Doctor Faustus E-Book

Christopher Marlowe

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price The classic story of the learned Doctor Faustus who sells his soul to the devil. This edition of Christopher Marlowe's play contains two self-contained versions, known as the A-text and the B-text, allowing readers to compare the available versions, and performers to choose the version that suits them best. It also contains a full introduction, notes on further reading, a chronology and a glossary of difficult words. Edited by D. Bevington & E. Rasmussen, and introduced by Simon Trussler.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

DOCTORFAUSTUS

byChristopher Marlowe

with an introductionby Simon Trussler

London

NICK HERN BOOKS

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Marlowe: Key Dates

Doctor Faustus: A-Text

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Epilogue

Doctor Faustus: B-Text

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Epilogue

Glossary

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Christopher Marlowe was the second of nine children of a Canterbury shoemaker. Born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, he attended King’s School, Canterbury, before entering Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a six-year scholarship intended to lead to Holy Orders. He duly achieved his BA Degree in 1584, but was awarded his MA in 1587 only following the Privy Council’s insistence. During the intervening three years he is thought to have been acting as a government spy against the French, in the Catholic seminary at Rheims.

Marlowe was probably in London later in 1587 for the first staging of the two parts of his heroic drama Tamburlaine the Great, but it is uncertain whether Doctor Faustus followed in 1588 or was first performed as late as 1593. The dates of his other plays – The Jew of Malta, Edward II and The Massacre of Paris – are also conjectural, though their number suggests a young dramatist pursuing a busy stage career. Yet hints of a darker side to Marlowe’s life persist. In 1589 he was briefly imprisoned in Newgate with his friend, the poet Thomas Watson, who had killed an innkeeper’s son in a street brawl. Three years later he was fined and bound over to keep the peace for assaulting two constables in Shoreditch – yet was also apparently back in government service, as a messenger during the siege of Rouen.

A fellow writer, Robert Greene, attacked Marlowe around this time for ‘diabolical atheism’ (the book’s publisher apparently censoring yet more scandalous allegations). Then, in 1593, the dramatist Thomas Kyd, arrested for possessing atheistical writings, alleged that these had belonged to Marlowe, also accusing his former friend of treason and sodomy. Summoned to appear before the Privy Council, Marlowe was examined on 20 May, released on bail, and ten days later stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer in a house or tavern in Deptford, south east of London. A dispute over the reckoning had allegedly been the cause, and Frizer was pardoned following a coroner’s finding of ‘homicide in self-defence’. On the day of Marlowe’s burial, in an unmarked grave in Deptford parish church, a note was delivered to the authorities from the informer Richard Baines, ‘concerning his damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God’s word’.

What Happens in the Play

The learned Doctor Faustus, discovered in his study in the University of Wittenberg, is bored with orthodox scholarship, and plans to seek the rewards of magic. He conjures the Devil’s servant Mephistopheles, who acts as an intermediary with Satan in the signing of a pact whereby Mephistopheles is to attend Faustus and do his bidding for twenty-four years, after which he will render up his immortal soul to Hell. Despite a Good Angel urging him to repentance, Faustus attends instead to the Bad Angel’s persuasions – although, in the event, his interrogations of Mephistopheles teach him little that he did not know, and his adventures offer more spectacle than fulfilment. Having been entertained by a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins, Faustus is taken to Rome to play tricks on the Pope, and then visits the Emperor’s court, where he humiliates a sceptical knight. Returning to Wittenberg, he conjures up the silent form of Helen of Troy and is so enraptured by her beauty that, despite the pleas of an Old Man to save his soul, he demands her simulated spirit, or succuba, as his mistress. As the end of his contracted term approaches, Faustus bids farewell to his fellow scholars, and ekes out a final, desperate hour, unable to implore the divine mercy of which he remains lingeringly aware. As the clock strikes midnight, he is carried away by devils to Hell.

