The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
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
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Gary R. Young and David Widger
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Absorbed in His Studies,
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