” and “gridirons”; thus, Robin m...
... middle of paper ...
...en a great thinker such as Faustus is pervious to the lures of evil. By acting as a parallel to Faustus, Rafe and Robin further highlight the tragic downfall of Doctor Faustus. Though their appearances in The Tragical History of D. Faustus are brief and their actions seem to be of no consequence, Rafe and Robin bring both comic relief and serious reflection to this tragic Marlovian play.
WORKS CITED
Cole, Douglas. Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of D. Faustus. In Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Edited by A.F. Kinney. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002.
Tydeman, William, and Vivien Thomas. State of the Art series: Christopher Marlowe - A guide through the critical maze. Bristol: The Bristol Press, 1989.
The southern economy was largely dependent on slaves, who worked on the numerous plantations of the South. Moreover, the main purpose of slavery in the South was for the cultivation of these cotton plantations. (Doc 4) For this reason, southerners believed
...ecause they feared that Slavery would soon be completely abolished. These tensions eventually led to the civil war where the North won and slavery was ended although there were still slave like laws in place after.
Constitutionally the North favored a loose interpretation of the United States Constitution, and they wanted to grant the federal government increased powers. The South wanted to reserve all undefined powers to the individual states themselves. The South relied upon slave labor for their economic well being, and the economy of the North was not reliant on such labor or in need of this type of service. This main issue overshadowed all others. Southerners compared slavery to the wage-slave system of the North, and believed their slaves received better care than the northern factory workers received from their employers. Many Southern preachers proclaimed that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible. Southern leaders had constantly tried to seek new areas into which slavery might be extended (Oates 349).
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Criticism on Shakespeare s Tragedies . A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. London: AMS Press, Inc., 1965.
Shakespeare, William. “The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 872.
“To put matters simply, it [the plague] did not spare those of any age or fortune,” (15). With this account, Nicephorus Gregoras, in my opinion, impeccably sums up The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A large percentage of the contributors to John Aberth’s book of documents acknowledge that the plague did not discriminate against any person or group of persons. For this reason, I consider the overall sense of what the plague meant to the people of the mid 1300s to be a looming understanding that the plague could not be avoided, no matter how wealthy, powerful, or religious a person claimed to be.
Mack, Maynard. Everybody’s Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Snyder, Susan. "Beyond the Comedy: Othello" Modern Critical Interpretations, Othello Ed. Harold Bloom, Pub. Chelsea House New Haven CT 1987.
Bradley., A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
The Black Death plagues had disastrous consequences for Europe in the 14th century. After the initial outbreak in Europe, 1347, it continued for around five years and then mysteriously disappeared. However it broke out again in the 1360s and every few decades thereafter till around 1700. The European epidemic was an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which began in Asia and spread across trade routes. When it reached Europe, a path of destruction began to emerge. Medieval society was tossed into disarray, economies were fractured, the face of culture and religion changed forever. However the plagues devastation was not all chaotic, there were benefits too, such as modern labour movements, improvements in medicine and a new outlook on life. Therefore in order to analyse the impact the Black Death had on societies in the 14th century, this essay will consider the social, economic, cultural and religious factors in order to reach an overall conclusion.
What is so interesting about Shakespeare's first play, The Comedy of Errors, are the elements it shares with his last plays. The romances of his final period (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) all borrowed from the romantic tradition, particularly the Plautine romances. So here, as in the later plays, we have reunions of lost children and parents, husbands and wives; we have adventures and wanderings, and the danger of death (which in this play is not as real to us as it is in the romances). Yet, for all these similarities, the plot of The Comedy of Errors is as simple as the plots of the later plays are complex. It is as though Shakespeare's odyssey through the human psyche in tragedy and comedy brought him back to his beginnings with a sharper sense of yearning, poignancy, and the feeling of loss. But to dismiss this play as merely a simplistic romp through a complicated set of maneuvers is to miss the pure theatrical feast it offers on the stage - the wit and humor of a master wordsmith, the improbability of a plot that sweeps...
The play up for discussion is the Kingsborough’s Community College spring production of Two Gentlemen of Verona The Musical. This is a musical adaptation of the original Shakespearean play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In this essay the Kingsborough’s Community College spring production of Two Gentlemen of Verona The Musical, the original Shakespearean play and five former plays adaptations, themes, and characters will be evaluated. The first is Euripides 431 B.C. E. play Medea, the second is the 148 A.D. Latin play, The Menaechmi by Plautus, the third is the 1509 play Everyman by an anonymous playwright during the Tudor period, the fourth is the 1671 three-act comedy play The Impostures of Scapin by French playwright Moliere and the fifth is the 1604 Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Even though there have been modern adaptations of these plays the theme and the recurring motif remains the same and it still probes into the life of humans.
Snyder, Susan. "Beyond the Comedy: Othello" Modern Critical Interpretations, Othello Ed. Harold Bloom, Pub. Chelsea House New Haven CT 1987.
Applebee, Arthur N. “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,” The language of Literature, Evanston, IL: Mcdougal Littell, 1997. 992-1102.Print.
Mehl, Dieter. Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Introduction. Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge U, 1986.