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Doctor Faustus
31111 pages
A vertiginous plunge into the intoxicating heights of human ambition and the terrifying depths of spiritual ruin.
What it feels like
Reading this play feels like standing on the edge of a precipice, intoxicated by the view but terrified of the fall. It moves with a brisk, almost feverish energy, sweeping you from the soaring heights of intellectual rebellion into a sulfurous, dread-soaked atmosphere of impending doom. The language is magnificent and muscular, oscillating wildly between breathtaking poetic grandeur and grotesque, farcical comedy—a stylistic whiplash that perfectly mirrors the protagonist's descent from visionary scholar to cheap conjurer. It is a deeply interrogative experience, forcing you to sit with the agonizing tension between boundless human potential and the crushing weight of cosmic consequence. This is a story for those who love dark, philosophical tragedies that end in spectacular, inevitable ruin.
- Mood
- foreboding
- sulfurous
- vertiginous
- dread-soaked
- Tone
- ironic
- grandiose
- tragic
- darkly comic
- interrogative
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- hubris and damnation · the limits of human knowledge · the illusion of power · spiritual despair · intellectual rebellion
- The writing
- Muscular, soaring blank verse that oscillates between magnificent poetic rhetoric and base, farcical prose.
- The arc
- Begins with the intoxicating thrill of boundless ambition and slowly decays into hollow distraction before ending in sheer, inescapable terror.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave dark, philosophical tragedies and revel in the tension between intellectual rebellion and cosmic dread.
Content notes
- demonic pacts
- religious despair
- blood
- damnation
About the book
"Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in two early versions, printed in 1604 and 1616, has posed formidable problems for critics. How much of either version was written by Marlowe, and which is the more authentic? Is the play orthodox or radically interrogative?" "Michael Keefer's early work helped to establish the current consensus that the 1604 version best preserves Doctor Faustus's original form, and that the 1616 text was censored and revised; the first Broadview edition, praised for its lucid introduction and scholarship, was the first to restore two displaced scenes to their correct place. All competing editions presume that the 1604 text was printed from authorial manuscript, and that the 1616 text is of little substantive value. But in 2006 Keefer's fresh analysis of the evidence showed that the 1604 quarto's Marlovian scenes were printed from a corrupted manuscript, and that the 1616 quarto (though indeed censored and revised) preserves some readings earlier than those of the 1604 text." "This revised and updated Broadview edition offers the best available text of Doctor Faustus. Keefer's critical introduction reconstructs the ideological contexts that shaped and deformed the play, and the text is accompanied by textual and explanatory notes and excerpts from sources."--Jacket.
Description from Open Library.
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