Doctor Faustus, is Christopher Marlowe's most popular play and is often seen as one of the overwhelming triumphs of the English Renaissance. It has had a rich and varied critical history often arousing violent critical controversy. This guide offers students an introduction to its critical and performance history, surveying notable stage productions from its initial performance in 1594 to the present and including TV, audio and cinematic versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated biography provide a basis for further individual research.

This volume in the "Revel Plays" series, offers reading editions, with modern spelling, of the 1604 and 1616 editions of Marlowe's play, arguing that the two cannot be conflated into one. Included are sources and commentary, literary criticism, style and staging/performance assessments.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover, course: Christopher Marlowe "Doctor Faustus", language: English, abstract: Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus was published in 1592 and appears to be an example of a Renaissance tragedy. However, many critics argue that Marlowe’sDr. Faustusowes a lot to the medieval dramatic tradition, to be precise, to the morality play tradition. Describing different types of the medieval plays, Philip Tilling claims that “themorality playas a kind of medieval religious play arose alongside the mystery play and was to continue, in modified form, throughout the Elizabethan period,culminating inMarlowe’sFaustus.”1So, Tilling considersDr. Faustusto be “a morality play in a modified form“. In my paper I seeDr. Faustusas a Renaissance tragedy which was to a certain degree influenced by the medieval dramatic tradition and has some characteristic features of the morality play. Proceeding on this assumption, I am going to concentrate on the play, pursuing three following issues: - to describe the characteristic features of the morality play inDr. Faustus- to point out the features which lead me to interpret it as a Renaissance tragedy - to describe the purpose of the morality play structure inDr. Faustus.Pursuing these objectives, I am, first of all, going to summarise the main characteristics of the morality play in order to see, how to apply them to Marlowe’s play. Then I will concentrate on the differences and similarities betweenDr. Faustusand the morality play on structural and thematic levels. In the last chapter of the paper I will focus on the issue of the function of the morality play structure inDr. Faustus.In conclusion I will summarize my arguments which support the thesis that the play should rather be seen as tragedy than as a morality play.

Stages of Loss supplies an original and deeply researched account of travel and festivity in early modern Europe, complicating, revising, and sometimes entirely rewriting received accounts of the emergence and development of professional theatre. It offers a history of English actors travelling and performing abroad in early modern Europe, and Germany in particular, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These players, known as English Comedians, were among the first professional actors to perform in central and northern European courts and cities. The vital contributions made by them to the development of a European theatre institution have long been neglected owing to the pre-eminence of national theatre histories and the difficulty of researching an inherently evanescent phenomenon across large distances. These contributions are here introduced in their proper contexts for the first time. Stages of Loss explores connections real and perceived between diminishments of national value and the material wealth transported by itinerant players; representations of loss, waste, and profligacy within the drama they performed; and the extent to which theatrical practice and the process of canonization have led to archival and interpretive losses in theatre history. Situating the English Comedians in a variety of economic, social, religious, and political contexts, it explores trends and continuities in the reception of their itinerant theatre, showing how their incorporation into modern theatre history has been shaped by derogatory assessments of travelling theatre and itinerant people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stages of Loss reveals that the Western theatre institution took shape partly as a means of accommodating, controlling, evaluating, and concealing the work of migrant strangers.

This re-visioning of the Marlowe canon aims to explain the ambiguous effects that readers have long associated with Marlowe's signature. Marlovian tragedy has been inadequately theorized because Marlowe has too often been set under the giant shadow of Shakespeare. Grande, by contrast, takes Marlowe on his own terms and demonstrates how he achieves his notorious moral ambiguity through the rhetorical technique of dilation or amplification. All of Marlowe's plays end in the conventional tragic way, with death. But each play, as well as Hero and Leander, repeatedly evokes the reader's expectations of a tragic end only to defer them, dilating the moment of pleasure so that the protagonists can dally before the "law" of tragedy.

Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we’re not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line? Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann. A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it’s concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.

Our ancestors saw the material world as alive, and they often personified nature. Today we claim to be realists. But in reality we are not paying attention to the symbols and myths hidden in technology. Beneath much of our talk about computers and the Internet, claims William A. Stahl, is an unacknowledged mysticism, an implicit religion. By not acknowledging this mysticism, we have become critically short of ethical and intellectual resources with which to understand and confront changes brought on by technology.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.