What You're Actually Looking At
Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about a man who sells his soul. The version most people study in college today is called The Second Part of Doctor Faustus, though the title varies between manuscripts. The text exists in two major early versions - the 1604 A-text and the later 1616 B-text. They're not the same play. They share the same backbone but differ in almost every other detail, including how many scenes exist, which characters appear, and what happens to Faustus at the end. I ran into this problem when I was compiling performance materials for a small theater production. Someone had ordered the B-text thinking it was the original, which meant we were working with an expanded version that includes clown scenes and additional comic relief that probably wasn't in Marlowe's hands at all. The casting call went out to twelve people for a script that only needed eight in the A-text. By the time I caught the discrepancy during rehearsal, three actors had already learned their blocking. Took me two weeks and a coffee-fueled night of cross-referencing facsimiles to figure out what lines actually belonged where. The workaround was to pick one version and commit to it. I went with the A-text because it's tighter, less padded, and arguably closer to what Marlowe actually wrote before publishers and company managers added stuff. For our purposes, that meant cutting the extended Low Comedy sequences in Act 3 and treating the Hermit scene as optional rather than mandatory. If you're doing this for academic reasons, pick a version. Don't read both and then confuse yourself about which one you're supposed to be analyzing.
Getting The Second By Christopher Marlowe
The full text is freely available online. Project Gutenberg has the A-text and the B-text separately. The Internet Shakespeare Editions also maintains a reliable scholarly version with annotations. For a printable copy, the Gutenberg edition is sufficient - no need to pay for a modern critical edition unless you're doing deep analysis on textual variants between the two versions. The differences are significant enough that serious papers usually cite which version they're working from. If you want a physical copy, the Norton Critical Edition of Marlowe's complete works is worth the price if you're a student. The appendices cover the textual question thoroughly and save you from having to buy separate scholarly articles explaining why scholars can't agree on whether the second part is even by Marlowe. And that's another thing most beginners miss.
The Authorship Problem Nobody Warns You About
The Second Part of Doctor Faustus has disputed authorship. Most scholars think Marlowe wrote the first part, then someone else - possibly Thomas Nashe or Richard Brome, though no one really knows - wrote or heavily revised the second part. The B-text in particular shows signs of having been reworked by a different hand, possibly after Marlowe was already dead. That means when you read it, you're not just reading Marlowe. You're reading a collaborative product at best, a ghostwriting job at worst. This matters because the tone shifts. The first part is relentless - Faustus makes his pact, regrets it, and heads toward damnation with a pace that doesn't let up. The second part slows down. There are more comic scenes, more exposition, and the ending actually has some version of a redemptive moment depending on which text you're reading. The A-text ending is famously ambiguous. Faustus cries out for mercy, but then the devil drags him to hell anyway. Or does he? The stage directions vary by edition. The B-text is more explicit about the damnation and adds a final chorus that tries to tie things up with a neat moral bow. The pitfall here is assuming the second part is just "Marlowe writing differently." It's not Marlowe writing differently. It's a different writer, possibly a different era of theatrical practice. The Elizabethan public playhouse and the Jacobean one weren't identical institutions, and the demands on a two-part play differed from what audiences expected by 1616. If you're writing a paper and treating the second part as if it's the same artistic project as the first, your argument will show that you didn't notice the seam.
Get the Full Details
How the Play Actually Works
Faustus is at Wittenberg. He's tired of studying the usual subjects - logic, medicine, law, theology - because none of them satisfy his ambition. He turns to magic. Mephistopheles appears. A demon is summoned. Faustus signs a contract in his own blood and gets twenty-four years of service from Lucifer's representative. This is not a metaphor. It's a literal deal, written out with witnesses and ink, and the play keeps reminding you of the paperwork throughout. Then Faustus does things. He travels, plays pranks on the Pope, summons Alexander the Great's ghosts, gives a lecture to the Duke of Vanholt that involves disappearing and reappearing with grapes. The comic episodes - the clown scenes especially in the B-text - get their own attention and sometimes their own plot threads. Faustus's original plan was to use his power to gain knowledge and pleasure. He mostly gets bored and starts playing tricks on people who don't deserve it. The structure is episodic rather than tightly plotted. This is typical of Elizabethan drama in general, but it's more pronounced here because the second part especially jumps between scenes without clear causal chains. Characters appear, say something, leave. The focus stays on Faustus but the action doesn't accumulate the way it does in something like Hamlet. It accumulates differently. You're watching a man waste a supernatural gift on petty amusements until the clock runs out.
What Teachers Usually Miss About It
Most introductory courses treat Doctor Faustus as a straightforward Protestant morality play. Faustus sins, he's damned, learn your lesson. That reading works for the first part in isolation. It doesn't work as well for the second part, and it barely works for the first part if you actually read the text carefully instead of relying on fifty years of classroom shorthand. Here's what gets glossed over: Marlowe gives Faustus plenty of chances to back out. The Good Angel appears multiple times. Faustus talks about repentance. He even tries to burn the contract at one point. The theology of the play is more complicated than "Faustus made a bad choice so he gets punished." There's a sustained argument about free will, predestination, and whether damnation is truly inevitable or self-inflicted. The play keeps opening that question and never quite closes it, which is probably why the ending looks so different in the two versions. Another thing people skip: the comedy isn't accidental padding. Even in the A-text, which is leaner than the B-text, there are moments of genuine humor - the Knight of the Ghost, the horse-courser episode, Faustus's own increasingly desperate attempts at entertainment. Marlowe understood that a two-hour play about a guy realizing he's going to hell for twenty-four years would be unbearably dreary without breaks. The comedy does structural work. It gives the audience room to breathe and makes Faustus's despair hit harder when the jokes stop.
A Note on Staging
If you're producing this play, here's the practical reality: the A-text runs about two hours with minimal cuts. The B-text can stretch past two and a half depending on how much of the expanded comic material you keep. Both versions require a devil on stage, a dragon for the final entrance, and enough resources for magic effects that range from simple to moderately elaborate. The summoning of Helen of Troy is a staging moment that tends to determine whether a production feels theatrical or just literary. Don't try to modernize the setting unless you have a specific reason. Setting Doctor Faustus in a boardroom or a university office usually strips the play of its actual stakes. The magic is the point. The fact that a man literally negotiates with demons is not incidental to the themes. Removing it turns the play into a generic story about ambition without the mechanics that make the themes work.
What to Do With It
Pick a version. Read it straight through before you read any criticism. The A-text first if you haven't read either. Then check the B-text if you want to understand the textual question. Write your analysis around the version you actually read. Cite line numbers, not page numbers from secondary editions. And if you're using the B-text, acknowledge that it may not be Marlowe's words. That alone will separate your paper from most of the others in the class. The play isn't great literature because it's profound. It's worth reading because it's messy, contradictory, and alive with the specific anxieties of a playwright who died at twenty-nine and left behind a career that shaped English drama more than anyone except Shakespeare. The second part is flawed. It's also interesting in ways the first part isn't, precisely because it's doing different things and probably written by different hands. Treat it like what it is - a draft of a draft, a revision of a revision - and you'll find more to say about it than the standard damnation-allegory reading allows.
