The Struggle Within Dr. Faustus

This hero with “super human aspiration” had lived in a time of the Middle Ages and the start of the Renaissance. These were two very different historical eras with quite different values, and Faustus is caught in the grip of changing times. The Renaissance period emphasized the revival of classical learning which fired the imagination of people with “the spirit and rational ideals of ancient Rome and Greece” (Burgess, 309). It has encouraged the people to …

…deliver a moral lesson. Since Faustus has delved into the field of church’s forbidden knowledge, his award should be hell. This hell in the end was completely different from what he had expected. It was as the Medievals considered it to be, and not what Mephostophilis told him about. This result was completely contradictory to what Renaissances longed for. At the same time this hell was never imagined like that by all the Greeks.