Overreacher in Marlowe's works - what are its characteristic features, and which of them can we find in Doctor Faustus?
Marlowe's major tragedies, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus, all portray heroes who passionately seek power - the power of rule, of money and knowledge, respectively. Each of them is an overreacher, who according to Marlowe, was a man of great eloquence and ambition, who desired to gain power over others. He is not satisfied with his situation and thus tries to reach for more, striving even beyond the bounds of human capacity.
Dr Faustus seeks the power that comes from knowledge, no matter at what cost. To get this power Faustus chooses to make a bargain with the devil. Faustus for his part desires the power that comes from black magic, but the devil on his side exacts a fearful price in exchange - the eternal damnation of Faustus soul. Faustus aspires to be more than a man - a demigod, a deity. His fall is caused by the same overwhelming pride and ambition (hubris) that caused the fall of the angels in heaven, and of humanity in the Garden of Eden.
The play, then, shows the tragic results of attempting to attain divinity through knowledge and the sinful nature of trying to achieve God-like powers. Faust is consumed by pride and arrogance which fuels him to become an overreacher who does not obey the forces of heaven but joins the demons and devils of hell and is damned for his actions and denouncement of god. Faustus is driven by intellectual curiosity but "it cannot finally be detached from the secondary motives that entrammels it, the will to power (and to conquer Europe)and the appetite for sensation".
The moral of the story is that ambition and dissatisfaction with what God had given is a wretched sin that could only lead to damnation. Faustus acquires the power he wanted, yet he couldn't use it at the end to save himself from hell. Marlowe tries to make his audience realize that disobeying God and craving more than what He endowed could only lead to ruin, damnation, and suffering. (Overreaching is not criticized for the ambition it shows in Faustus, but for the disrespect of God that it shows. Overreaching is seen as wanting more than God gives, when he alone knows how much we need.)
(Allusion to Icarus who attempted to escape from Crete with a pair of waxen wings, but flew too near the sun and plunged to his death when the sun melted the wax. He became the symbol of the `overreacher', of the man who tries to exceed his own limitations and comes to grief as a result. Like Icarus, in the Chorus's view, Faustus tried to `mount above his reach' and was punished for his presumption: `heavens conspired his overthrow' (l. 22). This is an intriguing twist on the Icarus myth; for whereas Icarus's pride seems to be self-destructive, Faustus's sparks the intervention of a deity who `conspires' to destroy him).