Marlowe and the Emergence of Elizabethan Theatre

The professional London theatre was barely out of its infancy when Christopher Marlowe began to write for the stage. The first purpose-built playhouse in London, called simply the Theatre, had opened just a decade earlier, in 1576, and the Curtain soon followed. Both were situated in London’s earliest ‘theatre district’ of Shoreditch, though later the Bankside in Southwark was often preferred. Both these outlying areas were beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London, whose rulers believed that playgoing encouraged immoral behaviour, and helped to spread the plague. It was only after a long closure on account of plague, in 1594, that two outstanding companies emerged to begin their long-lasting rivalry – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s), with whom Shakespeare worked for all but the earliest years of his theatrical career, and the Lord Admiral’s Men (later Prince Henry’s), under the management of the impresario Philip Henslowe. Henslowe’s so-called Diaries give us an account of performances and some intriguing insights into theatrical practices and finances from 1592 onwards, but unfortunately there are no such records for most of Marlowe’s career, and the rapidly changing state of companies and allegiances at the time – combined with the periods of closure during the plague years of 1592-94 – further confuse the situation.

Though products of this period of upheaval, Marlowe’s plays are firmly linked with the rising fortunes of Henslowe and his leading player (and later son-in-law), Edward Alleyn. Henslowe had built his first theatre, the Rose, on Bankside in 1589, and it was here, after the carrying out of extensive alterations and improvements three years later, that he installed a permanent acting company, the Admiral’s Men, whom we know to have performed Doctor Faustus in 1594. An earlier company of Admiral’s Men had probably performed both parts of Tamburlaine in 1588, and perhaps Doctor Faustus too, while a short-lived company of Strange’s Men, who appear to have joined forces with the Admiral’s on occasion, may have been the first to play The Jew of Malta. Both companies apparently contributed actors to a group of Pembroke’s Men who toured the provinces, probably with Edward II in their repertoire, during the plague closure. By the time Henslowe’s records become available, Alleyn was making all the great Marlovian heroes his own.

Marlowe’s Faustus, as also the roles of Tamburlaine and Barabas, assume a style of playing which, though impossible to verify with any accuracy, was rooted rather in rhetorical skill than psychological understanding. It’s worth noting that the word ‘acting’ was employed at this time to describe the gestic component of a player’s skills – an aspect of that ‘presentational’ style, out-front to the audience, that the long and often quite formal speeches of Doctor Faustus seem to require. A new term, ‘personation’, came into use around the turn of the century, as if needed to distinguish the more intimate and reciprocal manner, and more detailed approach to character-drawing, developed by Richard Burbage for his great Shakespearean roles.

Both actors had, of course, to contend with the elements (as well as the audiences) in the open-air theatres: here, the ‘groundlings’ stood on three sides of a raised platform stage, and protection from the weather was only to be found in the higher-priced seats of the galleries, whose tiers formed the theatre’s perimeter. After 1609, when adult companies began also to perform at indoor, ‘private’ playhouses, it is argued that plays were specifically targeted to appeal to the more socially-elite audience of those theatres: but when Marlowe was writing no such distinction had arisen. Rich and poor, learned and illiterate, attended the same playhouses and enjoyed the same repertoire of plays.

The unsettled state of the theatre during Marlowe’s short creative lifetime was to some extent reflected in his dramaturgy – but the changing structures and thematic concerns of his plays do not necessarily imply a developmental progress from ‘primitive’ to ‘sophisticated’. The techniques and conventions of the earlier Tudor drama – notably the moral and secular interludes – suggest a skilful use of available resources, and a complex theatricalisation of shared assumptions. Among Marlowe’s plays, Doctor Faustus is most clearly indebted to that tradition.

In the sheer scope and technical accomplishment of his plays, Marlowe marked out new ground for the Elizabethan drama – as he did, too, in his use of the medium of blank verse, in which he recognised (though he did not create) what was to become the distinctive dramatic idiom of the age. Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, as Ben Jonson famously called it, resonated most clearly and with least complicated rhetorical vigour in Tamburlaine, and achieved what Eliot called ‘a gain in intensity’ and ‘a new and important conversational tone’ in Doctor Faustus: then, in The Jew of Malta and Edward II, Marlowe went on to explore its more dialectical strengths, as a medium for the fully flexible and reciprocal dialogue of those plays. But such a sense of Marlowe’s ‘development’ as a dramatist depends upon a chronology which, as we shall see, remains controversial as well as largely conjectural.

