We should.
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms. From governments outsourcing decision-making to predictive AI, to billionaires promising salvation through machine learning, the fantasy of omnipotence is alive and well.
Faustus sneer of, “Divinity, adieu!” brushes aside moral frameworks in favour of power. Swap theology for ethics committees and you hear the same impatience today: regulation is a bore, progress is sexy. His dream of, “a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence” could double as the keynote at any AI summit where the hype gallops far ahead of reality.
And are we really any more equipped to face the consequences than Faustus was?
Because the Theatre of Politics is always hungry for spectacle. Faustus’ tricks for emperors and popes are little more than smoke and mirrors - a Renaissance deepfake. Leaders today may not conjure Helen of Troy, but AI-generated images and slogans serve the same purpose - though only one of these is a succubus. Imagine, if you will, letting AI write a corporate mission statement and then hiring graduates whose CVs were also written by AI. Ta-Da. The meta-loop is complete, we have performance without presence.
Marlowe, gloriously, then went on to write a play about the theatre of spectacle itself. Imagine, today, letting AI write a corporate mission statement and then hiring graduates whose CVs were also written by AI. The meta-loop is complete: performance without presence.
When Faustus faces the clock ticking down (and what a climax that is), his cry, “I’ll burn my books!” is not just personal despair but the universal soundtrack of too-late regret. He bargains with God. Who are we bargaining with? An opaque tech giant? Or nothing at all, as the whirring of a cooling AI server becomes our final countdown?
For those lucky IB and A level students studying this masterpiece, here’s the trick: showing this relevance isn’t extra polish, it’s structural strength. An essay that ties Faustus’ ambition to the seductions and dangers of AI, or to the theatrics of modern politics, doesn’t just tick AO3 or Criterion B - it hits harder. Your conclusion can step beyond “In summary, Marlowe shows…” and instead land with: Doctor Faustus remains urgent because our own age is still haunted by the same temptation: to reach for power without reckoning with the cost.
That’s not a conclusion. That’s a mic drop.
