Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is a play about a learned scholar at Wittenberg who grows bored with the limits of study and makes a bargain with the devil. In return for twenty-four years of power, with the demon Mephistopheles as his servant, he gives up his soul. It was probably first staged between about 1588 and 1592, in London, and it was printed after Marlowe's death, in 1604 and again in a longer form in 1616.¹²

The story comes from the German Faustbuch, a popular chapbook of 1587 about a real wandering magician, and an English translation appeared by 1592. Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated playwright and a rival of the young Shakespeare, turned it into a tragedy of ambition and damnation set in a Protestant world shaped by the Reformation and by Renaissance thirst for learning. The play contains the famous line about the face that launched a thousand ships, spoken to a vision of Helen of Troy. Marlowe died in 1593, so the text survives in two versions that differ in many scenes.¹