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Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The 1602
Additions
by
Fredson Bowers
The early editors of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus knew only the B-text, which had its first edition in 1616, until in 1850 Alexander Dyce printed both the A-text of 1604 and the B-text of 1616, a procedure followed by Peter Cunningham. However, the next editor, A. H. Bullen, in 1885 selected the A-version as his copy-text on the belief that it alone represented the pure original play whereas the 1616 text was a later revised version containing the additions for which Henslowe on 22 November 1602 paid £4 on behalf of the Admiral's men to Samuel Rowley and William Birde, or Borne. Bullen's hypothesis was followed by Tucker Brooke in his influential 1910 edition of Marlowe. This view prevailed until in 1946 Leo Kirschbaum exploded the bombshell of "The Good and Bad Quartos of Doctor Faustus" (The Library, n.s. 26 [1946], 272-294), which effectively argued that the A-text represents a so-called 'bad quarto,' that is to say a memorial reconstruction of some acting version contrived without direct reference to any manuscript in the authorial line. Because of the paraphrases of this A-version in the anonymous Taming of a Shrew (1594) and an apparent reference in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600-1601) to a scene in the B-text not present in the A-text (combined with what Kirschbaum took to be internal cross-references in A to episodes present only in B), Kirschbaum concluded that the A-text was a memorial reconstruction of the B-text as we know it from the 1616 quarto and hence that neither text contained the Rowley-Birde additions.
Sir Walter Greg had been working on parallel lines, but he could not have escaped being seriously influenced by Kirschbaum's conclusions, which he made the basis for the extraordinarily intricate and detailed reconstruction of the history of both texts in the introduction to his parallel-text edition of Doctor Faustus in 1950. It was peculiarly
In the opinion of the present writer Kirschbaum's argument needs re-examination, and a more scrupulous examination of the problem (removed from the question of the A-text as bad quarto) will suggest that the A-text — if it is a report as seems most probable — refers back to the original version of the play whereas the B-text of 1616 contains not only the 1602 Rowley-Birde additions but also their revisions, chiefly confined to the comic middle part of the play, conventionally assigned as Acts III and IV, but also affecting the tragic action in Act V.[2]
Five parallel passages are commonly accepted as borrowings from Faustus in the anonymous Taming of A Shrew entered in the Stationers' Register on 2 May 1594 and often considered to be itself a bad quarto of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew instead of a source of that play. Two of these passages echo lines in which the A and B-texts agree.[3] One repeats the word from the B-text in a passage where both versions otherwise agree,[4] and one the word from the A-text in similar circumstances.[5] These have no evidential value in respect to the 1602 additions. On the other hand, the fifth case (if legitimate) may echo a passage in a scene of the play where the A-text is wanting and the B-text alone is available. This is A Shrew, IV.ii.60-61, 'This angrie sword should rip thy hatefull chest, | And hewd thee smaller than the Libian sands', generally taken to be derived from Faustus, 1397-98, 'And had you cut my body with your swords, | Or hew'd this flesh and bones as small as sand' (IV.ii). Moreover, although Greg (p. 28) admits that the parallel is not necessarily convincing, he and Kirschbaum agree that it can be strengthened by a reference in The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.v.67ff. (TLN 2283-87) in Bardolph's speech, 'for so soone as I came beyond Eaton, they threw me off, from behinde one of them, in a slough of myre; and set spurres, and away; like three Germane-divels; three Doctor Faustasses.' This is taken to refer to the same scene, in which Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino are
If the B-text contains the additions of 1602, these two scenes of Benvolio's attempted revenge and its punishment by Faustus must be among them, for they are wanting in the A-text and are intimately bound up, also, with the Emperor Carolus scene and its quite different treatment of the scoffing knight in the A-text. A third piece, one that may be called internal evidence, has also been adduced by Kirschbaum (pp. 285-286) and approved by Greg. In the A-text the Horse-courser, entering wet, cries out, 'he bade me I should ride him into no water; now, I thinking my horse had had some rare Qualitie that he would not have had me knowne of, I like a ventrous youth, rid him into the deepe pond' (Greg, A-text, 1180-83). In the B-text Scene xv (IV.v) which is absent in the A-text, the Horse-courser's narrative in a different context reads, 'Doctor Fauster bad me . . . in any case ride him not into the water. Now sir, I thinking the horse had had some quality that he would not have me know of, what did I but rid him into a great river' (1540-43), whereas the parallel B-text of the incident itself (Scene xiv) as quoted above in the A-text has simply, 'I riding my horse into the water, thinking some hidden mystery had beene in the horse, I had nothing under me but a little straw' (1484-86). Because the language of the A-text seems to repeat that of the B-text in Scene xv wanting in A, not the language of the parallel B-text of Scene xiv, Greg believed that it established the presence of the text of Scene xv when the A-text was memorially reconstructed.
