Oxford Literature Companions offer student-friendly support for A Level set texts. This guide to Doctor Faustus is ideal for use in the classroom or for revision, providing insight into characterisation, contexts and critical views, along with activities that prompt a closer analysis of the writer's language and techniques.

Oxford Literature Companions offer student-friendly support for A Level set texts. This guide to Doctor Faustus is ideal for use in the classroom or for revision, providing insight into characterisation, contexts and critical views, along with activities that prompt a closer analysis of the writer's language and techniques.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death. Tamburlaine Part One and Part Two deal with the rise to world prominence of the great Scythian shepherd-robber; The Jew of Malta is a drama of villainy and revenge; Edward II was to influence Shakespeare's Richard II. Doctor Faustus, perhaps the first drama taken from the medieval legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil, is here in both its A- and its B- text, showing the enormous and fascinating differences between the two. Under the General Editorship of Dr. Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus survives in two considerably different versions: the A-text (1604) and the B-text (1616). For generations of editors, the existence of these two versions has posed one of the most complex textual problems in English literature.

One of the glories of Elizabethan drama: Marlowe's powerful retelling of the story of the learned German doctor who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Footnotes.