The Date and Sources of Doctor Faustus

The performances at the Rose in 1594 are the first references we have to the playing of Doctor Faustus. The Admiral’s Men perhaps purchased the prompt-book from a company of Pembroke’s Men, which may have performed the play at court during the Christmas celebrations of 1592, and at the Theatre in Shoreditch during a brief abatement of the plague in 1593. It remains uncertain whether the play dates from 1593, and so represents the culmination of Marlowe’s brief dramatic career, or, as I myself believe, was a product of the late 1580s, and thus written soon after Tamburlaine. But we do know that Doctor Faustus remained in the repertoire of the Admiral’s Men at least until 1597, and that a revival in 1602 restored the piece to popularity almost until the closure of the theatres in 1642.

If there was a real-life original for Marlowe’s Faustus, he appears to have been a self-appointed ‘skilled necromancer, astrologer, and friend of magicians’ itinerant in Germany in the early sixteenth century, who died in 1540 probably while conducting an experiment with chemicals. The anonymous author of the Historia von Doktor Johan Fausten, published in Frankfurt in 1587, seems to have conflated the not very noble, aspiring, or even academic life of this Faustus with medieval legends of a scholar who sold his soul to the Devil. Marlowe derived most of his plot from this prose Historia, probably through the fairly close translation into English by a never-identified ‘P.F., Gent’. Now generally known as the English Faustbook, this translation was published as The History of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus in 1592.

If Marlowe’s play was written earlier than 1592, he would thus have required access to a manuscript copy – although this would not have been unusual in the small and self-regarding literary world of the time. A ‘Ballad of Faustus’, surviving in the Roxburghe Collection, was licensed for publishing in February 1589, though this may have been prompted by the German Faustbuch rather than by Marlowe’s play. Ironically, Doctor Faustus became popular in Germany and survived there as a puppet-play until the legend was again utilised for ‘legitimate’ drama by Lessing and Goethe in the later eighteenth century.

The Two Texts of the ‘Tragical History’

This edition of Doctor Faustus is – and may well remain – unique in the ‘Drama Classics’ series in including two self-contained texts of the same play. The ways in which the two texts defy being ‘the same’ have suggested that this might be preferable to opting for one or the other, or trying to conflate the two. To understand how this situation arose, we need to understand something of the Elizabethan attitude to the printing of plays – over which the performing company rather than the author claimed such copyright as it was possible to enforce. We know from Shakespeare’s consistent disinterest in the printing of his plays that the existence of a living dramatist was no guarantee of the authority of a printed text: and of Marlowe’s output only Tamburlaine was published in his own lifetime. Indeed, companies often preferred to keep work unpublished to protect their sole right of performance, and in consequence the early editions of some popular plays appeared in unauthorised or ‘pirated’ forms.

The earliest edition we have of Doctor Faustus is dated 1604 – though this is conjecturally a reprint of a lost edition of 1601, when the play was first entered in the Stationers’ Register, to secure its publisher’s copyright. The three-year difference was once thought to be crucial, since in 1602 Henslowe’s Diary records payments to William Birde and Samuel Rowley ‘for their adicyones in docter Fostes’ – additions which were assumed to have been incorporated into the 1603 and subsequent revivals of the play.

Earlier in the century, therefore, scholars believed that this first extant edition of Doctor Faustus, known and printed here as the A-text, was probably closer to Marlowe’s original than the edition published in 1616, which is longer by over a third – and has been dubbed, with immaculate logic, the B-text. However, in a monumental work of bibliographical scholarship, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, 1604-1616 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), W.W. Greg demonstrated – it seemed as conclusively as the gaps in our knowledge permitted – that, so far from being an expansion by other writers of the A-text, the 1616 version of the play (the B-text) must already have been in existence when the earlier edition was printed. Greg argued that the A-text was almost certainly a ‘memorial reconstruction’ – that is, one put together by actors from their recollections of an actual performance, probably, in this case, as cut and adapted for touring purposes.