On these three pieces of evidence, in the last analysis, rests the whole case for the absence in the B1 quarto of the 1602 additions. It is now my task to re-examine Kirschbaum's and Greg's postulate, deriving from this evidence, that the whole B-text as we have it is a unified one that represents substantially the original composition of the play.
The most obvious point of attack are those scenes, or major parts of scenes, that are present in the B-text but wanting in the A-text. These are in order: (1) lines [831-835], 836-980 of Scene viii (III.i) which represent all but the opening of the scene and concern themselves with Faustus' decision to forgo the sights of Rome in favor of disrupting the Pope's feast, the rescue of Bruno, and the exit of the Pope and his train to prepare for the banquet; (2) Scenes xii-xiii
In Greg's view (pp. 23-29) these are all A-text subtractions from the B-text original, not B's additions to the A-form of the text.[8] Nevertheless, the evidence for at least some of this material points in the contrary direction. The first of these scenes, in Rome, illustrates with superior clarity the case for addition and revision. Both the A-text and the B-text prefix Scene viii (III.i) with Chorus 2 (753.2-778.1) — the A-text, however, omitting 760-772, 774 — which recounts Faustus' eight days' trip through the heavens and then, on a second trip 'to prove Cosmography', introduces him as first arriving in Rome in order to take part in St. Peter's feast that is being celebrated on this day. Both texts then continue with Faustus' account of his travels through France and Italy, and then his question where they now are, followed by Mephostophilis' reply and his description of Rome. Both then agree in Faustus' impatience to see the sights of Rome and in Mephostophilis' advice to remain in the papal palace to 'take some part of holy Peters feast.'
At this point the two texts diverge. The A-text continues, normally,
Stylistic evidence confirms addition and revision. The reviser of this scene was free with rhyming couplets whereas none had appeared earlier in the play; moreover, couplets have no place in the original opening of the scene. Liberal use of rhyme, indeed, sets off the work of this particular reviser, as well as his occasional practice of completing a part line with the opening line of the next speech, a convention only sparingly used, if at all, in the original manuscript.[10] This partiality for couplets, it must be emphasized, is no part of the play where the A-text is present: couplets occur only in certain of the scenes, or parts of scenes, in which the B-text is the sole authority. Thus they constitute the best stylistic test available to isolate the work of this reviser, for they are unique to him.
