It is natural, on approaching Doctor Faustus, to feel a certain sense of familiarity. Not only is it the best known, the most frequently performed, and the most widely studied of Marlowe’s plays; it is an early incarnation of a myth that has been highly influential both in ‘high’ and in popular culture, and that can be discerned (with varying degrees of obviousness) in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (first published 1808), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), not to mention the 1955 musical Damn Yankees (where a man sells his soul to become a baseball star) and the film Bedazzled (1967), to name just a few of many possible examples. The story has also attracted numerous parodies, such as the 1993 Hallowe’en special of the cartoon The Simpsons, ‘Treehouse of Horror IV’, in which Homer sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a doughnut. As this chapter will argue, though, Doctor Faustus is very much a play shaped by the debates of Marlowe’s own time, not just over religion but over science, politics and art; locating it in the historical moment within which Marlowe lived and wrote can help to dissipate the atmosphere of familiarity that surrounds the myth.

The ‘Faust Book’

In contrast to Tamburlaine, which can be dated around 1587 thanks to allusions to it in other texts, Faustus’s date is relatively uncertain. It is known to have been staged on 30 September 1594 (by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, presumably with Edward Alleyn in the title role), but this was not its first performance; the earliest known edition of its principal source, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (attributed to one ‘P. F.’), is from 1592, but the work may have been available to Marlowe before that date. The play certainly dates from after 1587, when the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten (which P. F. translated as the History) appeared in print, but recent editors of the play have tended to place it nearer the beginning than the end of the chronological window this creates.