Doctor Faustus: With The English Faust Book

(Paperback)

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Description

An authoritative text of Marlowe's classic play, with notes and a substantial introduction giving historical background, dramatic context, and performance history, including cinematic history. This text is based on the authoritative edition by Irving Ribner, updated, with much additional material on performance, by James H. Lake. Interviews with Ralph Alan Cohen of Shenandoah Shakespeare and Andreas Teuber (Mephistopheles in the Richard Burton production) discuss issues of performance. Includes illustrations, a useful timeline, a list of topics designed to promote discussion, and a up-to-date bibliography.

Reviews

Professor James Lake has done all Marlowe scholars and teachers of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a great service in once again making available Irving Ribner's magnificent edition of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Ribner's edition was the finest of its era (the 1960s) and will find an eager audience in professors who prefer to use individual paperback editions of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries rather than huge, unwieldy anthologies. Lake's new introduction traces the history of the Faust legend, places Marlowe's play in its Renaissance context, and provides a brilliant survey of the fate of Marlowe's Faustus in production on stage, film, and opera. His range of reference is astounding and extends from Simon Magus to St. Theophilis to Goethe to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to Orson Welles to Charlie Daniels ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia") and even to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. His introduction instructs even as it delights. Professor Samuel Crowl, Ohio University Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is a text used in a variety of college and university courses including great books courses, basic introductory courses in the history of drama, survey courses in the literature of the English renaissance, upper-division courses in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, senior seminars in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in the history of the Faust legend. Irving Ribner's edition of Marlowe was the finest of its generation and it will be most attractive to professors of broad survey courses in Western Liiterature and major courses in 16th Century drama to have his one-volume edition of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus once again in print. LAKE'S REISSUE Professor James Lake has done all Marlowe scholars and teachers of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a great service in once again making available Irving Ribner's magnificent edition of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Ribner's edition was the finest of its era (the 1960s) and will find an eager audience in professors who prefer to use individual paperback editions of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries rather than huge, unwieldy anthologies. Lake's new introduction traces the history of the Faust legend, places Marlowe's play in its renaissance context, and provides a brilliant survey of the fate of Marlowe's Fautsus in production on stage, film, and opera. His range of reference is astounding and extends from Simon Magus to St. Theophilis to Goethe to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to Orson Welles to Charlie Daniels ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia")and even to a Calvin and Hobbbes cartoon. His introduction instructs even as it delights. Samuel Crowl Ohio University

Author Bio

James H. Lake (Ph.D. University of Delaware) is Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and has been appointed to the faculty of the Greco Institute. He has served as Director of the LSUS Joys of Learning Humanities Seminars for the Elderly, Director of the University's Honors Program and Director of the LSUS Master of Arts in Liberal Arts Program. He has served on numerous boards, including the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Board of Directors of the Noel Foundation, and the editorial board of Shakespeare and the Classroom. He has published widely on Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Film, has edited the Focus-on- Performance edition of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and is the Series Editor for the New Kittredge Shakespeare.