The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe (affordable ebook reader .txt) 📗

of sugar and spices.” —⁠Nares ↩

Tavern. ↩

It was a common practice among our ancestors to feed horses on bread. Nares quotes from Gervase Markham a recipe for making horse-loaves. —⁠Bullen ↩

Booty. ↩

The actor was at liberty to supply the abuse. Mr. Bullen mentions that in an old play, the Tryall of Chevalry (1605), the stage direction occurs, “Exit Clown, speaking anything. ↩

The scene is an apartment in the Emperor’s palace. Much of the text of this scene is closely borrowed from the prose History. ↩

The scene is “a fair and pleasant green,” presently alluded to by Faustus, and is supposed to change to a room in Faustus’s house where the latter falls asleep in his chair. ↩

Horse-dealer. ↩

Smooth. ↩

Dr. Lopez, physician to Queen Elizabeth. He was hanged in 1594 for having received a bribe from the court of Spain to poison the Queen; as Marlowe was dead before the doctor came into notoriety, he could hardly have written this. ↩

A juggler’s term, like “presto, fly!” Hence applied to the juggler himself. —⁠Bullen ↩

Hostelry. ↩

Anhalt in the Volksbuch, Anholt in the prose History. ↩

The scene is the Court of the Duke of Anhalt. ↩

Beholden. ↩

This and the following scene are inside Faustus’s house. ↩

This stage-direction is not in the early editions: it was suggested by Dyce. ↩

Shakespeare surely remembered this line when he wrote of Helen in Troilus and Cressida, ii 2:⁠—

“Why, she is a pearl
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships.”

—⁠Bullen ↩

Dyce supposes the scene to be a room in the Old Man’s house, and Bullen “a room of Faustus’s house, whither the Old Man has come to exhort Faustus to repentance.” ↩

The scene is a room in Faustus’s house, ↩

“At si, quein malis. Cephalum complexa teoeres,
Clamares ‘lente currite noctis equi.’”

Ovid’s Amores, i 13, ll 39⁠–⁠40.

“By an exquisite touch of nature⁠—the brain involuntarily summoning words employed for other purposes in happier hours⁠—Faust cries aloud the line which Ovid whispered in Corinna’s arms.” —⁠J. A. Symonds ↩

Colophon

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
was published in 1604 by
Christopher Marlowe.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
B. Timothy Keith,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1997 by
Gary R. Young and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Absorbed in His Studies,
a painting completed in 1874 by
Eilif Peterssen.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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