introduction to "the tragical history of doctor faustus: a critical edition of the 1604 version"

7/23/2019 Introduction to "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: A Critical Edition of the 1604 Version"

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The Tragical Historyof Doctor Faustus

A CRITICAL EDITION OF THE1604 VERSION

Christopher Marloweedited by Michael Keeferwith a full critical edition of the revised and censored 1616 text

and selected source and contextual materials

broadview press


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I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 9

most of the lines attributable to Marlowe, it also incorporates extensiveadditions and revisions paid for by the theatrical entrepreneur PhilipHenslowe in 1602, almost a decade after Marlowe's death; these includereplacements of all of the scenes written by Marlowe's collaborators inActs Three and Four, and of all but the first of A's comic scenes. The manuscript that underlies the printed B text was thoroughly censoredprimarily during the revisionary process of 1602, when passages that suggestFaustus's acts of choice may not have been free were systematically altered,and then again in 1606, when expressions that might have been identifiedas blasphemous under the Act of Abuses passed by Parliament in that yearwere removed. The effect of this theologically-oriented censorship was toblunt the play's interrogative force, and to give it a homiletic rather thandissident orientation. The re-orienting of meanings is a matter not just ofthe sometimes quite subtle changes made to theologically sensitive passages, but also of the additions and rewritten scenes which alter the importof the play's comic sequences and completely reshape its last three acts.It would appear that processes of textual change continued after 1606: Bcontains one line that can plausibly be dated to 1609-10 or later, and somedetails of the B text are suggestive of editorial attentiveness at the time ofits printing in 1616.The 1616 quarto (Bi) appears to have been printed from a scribal manuscript made for that purpose. The earlier underlying manuscript fromwhich the scribal copyist was working was no doubt marked with layers ofrevision and censorship, as well as being interleaved with scenes rewrittenin 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 significant number of places at which Biagrees with Ai, the 1604 quarto, against corrupted readings of A3 indicatethat this copyist made thorough use of the source manuscript even inpassages where A and B are closely parallel, and where one might haveexpected reliance on the printed book rather than on a probably less easilylegible manuscript (Bowers ii. 129). This hypothetical source manuscriptused by the copyist is of interest for other reasons as well: it supplied thecopyist with lines omitted from Ai and its reprints, and also providedsuperior readings in several passages where the A text is deficient becauseof corruption during the process of copying or carelessness in the printinghouse. (Tempting though it might be to believe that the copyist's sourcemanuscript consisted in part of Marlowe's original manuscript, the available evidence does not unequivocally support such an assertion.)Like a palimpsest, a parchment that has been subjected to erasure and re-inscription, the B text reflects 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 inthe A text.1 These differences are in some instances clearly aligned withother tendencies evident in the new scenes and added passages dating fromthe 1602 revisionamong them the homiletic note of the Good and BadAngels' parting lectures in V. ii.Most of these systemic differences contribute to the B text's retreatfrom the A text's challenges to orthodoxy, and its return to the moralizingtones of the prose Faustbooks (to this extent the B text as a whole can bedescribed as having an orientation decisively different from that of A).However, other pronounced tendencies within the additions and revisionsa much fuller deployment of theatrical spectacle,2 an inflation ofthe rhetoric which accompanies this augmented spectacle,3 a willingnessto make repeated use of the same source material,4 and an opportunistic striving for immediate rhetorical advantages at the expense of largerstructural 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 significantlyaugmented by the B text's increased reliance on spectacle, to the extent of creating a cleardiscontinuity between the Faustus of disposable body parts"Nay, keep it," he says of hissevered head (B: IV. ii. 69); and the B text's Horse-courser retains Faustus's detached leg, likea cured ham, "at home in mine hostry" (B: IV. v. 49)and the Faustus whose tragic outcriesdemand a different order of audience response. Another kind of difficulty is produced in I.iii and V. ii, where the B text supplies a secondary audience of devils whose presence is notwell co-ordinated with the opening speeches of these scenes.

