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Faustus, By Dr. Faustus

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At the play’s outset, Dr. Faustus is in his study contemplating what academic discipline is the most fulfilling. He reviews a number of disciplines in his mind, such as logic and medicine (which he believes he is already adequately distinguished in), and law and theology (which he believes to have inherent inadequacies). Dr. Faustus’s route from religion to magic seems to be forcedly cobbled together in order to elicit a certain emotion towards sophists as a whole, and Marlowe laboriously thrusts Dr. Faustus into becoming an embodiment of the term “thinker” in its Momentarily pejorative context. Faustus is represented on the surface as a free-thinker who perhaps thought too much and too freely in his time, and though Faustus’s story was often hailed as a perfect depiction of free-thought in excess, Marlowe seems to be more interested in Faustus’s eventual inversion of his epoch’s notion that religion is the necessary vehicle to morality and decency. Faustus is depicted at the play’s beginning as an individual bent on self-gratification. His diverse interests and talents, if we are to take his proclamations of expertise as true, imply that he is not only a very adept individual, but also a rather insatiable one. This will of course be the downfall of Faustus, however the foreboding nature of even this first scene carries implications regarding the text’s treatment of free-thinking, existential experimentation, and non-conformant exploration. Dr. Faustus ventures to the

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