The tragical history of Doctor Faustus

Abstract

This book is the result of a life-long ambition of the author's to present a version of Marlowe's famous play Dr Faustus which has come down to us in a badly mutilated form. Marlowe died shortly after it was written and successive producers replaced much of his text with scenes of knock-about farce. Enough indications of the original form of the play remain, in the opinion of A. D. Hope, to enable a tentative restoration. He does not claim, of course, to have restored Marlowe{u2019}s original text, but to have produced a possible picture of what the missing scenes may have been like, using his own instincts and habits as a poet but aiming at something like Marlowe's own manner and the usage of Elizabethan English and stage-craft.