Dr Faustus Critics

• Dr Faustus was 'a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one' - R.M. Dawkins
• 'Marlowe's play challenged the limits of acceptable public behaviour' - David Riggs
• 'Marlowe whose blasphemies stood for an impulse that was acceptable to modern readers - free thought, anti-philistinism, the quest for transcendence' = david riggs
• it 'had the satisfying contours of a moral tale' - David Riggs
• 'as an intellectual, Marlowe identified with his protagonist; as a Christian, he repudiated him' - Riggs
• ' anyone who did not dread the hand of divine correction would sin with reckless abandon' - Riggs
• 'the institutions... taught Christopher Marlowe what transgression is' - Riggs
• 'poetry and spectacle transform into illicit pleasure' - Riggs
• 'The scholar remains in the all-male world of academic humanism, where books take the place of women' - Riggs
• '16th century Canterbury... was a spiritual wasteland' - Riggs
• 'He grew accustomed to the sight of condemned men being carted past his home to the gallows' - Riggs
• 'He conceived religion as a site of conflict rather than an accessible realm of sacred truth' - Riggs
• 'love between men was intrinsic to the humanist educational program' - Riggs
• 'neglect and almost contempt for all religion' - Riggs
• 'instead of seeking god in the heavens, Marlowe's generation charted the earthly course of imperial conquest' - Riggs
• 'man takes on him the attributes of a god, as though he were himself a god' - riggs
• ' Faustus remains accountable for his fate. The best he can do, in the end, is gesture towards the instruments of his undoing' - Riggs
• 'he opens the door to irony and scepticism' - Riggs
• 'books instilled a desire for what they could never have; material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority' - riggs
• ' early performances of Dr Faustus were notoriously successful at blurring the distinction between performance and reality' - riggs
• 'Without the gift of grace, Dr. Faustus is reduced to a commodity' - riggs
• 'Man's new faith in his own intellectual resources against a deeply rooted christian concept in the vanity of human endeavour alone' - Hilary Gatti