The differences between the two texts are substantial. The B-text amplifies the scenes at the papal court, and introduces the Emperor’s rival nominee for the papacy, Bruno, who is freed by the patriotic Faustus from the Pope’s clutches. At the Emperor’s palace, an elaborate retaliation is planned by the humiliated Benvolio and is duly thwarted by the omnipotent Faustus. And a great deal is made of the schemings of the cheated Horse-Courser and his companions to get their revenges, all of which are duly frustrated and defeated by Faustus. These episodes add to the comic weight of the play, although it seems likely that their omission from the A-text reflects no nice adjustment of dramatic balance, but rather (as the deletion of various other supernatural and spectacular effects confirms) the need to cut technically complicated scenes from a touring version of the play.

Before Greg’s seemingly definitive rethink, most critics had preferred the A-text not just because of its presumed ‘authority’, but because, of the two, it was clearly the more ‘serious’. But if the amplified high-jinks of the B-text represented later additions, might not the comic incidents of the A-text also, as one nineteenth-century editor succinctly put it, be ‘expunged with advantage’ – or at least passed over in dignified critical silence? Even in 1948 a critic of the stature of Helen Gardner could make passing reference to this ‘obviously mutilated’ play – while as late as 1969, when the most widely utilised edition of Marlowe’s Complete Plays was published in the ‘Penguin Classics’ series, its editor, J.B. Steane, admitted that he had only ‘reluctantly’ based his version of Faustus on the 1616 text, regretting that the ‘light, simple-minded comedy … distracts the mind from what is serious and valuable in the play’. Even in the A-text, he added sternly, there was ‘quite enough knockabout and emptiness in the middle section’ already.

The pendulum of critical opinion has continued to swing, notably assisted by the findings of a later textual scholar, Fredson Bowers; and by the ’seventies critical opinion once more favoured Birde and Rowley as mainly responsible for the additions to the B-text, perhaps prompted by Alleyn’s planned retirement. Thus, whereas the B-text had been chosen for the edition first published in the magisterial Revels Plays series in 1962, the A-text was preferred for the rival New Mermaid edition of 1989. Then, in 1993, an entirely new Revels edition appeared, on which by permission our own is based – and the decision was taken to include, as do we, the full texts of both versions of the play. Bibliographical niceties aside, this appropriately signalled a different focus of controversy – over the varying kinds of ‘authority’ the two versions might be taken to represent.

So: should we be aiming to reconstruct the text as first conceived by its author – until very recently what Shakespearean scholarship sought so earnestly to ‘retrieve’? Or should we actually prefer a version representing the corporate decisions of a theatre company as to what best works on a stage? Or does the only authority lie in the postmodern conception of what constitutes a ‘text’? This is now said to be always variable and indeterminate, subject to the changing circumstances, prejudices and needs of each individual ‘reader’ and to the shifting socio-political context of ever-changing times. Actors and directors might have been forgiven a wry smile at this insight – for their ‘performance text’, however derived, has always had to be brought to new life, every evening they perform.

The Critics’ Views of Faustus’ Fortunes

Of Doctor Faustus, critics have claimed with equal assurance that, in Leo Kirschbaum’s words, ‘there is no more obvious Christian document in all Elizabethan drama’, or, with Paul Kocher, that it was part of Marlowe’s ‘unremitting warfare with Christianity’. Generically, it is almost as readily supposed these days to express the pervasive ‘comic spirit’ discerned by Robert Ornstein as to be the ‘tragical history’ its title-pages suggest. Indeed, by using textbook criteria, Faustus may be pronounced not really a play at all, let alone a tragedy, since nothing, really, happens: Faustus learns that he has been in Hell all along, as Mephistopheles told him on their first acquaintance. Like Tamburlaine, he simply runs out of time.

As for Faustus himself, he may be declared either an ‘heroic rebel’ or the rightfully condemned subject of an ‘orthodox Christian sermon’. He may be variously perceived as of the traditional ‘aspiring mind’, or, in Philip Brockbank’s view, as the worthy embodiment of a ‘romantic agony between extremities of hope and despair’ – or again, through H.W. Matalene’s eyes, as ‘merely superficial’ even in his scholarship, a man who loves ‘knowing’ but hates ‘learning’. Add to this the difference in tone as well as in length between the two texts of the play, and the possibility of an initial collaborator and later ‘improvers’, and all the ingredients are there for a debate which seems doomed to remain eternally inconclusive.

