SOURCE: "Doctor Faustus: Tragedy in the Allegorical Tradition," in his Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy, Praeger Publishers, 1995, pp. 122-147.

In the following essay, Cole considers the relationship between Doctor Faustus and Marlowe's likely source, the English Faustbook..

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is not only Marlowe's best-known play but also the most often produced non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama in English professional theatre of the last century.³³ In textbooks and anthologies of drama, it stands conventionally as the most notable "bridge-piece" between the theatrical modes of medieval drama and the more modern developments associated with the Renaissance stage. The play's subject and theme have also earned for it a pivotal place in literary and cultural history, marking as it does an important threshold between images of medieval and modern man. Finally, it represents one of several artistic achievements in the Western tradition that have explored and re-explored...