Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)

Role of comic characters in the play dr. Faustus and how does marlowe use them to illuminate Faustus' downfall?

Role of comical element in dr faustus?

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If you were an Elizabethan dramatist some sort of comic relief in your plays was a must. We see it all over Shakespeare's plays (porter in Macbeth, gravediggers in Hamlet....). So Marlow felt the need to put humour, often crude, in his Faustus. This type of humour was considered comic relief and satisfied the groundlings who demanded a good dirty joke. Marlow also uses humour as a way to display Marlow's new conjuring powers. So Faustus grows horns out of a knight's head and slaps around the pope's ears during dinner. The subtext in all these pranks is that Faustus is spending his powers not in the pursuit of knowledge but in clowning around. Did Faust sell his sole to merely be an invisible buffoon? Well, this essentially contributes to his downfall.