Academic literature on the topic 'Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593) – ˜The œTragedy of Doctor Faustus'

En Angleterre, la révolution scientifique coïncide avec la Renaissance. Il n'est pas surprenant dès lors que Marlowe et Shakespeare s'emparent de la figure du savant dans Doctor Faustus et The Tempest. La science est encore plus présente dans l'oeuvre de Bacon : New Atlantis dépeint une société idéale dont la prospérité et le bonheur dépendent d'une institution scientifique nommée "Maison de Salomon". Le terme "savant" est néanmoins problématique. Il ne correspond à aucune catégorie sociale ou culturelle de l'époque. On peut cependant tenter de définir certains des traits que partagent alors les "philosophes naturels" : quoique très influencés par l'humanisme, ils témoignent d'un très vif intérêt pour la technique et tentent de défendre la magie contre les critiques féroces des théologiens. Ces trois aspects – l'humanisme, la magie et la technique – trouvent à leur façon leur place dans The Tempest et Doctor Faustus. La représentation populaire du savant hésite entre rejet et raillerie. Le savant est perçu soit comme un dangereux athée, soit comme un mélancolique inadapté au réel. Ce n'est pas à dire que la représentation littéraire ou sociale du savant soit parfaitement uniforme. Les savants prennnent, pour leur part, de plus en plus conscience de la communauté à laquelle ils appartiennent : la rhétorique agonistique s'efface derrière l'affirmation d'une nouvelle sociabilité. Mais la science demeure une activité ambiguë jusqu'à la fin de la période. L'enthousiasme de Bacon s'oppose à l'image plus ambivalente que Marlowe et Shakespeare proposent de la science, dont on sait combien la littérature, par la suite, critiquera les dérives potentielles
In England the dawn of the "Scientific Revolution" coincided with the Renaissance. It is therefore no accident that dramatists like Marlowe and Shakespeare seized on the figure of the "scientist" in Doctor Faustus and The Tempest. Science is even more present a theme in Bacon's works : in New Atlantis he describes an ideal society whose prosperity and comfort depend on a scientific institution which he calls the "House of Salomon. " The "scientist" was certainly not a "natural" feature of the social or cultural environment. One may say, however, that "natural philosophers", as they were sometimes called, shared a number of common characteristics. While still very much influenced by the humanist tradition, they expressed a very strong interest in technology. They also believed in magic and tried to legitimize its use in the face of the theologians' strictures. All three aspects – humanism, magic and technology – found their way into Doctor Faustus and The Tempest. On the whole, the popular image of the scientist was poised between rejection and mockery. He was seen either as a dangerous atheist or as a melancholy man detached from reality. Yet the literary depiction of the scientist was by no means a uniform one. Scientific treatises reveal the scientists' growing sense that they belonged to a learned community. They stopped emphasizing their isolation and gave prominence to their links with other scientists. Science remained an ambivalent pursuit until the end of the period. Bacon's enthusiasm is profoundly at odds with Shakespeare's or Marlowe's more ambivalent depiction which prefigures the later literary representations of science as a potentially destructive activity

The purpose of the study is to establish the critical need for stage action in order to understand fully the theme of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's primary intent is to invert the morality play, illustrating the distortions and ambiguities of a systematized religion and to establish the human dilemma when man is faced with moral choices. To illustrate this inversion, Marlowe uses emblematic action for an effect opposite to that of the traditional moralities: Often this action goes beyond the emblem, becoming a metaphor for Marlowe's theme, man as a victim, conflicting within himself and within the system which governs his morality.Chapter one introduces this theme and the crucial need for staging Marlowe's ideas. The first chapter also establishes a compromise of the textual problems inherent within any study of Doctor Faustus. Since the study argues that audience reaction is important to Marlowe's intent, attention is paid to how audience response governs the play's interpretation.Chapter two is a critical review of the historical staging practices which must be considered when studying the dramatic text. Included are stage size, costuming, and special effects.Chapter three is the advancement of the thesis in a scene by scene analysis of the text with special attention to the action as metaphor. Considered is how audience reaction represents part of Marlowe's purpose; the increasing tension of the audience furthers Marlowe's concept of the ambiguities present when humans are faced with moral choices. This purpose is traced scene by scene with specific attention to how it is metaphorically portrayed on stage.Chapter four is separate as a director's book, with the text reproduced, together with the researcher's marginal notes on specific blocking and with footnotes emplacing and expanding on the metaphorical action as it appears in the text.
Department of English

