I'm about to read Marlowe's Faustus and I just discovered there are two versions. I've read about the controversy, and I will read both, but what's your opinion, if you have one, or at least the version you prefer? Also, do you happen to know which one is the most performed?
I love your Faustus blogging, btw, despite never having much cared about or studied Faust stories!! You made me terribly curious
Thank you so much! It makes me so happy to know my posts make the subject sound interesting--which of course it is, I'm just glad to be doing it justice. 😉
As for your question, I think the 1604 A-text is the better one to start with, primarily because it has much stronger theological language (as it antedates the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which targeted irreverent religious language in dramatic texts and thus, unsurprisingly, hit the 1616 B-text of Faustus pretty hard). It also has fewer comedy shenanigans, an element of the play that I'm not actually down on as many readers, but they are much better in performance than on the page. I used to be a very staunch A-text loyalist, with little to no time for the B version, but performance has mediated that a lot. I have a pet theory that the A and B texts both derive from a lost longer version (which we could perhaps call Urfaustus as a nod to Goethe scholarship) which is structurally more similar to B but was not censored to the same degree. I am sure I'm not the first person to think of this. But there's no way to prove it, and I'm not sure how I think the external evidence of additions to the play ties in. My ideal text based on the extant versions is a mix of both, but there's no way to justify that editorially (although I do own a copy that has a composite script, it's a reprint of an edition published in 1895 and no modern editor would do it that way. It would have been kind of unusual even in 1895).
In performance, of course, you can do whatever you want and it seems like most productions do, depending on their attitude toward the comic sequences: some versions want the play to be wall-to-wall psychological horror and cut as much of the comedy as possible (which, I would argue adamantly, makes the play not work). The most widely available staged version is the 2011 Globe production, which is genuinely excellent; it's based largely on B but draws on the A-text primarily at the beginning and end. The other two filmed versions I'm aware of are both based on A, in one case (the 1967 Richard Burton film) to eliminate most of the silly bits and all of the non-Faustus bits; in the other (the 2010 Stage on Screen version) because it's primarily made to be shown in schools where the play is a set text so it's an uncut A-text (with one speech added from B). Neither of them is very good; if you're looking to watch a production, watch the Globe version.
