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This site allows for a side-by-side comparison between two different versions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and between each of these texts and one of Marlowe's primary sources, The English Faust Book of 1592 by P. F. Gent. The editor of this site has created the multiple links between the two extant printed editions of Doctor Faustus loosely following W. W. Greg's 1950 parallel text edition. Also available here is the first on-line text of The English Faust Book in its entirety. By presenting multiple, side-by-side versions of a single play, this edition presents each version as autonomous in its own right, rather than setting one up as the "better" or more "authentic" (because authorial) version than the other (see Basic Editorial Principles below). In addition, we hope that readers and scholars will be encouraged to do their own editorial work in comparing these two texts and that they will be able to do so more dexterously than they might have using printed editions.
Basic Editorial Principles: the difference the electronic text makes
An enormous benefit of web publication in the case of Doctor Faustus is that it allows us more easily than a print edition to move away from the production of a single composite edition (also known as a conflated or ecclectic edition) that joins parts of the A- and B-texts into a single text. The widespread print publication of composite editions has obscured many of the significant textual variants between these two texts and eroded the autonomous status of each. The electronic medium allows us to more easily maintain the full autonomy and authority of the A- and B-texts, to negotiate their differences while still displaying their similarities. As stated above, this editions produces links between theses two texts, many but not all of which parallel those identified by W. W. Greg in his valuable parallel text edition. Due to the constraints of the printed page, Greg indicated in his print edition the line breaks of the original versions of the A- and the B-texts by using a verticle slash. We have, however, recaptured the original line breaks here.
Editorial theory during much of this century was influenced enormously by the school of the New Bibliography and by W. W. Greg in particular who argued persuasively (see his "Rationale") for the development of composite editions, an editorial practice based on the idea that the "original" early modern text was in fact locatable. This editorial philosophy asserted that the original and therefore the "best" text for an editor to base his or her edition upon, known as the "copy-text," was that which remained closest to the author's own hand.
While Greg was a major force shaping editorial philosophy around the centrality of the author and in the subsequent argument for composite editions, he also, ironically, produced the first parallel text edition of Doctor Faustus As is the case in our linked-text edition, in Greg's parallel text edition, the corresponding pages of the A- and B-texts are presented in a side-by-side fashion for comparison. Greg's edition preserves a greater degree of autonomy of each text than do the many composite editions. The two texts in his edition, however, appear fragmented on the printed page so that the corresponding segments align visually; where passages are similar, they appear side-by-side and where they are different, they are paired with blank opposite pages or smaller textual gaps. While presenting a reader with two versions of the text, this edition preserves each text's autonomy to some degree. This type of display, however, also erodes textual autonomy by representing each version as broken, implying that it is only part of an imaginary and "uncorrupted" "original" text written by the author when in fact each seems to have been a distinct text (see Eric Rasmussen's Textual Companion to Doctor Faustus for excellent textual scholarchip on this play). As Leah Marcus suggests in her essay "Textual Instability and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus," (see Unediting the Renaissance, Routledge, 1996), Greg's edition seems ultimately to support the idea that it was usually necessary to conflate early texts to achieve a satisfactory edition of a work of Elizabethan literature. Marcus suggests further that Greg's side-by-side version of the A and B texts "whets the reader's appetite for the reconstruction of Marlowe's 'original' version of the play -- a version assumed to be unencumbered by infelicities and ambiguities that mar surviving printed playbooks."
In attempting to preserve more fully the autonomy of each version with this electronic edition, we are providing readers with the opportunity to study the similarities and the differences between them in their own right, without assuming that each is necessarily an imperfect copy of an original, or that one is necessarily a better approximation of "the original" than the other.
Modernizations
View the exact differences in spelling and punctuation between the original and modernized editions of the 1604 A text, the 1616 B text and The English Faust Book. These are made readily apparent through the "Change Orthography" pop-up menu at the top of the electronic text page.
Scholarly Notes, Glosses and Variants
Scholarly notes and glosses are currently available for the The English Faust Book. These provide definitions of words with complex or multiple meanings. After viewing the notes, users may return to the portion of the text that they have been using by clicking on the highlighted asterisk to the left of the note.
Textual variants, currently available for all other Marlowe texts, will eventually be added for Doctor Faustus, allowing users to select between the 3 extant versions of the A text and the 6 extant versions of the B text, as well as between later historical collations.