"Cliff Notes - Doctor Faustus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

the gallows.

In the sixteenth century, as you will see in Doctor Faustus,
there was still something magical about books and people who
could read them. That's why, when Marlowe was offered a
scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury, he probably jumped
at the chance. In 1581 the promising youth left home to attend
Cambridge University.

Cambridge fed Marlowe's hungry mind, even while it vexed his
spirit. The university library was one of the world's finest.
Good books were still scarce and expensive. The shoemaker's
household would have had its Bible and some collections of
sermons. But the Cambridge library shelves were lined with
leather-bound classics, those works of ancient Greece and Rome
that the Renaissance found so illuminating. Aristotle's studies
of Nature, Homer's magnificent epics, the Roman poet Ovid's
frank celebrations of love--they were all there, and Marlowe
read them avidly along with maps that showed him the exotic
places of the world.

The books and the library were part of the luxury offered by
Cambridge. But there was an oppressive side, too, to university
life. Cambridge in those years was a training ground for the
ministry, its graduates destined to be clergymen or
schoolmasters. Piety and sobriety were the virtues promoted in
its cold stone halls. Cambridge scholars slept in communal
dormitories, took their bread at the buttery (a sort of feudal
cafeteria), and wore, by regulation, simple wool caps and gowns.
Innocent pastimes like swimming were forbidden and subject to
severe punishment. In short, despite occasional high-jinks, the
lives of the students were not so different from those of
medieval monks.

There was a basic contradiction in all this, a contradiction
that lies at the heart of Doctor Faustus. The classics which
these young men were reading beckoned them toward the world and
the pleasures of the senses. But to stay at Cambridge and to
study these books, the young men had to appear to be devout
ministers-in-training. As Faustus puts it, they were "divines
in show."

A whole generation broke under the strain. They fled the
Cambridge cloister and descended on London to earn a precarious
living by writing. These were the so-called University Wits.
And Marlowe would soon join them, for he, too, was in rebellion
against the religious demands of Cambridge.

While studying for his master's degree, Marlowe wrote plays
in secret (plays were viewed as the devil's work by the church),