Doctor Faustus: The B Text

Book excerpt: Doctor Faustus is one of early modern English drama’s most fascinating characters, and Doctor Faustus one of its most problematic plays. Selling his soul to Lucifer in return for twenty-four years of power, wealth, knowledge, and sex, Doctor Faustus is at once an aspiring Renaissance magus and the hardened reprobate of Protestant theology. The introduction, annotations, and appendices of this edition, which is based on the 1616 B text, situate the play in the dynamic cultural changes of the early modern period. The first appendix allows the reader to compare the 1616 B text to its earlier printed version, the A text, and also reproduces a variant scene from the 1663 edition of the play’s revision for the Restoration stage. Substantial excerpts from The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, the play’s major source, offer insight into the process of adaptation by which prose fiction becomes spectacular theatre. Other appendices reproduce contemporary material on Renaissance magic, witchcraft, theology, Marlowe’s biography, and the development of his literary reputation.