Nicholas Brooke first presented the view that all these contradictory ingredients are present, but in a state of creative tension. It was already a commonplace that Doctor Faustus was indebted to the late-medieval tradition of morality plays, in which personified representations of good and evil contend for the soul of an average man – Everyman, Mankind – who is eventually redeemed. Brooke, however, started from the undeniable premise that Faustus is not saved, and suggested that – as in each of his plays – Marlowe was conducting an experiment in form. Faustus, he concluded, ‘used the fullest potential of the morality structure so that the conventional moral idea became untenable’. By this view, it is pointless looking for a ‘moral argument’ or even for ‘character’ in Faustus himself: rather, the ‘directive intelligence’ is ‘concerned to explore the ambiguities of the human predicament’.

The problem with this otherwise seductive argument is: how do you act it? We have long since understood the fallacy of Havelock Ellis’s assertion that Faustus is a ‘dramatic poem rather than a regular drama’ – not least through the rediscovery of the play in the live theatre which Ellis (as editor of the popular Mermaid edition) helped to bring about. Simply, it works on stage – and this may be in part because, however the performance styles of an Alleyn and a Burbage may have differed, those actors and their authors seem to have shared the assumption that Elizabethan audiences had a distinctive and self-consistent way of simultaneously ‘listening to’ and ‘looking at’ a play.

From the woodcuts which decorated the verses of their emblem books, to the words of welcome spoken within the triumphal arch of a civic pageant, to the dance of death in Old St. Paul’s, all those experiences of Elizabethan Londoners in any way analogous to their theatre-going suggest that they perceived a special kind of complementarity between word and image. For them, Faustus would not have been a ‘dramatic poem’ – or even a tragedy, as Aristotle or the neoclassical critic Castelvetro or Marlowe’s near-contemporary Sir Philip Sidney would have defined the form. Rather, it was a verbal scenario for theatrical illustration, whose structure they perceived as deriving from an essentially medieval rather than a classical tradition.

Brooke was right to suggest that it was against the grain of the medieval theological tradition that Marlowe was pushing: but no less surely was Marlowe working within the frame of the ‘comic strip’ tradition of medieval art – as played out in stained-glass windows, along Chaucer’s tale-strewn road to Canterbury, or in mystery plays trundling one after another through city streets. It is along such an axis that Marlowe’s procession of ancient and modern morality figures is plotted – sins and seductresses in anachronistic parade, ringmastered by an existential devil who knows that Hell is all around us. Caught in the middle is Faustus, a proud but confused academic trying to find his way between the worlds these figures portend: comic and tragic, Christian and satanic, heroic and hedonistic.

‘The Man that in His Study Sits’

Christopher Marlowe was, like Faustus, ‘born of parents of base stock’. The scholarship he therefore needed to go to Cambridge University was renewable after the award of a Bachelor’s degree only if the recipient intended to proceed to Holy Orders – as Marlowe must at least officially have intended. But so frequent were his absences during the last two years of his Master’s course that the university authorities would have refused him his degree, had they not received an assurance from the Privy Council that he had ‘done her Majesty good service’. Conjecturally, this was as a spy in the Catholic seminary at Rheims, where the Jesuits were trained for their task of restoring England to the Catholic fold. Modern scholars, reacting against the earlier tendency to read biographical significance into every facet of Marlowe’s work, tend to be wary about suggesting any correspondence between Marlowe in theological disguise among the papists and Faustus in his cloak of invisibility at the papal palace. More important, certainly, is not where Marlowe went when he detached himself from his academic studies, but why, like Faustus, he chose to abandon them.

One of the Privy Councillors who urged that Marlowe be granted his degree was Sir Francis Walsingham – himself a Cambridge man, and probably Marlowe’s spymaster. Another was Burghley, by this time Lord Treasurer – and also Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Yet another was Archbishop Whitgift, who, back in 1570, as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had masterminded the enactment of new statutes designed to curb the powers of the Fellows, some of whom were beginning to display puritan sympathies. Made Vice-Chancellor in the same year, Whitgift even enjoyed the right to imprison members of his own university. Another graduate of Trinity, Edward Coke, was one of Burghley’s protégés, and so not entirely disinterested when he described the universities as ‘the suns, eyes, and minds of the kingdom, from which religion, liberal education, and sound learning are spread most abundantly to every part of the realm’.