📄 Damnable Lives? The Inter-Textual Relations between Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and “The English Faust” Book

Summary

Kojoyan compares Christopher Marlowe's tragedy Doctor Faustus with its prose source, the English Faust Book (EFB). The EFB is P.F. Gent's free English rendering of the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten. The study asks how the play reshapes its source, looking at both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between the texts. The A-text is closer to Marlowe and more faithful to the EFB, so the author uses it as the base and sets matching episodes side by side. The comparison tracks who takes the initiative, which words are chosen, which characters are added, and when key information reaches the hero. Marlowe turns a timid, petitioning sinner into a defiant Renaissance overreacher. He adds an inner moral struggle through the Good and Evil Angels and keeps the ending uncertain for the audience. These changes are explained by the religious and political climate of the time: the play leans on Calvinist ideas of predestination and free will, while the EFB follows a more Lutheran line of hardened heart and deserved damnation. The paper shows how a source text's moral meaning can be rebuilt through small narrative and lexical shifts.

Key points

• The earliest surviving EFB edition dates from 1592 (Orwin). Its title page describes it as reprinted and corrected, which suggests an earlier lost edition that Marlowe may have used.
• The EFB has 63 chapters in three parts: the pact, the marvellous journeys, and the damnation.
• The play survives as the A-text (1604) and the B-text (1616). W. Greg once called the A-text a memorially reconstructed "bad quarto," but it is now seen as closer to Marlowe's manuscript, and all citations come from it.
• Several play elements have no counterpart in the EFB:
  • the Icarus allusion in the Prologue;
  • Faustus dismissing the university disciplines one by one;
  • the Good and Evil Angels;
  • Faustus himself offering his soul to Lucifer, whereas in the EFB Mephistopheles proposes the terms.
• Lexical contrast: the play's Faustus commands the devil, while the EFB's Faustus makes a request. OED definitions are used to support the difference. The play also warns Faustus about hell before the pact, while the EFB discusses hell only after it.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The force of a single verb or noun (order vs. polite asking) reveals the speaker's power stance, so verb choice works as a cheap signal of social relations.
• I2. Comparing two tellings of one event by asking who initiates the deal (devil proposes vs. hero offers) exposes a change in agency even when the outcome is identical.
• I3. Moving information earlier or later relative to a decision changes moral responsibility: warned before the pact means a freely chosen fate.
• I4. When a work survives in several versions, pick the one judged closest to the original as the reference before comparing against a source.
• I5. Grounding a claimed lexical contrast in standard dictionary definitions makes an interpretive argument checkable.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): Speech-act detection in prag could grade directives by strength (command vs. request) and record the implied power relation between speaker and addressee in the frame.
• I2 (world): When two texts describe the same transaction, the world model could align events and flag swapped initiator/agent roles as a meaningful difference rather than noise.
• I3 (world): Track what each character knew at the moment of each action, so event order plus knowledge states can support answers about blame and intent.
• I4 (learn): When building silver data from multiple witnesses, explicitly designate the most trustworthy witness as the reference and measure the others against it, rather than averaging them blindly.
• I5 (world): Contrasts between near-synonyms used in frames could be justified by citing WordNet glosses, which keeps each semantic distinction explainable.