The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

A CRITICAL EDITION OF THE 1604 VERSION

Christopher Marlowe edited by Michael Keefer

with a full critical edition of the revised and censored 1616 text and selected source and contextual materials

broadview press

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most of the lines attributable to Marlowe, it also incorporates extensive additions and revisions paid for by the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe in 1602, almost a decade after Marlowe's death; these include replacements of all of the scenes written by Marlowe's collaborators in Acts Three and Four, and of all but the rst of A's comic scenes. The man uscript that underlies the printed B text was thoroughly censoredpri marily during the revisionary process of 1602, when passages that suggest Faustus's acts of choice may not have been free were systematically altered, and then again in 1606, when expressions that might have been identied as blasphemous under the Act of Abuses passed by Parliament in that year were removed. The effect of this theologically-oriented censorship was to blunt the play's interrogative force, and to give it a homiletic rather than dissident orientation. The re-orienting of meanings is a matter not just of the sometimes quite subtle changes made to theologically sensitive pas sages, but also of the additions and rewritten scenes which alter the import of the play's comic sequences and completely reshape its last three acts. It would appear that processes of textual change continued after 1606: B contains one line that can plausibly be dated to 1609-10 or later, and some details of the B text are suggestive of editorial attentiveness at the time of its printing in 1616. The 1616 quarto (Bi) appears to have been printed from a scribal man uscript made for that purpose. The earlier underlying manuscript from which the scribal copyist was working was no doubt marked with layers of revision and censorship, as well as being interleaved with scenes rewritten in 1602 (Rasmussen 1993b: 54); the scribe also made use of a copy of A3, the 1611 reprint of the A text, readings from which are detectable in Bi (see Greg 65-71, Bowers: ii. 128, Bowers 1952: 198-203, Rasmussen 1993b: 46-49). Intriguingly, though, a signicant number of places at which Bi agrees with Ai, the 1604 quarto, against corrupted readings of A3 indicate that this copyist made thorough use of the source manuscript even in passages where A and B are closely parallel, and where one might have expected reliance on the printed book rather than on a probably less easily legible manuscript (Bowers ii. 129). This hypothetical source manuscript used by the copyist is of interest for other reasons as well: it supplied the copyist with lines omitted from Ai and its reprints, and also provided superior readings in several passages where the A text is decient because of corruption during the process of copying or carelessness in the printing house. (Tempting though it might be to believe that the copyist's source manuscript consisted in part of Marlowe's original manuscript, the avail able evidence does not unequivocally support such an assertion.) Like a palimpsest, a parchment that has been subjected to erasure and reinscription, the B text reects diverse and often divergent textual intentions. It is therefore of considerable interest as a record of early transformative

