Similarities Between Dr Faustus And Macbeth

Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus VS Shakespeare’s Macbeth Final Essay There has been talk for hundreds of years about any connections between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Theses connections range from never having met at all, to some collaboration on multiple pieces, to plagiarizing, and even to them being the same person. The two pieces of work that will be compared to help reign in some of these accusations will be Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, starting with the similarities of the plays. The overall themes of both Macbeth and Dr. Faustus were terribly dark and tragic with many evil concepts to the character’s nature. Macbeth had always been a warrior, and murder was practically his middle name on his way to becoming king and then staying that way, while Faustus was daring and power hungry enough to summon the worst thing known to man at that time: Lucifer. However, both also questioned their choices at one time or another. Macbeth questioned his right …show more content…
Faustus had comic reliefs sprinkled throughout their works to give the audience a break from all of the murders and other horrific scenes. One of Macbeth’s classic comic relief scenes was the drunken porter, stumbling around haphazardly yelling, “Ding dong!” every time the bell went off. Dr. Faustus has it’s own pair of idiots to provide the much needed relief, who at one time steal one of Faustus’ conjuring books to use for themselves and end up getting themselves turned into animals. But while there seem to be a ton of similarities between the two plays, there are also some notable differences, as well. One of which is the idea of heroics. In Macbeth, it’s fairly simple to discern Macduff as the hero in the story, even though Macbeth is the main character. Macduff is the one that fights against the crookedness that is obvious in Macbeth and his behavior, and he ends up slaying Macbeth in the end, thus ending his unrightfully rule