Introduction to Faustus.

'Doctor Faustus, is a play by Christopher Marlowe. It is based on the German story Faust and is sometimes referred to as 'The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus'. The play is about a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power. Doctor Faustus was first published in 1604 which was 11 years after Christopher Marlowe died.'




Wikipedia, Doctor Faustus(play) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_(play) [last accessed 13th October 2014]




This research helped to give me a better understanding to the background knowledge that lead up to the writing of the play. It also enabled me to gather information about the play that I had, before, not known about Doctor Faustus which helped me gain a better understanding of the underlying message of the play. The idea of a man selling his soul to the devil peaks my interests as its a topic that majorly involves religion, in which  people have wide spectrum of personal opinions on.


In this lesson we had to chose a scene from Doctor Faustus and transpose it into now-a-day situations and language, we had to refer back to the scripts to guide the situations so they fit and still oriented around the scene we had chosen,  and that it kept within with the style, genre and period in which the play was set. I was put in partnership with John and we decided to chose the topic of drug abuse, we believed that Faustus would be the type of person to struggle with keeping away from the lifestyle with the access he had to it and the devil was essentially to dealer coaxing him into trying to turn him into an addict, attempting to get into 'Faustus's' mind, and therefore sell himself to the condition. I found it quite challenging to pick through the script and find non specific phrases that could have the underlining meaning of drug abuse.