Desire: The Lacanian Approach To Marlowe's Play The Tragedy Of Doctor Faustus

Christopher Marlowe's significance lies in his contribution to the English drama in the history of English theatre. He is noted for his mighty line in dramaturgy, and known as the first one to use blank verse in drama. His employment of psychological conflicts and intense emotions has created powerful effects in dramatic characterization. This thesis attempts to study the psychological perspectives of Christopher Marlowe's protagonists in terms of Jacques Lacan's theory to illuminate our interpretations of Marlowe's play The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus. The focus of tragedy in this play lies in the problem of the collapse of the theistic vision which has long been one of the supportive moral sources in western society. The fact and fiction which is both his own creations and those of others are peculiarly intertwined with responding to Marlowe's work. In this play Marlowe is fuelled by speculation in fiction and scholarship about his mysterious man of the Elizabethan theatre. Marlowe's drama is characteristically challenging, unsettling and unconventional, and the corpus in this thesis will attempt to demonstrate these qualities.This thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One explores the theory of desire by Lacan and how the theory is applied to the study of the play and how the protagonist is motivated by his personal desire, and his obsession by the death wish. Chapter Two relates to the study of the relationship of tragedy and desire in the protagonist's attitude towards the religion, focusing on tragedy and desire. Marlowe embodies his protagonist with the spirit of atheism, and it is such spirit which subvert the hierarchy of the social system not only in this play but also in Elizabethan ideology, and in this chapter the catharsis of desire is expressed through the contract between the protagonist and the devil, finally the dilemma arises by the conflicts of the traditional morality and individual desire. Chapter Three is devoted to the protagonist's fulfillment of desire, and the final expression of desire and the protagonist's indomitable sublime beauty in embracing the summit of desire-death. Hence the perfection and wholeness of the protagonist is fulfilled by his death, the final doom arrives, and the protagonist gets his eternal expression and regeneration with its tragic beauty.In the employment of the theory of desire in analyzing Marlowe's play, the theories of Jacques Lacan illuminate our interpretations of this play from psychoanalytical perspectives, Marlowe dramatizes the feature of uncertainty, unconventionality and rebellion which exists in his contempories'spiritual aspect. And in Marlowe's play, it also reveals the moral diseases of Western culture that has caused the collapse of the Western religious order. And in Marlowe's play the moral and psychological truth about the individual has also been reflected unconsciously. However, Marlowe's opinion in his play on the desire of human being is complex, it cannot be explained clearly in any single theory, thus this thesis only aims at using the theory of desire to explore the individual tragedy and the connections between tragedy and desire.