Doctor Faustus A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition

“While the texts of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus are notoriously slippery, mysterious, and dangerous, this Norton Critical Edition is remarkably lucid, enriching, and enlightening. Kastan and Hunter have done an exemplary job contextualizing the A- and B-texts within their printing, religious, and performance histories. A must read for anyone teaching or studying early modern literature.” ―Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• Newly edited texts of the 1604 (A-Text) and the 1616 (B-Text) versions of the play.
• Editorial matter by David Scott Kastan and Matthew Hunter.
• Sources and background materials related to Christopher Marlowe, the composition and publication of Doctor Faustus, early performance of the play, the Faust legend, and Renaissance magic, including a new selection from James I and IV’s Of Daemonologie.
• Eighteen critical essays: five classic assessments and―new to the Second Edition―thirteen recent interpretations.
• A chronology and an updated selected bibliography.

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.

Matthew Hunter is assistant professor of English at Texas Tech University. His book The Pursuit of Style: Early Modern Forms of Talk on the London Stage is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He has also edited, with Allison Deutermann and Musa Gurnis, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: Persons Made Public.