3 One example of this inflated rhetoric is Faustus's declaration to the Emperor that his "magiccharms" can "pierce through / The ebon gates of ever-burning hell, / and hale the stubbornfuries from their caves" (B: IV. i. 67-69)a statement that contradicts both the A text'sconsistent representation of verbal magic as futile and those Marlovian scenes in the B textin 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 ofa motif from Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The B text revisers also make what might be calledparasitic repetitions of A-text material: for example, the repetition at B: II. i. 162, of theline "This will I keep as chary as my life" (A: II. iii. 168; B: II. iii. 161), which suggeststhat the lost scene B: II. ii was built, like B: II. iv, around comic action involving a stolenmagic book. In the B text, the first line of Faustus's speech to Helen ("Was this the face thatlaunch'd a thousand ships" [B: v. i. 94]) is anticipated three times (at B: IV. ii. 46-48 and49-50, and at B: V. i. 26-27), with consequences that could vary according to the staging ofperformances, but that probably include a dissipation of rhetorical impact.5 The exaggeratedly courtly language with which Faustus declares that the Emperor's flattering welcome "Shall make poor Faustus to his utmost power / Both love and serve theGerman Emperor" (B: IV. i. 62-63) is in obvious tension with his earlier boast that "TheEmperor 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 formof jest popularized by Shakespeare's Falstaff(B: IV. i. 160-62); six lines later, at the beginning 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 overto keep the peace by two constables of Shoreditch whom he had evidentlythreatened; and in September of the same year, in Canterbury, he assaultedone William Corkine with a stick and dagger (Urry 62-68). To this maybe added Thomas Kyd's statements, in two letters written after Marlowe'sdeath, 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 doubtknew how Marlowe was said to have died; and he was desperately seekingto ingratiate himself with the authorities. Given what is known of thestate of moral panic into which the members of the Privy Council hadbeen thrown, it seems altogether more likely that Marlowe's death was adeliberate act of state.The eagerness with which Kyd's interrogators pursued his statementsabout Marlowe's blasphemies is a reminder that the two poets were arrested at the height of Archbishop Whitgift's violent campaign againstreligious dissidence. Two leading nonconformists, John Greenwood(whom Marlowe had known at Cambridge) and Henry Barrow, had beenhanged in April 1593 (Urry 81). John Penry, another Cambridge contemporary who shared their views and who was suspected of having helpedto produce the Marprelate tracts, was executed on May 29, the day beforeMarlowe's death, "at St. Thomas a'Watering, about two and a half milesfrom the house in Deptford where Marlowe was killed" (Kuriyama 2002:122). In the drafts of Penry's appeals to Lord Burghley one hears a half-strangled outcry against tyranny:

Wear it not my Lord for the hope of a better lyf, yt wear better forus to bee Queen Elizabethes beastes then hir subjectes [...]. For weerwee hir beastes going under hir mark the proudest prelate in the landdurst 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 profiteth mee not [...].Are wee a free people under our naturall princ, or are we heldfor slaves and bond-servantes under some cruell and unjust tyrant[?](Penry 59, 60-61, 68)But Penry would have been as horrified as his persecutors by the ribald blasphemies attributed to Marlowe by Thomas Kyd and by RichardBaines. Kyd, reflecting back to 1591 or earlier, wrote that "it was his custom when I knewe him first & as I hear saie he contynewd it in table talkor 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 first instance Kyd offers of Marlowe's blasphemies,


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(b) Informing contextsThe English Faust Book has been commonly represented as the sole sourceof The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. However, there are grounds forasserting that Marlowe was not merely adapting the Faust Book for thestage, but was also actively reshaping the legendand, I would suggest,subtly undermining its repressive orthodoxythrough an exploration ofits historical and ideological roots.Faustus's desire to be "as cunning as Agrippa was" (I. i. 118) providesone clue to the manner in which motifs from other texts are woven intothis play. Agrippa's rhetorical demolition of all the orthodox forms ofknowledge in De vanitate was suspected, despite the evangelical orientation of that book, of having been designed to prepare readers for the magical doctrines espoused in De occulta philosophia: although in De vanitate heclaimed to be "Professinge Divinitee" (Agrippa 1974: 12 [cap. 1]), he wasthought by some to be doing so hypocritically (cf. Thevet ii. fol. 544r-v).This is very much the pattern of Faustus's first speech. Announcing hisintention to be "a divine in show" (I. i. 3), he launches into a sophisticalsurvey of the academic disciplines, of which there is no hint in EFB, andthen into a rapturous praise of magic, which is paralleled in De occultaphilosophia 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 deificationwhich figures in both of Agrippa's best-known works (Keefer 1988: 620-39) is also ironically echoed in this play. Faustus initially declares: "Asound 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 intodivine form which would deliver him into "a world of profit 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 bybeing "chang'd / Unto some brutish beast" (V. ii. 100-01), and he callsupon the stars that reigned at his nativity to

