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Five-Act Structure in Doctor Faustus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2022

G. K. Hunter
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Extract

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.

What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is not the lack of division in the original texts; it is rather the reluctance of modern editors to impose an act-structure on the modern texts. This is curious, but it seems possible to discern why the reluctance exists and a survey of the modern editions of Faustus throws some interesting light on critical attitudes to the subject matter of the play.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 8 , Issue 4: Marlowe Issue , Summer 1964 , pp. 77 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 The Tulane Drama Review

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References

1 W. T. Jewkes notes that “of the 134 plays written for the public stage [and printed before 1616], 30 are divided, as against 104 undivided.” (Act division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583-1616, [Hamden, Conn.: 1958], p. 96.)

2 I mean the perception that the 1616 text must be the basis of any modern recension. In this text the nature of the structure is much clearer; and it was, in fact, the reading of Greg's editio minor that first made clear to me the precision with which the play moved. Greg himself, however, hedges his bets. He finds the act division “convenient in discussing the construction of the play” (parallel text edition, p. 153) and so presents it to the reader; but he confides to us in a footnote that “I see no reason to suppose that any act division was originally contemplated” (p. 153 n.5). His argument is that there is too great a disproportion between the numbers of lines to he found in the different acts for these to make just divisions. A rereading of The Winter's Tale, in which Act IV is two and a half times as long as Act III, ought to convince us of the insignificance of this mode of assessment.

3 Op. cit., p. 97.

4 Recorded in the Diary of H. Crabb Robinson, for 2nd August, 1829.

5 Cf. Thomas, William, who calls Rome “the onelie Jewell, myrrour, maistres, and beautie of the worlde” (Hislorie of Italie [1549]).Google Scholar

6 I preserve the original form negromantic, though most modernizing editors change it to necromantic. This seems to me to be a greater change than is warranted by a licence to modernize. It is the “black art” in general that Faustus is welcoming, not the power to raise the dead.

7 De Sacramentis (Prologue), in Migne's Patrologia Latina vol. CLXXVI, col. 185.

8 The first is to be found in Patrologia Latina XC, cols. 1127 ff., and the second (attributed to Honorius Augustodunensis) in vol. CLXXII, cols. 39 ff. I am indebted to Dr. Hans Liebeschütz for pointing these out to me.

9 My italics.

10 I find that this general point has been made by Kirschbaum in his paperback The Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Meridian, 1962): “Surely Marlowe means to stress the magician's continuing degradation by showing him first playing his tricks with the spiritual head of all Roman Christendom and then ultimately declining, to play them with the clowns” (p. 119).

11 “Marlowe's Faustus: a Reconsideration,” R.E.S. XIX (1943).

12 See Greg, W. W., “The Damnation of Faustus,” M.L.R. XLI (1946).Google Scholar

13 See Hunter, G. K., John Lyly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 135-40Google Scholar. The significance of the parody in Faustus is denied by Jump (op. cit. lix-lx).

14 Doctor Faustus, ed. Boas, F. S. (London: Methuen, 1932), p. 27.Google Scholar