Focusing on the A-text (1604) version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus , this study further assesses biographical information on the poet and intellectual currents of the Counter Reformation, so as to investigate the play's relation to emergent trends of individualism in the Renaissance, recovery of the pagan past, and intellectual aspirations that could readily collide with orthodoxy. Clearly reflecting anxieties of the period about individual deviance from social norms through intellectual overreaching, Doctor Faustus powerfully testifies to the potential dangers of human aspiration and the scholarly spirit of unbounded learning. While thus exploring the exotic temptations of forbidden knowledge, the play resurrects and interrogates traditional taboos which related intellectual appetite to wrongful lust. Marlowe stages an explosive conflict between the conservative tradition of intellectual inquiry, which distrusted the unorthodox scholarship and Neoplatonic magic that some widely influential thinkers promoted in the Italian Renaissance, and Faustus's own creative desires, ambitions, and imagination. The tension between proscribed and prescribed knowledge climaxes in the invocation of Helen of Troy. While Helen's significance is complex, we find that, in relation to the play's concern with dissent from orthodoxy, she focuses the power of intellectual longing to seduce and ravish the mind. Apart from being a superior play, Doctor Faustus encapsulates Marlowe's awareness of his period's uneasy perception of unconventional thinking, and urges the importance of challenging restrictions on how much one is permitted to know.

La présente thèse compare le drame Le Docteur Faust de Christopher Marlowe (1604, 1616) avec la première traduction française faite par Jean-Pierre Antoine Bazy (1850) et la première traduction italienne faite par Eugenio Turiello (1898) en visant à identifier les changements textuels révélateurs du contexte culturelle et idéologique au moment où se produisent les deux textes cibles. Le Docteur Faust est un exemple emblématique de l’instabilité du texte dramatique source. Il nous est parvenu en deux versions (le texte A et le texte B) différentes du point de vue structurel, thématique et doctrinal. En revanche, aucune version ne permet pas une interprétation cohérente. Ce travail a pour propos d’examiner si les traductions de Bazy et de Turiello, qui proviennent de contextes géographiques, historiques et littéraires différents mais étroitement liés, multiplient les lectures plausibles ou bien si elles aboutissent à une vision plus constante. En outre, on s’interroge sur la cause des variations textuelles, généralement dénommées en traductologie les glissements. Tout d’abord, j’ai identifié une régularité des glissements qui se manifestent dans deux traductions en question. Puis, j’ai analysé les effets des glissements sur la structure et la signification générales des textes. Enfin, en adoptant une approche socioculturelle de l’analyse des traductions, j’ai exploré la manière dont les changements sont déterminés par l’idéologie des traducteurs et leur interprétation de l’original. Cela explique leur position au sein de l’espace politique et idéologique de chaque culture d’arrivée, ainsi que les normes traductrices et culturelles adoptées au cours de la traduction
The aim of this research is to compare Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616) with the first French translation by Jean-Pierre Antoine Bazy (1850) and the first Italian translation by Eugenio Turiello (1898) in search of the changes that are symptomatic of the cultural and ideological context of translation production. The case of Doctor Faustus represents the epitome of the instability of a dramatic source text. Two main versions of the play (the A-text and the B-text) differ in structural, thematic and doctrinal terms. At the same time, neither version delivers a coherent vision. The research seeks to examine whether Bazy’s and Turiello’s translation, belonging to different yet related geographical, historical and literary traditions, further multiply the potential readings of the original or whether they display a more consistent framework. In addition, we will analyse the causes of textual variation, commonly labelled in Translation Studies as shifts. First, we identified a pattern of shifts manifested in the target texts in question. Then, we discussed the ways in which the identified patterns of shifts affect the general meaning and the structure of the texts. Finally, adopting a socio-cultural approach, we showed how certain shifts are conditioned by the translators’ ideology and their interpretation of the original. This in turn reveals the positions they occupy within the political and ideological space of each target culture and the main cultural and translation norms operating in the recipient systems