Compare Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as protagonists, focusing on their reasons for and means of achieving their goals

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

Faustus, a German professor at Luther’s Wittenberg University, is dissatisfied with what traditional scholarship can teach him. He turns to black magic when Mephistopheles, Lucifer’s assistant, reveals its power to him in a vision in which a Good Angel and a Bad Angel argue for control of Faustus’s conscience. He signs over his soul to 1. 1. Lucifer for what he believes will be 24 years of pleasure and intellectual power. In a series of interludes that the audience is to understand as taking place over the passage of a great deal of time, Faustus engages in a series of adventures. At his death, he finally realizes his mistake, but it is too late: Faustus dies and descends into hell.
2. Early in Hamlet, his father’s ghost reveals to Hamlet that his uncle, Claudius, murdered his father to replace him as king and as husband to Hamlet’s mother. The ghost orders Hamlet to avenge his murder, setting the play in motion. Hamlet is deeply conflicted and self-contradictory: he alternately behaves like a raving madman—sometimes by design, and sometimes seemingly not—and a refined intellectual. He is at once intensely self-reflective and seemingly tormented by the very act of self-reflection. His internal conflicts lead to the death by suicide of Ophelia, who loved him, and they keep him from acting decisively against Claudius until the very end of the play, in a scene where all of the major characters save Horatio die.
3. Both protagonists derive from conventional dramatic forms—Faustus from medieval morality plays and Hamlet from revenge tragedy. Both protagonists, however, struggle with themes essential to modern audiences: Faustus with the limits of knowledge and individual autonomy and Hamlet with identity, conscience, and duty.