draw up Faustus like a foggy mistInto the entrails of yon laboring cloud,That when you vomit forth into the airMy 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 forthe 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 theauthorial authenticity and temporal priority of the B text has been conclusively refuted. The additions to the play paid for in 1602 by the theatricalentrepreneur Philip Henslowe, which Greg thought must have been lost,have been securely identified as constituting the third and fourth acts, andparts of the fifth, of the B text (Bowers, "Additions"). The external evidence which Greg thought demonstrated the priority of B has been showninstead to prove that of A (Kuriyama 1975). Greg's detailed arguments forthe superiority of B-text readings have been shown to be easily reversibleand transparently prejudiced (Warren, Keefer 1983); and the practice ofidentifying memorial corruption as a principal explanation of so-called"bad quartos" has been subjected to sustained and devastating criticism,most thoroughly by Laurie Maguire.1Since the mid-1980s, when new editions of the play based on the A textbegan to appear, it has become generally accepted that the A text of theplay is both earlier and more authentic than B, which is acknowledgedto be thoroughly sedimented and derivative. B, in other words, containsmaterial written in 1602, and also, it appears, further revisions undertakento avoid fines for blasphemy under the Act of Abuses, which became lawin 16062; moreover, scattered readings throughout much of the text arederived from the 1611 reprint of A (A3), which was evidently used duringthe printing of B. But how much earlier than B is A, and how much moreauthentic? Are any of the textual sediments contained in B early enough tointerest editors and critics for their substantive value rather than for whatthey reveal of the play's early performance and reception history?Lacking strong evidence on these questions, editors made do withstrong opinions instead. In the first of the new A-text editions, DavidOrmerod and Christopher Wortham declared that

There is enough in favour of the A-version in general terms ... tocreate a presumption in favour of authenticity and it is now up toits opponents to prove the contrary for every line and every readingwhich is questioned. In closely parallel passages B has some superiorreadings, but these can be put down to intelligent editorial emendation rather than access to a supposed manuscript by Marlowe.(Ormerod and Wortham xxviii)

1 Other significant textual-critical contributions to the refutation of Greg's view of this playinclude 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 theHoly 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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I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 1 9

As its heading indicates, chapter 21 tells "How Doctor Faustus was carriedthrough the air up to the heavens to see the world, and how the sky and planetsruled," his means of transportation "a waggon with two dragons before itto draw the same, and all the waggon was of a light burning fire" (EFB122, 123). This first celestial expedition, of eight days duration, is describedin first-person narration by Faustus himself in a letter to a friend. Tellingfirst of how he attained an overview of "many kingdoms and provinces,likewise the whole world, Asia, Europe and Africa" (EFB 124), he recounts what he saw when he looked up to the heavens, and thenafteran extended interruption by the English translator, who professes to knowmore about astronomy "than any rude German author, being possessed bythe devil, was able to utter" (EFB 126)he describes how "at the eightdays' end came I home again and fell asleep, and so I continued sleepingthree days and three nights..." (EFB 127).

Chapter 22 tells in third-person narration "How Doctor Faustus madehis journey through the principal and most famous lands in the world" carriedthis time upon the back of Mephostophiles, who "changed himself intothe likeness of a flying horse" (EFB 127). There are in fact two journeysin this chapter: one in which Faustus travels over most of the countriesof the known world, including "the frozen zone and Terra Incognita,"but manages to see "very little that delighted his mind" (EFB 128), and asecond journey, confined to parts of western Europe and more to his taste,which takes him to Trier, Paris, Mainz, Naples, Venice, Padua, and finallyRome. This second journey, in condensed form, provides the substance ofthe 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 radicallyabbreviatedbut with this difference, that the A-text chorus conflatestwo distinct aerial journeys which in the source text and in the B textare narrated separately and in sequence. If relative closeness to the sourcetext is elsewhere a reliable indication of textual priority (see Rasmussen1993b: 8-10), the presence in B of a narrative articulation derived from theEnglish Faust Book but absent in A would be one sign that in this passage Bpreserves a text earlier than that of A.Stage directions may provide a second indication of the relative priorityof B. The B text's "Enter the Chorus" (Greg B: 777) resembles the stagedirection 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 thesedirections with the structure of the play, which might suggest authorialprovenance in these segments of text, the stage direction of the A-textChorus to Act III, "enter Wagner solus" (Greg A: 809), could reflect a theatrical book-keeper's concern with the identity of the figure who is to speakthe choral lines, and thus with the practicalities of stage business.


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I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 3 9

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 1993Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, andMarlowe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993.

Bartels 1997, ed. Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe. New York: G.K. Hall;London: Prentice Hall, 1997.

BaskervillBaskervill, CR. The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. 1929; rpt. NewYork: Dover, 1965.

BeconBecon, Thomas. The Catechism of Thomas Becon [...] with other pieces ivrittenby him in the reign of King Edward the Sixth. Ed. John Ay re. Cambridge, 1844.

BehringerBehringer, 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 1962Bevington, David. From "Mankind" to Marlowe. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUP, 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.BirringerBirringer, Johannes H. "Between Body and Language: 'Writing' theDamnation of Faustus." Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 335-55.Bloom

Bloom, Harold, ed. Christopher Marlowe. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.BluestoneBluestone, Max. "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy inContemporary Interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." InReinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin. New York:Columbia UP, 1969. 33-88.Bluestone and Rabkin, and Norman Rabkin, eds. Shakespeare's Contemporaries. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.Boas 1940Boas, F.S. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study. Oxford:Clarendon P, 1940.


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introduction to "the tragical history of doctor faustus: a critical edition of the 1604 version"

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