This week I only managed one book – but what a book to have tried, I was clearly delirious when I picked it…!
Book 25 – Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. I have long thought that Kit Marlowe is unfairly missed from school reading lists: not only a contemporary of Shakespeare, he has the added mystique of a violent death and an arrest warrant out for him when he died, aged just 29. He is the type of character that would be at least infamous in the public eye nowadays.
Anyway – onto the book! This was actually a play and as such I can’t really judge it like a book. It was in Elizabethan English which made reading it a challenge but it wasn’t as dense or complex, reading-wise, as some of the Shakespeare plays I’ve read and I was able to follow it pretty easily.
The story follows Faustus as he offers up his soul to the devil in exchange, ostensibly, for knowledge and power. The cast involves humans, angels and devils and as such runs from good to bad and everything in between.
As a play the pacing was inevitably different from that of a book – I found the whole thing a little rushed but there were a few good examples of how far Faustus was prepared to push his own morality in the knowledge that it didn’t matter. His sudden fear at the end of the play as to how he would cope in purgatory was rather less effective than may be hoped; he made the choice in knowledge of the outcome, benefitted from his pact for over 2 decades, and used his strength against others, so any sudden change of heart was a little late in the day!
In terms of structure, I am used to the rhyming couplets of Shakespeare which don’t appear as regularly here – there is much of the play that appears to be in genuine prose style as we would see it now. This in a large part accounts for the ease of reading – there is no tortured sentence structure required.
All in all, I’d say read it if you want to get a wider perception of Elizabethan tastes – as well as some Philip Sidney, my next Elizabethan to try!
Happy reading
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
Very brave! I find I have to read plays out loud to follow them, which kind of makes sense. But I rarely do 🙂
🙂
I quite enjoy reading plays because the stage directions help me imagine the scene. I’m not sure I want to tackle one of the many Shakespeare plays I haven’t tried yet, but I do have one floating in the wings so maybe I’ll build up to that…
Doctor Faustus was easier for me to read than Moby Dick, and I’m struggling with The Turn of The Screw – really hope to have finished that before I go away so I can write up the post!
Well really, who can read Moby Dick? It’s impossible! Washington Square was a nice gentle read rather than the Screw if that helps 🙂
Hehe it was certainly impossible for me 🙂
The Screw – brilliant name btw – is what I laughingly call research for the haunting/not haunting/possibly haunting novel; it’s not really helping yet but I hope by the end of the book I’ll have got some ideas about what does and doesn’t work in the confines of a novel… Not sure I can read another James for a while after this though!
These are great to read because it gives us a really good view into the classics. Well done, EJ 😀
Ah thank you 🙂
I’m really glad I split them into their own posts, it’s quite a lot of fun being able to talk about them!
[…] I start, I’ll remind you that I read Doctor Faustus a little while ago and rather liked it; I found it a relief not to have to fight through the rhyme […]