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
