Few readers of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus would, I think, concur in the judgment pronounced by a popular contemporary critic who declares that Faustus is “essentially childish. . . . He longs for magic power like a boy who has read the Arabian Nights.” Instead of juvenile simplicity, the magician of Wittenberg presents, for most of us, a highly complex problem of personality, embodying in his single nature most magnificent aspiration, most basely earthbound satisfaction. The Faustus of the opening and closing scenes, and of certain ones between, is authentic superman, exalted by the passionate urgency of his yearning into a vast and lofty plane of being. Yet, once possessed of magic, this superman becomes, in his exercise of it, boor, buffoon, and sensualist.