Dr Faustus Act 1 Scene 1 Summary

[Claribel Lizama]

Peterasked me to do a 12 scene summary/synopsis for the artists for our show. While I did not do a synopsis for pages 20-25, I have the rest of the show summarized. I hope this will help those who are confused by the language Stein uses within this show. Page numbers are based off of the revised script Peter released which you can find here: link.

This article speaks all about dr Faustus summary in short. This, dr faustus summary centers Doctor Faustus, a well-respected German scholar. He becomes dissatisfied with the limits of traditional forms of knowledge i.e. logic, medicine, law, and religion. Thus, he decides to learn to practice magic.

His friends namely Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts. Hence, he starts his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Mephastophilis warns Faustus of the horrors of hell. However, Faustus ignores his warnings.

Faustus again has second thoughts. However, Mephastophilis bestows rich gifts on him and gives him a book of spells to learn. Later, Mephastophilis answers the questions asked by him about the nature of the world. However, he refuses to answer only when Faustus asks him about the creation of the universe.

This refusal prompts yet another spell of misgivings in Faustus. However, Mephastophilis and Lucifer bring in personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins to prance about in front of Faustus. Then, he is impressed enough to settle down his doubts.

After this incident in dr Faustus summary, he travels through the courts of Europe. He spreads his fame wherever he goes. Eventually, Charles V (the enemy of the pope), the German Emperor, invited him to his court. He asks Faustus to allow him to see Alexander the Great, the famed fourth-century b.c. Macedonian king and conqueror.

However, the twenty-four years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, Faustus begins to fear his approaching death. He has Mephastophilis call up Helen of Troy, the well-known splendor from the ancient world.

But a very short period was left for his death. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-stricken. They resolve to pray for him. On the final night before the ending of the twenty-four years, Faustus was full of fear and remorse.

Gretchen suspects that Faust does not believe in God. She asks him about it, but he refuses to comment. All that Faust believes in is love; he even says that he believes in what they feel for each other. Gretchen hates Mephistopheles, both sarcastic and angry; she wishes that Faust did not associate himself with him. She knows that Mephistopheles lacks empathy towards everything and sees everyone as a rival. She also mentioned that when Mephistopheles is near, she is not able to accomplish praying, and is almost unable to feel her love for Faust. Gretchen and Faust want to spend some time together, but she is worried that her mother could catch them since she is a light sleeper. Faust suggests that he gives her three drops of sleeping potion, which should cause her to get to a profound and pleasant slumber. Gretchen subsequently agrees to the idea and leaves the room. Mephistopheles overhears their conversation from his hiding spot and uses the situation to his advantage.

Gretchen approaches a statue that depicts The Mother Mary and settles at the foot of the cross. She lays some flowers at the feet of the statue and prays that Mary saves her from death and embarrassment.

These scenes show the consequences that follow the consummation of the love Faust and Gretchen share. They reinforce two different kinds of emotional pain; first, yearning for each other and, later, repentance. Such a display of emotion is typical from writers who focus on the romantic genre. In the fourteenth scene, Faust enjoys the elated emotions of being in love and experiencing nature in-depth. Gretchen is suffering in the fifteenth scene; she is sitting and spinning in her room alone. Her feelings and longing for Faust are overwhelming her. Franz Schubert, inspired by her lines, hence set music from them in 1814. Walter Savage Landor, who is an English poet, also had her words in his mind; after seeing a fragment by poet Sappho from Greek in 1846, he immediately turned the two into the poignant verse. In the sixteenth scene, Gretchen is deeply concerned by the lack of faith in God that Faust exhibits. Faust does not worship God but has his own belief system. This is a vital summary that is often quoted in well-known romanticism.

In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth scenes, Faust is in love with Gretchen and still elated at the relationship he has with her. Gretchen is, however, suffering. Not only has she disobeyed the teachings of the church, but has also sinned against her family and neighborhood moral codes. And everybody, from her brother to Leischen, disapproves and causes her even more emotional distress. In the twentieth scene, we can only speculate about what made her collapse. Was it her heightened emotional state or a symptom of pregnancy?