Scene xii (IV.ii), 1324.2-1430.4, contains at least fourteen rhyming couplets, and Scene xiii (IV.iii), 1430.5-1456.1, in its short length has nine. These two linked scenes found only in B depict the attempted revenge of Benvolio and the punishment Faustus gives to Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino. Little doubt can exist that these two scenes are the work of the author of the additions and revisions in Scene viii and hence that they participate in the additions made to the B-text. Scene xii has one completed line between speeches, and Scene xiii has four. The elaboration of the material here away from the simple dramatization of the Historie in the A-text of Scene xi is obvious, and the same difficulty exists here as with Scene viii in accepting the A-text as a memorial reconstruction. That is, the A-text knows nothing of the elaborate byplay marking Scene xi between Benvolio and his friends, or between Benvolio and Faustus, that associates this new material with revised Scene viii through the introduction of Saxon Bruno, and that leads to the revenge and its punishment. Although the exhibition of Alexander to Carolus is recalled in its salient details, the reporter of the A-text would need to have suffered a complete blackout when it came to the extensive comic material that is interwoven in Scene xi, so complete indeed that not a single detail was remembered and he was forced to return to the Historie to rebuild in an elementary and quite different action the lost original. This is not a hypothesis that lends itself to ready belief when the stylistic evidence as well as the evidence for elaboration, not for subtraction, associates this extensive section with the additions in Scene viii.
In Scene xviii (V.ii) the opening triumph of Lucifer, 1796.2-1819, has only one couplet (1811-12) but two completions of part lines. By common consent it stands out stylistically from what follows in the scene, it is wanting in the A-text, and thus it can be assigned with some confidence to the revision of the original play. In corroboration, a faulty join of the new material is revealed by the repetition in its brief interlude between Faustus and Wagner of information given in Wagner's soliloquy (present in both texts and therefore part of the original) beginning Scene xvii (V.i), a repetition reminiscent of the same overlapping of old and new material in Scene viii.[11] Finally, 1879.1-1925, another set piece later in Scene xviii, with its visions of heaven and of hell distinguishes itself from the surrounding action by containing at least ten couplets and two completed part lines. It is unknown to the A-text[12] and stylistically associates itself with the similar cases earlier of B-text additions.
The two crucial allied facts are that these noted scenes are unique to the B-text and, simultaneously, share distinctive stylistic characteristics not found elsewhere in the B-text (or in the A-text). The double association is critically significant in setting these scenes apart from the rest of the material that can be assigned as part of the original manuscript on the grounds that it is shared by both the A-and the B-texts. These scenes distinctive to the B-text are important in the comic action of Acts III and IV but they also touch up the tragic last scene. It now remains to examine the only other scene unique in the B-text, Scene xv (IV.v), 1504.2-1557.1, which instead is a part of the farcical action, with its conclusion in 1588.1-1668 attached to the comic action of Scene xvi (IV.vi).
In these two prose sections involving the clowns' drinking bout and their interruption of the magic show at Vanholt, the touchstone of couplets and completed lines cannot be applied, and little can be done to associate the language with that in the verse scenes by the couplet writer.[13] General probability, then, constitutes the argument. That is, all other scenes unique in the B-text can be isolated as distinctive additions set apart from the style and matter of the original manuscript as shown by the agreement of the two texts; hence some special circumstance would need to be present to justify any hypothesis that, alone of all the scenes wanting in the A-text, the tavern action in Scene xv and the aftermath at Vanholt in Scene xvi were omitted in A1 because of total memorial failure or the exigencies of provincial production.[14] Two small hints may, instead, suggest that these sections are also additions, presumably by the same reviser(s) who supplied the other unique B-scenes. In the first place, the original scene at Vanholt— although it exhausted its source in the Historie insofar as the Historie account could be dramatized[15] — was brief and relatively undramatic, especially after the more extensive Carolus episode presented in the original play (as reconstructed by the A-text). Since in the Carolus episode the reviser chose to expand the action of the magic-show by an extensive and completely original reworking of the Historie's account of the knight and his horns (reproduced from the Historie with some faithfulness in the A-text), it may be suggested that he would have felt even more keenly the need to piece out the spare and static magic business at Vanholt by similar extraneous material. In contrast to the Carolus scene where the Historie and the original version of the play suggested the action to elaborate, the Historie was of no use for the additions to Vanholt and the grapes. It may be conjectured, therefore, that with some ingenuity the reviser chose to extend the Horse-courser action beyond its conclusion both in the Historie and in the A-text original. He took hints about the eating of the hay
