'This excellent Faustus is damned by accident or by predestination; he is brow-beaten by the devil and forbidden to repent when he has really repented. The terror of the conclusion is thereby heightened; we see an essentially good man, because in a moment of infatuation he had signed away his soul, driven against his will to despair and damnation.' (George Santayana, 1910)
'The limitless desire, the unbridled passion for the infinite, a certain reckless, high confidence in the will and spirit of man are all there [in Faustus's mind]. This rare power of abstracting the nature of man, of revealing only the universal and the general, yet so revealing that it comes home to the heart of every individual man, reaches its height at the end of the play . . .[Dcotor Faustus] perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature'.
(Una Ellis-Fermor, 1927)
Marlowe, the moment the exhaustion of the imagination fit deprives him of the power of raving, becomes childish in thought, vulgar and wooden in humour, and stupid in his attempts at invention . . .itching to frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he does not himself believe. (George Bernard Shaw, 1896)
'I cannot find, in Marlowe's play, any proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to him, unless the belief in witchcraft and the Devil can be regarded as such; and at the time he wrote, not to have believed in both, would have been construed into the rankest atheism and irreligion.' (William Hazlitt, 1820)
'In Faustus Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to gain in intensity, in the last soliloquy; and he developed a new and important conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil.' (T. S. Eliot, 1919)
'[Marlowe is] the father and founder of English dramatic poetry. [Marlowe's characters are] day-dreams of their maker's deep desires projected from the men around him, and rendered credible by sheer imaginative insight into the dark mysteries of nature.
(J. A. Symonds, 1884)
Faustus moves repeatedly through a circular pattern from thinking of the joys of heaven, through despairing of ever possessing them, to embracing magical dominion as a blasphemous substitute.'
(C. L. Barber, 1964)
'There is a case for seeing this devalued section of the play [the middle scenes] as an extraordinary phantasmagoria, grotesquely satirical, sometimes sinister, sometimes absurd, an illusionistic impression of tweny-four wasted years as bold in what it attempts theatrically as the scenes on the heath in King Lear.'
( Malcolm Kelsall, 1981)
'Doctor Faustus is neither a morality play not an unambivalent celebration of radical humanism; it is a tragedy which dramatises a conflict between two irreconcilable systems of values, each of which, we may feel, has at least partial validity and a genuine claim to our allegiance. While Marlowe may have sympathised with Faustus's rejection of traditional authorities and the strict limits which they impose upon human aspirations, he was nontheless aware that Promethean self assertion could degenerate into debasing forms of self-aggrandisement.' (John S. Mebane, 1989)
(Derek Russell Davis, 1997)
