Dottor Faustus

Materie:	Scheda libro
Categoria:	Inglese
Voto:	2.5 (2)
Download:	258
Data:	21.05.2007
Numero di pagine:	3
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

Plot: John Faustus, who feels he has reached the limits of human understanding and sells his soul to the devil in order to gain godlike knowledge about the secrets of the universe, together with the infinite power this kind of knowledge can give. The fields of the knowledge: theology, philosophy, medicine, law, magic. He agrees to surrender his soul to Lucifer at the end of 24-year period. He alternates moments of doubt and moments of pleasure occasioned by dubious magic spells. Mephistopheles, a Lucifer’s servant, enables Faustus t become invisible to play a joke on the pope, to woo the ghost of Helen of troy, and to watch a parade of the seven deadly sins. Then Lucifer claims his part of the bargain and Faustus is dragged to hell.
Technique: This is a morality play. In Faustus the end of the journey is different. Marlowe creates a new tragic renaissance hero whose passionate results in death and subversive search for knowledge and power results in death and spiritual damnation, and the morality play becomes a tragic play. He invents also the blank verse, a very flexible line, which can convey not only solemn but also colloquial speech.
Themes: -the ambition hero who challenges a god is an old theme and common to most cultures.
In the tradition of the morality play, his damnation may be interpreted as punishment for the sin of pride, as the reaffirmation of the Christian doctrine of salvation, as the predicament of the new humanism hero, who challenges medieval obscurantism.
-the time that goes too fast
-“I’ll burn my books”= he prefers losing his knowledge instead of going to hell.
Overreacher: a hero that for reaching his goal he is prepared to defy all moral rules and conventions. He’s a rebel. Faustus is at the beginning confident, determined, excited and ambitious; at the end he is desperate, humble and anxious.
Parafrasi: now you have only one hour and then you must be damned foe ever, (uguale)
That time may stop, and midnight will never come, the sun rises, rises again and makes this day as eternal, or let this hour to be a year, a month, a week, (uguale), slowly, slowly run horses of the night, the stars are still moving, time runs, the clock will strike and the devil will come and you Faustus will be damned. Oh I’ll jump towards god, who pulls me down? I see Christ’s blood flawing in the sky. One drop, even half drop, would save my soul: ah my Christ.
Ah, don’t tear my hearth because I name Christ. Yet I will go on calling (uguale).
(uguale), it’s gone (uguale), and turns his angry looks towards him.(uguale x un bel pò)
no, no, it isn’t enough! Then I will quickly run into the earth, earth open up! O,no, it won’t give me any shelter! (uguale) whose influence has assigned death and hell, now pull up Faustus like a foggy mist. Into the infernal organs up there moving with difficulty. (uguale) my body may come out from my smoky mouths, and that my soul may go up to heaven.
(uguale) it will have pasted soon. You can’t forgive my soul, whose blood has released me. (uguale) there is no end to the damnation of the soul, why aren’t you a creature without a soul? Or why is this soul that you have immortal? (uguale) if it were true (uguale) and I would be changed. (uguale x un bel pò) that he has deprived you of the pleasure of heaven (uguale) or Lucifer will bring you quickly to hell. (uguale) he want to be found.
1°sonnet: opens with a comparison; the poet asks if he can compare tha fair youth to a summer day, and the answer is that the fair youth is more lovely and more temperate. Then the poet supports his point and describes some of the imperfection of a summer’s day which can be windy or cloudy, or the shortness; besides the beauty of summer inevitably declines. The poet promises that the youth’s beauty will never die because of the immortality of his verse.
2° sonnet: (differences between Petrarch’s sonnet and Shakespeare’s sonnet), the Italian sonnet starts with a new convention in the representation of the theme of love: the woman is always idealized, distant and chaste, and the poet’s love hopeless. In the Shakespeare sonnet instead the woman isn’t idealized, there is an unconventional portrait, he describes in a realistic way, her beauty isn’t exaggerate by false comparisons. (example: wife of bath). In every age the ideal of male and female beauty changes. “beauty is in the eye of the beolder”