Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of "Doctor Faustus"

Marcus, Leah S.

doi:10.1086/rd.20.41917246

Cited by 72 publications

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“…To be sure, the B-text contains revisions suggesting that Faustus's predetermined damnation is not certain and that salvation remains open to him if he repents. Nevertheless, contrary to Marcus's conclusion that the two versions are 'profoundly different', 17 I contend that the B-text's seemingly anti-predestinarian revisions are nullified and Faustus's reprobation re-emphasized via the amplification of the role of the stage devils. Even more than in the A-text, the devils control Faustus from the start.…”

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confidence: 74%

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

Scott

2021

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Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is generally treated as a soteriological riddle: is Faustus damned, and if so, when, and why? This essay argues that such approaches miss the overwhelming emphasis (in both surviving versions of the play) on Faustus’s reprobation. Faustus, instead of presenting a puzzle waiting to be solved, is better appreciated as an incomparable portrait of the experience of reprobate living. Even more, via its textual and performance history, Faustus sheds light on the collective and collaborative practices of real Renaissance actors and theatregoers coming to terms with the post-Reformation religious trauma they shared with the lonely doctor.

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confidence: 74%

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

Scott

2021

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“…Marlowe's Doctor Faustus stages a confrontation between the old forms and the new religion, using an old medieval dramatic form, with its strucrures of sin and redemp tion, while locating its figure in Wittenberg, the city associated with Luther, and the birthplace of the Reformation (Marcus 1989). As David Riggs has shown, the Reform ers' rigorous questioning of church doctrine opens up the possibility, not only of believing differently, but also of believing nothing at all, a crime for which Marlowe was accused in the famous Baines Note (Riggs 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature

Williams

2010

A Companion to Tudor Literature

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The term "medieval" is the creation of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jakob Butckhardt, whose argu ment for the Renaissance required a conception of the Middle Ages to define what came before it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the terms "medieval" and "medievalism" appear first in the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, and A. W. N. Pugin, tying them to the nostalgia and aesthetic ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Gothic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement. The alternative term for the period is the "Middle Ages," first used by John Foxe, according to the OED, in his work of Protestant martyrology, Actes and Monuments of the English Martyrs (1570). Foxe refers to the pre-Reformation period as "the middle age," which he describes as "the primitive tyme of the church." Foxe is translating a Latin term, medium aevum, devised by Petrarch and other humanists ro denote the period between the ancients and the moderns ro describe England's Catholic past.Medievalism and the idea of the Middle Ages are retrospective inventions, having less to do with the qualities of the period itself than with the agendas of those who seek to describe it. According ro Brian Stock's oft-quoted formulation:The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications "the Middle Ages" thus consti tute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world. (Stock 1990: 69) Whether we regard the period through the nostalgic eyes of a Ruskin or Rossetti or, following Foxe, as a primitive time, our views of the Middle Ages are conditioned by certain value judgments. In Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547, James Simpson argues that prevailing definitions of the Middle Ages are the result of Reformist institutions and policies of Henry VIII that erlacted a contraction and Simplification of the medieval literary culture that preceded it, producing a specific notion of the period and establishing strict boundaries between it and the Renaissance.

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“…Furthermore, theatrical and cultural influences on a text (influences which New Bibliography dismisses in the search for authorial intention) mean that, in all likelihood, a play, and its text, might change regularly to suit performance, particularly if a play is taken on tour and thus performed in locations of varying religious ideology and the company wish to avoid, or alternatively even court, controversy. 18 The early modern audience were probably used to this fluidity, and would less likely have viewed the book as a final definitive text, than as a snapshot in the life of a play. As Orgel states, 'The text in flux, the text as process, was precisely what Renaissance printing practice preserved.'…”

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Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Duxfield

2008

Literature Compass

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Author's Introduction Most people familiar with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus will have experienced it as a unified entity neatly presented in a twentieth‐century edition. What is fairly well known, but not always taken into serious consideration by scholars, however, is that Doctor Faustus is a play that exists in two widely differing forms, and that in making modern editions, editors often produce something that is in turn similar to neither of these. Looking at how the problem of the two texts of Doctor Faustus has been dealt with by editors over the last hundred or so years provides students with an accessible way in to the subject of textual scholarship and editing theory, and the consideration of potential future directions for editing practice. Author Recommends The introduction to W. W. Greg's parallel edition Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: 1604–1616 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950) is a prime example of New Bibliographical editorial practice at work, while the mirrored texts provide a visual breakdown of the differences between the two texts of the play. For a more modern approach to the play in its variant forms see either the Revels Plays edition Doctor Faustus: A‐ and B‐ Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) or the Oxford World's Classics edition Doctor Faustus and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), both edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Great examples of Shakespeare in multiple text format can be found in Rene Weiss's King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (London: Longman, 1993), and, more recently, in Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor's three‐text edition of Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare series, released in two volumes: Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006) and Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Leah S. Marcus's Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996) is an insightful and accessible example of the kind of challenges laid down to traditional author‐centric editing by late twentieth‐century editorial theory. Particularly useful in the context of this guide are the chapters on Doctor Faustus and The Tempest. Several recent publications offer useful collections of essays on the history and the current position of the textual scholarship and the editing of early modern texts, mainly with reference to Shakespeare. They include Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996); In Arden: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), edited by Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan; and Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), edited by Peter Holland. A more general approach is taken by Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger's collection Textual Formations and Reformations (London: Associated University Presses, 1998). Finally, an up to date practical aid can be found in Michael Hunter's Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Online Materials 1. Early English Books Online http:/...

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Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of "Doctor Faustus"

Cited by 72 publications

References 0 publications

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

‘That’s hard’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Trauma of Reprobation

Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

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