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decasyllabic verse or which simplify lexical or syntactical obscurities in the A text.1 These differences are in some instances clearly aligned with other tendencies evident in the new scenes and added passages dating from the 1602 revisionamong them the homiletic note of the Good and Bad Angels' parting lectures in V. ii. Most of these systemic differences contribute to the B text's retreat from the A text's challenges to orthodoxy, and its return to the moralizing tones of the prose Faustbooks (to this extent the B text as a whole can be described as having an orientation decisively different from that of A). However, other pronounced tendencies within the additions and revi sionsa much fuller deployment of theatrical spectacle,2 an inflation of the rhetoric which accompanies this augmented spectacle,3 a willingness to make repeated use of the same source material,4 and an opportunis tic striving for immediate rhetorical advantages at the expense of larger structural values5produce recurrent discontinuities and contradictions.
1 B: III. i. 25-28 provides a conspicuous instance of the regularizing of decasyllabic verse. For examples of the simplifying of hard or obscure A-text readings, see B: Prologue 17-18; B: I. i. 12, 115; B: I. iii. 1; B: V. i. 98. 2 Elements of farce and the grotesque, though very much a part of the A text, are signicantly augmented by the B text's increased reliance on spectacle, to the extent of creating a clear discontinuity between the Faustus of disposable body parts"Nay, keep it," he says of his severed head (B: IV. ii. 69); and the B text's Horse-courser retains Faustus's detached leg, like a cured ham, "at home in mine hostry" (B: IV. v. 49)and the Faustus whose tragic outcries demand a different order of audience response. Another kind of difculty is produced in I. iii and V. ii, where the B text supplies a secondary audience of devils whose presence is not well co-ordinated with the opening speeches of these scenes. 3 One example of this inated rhetoric is Faustus's declaration to the Emperor that his "magic charms" can "pierce through / The ebon gates of ever-burning hell, / and hale the stubborn furies from their caves" (B: IV. i. 67-69)a statement that contradicts both the A text's consistent representation of verbal magic as futile and those Marlovian scenes in the B text in which this sceptical view of the magic power of words is preserved (see Keefer 1983: 333, 336-44). 4 This tendency is evident at B: III. i. 90-98.1 and 135-43, where repeated use is made of a motif from Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The B text revisers also make what might be called parasitic repetitions of A-text material: for example, the repetition at B: II. i. 162, of the line "This will I keep as chary as my life" (A: II. iii. 168; B: II. iii. 161), which suggests that the lost scene B: II. ii was built, like B: II. iv, around comic action involving a stolen magic book. In the B text, the rst line of Faustus's speech to Helen ("Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships" [B: v. i. 94]) is anticipated three times (at B: IV. ii. 46-48 and 49-50, and at B: V. i. 26-27), with consequences that could vary according to the staging of performances, but that probably include a dissipation of rhetorical impact. 5 The exaggeratedly courtly language with which Faustus declares that the Emperor's at tering welcome "Shall make poor Faustus to his utmost power / Both love and serve the German Emperor" (B: IV. i. 62-63) is in obvious tension with his earlier boast that "The Emperor shall not live but by my leave, / Nor any potentate of Germany" (A: I. iii. 110-11; B: I. iii. 108-09). In B-' IV. i, Benvolio is a jesting buffoon who at one point copies a form of jest popularized by Shakespeare's Falstaff(B: IV. i. 160-62); six lines later, at the begin ning of the next scene, he is earnestly deploying the stock rhetoric of a nobleman obsessed

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Thomas Watson, and was killed. In May 1592 Marlowe was bound over to keep the peace by two constables of Shoreditch whom he had evidently threatened; and in September of the same year, in Canterbury, he assaulted one William Corkine with a stick and dagger (Urry 62-68). To this may be added Thomas Kyd's statements, in two letters written after Marlowe's death, that he "was intemperate & of a cruel hart," and known for his "rashnes in attempting soden pryvie injuries to men" (Maclure 33, 36). Kyd's evidence, however, is tainted: he had been tortured; he no doubt knew how Marlowe was said to have died; and he was desperately seeking to ingratiate himself with the authorities. Given what is known of the state of moral panic into which the members of the Privy Council had been thrown, it seems altogether more likely that Marlowe's death was a deliberate act of state. The eagerness with which Kyd's interrogators pursued his statements about Marlowe's blasphemies is a reminder that the two poets were ar rested at the height of Archbishop Whitgift's violent campaign against religious dissidence. Two leading nonconformists, John Greenwood (whom Marlowe had known at Cambridge) and Henry Barrow, had been hanged in April 1593 (Urry 81). John Penry, another Cambridge contem porary who shared their views and who was suspected of having helped to produce the Marprelate tracts, was executed on May 29, the day before Marlowe's death, "at St. Thomas a'Watering, about two and a half miles from the house in Deptford where Marlowe was killed" (Kuriyama 2002: 122). In the drafts of Penry's appeals to Lord Burghley one hears a halfstrangled outcry against tyranny: Wear it not my Lord for the hope of a better lyf, yt wear better for us to bee Queen Elizabethes beastes then hir subjectes [...]. For weer wee hir beastes going under hir mark the proudest prelate in the land durst not attempt to tak us unto ther owne handes. [....] Shall I not have justic? Will it hurt England to grant mee justic? [....] I ame an inocent, it proteth mee not [...]. Are wee a free people under our naturall princ, or are we held for slaves and bond-servantes under some cruell and unjust tyrant[?] (Penry 59, 60-61, 68) But Penry would have been as horried as his persecutors by the rib ald blasphemies attributed to Marlowe by Thomas Kyd and by Richard Baines. Kyd, reecting back to 1591 or earlier, wrote that "it was his cus tom when I knewe him rst & as I hear saie he contynewd it in table talk or otherwise to jest at the devine scriptures gybe at praiers, & strive in argument to frustrate & confute what hath byn spoke or wrytt by prophets & such holie men." The rst instance Kyd offers of Marlowe's blasphemies,

