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Doctor Faustus and A Shrew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Raymond A. Houk
Raymond A. Houk*
Affiliation:
Washington, D. C.
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Extract

This study of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus and The Taming of a Shrew is related to the preceding study on “Shakespeare's Shrew and Greene's Orlando” in that both involve parallels between A Shrew and contemporary plays—parallels which have been thought by H. D. Sykes and others to involve Samuel Rowley in the rôle of a contributor to each. Instead of such a common author a theory of common sources in earlier versions of the plays is herein maintained. Shakespeare is apparently not involved in these parallels with Doctor Faustus either as the author of The Taming of the Shrew or as the probable author of the original version of the play.

The parallels with A Shrew which are herewith cited seem to call for a theory of a common source in an earlier form of Doctor Faustus than the 1604 and 1616 texts.1

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , December 1947, pp. 950 - 957
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 Cf. Boas, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (London, 1932), pp. 4, 22-23.

2 The Taming of a Shrew (London, 1908), p. 92. Boas printed five parallels between A Shrew and Doctor Faustus in the appendix to his edition of A Shrew, pp. 93-98, and again in his edition of Doctor Faustus, op. cit., pp. 198-199.

3 Boas, Faustus, pp. 22-23, 30, 74, 139, 199.

4 C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910), p. 156. Boas, Faustus: i. iva. 1-4, p. 74.

5 Brooke, p. 195. Boas: i. ivb.1-4, p. 74. Cf. H. D. Gray, “The Taming of a Shrew,” PQ, xx (1941), 332. The version of this parallel in the Wily Beguiled of 1606, lines 1094-99 in the Malone Society edition (London, 1912), may be explained as the latter's imitation of A Shrew. Cf. Sykes, Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (Oxford, 1924), pp. 69-74, published in part in 1920 in a Shakespeare Association pamphlet.

6 Sykes, op. cit., pp. 54-67, argued that Rowley may have revised the Faustus of 1616. Greg in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso (Oxford, 1923) hazards that “It is possible that some of Rowley's work may appear in the version of 1604.” Boas would go so far as to suggest that Rowley may have been a collaborator of Marlowe himself (Faustus, op. cit., pp. vi. 27-28).

7 Greg, op. cit., p. 360. Cf. Houk, PMLA, lxii (1947), 661-662, 667-668.

8 Sykes, op. cit., pp. 53, 60, cites four passages in The Famous Victories in which the phrase occurs.

9 The phrase “clapping him upon the head” appears in the English Faust Book. I cite the reprint of The Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus, translated into English by P. F., Gent. (London, 1592), in H. Logeman's The English Faust-Book of 1592 (Gand, 1900), p. 108. Cf. Boas, Faustus, p. 192.

10 Sykes does not seem to have identified the Marlowe imitating poet in A Shrew with either Rowley or William Birde. Sykes, op. cit., p. 66, stated, “Birde's share in the Faustus alterations is, I think, confined to those made in the closing scenes of the play.”

11 Scholars concede that Marlowe may have written the prose scene in Doctor Faustus which is paralleled in A Shrew, ii.ii.1-4. See T. M. Parrott, MLN xxxviii (1933), 399, on Boas, Faustus, op. cit., p. 27.

12 Boas (Faustus, p. 30, note 1) wrote: “Rowley was the author in both cases.” Cf. Boas' note on iv.iiib. 73-74, p. 139, wherein he refers to “the apparent echo of these lines in The Taming of a Shrew.” Cf. Boas, Faustus, p. 199.

13 Brooke, p. 216. Boas: iv.iiib.71-76, p. 139. Percy Simpson does not list these lines among those which he attributes to Marlowe in “The 1604 Text of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vii (1921), 154.

14 Logeman, op. cit., p. 16.

15 Brooke, pp. 153, 149, 166, lines 235-238, 111-112, 639-640. 16 Boas: i.iiib.1-4; i,ib.84-85; ii.iib.28-29, pages 68, 62, 90.

17 Tucker Brooke thinks that “Marlowe must have written ‘earth,‘ ” PQ, xii (1933), 20.

18 Brooke, p. 185.

19 The episode of the “inchanted Castle,” not staged in the play, and not specifically mentioned in the 1604 Doctor Faustus, is given in Chap. xl of the English Faust Book (Logeman, op. cit., pp. 93-95) after, not before, the episode of the grapes in Chap. xxxix, pp. 92-93.

20 Brooke, pp. 220-221. Boas: iv.viib.8-9, p. 152.

21 Brooke, p. 185.

22 Brooke, p. 221. Boas: iv.viib.10-13, p. 152.

23 Brooke, p. 185.

24 Brooke, p. 221. Boas: iv.viib.14-18, p. 153.

25 Brooke, p. 185.

26 Brooke, p. 221. Boas: iv.viib.19-21, p. 153.

27 Boas, Faustus, op. cit., p. 190. Faustus' explanation that he had provided the grapes, and other rare fruits, “by means of a swift spirit,” would seem to indicate that, as in the English Faust Book (Logeman, op. cit., pp. 92-93), Mephastophilis was not originally visible to the Duke and Duchess.

28 Brooke, pp. 185-186, lines 1217-36.

29 Brooke, p. 221, lines 1276-89. Boas: iv.viib.22-36, pp. 153-154.

30 Simpson has decided that the “quarto of 1604” is “the earliest and least contaminated text” of Doctor Faustus, op. cit., xiv (1929), 30.

31 Tucker Brooke declared in 1910 that the English Faust Book “was used not only by-Marlowe himself, but also by the elaborators of the 1616 text,” op. cit., p. 142.