A short and slightly goofy overview of what this play is all about!
Blank Verse
Marlowe is considered to be a master of blank verse, as well as the author who successfully proved poetry could exist outside of rhyming couplets.
WHAT'S THAT? According to the Poetry Foundation, it's "Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns. Poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” are written predominantly in blank verse.
Blank verse is a form of poetry where the lines are unrhymed, but there is a specific number of syllables in each line. This is known as iambic pentameter. Blank verse also varies which syllables are stressed and unstressed to create a sort of pattern of inflection that not only helps actors to convey the meaning of the line but also helps with memorization.
RHYMING COUPLETS (courtesy Shakespeare's Sonnet 18)
Iambic pentameter: da-DA, da-DA, da-DA, da-DA, da-DA
With rhymes at end of alternating lines
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May;
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
BLANK VERSE (courtesy of Milton's Paradise Lost)
you still hear the da-DA, da-DA, da-DA, da-DA, da-DA rhythm, but the rhyme is gone
Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe
With loss of Eden till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning, how the heav’ns and earth
Rose out of Chaos.
TO LEARN MORE:
An Overview & Explanation of Blank Verse
Blank Verse as a Literary Device
A Literary Analysis of Marlowe's Work Writ Large
A Text and B Text
Doctor Faustus was never published during Marlowe’s lifetime. Two versions of the script exist: the A edition published in 1604 and the B edition published in 1616. Thoughtful scholars have disagreed about which edition is the most accurate to Marlowe’s intent and what he could have seen onstage. (It is unclear what he did see, as the most famous early performance took place in 1594.) But it is likely that neither version is direct from Marlowe’s pen—even the A version contains an allusion to a man put to death after Marlowe: “Doctor Lopus was never such a doctor.” Lopez was executed for treason in 1595.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?
-A is shorter than B overall
-B contains extended versions of the comic scenes
-A has a tighter focus on Faustus himself
-B has longer and more detailed stage directions
-The Calvinist perspective is stronger in A
-B reflects some possible changes made due to English law at the time. In 1606, Parliament passed An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which made blasphemy onstage illegal. Blasphemy was defined as “jestingly or profanely speaking or using the holy names of God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and reverence.”
-It is unclear that all B material originated with Marlowe
-Various lines show differences in how Faustus sees his fate, with Mephistopheles appearing to accept responsibility at one point, and the Evil Angel assessing Faustus’s actions as a mistake, even though the Angel advocated for them at the start of the play
-A has a more ambiguous ending, but has an epilogue that includes a general waring about Faustus’s fate
The "N" Text
For our production Dr. Nic has created his own edit, using material from both of them--and more. He shared notes with the dramaturgs over the summer about his decision-making process, and has more fully elaborated for the cast and creative team.
I first began thinking about Dr. Faustus a little over eight years ago, after seeing another production. I wasn’t crazy about this production, but I was excited by the raw material of the text and the story it told. Well, at least part of the story it told. It was a very brief version – barely over an hour from what I recall, and I remember being baffled by the “comedic” material and not finding it funny at all (and it was clearly intended to be). What I particularly loved were the moments when this production embraced the spooky, the creepy, and the demonic. Danielle, my (now) wife, largely agreed and said, “You know what it should look like? Bloodborne.” Then a still-recent and popular video game title, Bloodborne is a survival/combat game set in a late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century-inspired gothic fantasy horror world. And, yes, I thought, it should look like that!
But I also knew that if the show was to work as a kind of gothic thrill ride, I’d need to emphasize the horror inherent in the script. After all, we’re talking about a play in which a man summons a demon and sells his soul to the devil. In the end, demonic spirits and Lucifer himself drags the man to hell and (in the B version) rip him to pieces. It’s horrifying! In my research, I saw that many scholars interpreted even many of the “comedic” scenes as violent, subversive, and purposely centered on tensions that tear themselves apart. “Highlighting the horror” of Marlowe’s story became my mantra.
Sometimes this meant merely bringing forward the horror that was already there. The moment when Mephistopheles turns a man into a dog, for example, was likely played for laughs will a silly costume and mask. What if getting turned into a beast was painful, instead? What if we played more with the trope of the werewolf, too? In other places, I took greater liberties. For instance, I made Faustus’s attacks on the Pope significantly more violent and added a scenic device the plays up the demonic nature that violence. Despite the changes, I tried to remain true to the central ideas – again, it was about highlighting horror, not just adding it for its own sake.
In addition to “highlighting the horror,” I always wanted to trim the play down so that our production would focus, in fact, on telling the story. This meant trimming a lot of (what I see as) unnecessary characters and sequences, including several whole scenes. For example, in the B text’s first scene with Faustus, he consults two academic friends, Cornelius and Valdes, on whether or not he should do magic. They’re enthusiastic and they say they should go to dinner and talk about it. This conversation lasts several pages, and then we never see or hear from Cornelius and Valdes again! Does Faustus really need to have his buddies confirm that he wants to do magic? Cutting this sequence tightens up the action and moves the story along (and reducing the number of costumes we’d need to have by two!).
