Note: The following scenes do not appear in the A text of Doctor Faustus.

Faustus complies, warning Benvolio to have more respect for scholars in the future. The knight pleads for mercy, and the emperor entreats Faustus to remove the horns. The starting-point for Keefer's interpretation of the play appears (paradoxically) near the end of the book, on page 200, where he quotes from Alan Sinfield's Literature in Protestant England, 1550-1650 (1983). Faustus conjures a pair of antlers onto the head of the knight (again, Benvolio in the B text). 118-19) that he wishes to emulate Appendix 4 contains excerpts from Calvin's The Institution of Christian Religion (trans. There are also four appendices totalling 118 pages: Appendix 1 prints the scenes that appear only in the B (1616) Text Appendix 2 consists of modernized excerpts from The history of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus (the 'English Faustbook' of 1592) Appendix 3 has excerpts from Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientarum et artium atque excellentia verbi dei declamatio (1530) and the De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533)-Agrippa was a contemporary of the historical Faustus and the person Marlowe's Faustus says (A-Text I. Keefer's edition has a 92-page Introduction subdivided as follows: the rationale for a new edition of Doctor Faustus a life of Marlowe the historical Doctor Faustus the Faustus legend sources and context of Marlowe's play the dates of Marlowe's A- and B-Texts memorial transmission and censorship explanation of the text of the present edition editions of Doctor Faustus works cited. Yet there are differences of approach and of content which make the existence of the two books welcome. It seems strange that yet another A-Text edition should appear so soon afterwards. With a concise and illuminating introduction, and relevant notes and images, this Revels Student Edition of the 'A' and 'B' texts of Dr Faustus will prove to be an enthralling document, and an excellent edition for student and theatre-goer alike.I recently reviewed for The Review of English Studies Roma Gill's edition of the A-Text (NS 42 (1991), 574-6). This edition uniquely presents the two texts in facing pages, making the reader aware of the changing tastes of audiences, the stage history of the play, and of just how intricate The B-text adds a considerable amount of material from the Faustbook, padding out the story with more raucous comedy to satisfy audience longings for more magical stunts. Some passages are clearly not by Marlowe, but by some other dramatist commissioned by the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe to supplement Marlowe's incomparable tragic writing with some comic horseplay. The so-called A-text of 1604 is very short, with missing and misplaced scenes. Marlowe himself was highly controversial in his own day, and remains so today, as a daringly heterodox writer. Dr Faustus, first published in 1604 long after Christopher Marlowe had died (in 1593) and then published in an expanded version in 1616, has long fascinated readers and scholars alike as one of the great puzzles in Renaissance English drama.

Dr faustus b text