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A-level English Dr Faustus essay- presentation of comic scenes
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High grade A-level English essay on Dr Faustus. Titled 'Explore Marlowe’s presentation of the comic scenes'
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By: domchapman2005 • 6 months ago
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Explore Marlowe’s presentation of the comic scenesMarlowe’s presentation of the comic scenes serves to highlight and communicate major ideas
in the text. Not only are they presented as comic relief and entertainment for the audience
between the more serious scenes, but also they shed light on the fate of Faustus, and his
increasing degradation and further serve to question whether necromancy is linked to
intelligence and academia.
Marlowe’s comic scenes are presented and used in order to provide tragic relief from the more
serious scenes. Elizabethan playwrights commonly used comic interludes in order to ease the
tension and refresh the mind of the audience. Arguably without the comic scenes, the play may
be consumed with intense drama and therefore provides a comic relief for the audience. The
comic scenes make use of bawdy humour and animalistic images such as ‘apes’ and ‘dogs’.
Furthermore, sexual humour such as cuckoldry is alluded to with the reference to ‘devils have
horns’, which is the symbol of a cuckold. Marlowe presents the comic scenes through
carnivalesque humour referring to bodily appetites. Crucial elements of carnival include a focus
on the materiality of the body with emphasis on the functions and aspects of the body
associated with processes defined as grotesque and degrading. Linked to this, the fact that
Faustus becomes involved in comic scenes as the text progresses highlights his degradation and
the reality of his situation. Marlowe’s technique of having serious interspersed with comic
scenes is used in morality plays where comic scenes frequently involved the devil and often
were characterised by knockabout physical comedy and carnival elements as similarly
presented in this text. Through the bawdy humour coupled with the employment of stock
characters such as the ‘cheeky servant’, Marlowe uses comedy in order to provide
entertainment, which would have appealed to an Elizabethan audience. Illustrated in the
debase humour of Robin wanting to be turned into a ‘frisking flea’ in order to ‘tickle the pretty
wenches’ plackets’ referring to bodily appetites and therefore carnivalesque humour, serving to
provide some variety and relaxation between the intensities of the serious scenes.
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