The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: From the Quarto of 1604.

A brilliant scholar, weary of the limits of human learning, signs away his soul in his own blood for four and twenty years of forbidden power. Marlowe's tragedy still burns with the ambition and terror of that bargain.

What it's about

This edition presents The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus from the 1604 quarto, the earliest printed version of Christopher Marlowe's great play. Faustus, having mastered all the accepted disciplines, turns to black magic and conjures the demon Mephistopheles, striking a pact that grants him supernatural power in exchange for his soul. He travels, works wonders, plays tricks on popes and emperors, and glimpses the classical past, yet the years drain away and the reckoning approaches. The play moves inexorably toward one of the most harrowing final scenes in English drama.

Themes

Marlowe dramatizes the hunger for knowledge and power that defines the Renaissance mind, and its collision with the medieval certainties of sin and damnation. Free will, repentance forever offered and forever refused, the emptiness of the pleasures Faustus buys, and the loneliness of a soul cutting itself off from grace all drive the tragedy. Its verse gave the English stage a new grandeur.

Why it still matters

Faustus is the archetype of the overreacher, the ancestor of every character who trades the soul for mastery, and Marlowe's play stands beside Shakespeare's as a founding work of English tragedy. Its poetry, especially in the closing hour, is among the language's most quoted. The Faust myth it shaped has echoed through literature ever since.

Who it's for

For students and lovers of drama, for readers drawn to the Renaissance and its restless spirit, and for anyone who wants to feel the full force of a soul in the balance. A tragedy that has lost none of its power to grip.