Name: Doctor Faustus
Price: 905.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Christopher Marlowe
ISBN: 9781551112107

Type

Physical Book

Author

Christopher Marlowe

Publisher

Broadview Press Ltd

Year

1999

Language

English

Pages

304

Format

Paperback

Weight

ISBN

1551112108

ISBN13

9781551112107

Edition No.

Synopsis "Doctor Faustus "

Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in two early versions, printed in 1604 and 1616, has posed formidable problems for critics. How much of either version was written by Marlowe, and which is the more authentic? Is the play orthodox or radically interrogative? Michael Keefer’s early work helped to establish the current consensus that the 1604 text was censored and revised; the Keefer edition, praised for its lucid introduction and scholarship, was the first to restore two displaced scenes to their correct place. Most competing editions presume that the 1604 text was printed from authorial manuscript, and that the 1616 text is of little substantive value. But in 2006 Keefer’s fresh analysis of the evidence showed that the 1604 quarto’s Marlovian scenes were printed from a corrupted manuscript, and that the 1616 quarto (though indeed censored and revised) preserves some readings earlier than those of the 1604 text. This edition has been updated and revised. Keefer’s critical introduction reconstructs the ideological contexts that shaped and deformed the play, and the text is accompanied by textual and explanatory notes and excerpts from sources.

Christopher Marlowe

(Author)

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Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, and translator. His life remains a great mystery surrounded by all sorts of legends. He was born in Canterbury the same year as William Shakespeare into a prosperous middle-class family. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1584 and completed his Master's in 1587. Initially, Cambridge authorities were reluctant to grant him the degree because they suspected he had converted to Catholicism, but the Queen's Privy Council intervened on his behalf, emphasizing that Marlowe "had rendered good service to Her Majesty" and had been working for the "benefit of the country." However, the exact nature of the service he provided to the crown is unknown. After his years in Cambridge, Marlowe moved to London where he led a dark and turbulent life (he had a couple of run-ins with the law and had a bad reputation) while trying to make his way as a playwright.

He is the author of seven plays and an incomplete poem: the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and The Massacre at Paris, as well as the poem Hero and Leander. In 1593, at just twenty-nine years old, he was arrested and accused of being an atheist. He did not go to prison, and before his case was judged, he died during a brawl in a tavern in Deptford.

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