Doctor Faustus (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Renaissance England’s great tragedy of intellectual overreaching is as relevant and unsettling today as it was when first performed at the end of the sixteenth century.

This edition provides newly edited texts of both the 1604 (A-Text) and 1616 (B-Text) versions of the play, each with detailed explanatory annotations. "Sources and Contexts" includes a generous selection from Marlowe’s main source, The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus, along with contemporary writings on magic and religion (including texts by Agrippa, Calvin, and Perkins) that establish the play’s intellectual background. This volume also reprints early documents relating to the writing and publication of the play and to its first performances, along with contemporary comments on Marlowe’s scandalous reputation. Twenty-five carefully chosen interpretations―written from the eighteenth century to the present―allow students to enrich their critical understanding of the play. These diverse critical essays include classic analyses by Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and A. C. Swinburne, among others, and recent criticism from, among others, Michael Neill, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Alison Findlay, Stephen Orgel, and David Bevington. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Yale University. Among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), Shakespeare after Theory (1999), Shakespeare and the Book (2001), A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (2014), and On Color (2018). He served as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare (3rd Series), as the coeditor of the Bantam Shakespeare, and as series editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and he edited the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. He is also responsible for a number of influential critical anthologies, including Staging the Renaissance (with Peter Stallybrass), The New History of Early English Drama (with John Cox), and A Companion to Shakespeare. He is now writing a book on Shakespeare and Rembrandt.