Daring and dissolute, the figure of Doctor Faustus is responsible for much of the great appeal Christopher Marlowe's play has held. Marlowe, who was himself a man involved in sundry scandals, rushed headlong into a violent death at the age of twenty-nine; the enduring fascination with the character and the play, in part, has been due to the proximity between the protagonist and the playwright. William Prynne, in one of the earliest allusions to Doctor Faustus, juxtaposes a performance of the play with "the various tragicall ends of many, who.. .have been slaine in Playhouse, or upon quarrels there commenced ...;" although Marlowe died in a tavern instead of the theater, Prynne must have written this with the dire fate of the playwright in mind. Interest in Marlowe's works revived in the nineteenth century, and William Hazlitt compared the playwright's "lust of power in his writings," to Faustus's "tormenting desire to expand his knowledge to the utmost boundaries of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge."   This tradition culminated in Christopher Marlowe: the Overreacher, in which Harry Levin explains that Faustus "was no ordinary sinner; he was,like Marlowe himself, that impenitent and willful miscreant whom Elizabethan preachers termed a scorner." Stephen Greenblatt's influential and groundbreaking Renaissance Self-fashioning continues to endorse this view. Marlowe's characters, in their struggle against "the vacancy of theatrical space [that] suggest[s] his characters' homelessness," reject the moral tenets of the audience and assert their sometimes blasphemous individuality. Marlowe's characters demonstrate that the alienation created by social self-fashioning is as illusory as they themselves are; they become real only by asserting their existence. Marlowe invented "fictions only to create and not to serve God or the state, to fashion lines that echo in the void...;" his characters reflect this, for their "one true goal ...is to be characters in Marlowe's plays...... Greenblatt presents Marlowe and his characters as displaced rebels.    One the other hand, interest in the Christian framework of the play has inspired an antithetical portrayal of Faustus. Leo Kirschbaum, in his essay, "Marlowe's Faustus: A Reconsideration," written during the 1940s, depicts Faustus as an inane character "who for lower values gives up higher values." This was one of the first critical works to present a perspective opposed to the romantic interest in Marlowe and Faustus's "lawless imagination." A. L. French's "The Philosophy of Doctor Faustus," argues even further that the play is not about the lackluster protagonist, but about "the working-out of a predestinate fall.- In a discussion that conversely attempts to purge the play from connections with the predestination theory, Malcolm Pittock reaches a similar conclusion about the Doctor by perceiving Faustus as a self-deluding fool who voluntarily relinguishes salvation for despair. Although radical in its aim, Jonathan Dollimore's "Subversion through Transgression" arrives at a similar understanding of Faustus. The protagonist's damnation is inevitable, not because he is aspiring, but because of "the limiting structure of Faustus's universe for what it is, namely `heavenly power.' Fautsus has to be destroyed since in a very real sense the credibility of that heavenly power depends upon it."Marlowe shapes Faustus as a victim who shows how the established norm is "far from justice." Emphasizing the Protestant aspects of the play even further, Alan Sinfield, in his Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, argues that "Faustus disrupts any complacent view of orthodox theology ...... But this view of the play, likewise, does not take into consideration the appeal of Faustus as a character; Christian issues become the main concern of the play and Faustus becomes a victim that struggles feebly and loses in this overbearing framework."    There have been a number of studies defining the audacity of Faustus in connection to the Christian elements and ideas of the play. Johannes H. Birringer percieves the Doctor as a character who is attempting to establish and assert his identity by opposing the Christian framework. T. McAlidon identifies the main interests of the play as the Doctor's "psychic torment."" Both arguments examine the theological aspects of the play while appropriating Greenblatt's concept of "self-fashioning," in order to return to the Romatic view of a daring yet doomed hero.    Other critics have dismissed the religious debate as fulite. In his introduction to the Modern Interpretation Series, Bloom scoffs "at the exegetes who debate the supposedly relevant theologies - Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran - and their presumed effect upon whether Faustus either will not or cannot repent." He believes that Marlowe does no more than mock each denomination for the sake of blasphemous laughter. Wilbur Sanders echoes this attitude towards the playwright in his The Dramatist andthe Received Idea. In this comparison of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the former emerges as a barbaric brute who simply employs a jumble of Christian ideas for mercenary purposes: that is, to indulge the audience. Nonetheless, though Marlowe does parody and play with various Christian ideas, it is not possible to ignore them simply as the butt of his jokes. They are central issues of the play, for Faustus is a theologian and the play is, after all, about his damnation. G. K. Hunter is an example of a literary critic who ignores the religious aspects. In "Five-Act Structure in Doctor Faustus," he describes the descent of Faustus through the play not only as "backwards into evermore superficial shallows of knowledge and experience" but also "from the full pursuit of astronomy in act 3...to cosmography, from the heavens to the earth." The last act "is now confined to the enjoyment of some `two or three' private friends ......  Faustus contracts into a private self. Bloom in the introduction says Faustus in the last scene goes of his own accord. He is acting by himself, for himself. The play could be thought of as a dwindling from the cosmic scale to the concerns of the petty individual. What seems to be the grandeur of Faustus at the beginning seems to diminish to the loneliness of Faustus at the end. However, the conclusion Hunter arrives at is that "Faustus has now fallen beneath the level of the clowns and horse-courser...." This is because he does not give the theological issues of the play the full consideration they deserve. Marlowe examines both the grandeur and the insignificance of the individual, throughhis references to theology.    This paper returns to an old-fashioned "interpretive" study of Doctor Faustus, for one of the most enchanting aspects of Doctor Faustus and of the Faust legend itself, is the figure of Faustus. However, the purpose of this paper is, not to deny one aspect of the protagonist or the other, but to reconcile the two aspects, and to determine the nature of his ambition. An examination of the way Marlowe manipulates the reactions of the audience reveals how he is inviting the audience to reassess this familiar figure for themselves. This will reveal a Faustus alienated from a society embraced by a Christian framework. The play, then, presents an alternative order as an escape from such a society, which becomes the object of Faustus's ambition. In order to judge the nature of Faustus's ambition and of Faustus himself, the ensuing argument will examine ways in which the opening and ending of the play address and challenge both the scholarly and unlearned members of the audience.