Explore the tragic nature of Faustus’s final soliloquy. Manzar Haq 12th Grade

Doctor Faustus’ closing speech is unquestionably the most emotional scene in Dr. Faustus. His mind moves from idea to idea in desperation and he spends his final hour in vain hoping that he may be spared from his fate. He looks inward for an escape when all he really needs to do is look upward. Lucifer does not send Faustus to hell, Faustus sends himself by not accepting the gift of salvation that God freely offers him right up until the end. This denial of salvation in itself brings out the sheer tragic nature of Faustus, confirming that Faustus is a tragic hero. According to most Elizabethan tragic plays, the essential characteristics of a tragic hero must be failure of judgement and being able to evoke feelings of pity and sorrow in the readers’ mind. Faustus does evoke these feelings but for a number of reasons.

To start off, one of the most obvious forms of tragedy that Marlowe presents in the final soliloquy is the waste of time. A structuralist view on Faustus’s final soliloquy would raise comments on how Marlowe skilfully uses rhythm to underline the passage of time.
The starting sentence of his soliloquy is “Now hast thou but one bare hour to live” which is a sequence of monosyllabic words, it is not entirely clear...