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Article: Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.(Renaissance playwright, Christopher Marlowe)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Rice University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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He that casts all doubts shall never be resolved.
English Renaissance proverb
It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and has been deemed a skeptical play. [1] More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with superstition." [2] Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature." [3] And the varied testimony ...