Nature teaches us to have “aspiring minds,” wrote Christopher Marlowe. His Doctor Faustus believed “a sound magician is a mighty god.” Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero were accomplished scholars whose hunger for knowledge pushed them past the limits of available knowledge into black magic. Their drive to control others this way, and the threat of damnation for doing so, captured the Renaissance imagination. They are solitary and manipulative with a flair for the spectacular. Each faced an unforeseen reckoning. With close reading and group discussion, ask: Where does superior intellectual accomplishment end and dangerous hubris begin? Who decides this? Do we face in today’s technology any such “aspiring minds”? Video clips, including Richard Burton as Faustus, will be shown in class. Use the Norton (Kastan) edition of Doctor Faustus and the New Cambridge Shakespeare (Linley) edition of The Tempest.
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