It will be observed that this hypothesis for the addition of the farcical scene in the tavern, with its transferred recapitulation of the Horse-courser's adventure with Faustus, answers Kirschbaum's and Greg's postulate (described above, earlier) according to which the A-text (1180-83 in Greg's numbering) in the original scene echoes language not of the parallel B-text but instead of the B-text recapitulation in the tavern scene, wanting in A, and hence provides evidence that this tavern scene had been present in the original manuscript where it affected the A-text memorial reconstruction of the earlier scene. Instead, if one hypothesizes the addition of the tavern episode, one may reasonably associate with this a corresponding revision in the earlier scene of the B-text Horse-courser's account of his adventure since it was to be repeated in the later tavern narratives of Faustus' mischiefmaking. Thus one need only take it that the supposed echo in A-text's Scene xiv (IV.iv) of B-text's Scene xv (IV.v), 1540-43, in fact represents no more than A's version of the original scene before its revision and hence before the B reviser's transfer of the fuller account in Scene xiv to the new Scene xv (with the corresponding reduction in B Scene xiv of the original details preserved in A). The narrative in Scene xv is thereby made no more repetitious than is effective in the retelling of a good joke, and the more precise detail transferred to the tavern scene leads naturally to the concluding jest of Faustus' wooden leg in expanded Scene xvi, which requires the tavern narrative as its motivation.[16] No technical objection on the evidence of the A-text
The view that the scenes unique to the B-text represent the Rowley-Birde additions of 1602 has been objected to on the ground that these are not extensive enough to warrant the payment of £4, close to the price for a new play.[17] At this distance it is difficult to adjudicate the merits of such a payment, which presumably would be based more on the intrinsic importance of the new material for reviving the popularity of an old play than on mere length. If the number of editions of the B-text (six between 1616 and 1631) is any guide to its popularity on the stage — and editions may sometimes coincide with revivals — Rowley and Birde earned their money. It is possible, however, that they earned it more thoroughly than is usually supposed. That is, the question of less identifiable revision as well as of the readily isolated new additions must be raised.[18] That there was revision of Scene xiv as a consequence of the addition of Scene xv has been suggested above, with some evidence in its favor. The new material that expanded Scene xi at the Emperor's court as preparation for the added scenes xii and xiii has also been mentioned as a revision of the A-text's elementary (or original) treatment of the scoffing knight dramatized from the Historie. Although these two cases of revision were required by the additions that followed, it is possible that other scenes were worked over in consideration of the £4 payment. In this connection it may be no accident that the B-text's Scenes vii (II.iii) and x (III.ii) substitute
Since one result of the reviser's observed ministrations was the overlapping or the awkwardness of his joins to original material as in the beginning of the scene at Rome and in the bequest to Wagner,[21] other such difficulties may reveal his hand. One of these is the very odd presentation of two magic books to Faustus, the first by Mephistophilis in Scene v (II.i), 543-551, and the second by Lucifer in Scene vi (II.ii), 717-720, in both cases Faustus' thanks being cast in identical words. It is just possible that the reviser was working over the Seven Deadly Sins action and then, moving back, excised the weak prose continuation of
Other anomalies in the play may refer back to the reviser. Some modern editors have found that the exhibition of Helen to the Scholars in Scene xvii (V.i) is inferior on the whole in the B-text to the A-text version.[24] In the same scene, moreover, the first speech of the Old Man is so completely different in both versions as to go beyond memorial corruption in the A-text and to require actual rewriting in one or the other form of the play. Similarly, it is perplexing whether the A-text's omission of the Scholars' discovery of Faustus' body represents Marlowe's original ending and a later production cut, or whether the
