Doctor Faustus

"There is no better introduction to the ambitions and contradictions of the English Renaissance than Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe's remarkable tragedy of intellectual overreaching. Marlowe's play tells the story of Faustus, a famous medieval German scholar. Bored by all the disciplines he has mastered, he turns to magic, ultimately summoning the demon Mephistopheles, who arranges for Faustus to make a deal with the Devil: Faustus's soul in exchange for Mephistopheles's service and twenty-four years of magical power. This Norton Critical Edition of the play features the two early versions of Marlowe's play, the A-Text from 1604 and B-Text from 1616, each with detailed annotations. It also includes a rich array of supplementary materials that provide background and criticism. In "Sources and Contexts," there are primary documents from Marlowe's era, including a letter charging Marlowe with heresy, records of early performances of the play, and a generous selection from Marlowe's source, an early English translation of the German prose History of Doctor Faustus. There are also modern scholarly accounts of Marlowe's biography, of the relation of the variant two texts, and of the history of Renaissance magic and religion. In the section of "Criticism," early and contemporary critics provide suggestive analyses of the play through various lenses, each revealing the play's complicated relation to the social, political, and religious worlds in which the play was written and engaged by audiences and readers"--