Dr. Faustus, Niccolo Machiavelli, and the Armitage Family—The Genius of Renaissance Success and Ambition .

 Paper details In Doctor Faustus, greed, pride, ego, and ambition are presented as dangerous qualities (portrayed, in part, by the Seven Deadly Sins). These vices cause the downfall of Faustus and trigger a series of mystifying events, most tragically, his death. These vices/sins/character flaws are the driving forces of the play.Faustus’s ambition is driven by a number of factors, but mostly by his ego and by his unquenchable thirst for absolute knowledge. And it does not help that he sells his soul to the devil—that can’t be good!Make no mistake: Faustus is a villain (or rather, he “becomes” a villain) because of his insatiable desires. But are there not times when determined ambition, greed, ego, etc. could be beneficial, even beyond the individual? Renaissance, by definition, means “rebirth, renewal,” of thinking in philosophy, art, culture, science, literature, religion, and so forth. During this era, people were “rethinking” approaches to everything. Faustus wants more from life RIGHT NOW. Let’s face it—he is like other people who have everything—he is bored: he masters every learnable craft, but he wants more, and more, and more. His overly inflated ego consumes him and encourages his insatiable appetite for knowledge and power. He is irrational…or is he?What’s wrong with wanting it all? What’s wrong with challenging traditional dogma and doctrine that have been used to stifle the creative, artistic, and individual voices since the beginning of time? And why should those courageous enough to “occupy” be punished? Faustus is a man of his time and, though a bit extreme, and wicked, he is as Professor R.M. Dawkins proclaimed in an epigram, “a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one” (Introduction). He is condemned for being courageous.In fact Christopher Marlowe (Faustus) himself was the product of the Renaissance. He was saturated with the spirit of the Renaissance with its great yearning for limitless knowledge, with its hankering after sensual pleasures of life, with its intemperate ambition and supreme lust for power and pelf and finally with its spirit of revolt against the medieval pattern of living, its orthodox religion and conventional morality and ethical principles. We may unhesitatingly call Marlowe the first champion of the Renaissance, as he was more than anyone else greatly influenced by Italian Renaissance. Hence it was but natural that his great works should reveal the main characteristics of the Renaissance. And then, unlike Shakespeare, Marlowe could not but project his personality into the great and mighty characters of his plays, including, of course, Doctor Faustus.The Prince by Machiavelli, the famous social and political writer of Italy, profoundly influenced the spirit of the Renaissance. It was Machiavelli’s forceful writings that encouraged the men of that age to disregard all ethical and conventional moral principles to achieve the end by any means, fair or foul.Some of the most important characteristics of the Renaissance and Machiavellian doctrine are of complete freedom to gain one’s end by any means necessary. With their spirit of individualism they all are dominated by some uncontrollable passion for gaining some ideal or finding the fulfilment of some intemperate ambition. They all seem to be inspired by Machiavellian ideals of human conduct and human desires, and hence the common moral conventions and the established religious sanctions can never thwart them from striving to gain their end.Of all Marlowe’s heroes, Doctor Faustus seems to be the veritable incarnation of the genius and spirit of the Renaissance, as his character reveals a great yearning for limitless knowledge, power and pelf, a craving for sensual pleasures of life, a defying spirit of atheism or scepticism and also a spirit of revolt against conventional religious doctrines and Christian theology. One of the most significant characteristics of the Renaissance was individualism that led to the spirit of revolt to free the human mind from the shackles and dogmas of the Church and feudalism.Faustus boldly asserts his individualism and raises the standard of revolt against the medieval restrictions on the mind of man.