The alterations made in the B-text at a later time than the formation of the A-text are not confined, then, to the additions, important as these are, but also include revision and expansion of comic and farcical scenes already in existence as well as some reworking of the tragic action in Act V. That these alterations are on the whole extensive enough to be identified with the additions by Rowley-Birde for which £4 were paid in 1602 is the proposition I wish to advance. They cannot be identified with anything else, certainly. Indeed, the characteristics of the verse in the additions to Scene viii in Rome, with special reference
The question at last arises whether the evidence herein adduced for the special characteristics that set apart the unique B-scenes and the expansions of other scenes, together with the revision, all of which points irresistibly to the Rowley-Birde additions of 1602, is strong enough to stand against the three pieces of contrary evidence — from The Taming of A Shrew, from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and from the supposed memorial echoes in the A-text of unique B-scenes. The 'echoes' can be discarded immediately on the ground that they are as reasonably to be assigned to revisions in the B-text as to memorial recollection in the A-text. The suggestion that A Shrew, IV.ii.60-61, 'This angrie sword should rip thy hatefull chest, | And hewd thee smaller than the Libian sands' is a paraphrase of Faustus, 1387-98, 'And had you cut my body with your swords, | Or hew'd this flesh and bones as small as sand' in the unique B-scene xii (IV.ii) is, in Greg's words (p. 28), 'one of the least convincing of the parallels, and cannot be taken by itself to prove anything at all.' But Greg continues, 'It is, however, supported by a curious point relating to another of the scenes peculiar to B,' and he describes the allusion in The Merry Wives of Windsor to the punishment of Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino, and approves of the authenticity of this latter reference. He concludes, 'Since, then, The Merry Wives was probably written in 1600 to 1601, it follows that the scene in question was at any rate no part of the Rowley-Birde additions of November 1602.'
Although not so positive as Kirschbaum and Greg of the precise application of this reference to the B-text's Scenes xii-xiii,[28] I am not
In the midst of these uncertainties about the exact form of the Shakespeare text, therefore, no one can say for sure that the allusion to Faustus was present in The Merry Wives on its initial writing in 1600-1, given the known facts that suggest Folio alterations in the play.
Notes
It is true that one of the more substantial pieces of evidence in favor of memorial transmission involves what appears to be knowledge in the A-text of episodes in the B-text either not used in A or else so materially altered as to represent quite independent treatment in A. If the view of this evidence is reversed and the references become not debased memorial recollection in A of the present scenes in B but instead B-text revisions, as I propose to argue, the case for A1 as a bad quarto is weakened but not, I am strongly inclined to think, destroyed. Greg himself had his moments of concern about various discrepancies in this evidence and in its direction when he contemplated seriously as an alternative the possibility: perhaps revision unknown to the A-reporter had been made in the manuscript underlying the B-text on the occasion of the conjectured purchase of a Pembroke's men promptbook in 1593 for the acting of the play by the Admiral's company in the autumn of 1594. In the end, however, he decided (pp. 95-97) that the weight of the evidence was not sufficiently in favor of such revision to warrant the complexities of hypothesis that would follow, and thus he decided to 'proceed on the assumption that the B-text is substantially of one date, and represents the play as drafted in the autumn of 1592.'
Thomas Bushell, the publisher of the 1604 quarto, entered for his copy on 7 January 1601, almost two years before the payment on 22 November 1602 to Rowley and Birde. It is a reasonable conjecture that the copy used for entrance did not differ from that in the 1604 quarto, whether or not lost editions intervened between 1601 and 1604. That is, although it might be theoretically possible for Bushell between 1602 and 1604 to have acquired a redaction of the A-text containing the additions that differed from the original copy he had entered, the consequences of this line of speculation are scarcely to be contemplated: it would follow either (a) Bushell purchased a memorial text in 1601 and then a second memorial text after 1602; or (b) Bushell purchased a good text in 1601 but published a different shortened and debased text, still without the additions, in 1604.
