''Doctor Faustus'' - Class Discussion

Something I think our last lesson indicated was that religious issues are still a talking point today. Although views have changed since Marlowe’s day (if anything, people in England now are presumed to be atheists unless they tell you otherwise) from our discussion in class, I got the impression that the people who didn’t believe in God and souls and the things we were talking about were quite passionate about the fact that they didn’t believe and were confident in their views. I thought it was quite interesting how strongly people don’t believe and if you look at the context in which Doctor Faustus was written, questioning religion, in the way that we were able to do in class, would have been quite daring and unusual. Basing a play on religious themes is probably, in many ways, a sure-fire debate-starter and is sure to provoke a strong audience reaction as even at a time when religion isn’t perhaps as important to as many people as it once was, everyone has their own opinions and some response to it. Religion is something that you can’t really get away from and in order to either believe or not believe or have a faith, one must have weighed up the ‘facts’…in the way that Doctor Faustus weighs up the facts in his opening soliloquy. One thing I love about this soliloquy is the fact that, true to the gothic genre, it’s steeped in history and has many cultural references (which are interesting and somewhat confusing at first, seeing as they’re old cultural references!)