The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Marlowe’s most enduring tragedy follows John Faustus, a brilliant scholar who has exhausted the conventional branches of learning and turns to black magic in pursuit of unlimited knowledge and power. He strikes a bargain with Lucifer through the demon Mephistopheles, trading his soul for twenty-four years of service. What follows swings between grand ambition and petty conjuring tricks, comedy and dread, as the clock runs down toward a damnation Faustus cannot escape. Written in the early 1590s, the play gave English drama one of its first great psychological portraits of a mind arguing itself into ruin, and its closing hour remains one of the most harrowing scenes in the language. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes the full text.