Doctor Faustus
1662
- drama
- legends
- british and irish drama (dramatic works by one author)
- poetry (poetic works by one author)
- theatre
- literature
- european economic community
- magicians
- marlowe, christopher, 1564-1593
- devil
The story
"Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in two early versions, printed in 1604 and 1616, has posed formidable problems for critics. How much of either version was written by Marlowe, and which is the more authentic? Is the play orthodox or radically interrogative?" "Michael Keefer's early work helped to establish the current consensus that the 1604 version best preserves Doctor Faustus's original form, and that the 1616 text was censored and revised; the first Broadview edition, praised for its lucid introduction and scholarship, was the first to restore two displaced scenes to their correct place. All competing editions presume that the 1604 text was printed from authorial manuscript, and that the 1616 text is of little substantive value. But in 2006 Keefer's fresh analysis of the evidence showed that the 1604 quarto's Marlovian scenes were printed from a corrupted manuscript, and that the 1616 quarto (though indeed censored and revised) preserves some readings earlier than those of the 1604 text." "This revised and updated Broadview edition offers the best available text of Doctor Faustus. Keefer's critical introduction reconstructs the ideological contexts that shaped and deformed the play, and the text is accompanied by textual and explanatory notes and excerpts from sources."--Jacket.
What it’s like
Dense blank verse and a scholar's apparatus: a sober, closely annotated page where a sixteenth-century voice swings between soaring rhetoric and cheap clowning, with textual notes crowding the margins and source excerpts gathered at the back. The mood is restless and intellectual, edged with dread as a learned man bargains his soul away, and the comic interludes give it a sudden, knockabout lightness that sits uneasily beside the rising sense of doom. The violence is mostly offstage or brief, but the play's horror is psychological, centred on despair, damnation and devils who appear in ordinary rooms. Readers will feel the pacing as a series of abrupt scene changes and quick, theatrical exits rather than sustained description. The critical introduction carries a tone of careful argument, and the whole edition suits slow, deliberate reading with a pencil at hand, for students, theatre people and anyone curious about how this text has been reconstructed and disputed across four centuries.
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