I also re-wrote some material to be more comprehensible to a modern audience in 2023. There are certain historical, cultural, and literary references that the average audience member today just isn’t going to know. For example, I cut much of the opening chorus to get to the facts about Faustus’s biography. That chorus begins with a negative and a classical allusion. The Elizabethan language will already take our audience a few minutes to get used to hearing, so I tried to clarify and cut where I could.
To make our cut, I consulted both modern and original versions of the A and B texts as well as the Globe Theatre’s staging of the show. I used material from all five of these different versions, pulling what I thought was helpful to telling the story as I see it. And, upon learning that actors helped to publish the texts in the early seventeenth century, decided to lean on the original versions of the A and B text, hypothesizing that they would yield a similar kind of clarity as Shakespeare’s Folio (which is what we did our workshop on before our read-through).
What I ultimately hope is that my adaptation or translation of Marlowe’s text into a Gothic setting and worldview both remains recognizably Marlowe’s Faustus and showcases it in new ways that audiences will find fun, exciting, and enlightening.
Production History
In spite of the treatment he received during life, Cambridge University proudly claims Marlowe as an alum, and keeps careful notes of the production history of Doctor Faustus. The details below are from their notes, British spellings and all.
The Admiral's Men and Histriomastix
Nobody is quite sure exactly when Dr Faustus was written, or even when it was first performed. All we do know is that the first performances were probably during Marlowe's lifetime, although the actual text was published in 1604, eleven years after his premature death in May 1593. Unfortunately for Marlowe (who didn't get to watch) the best-documented run of performances was also posthumous, as an outbreak of plague forced theatres to close between 1592 and 1594.
The first mention of the play is in December 1592, just months before Marlowe's death, when it is entered in the Stationers' Register. The first recorded performance, however, is not until 1594, when an actors' company called The Admiral's Men put it on after the re-opening of the theatres. In the 1594-1595 season, Dr Faustus was performed at least twelve times by the Admiral's Men, second only to another play by Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and the anonymous Wise Men of Westchester.
Doctor Faustus was perfomed consistently until 1597, and rapidly became the subject of superstition and legend. Marlowe had famously been arrested for atheism and for some spectators this became exaggerated into necromancy and sorcery of the kind portrayed in the play itself. This overlap between real and stage magic reappears later, in another legend recorded by the Puritan William Prynne, attacking the theatre in his 1632 anti-theatrical diatribe Histriomastix. He claimed that in one performance real devils appeared on stage 'to the great amazement' of actors and the audience, sending people mad with distraction at the 'fearful sight'.
Pepys and Malone
Doctor Faustus was steadily reprinted, with varying degrees of accuracy, throughout the early seventeenth century. It had first been published in a quarto version in 1604, attributed to 'Ch. Marl.', but in 1616 a second edition came out, about a third longer and containing several extra comic episodes. This version is often known as the B-text.
Despite this reprinting, interest in Marlowe and Faustus waned dramatically throughout the seventeenth century.
Samuel Pepys saw it with his wife Elizabeth at the Red Bull on May 26th 1662 and was far from complimentary: he thought it was 'so wretchedly and poorly done, that we were sick of it'. Their distaste is indicative of a general loss of interest in Marlowe and his works: he gradually disappeared both from the stage and from the writings of literary critics and journalists. He was not included in Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England (1662), Dryden did not mention him, and even Dr Samuel Johnson remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter.
Still, eventually the tide once again began to turn in Marlowe's favour. Edmund Malone (1741-1812), a friend of Dr Johnson and an active scholar of Shakespeare, compiled a volume of Marlowe's works, piecing the texts together and adding notes and annotations. Despite some remaining errors of attribution, this was a definite step towards preserving Dr Faustus and Marlowe's other works and bringing them to the notice of the Victorians.
Charles Lamb and Frankenstein
One of the most important critics of Marlowe, who probably went the furthest towards restoring his reputation in the nineteenth century, was Charles Lamb. His Specimens (1808), which was much more respectful of Marlowe than previous writers like Pepys, strongly influenced later approaches to Marlowe. Lamb notes Marlowe's obvious enjoyment of dabbling in the controversial ('[Faustus and The Jew of Malta] are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects...') and praises the way he creates tension in Doctor Faustus:
The growing horrors of Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and bloody sweat.
The Faustian theme of intellectual overreaching recurs in Gothic writing in the nineteenth century, particularly in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The connection is obvious: both Faustus and Frankenstein have a desire for knowledge and power beyond the human realm, which they both pursue with the best science of their day.
Significantly, they are both linked to the same country and even to the same town. Shelley writes that Frankenstein learnt his black arts at university at Ingolstadt, in Germany: this is also where the earlier Faust legend, on which Marlowe drew, was centred. Where Faustus had sought knowledge through alchemy, Frankenstein actually tries to create life using electrochemistry. Each text is also haunted by the absence of a wife. Faustus asks Mephastophilis to get him a wife, but the devil refuses and will only bring him prostitutes.