Chapter 1 examines London’s Rose Theatre (1587–1603), which contributed significantly to the development of western theatre. We explore Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the intimacy of the Rose against his large-scale imagined worlds. The Rose was located very near the Globe Theatre, best known for William Shakespeare’s plays. The virtual-reality model of the Rose highlights physical proximity as a key factor in this intimate amphitheatre. The chapter takes readers through blocking and how a virtual model can determine possibilities for movement and action on this stage, against both a physical and metaphysical attention to subjectivity, as audience members were shifting from the end of the medieval era into the early modern era. In this polygonal cauldron-like venue, Doctor Faustus rehearses the profound shifts of subjectivity from God-centred to human-centred. The performance laboratory research conducted in the virtual amphitheatre demonstrates a convergence of multiple theatrical forms, philosophical ideas, and audiences.

Marlowe’s play survives in the so-called A-Text of 1,517 lines, first printed in 1604, and in the B-Text of 2,121 lines, printed in 1616. The B-Text is not only the longer, but also the more overtly political play, providing more in-set spectacle that is reminiscent of court performance. The difference in length has often been explained with reference to cuts made to allow provincial acting during the plague of 1592–4 or to additions made to the play in 1602 (Greg 1950). However, Eriksen offers another solution, positing that, in fact, the longer and more politically informed B-text is the earlier and was intended for court performance by a dramatist who had already tried his hand at court drama in Dido. Doctor Faustus, Eriksen argues, would be his second attempt, written in support of the self-sovereignty of Elizabeth I before the attack of the Spanish Armada in August 1588. Its consistent staging of imperial iconography in the papal and imperial scenes, especially the use of the 'pillars' and Alexander the Great, portrays Charles V as a wise ruler in contrast to his aggressive son and the Pope as a usurper of imperial power, both posing threats to the queen.

ew works of literature have occasioned such vehement controversy as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Almost every aspect of the play has been debated: the date, the text, the authorship, and, most significant, the ethos of the drama. Commentators adopting a heroic interpretation of the tragedy see the play as a celebration of Faustus, the humanist hero of Renaissance individualism, who barters his soul in return for all the things the Renaissance privileged: knowledge, beauty, power. Conversely, Christian apologists read the play as a religiously orthodox drama condemning Faustus as a damned sinner. After seeking to guide the reader through the labyrinth of critical controversy surrounding the tragedy, I conclude that the play validates both the Christian and humanist readings, depicting a hero whom we can simultaneously admire and censure, sympathize with and deplore. The presence of contradictory perspectives evoking markedly divergent responses to the multifaceted hero suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe penned an interrogative drama that brilliantly argues on both sides of the question.