Marlowe Doctor Faustus

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78001-036-6
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 158 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classi

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marlowe, Christopher

Leseproben

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...