This is not a work of scholarship. I don't believe that the author, a respected scholar, would disagree with this evaluation -- there is no direct engagement with a critical tradition, no overarching thesis that drives the argument, and not a single footnote to be found. Why, then, does this volume merit consideration?

We have countless books and essays on the teaching, introduction, and explanation of Shakespeare, for dummies and others. (There's even a Library of Congress classification for this subject: PR 2987.) Yet an amateur reader would be hard pressed to find the Marlovian equivalent of The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard. Aside from occasional notes in the Marlowe Society of America Newsletter (e.g. Hamlin and Hopkins) and a short essay on the poetry by Arthur Kinney, there is nothing comparable in Marlowe scholarship to the hundreds of pieces on "the Teaching of Shakespeare." (For a comparatively recent bibliography on this subject, see O'Brien). Marlowe simply does not enjoy Shakespeare's fetishized, hypercanonical status. Is Marlowe somehow less amenable to being "friendly" and "painless"? Perhaps his tendency to write "something not unlike caricature," to cite Eliot's offhand evaluation, provides a tentative explanation for the discrepancy between these playwrights' respective receptions. As 'character' remains the predominant mode of Shakespearean appreciation (witness Bloom's Invention of the Human), Marlowe's caricatures appear destined to remain unread or, at best, misread by the wider public.

Stevie Simkin's Marlowe: The Plays, a volume in the Palgrave Analysing Texts series, appears to me a first attempt at introducing Marlowe to the general reader. There have, of course, been other studies which present an overview of Marlowe's work -- Simkin himself recently published A Preface to Marlowe -- but these are largely oriented towards an academic audience, with the scholarly apparatus lacking here. I hesitate, slightly, to call this an introduction, because the volume does not announce itself as such, either on its covers or in its prefatory materials. Yet it clearly reads as such; in fact, it reads very much like a series of thoughtful, if at times belaboured, lectures on the two parts of Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II (Dido and Aeneas and The Massacre at Paris are occasionally mentioned, but never discussed at length).

As the first sentence of the "Introductory Guidance" states directly, "The rationale of this book is based on close analysis of short extracts from Marlowe's five major plays" (1). After an admittedly "brief overview" (3) of textual history, blank verse, dramatic characterization, and cultural tradition, Simkin proceeds to gather extracts from the plays based on groupings that are structural ("openings" and "endings" of dramas), generic (comedy), or (most often) thematic (gender, power, and religion, as would be expected, along with the somewhat loosely articulated "Heroes and Anti-Heroes"). Each of these first seven chapters begins with some general observations before moving on to textual analysis of 50-80 line passages, usually from four or five different plays. The extract is quoted in full, and then examined in detail for about four pages, including: an overview of what is happening in this scene (a rough plotting); a discussion of how this chapter's themes are worked out in this passage, with helpful contextualization (slightly more than what you would expect from the explanatory footnotes of a good edition of the plays); an analysis of the "style" (imagery, tone, rhythm, rhetorical patterns, repetitive keywords, irregularities in the sound of the lines, etc.); and some gestures towards the rest of the play. In the later chapters there is an additional emphasis on problems that could arise in staging (Simkin both teaches and directs drama). Following the extracts and their analyses, the chapters end with a summary of "Conclusions," "Methods of Analysis" (these two being at times nearly indistinguishable) and "Suggested Work" for further reading (most often additional scenes that could be read in order to complicate the previous conclusions). These final pages are perhaps a product of the volume's origins (as they evoke the "Course Aims, Objectives, and Outcomes" which regularly accompany British syllabi), but they likewise reinforce the pedagogical aims of the book. They also follow the Analysing Texts format, which is, admittedly, formulaic but consistent.

If these analyses sound familiar, they should -- they resemble nothing more than the fairly typical undergraduate assignment of reading a literary passage closely, paying attention not only to the content but also the form of the expression. This is not intended as a criticism of Simkin's work, for these close readings are consistently thoughtful and thorough (and one would be hard pressed to find a student who could successfully string together thirty-two such readings!); they are deliberately intended to model the practice for the reader. But they do become ponderous for a literary scholar, because they aren't really offering any new flashes of insight into the extracts; moreover, they're building only slightly in complexity from chapter to chapter. (To his credit, he constantly threads his readings together, reminding the reader of previous and looking forward to future sections of the book.)

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