SOURCE: "Five-Act Structure in Doctor Faustus," in Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 8, No. 4, Summer, 1964, pp. 77-91. Reprinted in Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1988, pp. 13-25.

In the following essay, Hunter analyzess the reluctance of Romantic critics to treat Doctor Faustus as a theatrical work and argues for the dramatic unity of the play.

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.

What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is...