A Shrew, II.i.79-80, 'To seeke for strange and new-found pretious stones, | And dive into the Sea to gather pearle' from Faustus, 109-112, 'I'le have them flie to India for gold; | Ransacke the Ocean for Orient Pearle, | And search all corners of the new-found-world | For pleasant fruites, and Princely delicates' (I.i). (All quotations from Faustus and line-numbers are from my edition of Marlowe [Cambridge University Press, 1973].) Second, A Shrew, III.vi. 31-32, 'As once did Orpheus with his harmony, | And ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe' from Faustus, 579-581, 'And hath not he that built the walles of Thebes | With ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe, | Made musicke with my Mephistophilis?' (II.ii).
A Shrew, Induction,i.9-12, 'Now that the gloomie shadow of the night | Longing to view Orions drisling lookes | Leapes from th' antarticke world unto the skie | And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath', which is identical with Faustus 229-232 (I. iii) except that the A-text has 'earth' where A Shrew and the B-text read 'night'.
A Shrew, II.ii.1-4, 'Boy. Come hither, sirrha, boy. | Sander. Boy, oh disgrace to my person, sowns, boy of your face, you have many boies with such pickadevantes, I am sure'. Here the Faustus A-text, though departing slightly in other respects, reads the key word 'pickadevaunts' whereas the closer B-text (probably by the ministration of the inscriber or editor) reads 'beards.' A-text, 'Wag. Sirra boy, come hither. | Clo. How, boy? swowns boy, I hope you have seene ma-|ny boyes with such pickadevaunts as I have. Boy quotha?'; B-text, 343-345, 'Wagner. Come hither sirra boy. | Robin. Boy? O disgrace to my person: Zounds, boy in your face, you have seene many boyes with such beards I am sure' (I.iv).
With these must almost certainly be associated lines 1154.2-1203.1, the beginning of Scene xi (IV.i), which introduce Martino, Frederick, and Benvolio and detail the preparations for the entrance of the Emperor with Faustus, and no doubt lines 1316-1320, Benvolio's threats at the conclusion of the scene which prepare for the action of Scenes xii-xiii.
The variations in the Old Man's lines are also in question, as is the Scholars' discovery of Faustus' body, and will be considered later.
Greg's reasoning in this matter is almost wholly directed by his feeling that additions of this nature and extent would necessarily represent the Rowley-Birde additions, which he is unwilling to admit. He is well aware of the difficulties of his position but believes that he is choosing the lesser of two evils. Similarly, although tempted by the hypothesis for some revision in 1594, he does not concede that the weight of the evidence justifies any departure from his general position that the B-text throughout is unified and was prepared only from the original foul papers, any revision in these being confined substantially to Marlowe's second thoughts made in the promptbook itself as represented by the A-text report.
From the presence in the B-text of seemingly original lines 760-772, 774, missing from the A-text Chorus, we know that this Chorus was available in the manuscript and was not an A-text invention. The curious anomaly in B 845-846 sounds almost as if it were Mephostophilis who had been suggesting a trip through Rome and it was Faustus, not Mephostophilis, who was urging participation in the feast before seeing the sights. Some slight possibility may exist that the reviser proposed to cut or alter part of the A-text beginning the scene, as well as the Chorus, but if so it is clear that the particular original manuscript from which the B-text inscriber was working had not been adjusted to correspond with the reviser's papers. There is no dispute between the two texts, however, that the initial arrival in the Pope's palace was merely to have a pied à terre, and the decision to participate in the feast before sightseeing — no matter who proposed it — followed as a consequence.
See 868 in this scene and references below. A completed line of this sort indicated earlier in the Cambridge text at 595 may be authentic or accidental. The tendency, though more marked in the work of this reviser than in the original, is not a prominent one, however: see 889-890 and 901-902 for opportunities that he passed over.
Just possibly the reviser proposed to excise Wagner's original soliloquy as the devils carry in the banquet (1674-80) since it is not essential to the action at this point, although closer to the Historie than the revision. The new position has the virtue of associating Wagner's farewell with that of the Scholars and thus of concentrating the material.