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(b) Informing contexts The English Faust Book has been commonly represented as the sole source of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. However, there are grounds for asserting that Marlowe was not merely adapting the Faust Book for the stage, but was also actively reshaping the legendand, I would suggest, subtly undermining its repressive orthodoxythrough an exploration of its historical and ideological roots. Faustus's desire to be "as cunning as Agrippa was" (I. i. 118) provides one clue to the manner in which motifs from other texts are woven into this play. Agrippa's rhetorical demolition of all the orthodox forms of knowledge in De vanitate was suspected, despite the evangelical orienta tion of that book, of having been designed to prepare readers for the magi cal doctrines espoused in De occulta philosophia: although in De vanitate he claimed to be "Professinge Divinitee" (Agrippa 1974: 12 [cap. 1]), he was thought by some to be doing so hypocritically (cf. Thevet ii. fol. 544r-v). This is very much the pattern of Faustus's rst speech. Announcing his intention to be "a divine in show" (I. i. 3), he launches into a sophistical survey of the academic disciplines, of which there is no hint in EFB, and then into a rapturous praise of magic, which is paralleled in De occulta philosophia but not in the Faustbooks. By the time he mentions Agrippa, Faustus is thus already emulating him, if in a parodic manner. The Hermetic-Cabalistic notion of spiritual rebirth and deication which gures in both of Agrippa's best-known works (Keefer 1988: 62039) is also ironically echoed in this play. Faustus initially declares: "A sound magician is a mighty god: / Here tire, my brains, to get a deity!" (I. i. 63-64). He thus announces a project of a self-begotten rebirth into divine form which would deliver him into "a world of prot and delight, / Of power, of honor, of omnipotence" (I. i. 54-55). In his last soliloquy, however, he wishes futilely that he might evade eternal punishment by being "chang'd / Unto some brutish beast" (V. ii. 100-01), and he calls upon the stars that reigned at his nativity to draw up Faustus like a foggy mist Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud, That when you vomit forth into the air My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths, So that my soul may but ascend to heaven. (V. ii. 85-89) In what can be read as a violently physical reversal of spiritual rebirth, Faustus proposes an abject surrender of bodily integrity in exchange for the salvation of his soul: having once aspired to "rend the clouds" (I. i. 60),

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Since the early 1970s, every major element of Greg's argument for the authorial authenticity and temporal priority of the B text has been conclu sively refuted. The additions to the play paid for in 1602 by the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, which Greg thought must have been lost, have been securely identied as constituting the third and fourth acts, and parts of the fth, of the B text (Bowers, "Additions"). The external evi dence which Greg thought demonstrated the priority of B has been shown instead to prove that of A (Kuriyama 1975). Greg's detailed arguments for the superiority of B-text readings have been shown to be easily reversible and transparently prejudiced (Warren, Keefer 1983); and the practice of identifying memorial corruption as a principal explanation of so-called "bad quartos" has been subjected to sustained and devastating criticism, most thoroughly by Laurie Maguire.1 Since the mid-1980s, when new editions of the play based on the A text began to appear, it has become generally accepted that the A text of the play is both earlier and more authentic than B, which is acknowledged to be thoroughly sedimented and derivative. B, in other words, contains material written in 1602, and also, it appears, further revisions undertaken to avoid nes for blasphemy under the Act of Abuses, which became law in 16062; moreover, scattered readings throughout much of the text are derived from the 1611 reprint of A (A3), which was evidently used during the printing of B. But how much earlier than B is A, and how much more authentic? Are any of the textual sediments contained in B early enough to interest editors and critics for their substantive value rather than for what they reveal of the play's early performance and reception history? Lacking strong evidence on these questions, editors made do with strong opinions instead. In the rst of the new A-text editions, David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham declared that There is enough in favour of the A-version in general terms ... to create a presumption in favour of authenticity and it is now up to its opponents to prove the contrary for every line and every reading which is questioned. In closely parallel passages B has some superior readings, but these can be put down to intelligent editorial emen dation rather than access to a supposed manuscript by Marlowe. (Ormerod and Wortham xxviii)
1 Other signicant textual-critical contributions to the refutation of Greg's view of this play include those of D.J. Lake, Hjort, Keefer 1987, and Gill 1988. 2 The key phrases of "An Acte to restraine Abuses of Players" are quoted by Roma Gill: "... That if at any tyme or tymes ... any person or persons doe or shall in any Stage play ... jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie, which are not to be spoken but with feare and reverence, shall forfeite for everie such Offence by hym or them committed Tenne Pounde" (Gill 1990: xvii).

