An Analysis Of Language-use And Characterization In Doctor Faustus From The Perspective Of Stylistics

Christopher Marlowe is a pioneering poet and dramatist before Shakespeare,known as;"the father of English tragedy".During his literary career,Doctor Fauwstus,among Marlowe’s six plays and five poems,is widely acknowledcged as a successfiul play in terms of language-use.Plenty of scholars have analyzed its themes in light of such theories as Historicism,the New Criticism,Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis,etc.However,few research has been carried out to study language-use and characterization in the drama from the perspective of stylistics.In Doctor Faustus,Marlowe gives the priority to language-use in the creation of characters.Based on text-analysis and quantitative analysis,this paper.,mainly analyzing language-use and characterization from the perspective of stylistics at lexical,syntactical and rhetorical levels,explores the language features of each character,and their functions in the creation of characters,so as to demonstrate how Marlowe presents his characters in terms of language-use skillfully and shows readers complexity and diversity of human nature.In the drama,the protagonist Faustus is a combination of a Renaissance hero and a villain,using modal verbs,positive adjectives and negative adjectives at lexical level;utilizing interrogative sentences and imperative sentences at syntactical level;and making use of figures of speech,namely,repetition,parallel,allusion,and symbol.The minor character Wagner,a comic but arrogant servant,always uses such language unfitting his status as big words at lexical level,puns in rhetoric,and short sentences at syntactical level.Mephistophilis.an honest but evil servant,his language-use also has distinctive features by using plain words,rather than big words,at lexical level;long sentences instead of short sentences at syntactical level;without any figures of speech at rhetorical level.It is with skillful language-use that Marlowe makes a great success in portraying his distinctive characters at all levels.