Such a promising beginning.

 And what does our giant do, having achieved the inhuman power of black magic? He is bored to death (sorry for the pun) and goes on playing practical jokes. In the invisible state he steals the pope’s food;  provides the horse-courser with a horse that turns into a heap of straw. Here we can see a grand image of a creature, busy with self-praising, but at the bottom this creature with all its cannibalic individualism is only a pitiable nonentity, cursing himself for his gigantism:

Cursed be the parents that engendered me:

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer...(13, 103-104)

Maybe it is not very nice of me to make fun of what Marlowe called The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. But did Marlowe really think he was writing a tragedy? I doubt it. In contrast to the philosophic direction of Goethe’s Faustus (sorry, I did not read it, just briefly passed through with the purpose to fulfil this assignment), Marlowe’s Faust is indeed a play, written freely, a little chaotically, with humor which would be enough to deprive of sleep for a few nights even Shakespeare. Whereas Goethe’s Fausust promulgates human power, human superiority, human possibilities, - Marlowe in his Faustus such qualities satirizes. Most clearly this satire is shown in the episode where his servant Robin steals Faustus’ “conjuring books” with the purpose to “make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked before me” and “make [Rafe] drunk with ipocrase at any tavern in Europe for nothing” (Scene 6). (Uh, I just read in the preface to Doctor Faustus in the Norton edition that “it is quite possible that these comic scenes are the work of a collaborator”. Give me a break! Anyway, Marlowe or a collaborator, whoever took a hand in the work, the play stands with comic scenes.)

      In order to show that I did not yawn during Dr. Kolbrener’s lessons and to demonstrate “the depth and detail of my knowledge” let me add that this play is a morality play, because Marlowe finishes it with a moral:

...Regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise

Only to wonder at unlawful things:

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practice more that heavenly power permits. (Epilogue)

Fausus’ fate is very much medieval, whose characters stood on the cross-roads between good and evil and had to make a choice. Thus, according to the unshakable medieval logic, Faustus is damned to eternal suffering.

Looks like I said all I could about the “individual” in Doctor Faustus. And just now realized that what Marlowe described in his play demonstrates not “emergence of the individual” INTO being during the golden age, but rather “emergence” OUT of being during the decline of the golden age. My goodness, Renaissance is so varied.