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As its heading indicates, chapter 21 tells "How Doctor Faustus was carried through the air up to the heavens to see the world, and how the sky and planets ruled," his means of transportation "a waggon with two dragons before it to draw the same, and all the waggon was of a light burning re" (EFB 122, 123). This rst celestial expedition, of eight days duration, is described in rst-person narration by Faustus himself in a letter to a friend. Telling rst of how he attained an overview of "many kingdoms and provinces, likewise the whole world, Asia, Europe and Africa" (EFB 124), he re counts what he saw when he looked up to the heavens, and thenafter an extended interruption by the English translator, who professes to know more about astronomy "than any rude German author, being possessed by the devil, was able to utter" (EFB 126)he describes how "at the eight days' end came I home again and fell asleep, and so I continued sleeping three days and three nights..." (EFB 127). Chapter 22 tells in third-person narration "How Doctor Faustus made his journey through the principal and most famous lands in the world" carried this time upon the back of Mephostophiles, who "changed himself into the likeness of a ying horse" (EFB 127). There are in fact two journeys in this chapter: one in which Faustus travels over most of the countries of the known world, including "the frozen zone and Terra Incognita," but manages to see "very little that delighted his mind" (EFB 128), and a second journey, conned to parts of western Europe and more to his taste, which takes him to Trier, Paris, Mainz, Naples, Venice, Padua, and nally Rome. This second journey, in condensed form, provides the substance of the speech by Faustus which begins III. i in the A and B texts alike. In both versions of Doctor Faustus this two-chapter sequence is radically abbreviatedbut with this difference, that the A-text chorus conflates two distinct aerial journeys which in the source text and in the B text are narrated separately and in sequence. If relative closeness to the source text is elsewhere a reliable indication of textual priority (see Rasmussen 1993b: 8-10), the presence in B of a narrative articulation derived from the English Faust Book but absent in A would be one sign that in this passage B preserves a text earlier than that of A. Stage directions may provide a second indication of the relative priority of B. The B text's "Enter the Chorus" (Greg B: 777) resembles the stage direction to the Chorus to Act IV (which is preserved only in the A text): "Enter Chorus" (Greg A: 930). In contrast to the implicit concern of these directions with the structure of the play, which might suggest authorial provenance in these segments of text, the stage direction of the A-text Chorus to Act III, "enter Wagner solus" (Greg A: 809), could reect a theat rical book-keeper's concern with the identity of the gure who is to speak the choral lines, and thus with the practicalities of stage business.

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Baron 1992b . "The Precarious Legacy of Renaissance Humanism in the Faust Legend." In The Harvest of Humanism in Central Europe: Essays in Honor of Lewis W. Spitz, ed. Mannfred P. Fleischer. St. Louis: Concordia, 1992. 303-15. Bartels 1993 Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Bartels 1997 , ed. Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe. New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1997. Baskervill Baskervill, CR. The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. 1929; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965. Becon Becon, Thomas. The Catechism of Thomas Becon [...] with other pieces ivritten by him in the reign of King Edward the Sixth. Ed. John Ay re. Cambridge, 1844. Behringer Behringer, Wolfgang. Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe. Trans. J.C. Grayson and David Lederer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Bevington 1962 Bevington, David. From "Mankind" to Marlowe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Bevington 1991 . "Marlowe and God." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 17 (1991): 1-38. Bevington 2002 . "Staging the A- and B-Texts of Doctor Faustus." In Deats and Logan, 43-60. Birringer Birringer, Johannes H. "Between Body and Language: 'Writing' the Damnation of Faustus." Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 335-55. Bloom Bloom, Harold, ed. Christopher Marlowe. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Bluestone Bluestone, Max. "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Contemporary Interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." In Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. 33-88. Bluestone and Rabkin , and Norman Rabkin, eds. Shakespeare's Contemporaries. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Boas 1940

Boas, F.S. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1940.