The present study considers Christopher Marlowe’s "Doctor Faustus" as an indictment of the early capitalist and bourgeois ideology of Elizabethan England. The study claims that Faustus’s damnation is more than a personal or religious tragedy. It mirrors the problems of the new economic order which was emerging in Marlowe's day. Most readings of the play have concentrated on Faustus’s individual ambition, pride or rejection of God. Such readings fail to take into account the economic and social conditions that produce the problems that Faustus faces. Three questions guide this study: How does Doctor Faustus show the shaping of human desires by the early capitalist economic structures? How is Faustus’s desire for knowledge and power a symptom of the contradictions of the early bourgeois society? Why is the sale of the soul the inevitable outcome of capitalist thought in the play? The study is framed using neo-Marxist theory. The main theorists used are Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. Gramsci shows that the ruling class holds power in culture and ideas and not just through force (Gramsci 12). Institutions such as the schools and the churches determine the way people think (Althusser 85). Marx demonstrates that capitalism transforms everything into a commodity to be bought and sold, even human relationships (Marx 48). The play’s analysis shows that Faustus embraces the values of the emerging bourgeois world: individual achievement, knowledge as power and worldly pleasure. His pact with the devil is a metaphor for the sale of the soul, the ultimate logic of capitalism. The conclusion is that Marlowe depicts early capitalism as a system that eats people up from the inside, leaving only damnation and the loss of true human fulfilment.
- Quote paper
- Nirmal Gurung (Author), 2026, The Price of the Bourgeois Dream. A Neo-Marxist Reading of Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.hausarbeiten.de/document/1745391
