Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe (1604)
“A brilliant scholar sells his soul for twenty-four years of unlimited power — then spends most of them on party tricks.”
At a Glance
Doctor Faustus, a renowned German scholar, grows dissatisfied with conventional learning and turns to necromancy. He summons the devil Mephistopheles and signs a contract in blood: twenty-four years of supernatural power in exchange for his eternal soul. Faustus uses his gifts not for the grand intellectual conquests he imagined but for increasingly trivial entertainments — pranking the Pope, conjuring grapes for a duchess, summoning Helen of Troy. Despite repeated warnings from angels, friends, and his own conscience, Faustus cannot or will not repent. When the clock strikes midnight on his final hour, devils drag him to hell.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Doctor Faustus is the first great tragedy in English — written before Shakespeare's mature tragedies and arguably the catalyst for them. Marlowe's blank verse demonstrated that English dramatic poetry could achieve the rhetorical power and psychological depth previously reserved for classical literature. Without the mighty line, there is no Hamlet, no Macbeth, no Lear. The play also established the overreacher as a tragic type that dominated Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for fifty years.
Diction Profile
High formal — blank verse throughout major scenes, with prose reserved for comic subplots and lower-class characters
Moderate