This edition of Doctor Faustus features annotated versions, with
modernized spelling and punctuation, of the 1604 A-text and the
1592 text of Marlowe's source, the English Faust Book--a
translation of the best-selling Historia von Johann Fausten
published in Frankfurt in 1587, which recounts the strange story of
Doctor John Faustus and his pact with the spirit Mephistopheles.
David Wootton's Introduction charts Marlowe's brief, meteoric
career; the delicate social and political climate in which Doctor
Faustus was staged and the vexed question of the religious
sensibilities to which it may have catered; the interpretive
significance of variations between the A and B texts; and the
shrewd and subversive uses to which Marlowe put the English Faust
Book in crafting, according to Wootton, a drama in which orthodox
Christian teaching triumphed, but in which Faustus has all the best
lines.