Doctor Faustus

by Christopher Marlowe, James H. Lake (Editor)

Overview

James H. Lake and Irving Ribner's edition of Doctor Faustus is an annotated version, with modernized spelling and punctuation, of the 1616 B-text. James H. Lake's Introduction discusses the play’s historical and dramatic contexts, but focuses on its performance history from the Elizabethan era to our own, including film productions. Textual notes discuss variations between the A and B texts. Interviews with Ralph Alan Cohen of Shenandoah Shakespeare and Andreas Teuber (Mephistopheles in the Richard Burton production) as well as illustrations from theatre and film performances included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781585100897
Publisher:	Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2005
Series:	Focus on Performance Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	114
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

James H. Lake (Ph.D. University of Delaware) is Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and has been appointed to the faculty of the Greco Institute. He has served as Director of the LSUS Joys of Learning Humanities Seminars for the Elderly, Director of the University’s Honors Program and Director of the LSUS Master of Arts in Liberal Arts Program. He has served on numerous boards, including the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Board of Directors of the Noel Foundation, and the editorial board of Shakespeare and the Classroom. He has published widely on Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Film, has edited the Focus-on- Performance edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and is the Series Editor for the New Kittredge Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

PREFACE, CHRONOLOGY OF MARLOWE’S LIFE AND WORKS, INTRODUCTION, Origins of the Faustus legend, The first English biography of Faustus, Extracts from the Damnable Life, Date of the play, Authorship of the play, The Renaissance, The morality plays, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s theatre, Stage-history of Doctor Faustus, Text of Doctor Faustus, THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS, NOTES, SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editorial Reviews

Professor James Lake has done all Marlowe scholars and teachers of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a great service in once again making available Irving Ribner’s magnificent edition of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Ribner’s edition was the finest of its era (the 1960s) and will find an eager audience in professors who prefer to use individual paperback editions of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries rather than huge, unwieldy anthologies.

Lake’s new introduction traces the history of the Faust legend, places Marlowe’s play in its Renaissance context, and provides a brilliant survey of the fate of Marlowe’s Faustus in production on stage, film, and opera. His range of reference is astounding and extends from Simon Magus to St. Theophilis to Goethe to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to Orson Welles to Charlie Daniels (“The Devil Went Down to Georgia”) and even to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. His introduction instructs even as it delights.

Professor Samuel Crowl, Ohio University

Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is a text used in a variety

of college and university courses including great

books courses, basic introductory courses in the

history of drama, survey courses in the literature of

the English renaissance, upper-division courses in

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, senior seminars in the

works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in the

history of the Faust legend. Irving Ribner's edition

of Marlowe was the finest of its generation and it

will be most attractive to professors of broad survey

courses in Western Liiterature and major courses in

16th Century drama to have his one-volume edition of

Marlowe's Dr. Faustus once again in print.

LAKE'S REISSUE

Professor James Lake has done all Marlowe

scholars and teachers of Elizabethan and Jacobean

drama a great service in once again making available

Irving Ribner's magnificent edition of Marlowe's Dr.

Faustus. Ribner's edition was the finest of its era

(the 1960s) and will find an eager audience in

professors who prefer to use individual paperback

editions of the plays of Shakespeare and his

contemporaries rather than huge, unwieldy anthologies.

Lake's new introduction traces the history of the

Faust legend, places Marlowe's play in its renaissance

context, and provides a brilliant survey of the fate

of Marlowe's Fautsus in production on stage, film, and

opera. His range of reference is astounding and

extends from Simon Magus to St. Theophilis to Goethe

to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to Orson Welles to Charlie

Daniels ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia")and even to

a Calvin and Hobbbes cartoon. His introduction

instructs even as it delights.

Samuel Crowl

Ohio University

From the Publisher