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Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus | |||
2004 • 1-58510-089-7 • paper • 128 pages • 6 x 9 • $9.95 An authoritative text of Marlowe's classic play, with notes and a substantial introduction giving historical background, dramatic context, and performance history, including cinematic history. Interviews with Ralph Alan Cohen of Shenandoah Shakespeare and Andreas Teuber (Mephistopheles in the Richard Burton production) discuss issues of performance. Illustrations, a useful timeline, a list of topics designed to promote discussion, and a up-to-date bibliography. This text is based on the authoritative edition by Irving Ribner, updated, with much additional material on performance, by James H. Lake. | About the Authors | Contents | Preface | Reviews |
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James H. Lake is Professor of English at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. Lake received his B. A. and M. A. degrees from Tulane University and his Ph. D. from the University of Delaware. He has published widely on Shakespeare and cinema. He is the general editor of the Focus on Performance series.
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Each volume in the Focus On Performance series is designed to make dramas of the past more accessible to contemporary readers. It is a premise of the series that the cultural icons to which we all naturally respond and which are encoded in great drama are best realized through performance, especially through cinema. Each volume in the series provides an established text, with annotations; a substantial introduction, containing historical background, dramatic context, time-line, up-to-date bibliography, and commentary from leading actors, directors, or critics. The present volume includes exclusive interviews with Ralph Alan Cohen, Director of the Shenandoah Shakespeare 2000 production of Doctor Faustus and Executive Director of the Company, based in Staunton, Virginia; and Andreas Teuber, Mephistophilis in the Coghill-Burton 1966-67 stage and film productions of the play, and now Artistic Director of the Cambridge Theatre Company in residence at the Hasty Pudding Theatre in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The play text comes from The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Irving Ribner, as reprinted in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: Text and Major Criticism. The format of the book has been revised to comply with the standards of the new series but the original play text and Ribner’s textual notes are unchanged. Some of the footnotes, however, have been augmented, some new ones added, and act and scene designations have been changed from Roman to Arabic numerals. Readers should be aware that there are two versions of Doctor Faustus, neither of which was written entirely by Marlowe. One was printed in 1604, the other in 1616. The earlier version is relatively short and straightforward. The later is much longer and contains more comedy; it is also more cynical and deterministic. Yet today’s audiences find the skepticism and mingling of comedy and tragedy just as appealing as audiences did in the seventeenth century. Ribner felt that the 1616 version was actually closer to the original play, as many others have also thought, and he therefore used it as his “copy text.” Many other editors, however, prefer the 1604 version, believing that it is more authentic. Readers who wish to pursue the matter will find further discussion preceding the textual notes at the end of the play.
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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 Professor James Lake’s useful edition. . .supplements his meticulous text of Doctor Faustus with an intriguing array of relevant interviews, illustrations, and cogent bibliographies. Every Marlowe scholar will want to own this book. -- Professor Ken Rothwell, University of Vermont
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Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
