Doctor Faustus: With The English Faust Book (Hackett Classics)
<DIV><P>This edition of <I>Doctor Faustus</I> features annotated versions, with modernized spelling and punctuation, of the 1604 A-text and the 1592 text of Marlowe's source, the <I>English Faust Book</I>--a translation of the best-selling <I>Historia von Johann Fausten</I> published in Frankfurt in 1587, which recounts the strange story of Doctor John Faustus and his pact with the spirit Mephistopheles.</P><P>David Wootton's Introduction charts Marlowe's brief, meteoric career; the delicate social and political climate in which <I>Doctor Faustus</I> was staged and the vexed question of the religious sensibilities to which it may have catered; the interpretive significance of variations between the A and B texts; and the shrewd and subversive uses to which Marlowe put the <I>English Faust Book</I> in crafting, according to Wootton, a drama in which orthodox Christian teaching triumphed, but in which Faustus has all the best lines.</P></DIV>