That the visions of heaven and of hell require elaborate stage properties has been taken as evidence that these lines were omitted in the A-text although present in the original manuscript. This might provide an acceptable reason were it not that it does not apply to 1880-91 within the action — Mephostophilis' exultation over Faustus — nor to the following dialogue in 1892-1898 between the Good and Bad Angels. Moreover, if the exigencies of provincial performance had prevented a descent of the throne, only minor adjustment in the Good Angel's lines 1899-1908 would be necessary to do without it, and not much more in the Bad Angel's description of the torments in hell and his farewell (1909-25) that follows just before the clock strikes eleven and Marlowe's own great final soliloquy begins. However, once the stylistic link of the couplets and the completed part lines is made with the other sections of the play unique with the B-text, the too easy rationalization of the A-text omissions here as stemming from provincial performance loses its pertinence.
However, the two farcical scenes are by the same writer, whether or not he was the author of the other additions. One cannot be an addition and the other a fragment of the original version omitted in the A-text.
Total memorial failure is not a convincing explanation given the acceptable memorial reconstruction of other farcical scenes such as the initial one between Wagner and Robin or the Horse-courser episode, or the conjuring of Robin and Dick. As for cutting for provincial performance, one may reasonably enquire why one of the better farcical episodes would be selected for omission in both its parts.
The Historie recounted the magical erection of a castle in the air and a tour through it by the participants in the adventure, an episode that would seem to defy staging and is therefore only mentioned at the start of the scene. Thereafter the Historie furnished only the relatively thin action of the grapes.
Another A-text 'echo' is perhaps even clearer as, instead, part of the B-text's transfer of original A-text material to the new Scene xv. The slightly unusual word 'Hostry' (or 'Ostry') is first found in B-text's Scene vii (II.iii), 733, in Robin's warning to Dick not to interfere with his conjuring, although missing in the memorially transmitted combined A-text version of this scene coming later. In the B-text it is next used in Scene xv, 1552, in the Horse-courser's narrative in the tavern. Here the word seems to have been taken over by the reviser from the A-text of Scene xiv (Greg, Scene xi, lines 1214-15) when the Horse-courser promises Mephostophilis forty more dollars to release him after he has pulled off Faustus' leg: 'come to my Oastrie, and Ile give them you.' It is interesting that a discrepancy appears between Scenes xiv and xv that involves this word. In Scene xv the Horse-courser boasts of Faustus' leg: 'now 'tis at home in mine Hostry' (this the phrase taken over from the A-text lines 1214-15) although in the B-text Scene xiv he proposed in his escape 'to cast this leg into some ditch or other'. The A-text does not mention the fate of the leg; thus it is as possible that the casting into a ditch is a carelessness on the part of the B-reviser as it is a lapse in the memorial report of the A-text. However, on the evidence of the use of 'Hostry' in the B-text Scene xv borrowed from the A-text of Scene xiv, Mephistophilis was present in the original Scene xiv, as in the A-text, and it was the reviser who removed him although forgetting to delete his name from the opening stage-direction. This appears to be the true explanation for his presence in the direction, not contamination from the A-text affecting a careless editor-inscriber of Scene xiv from the original manuscript.
Allied to this, in some part, is Greg's objection that if the unique B-scenes are removed, thus taking away much of the substance of the comic action of Acts III and IV, he does not see that very much is left of the original play. This objection is overstated. The A-text Acts III and IV still hold the three essential comic actions at Rome, at the Emperor's court, and at Vanholt, plus the farcical Horse-courser scene and, combined, the farcical scenes of Robin's theft of Faustus' magic book, the affair of the silver goblet, and the conjuring of Mephostophilis. If due account is taken of the normal reduction in the length of memorially reported scenes, something of a reasonable acting version of about 2,000 lines would result.
What follows is more speculative than the case that has been presented for the identification of the 1602 additions and should not be taken as in any sense affecting the virtue of the argument for these.
This speculation reverses Greg who takes it that the re-entrance is not really continuous action but a clumsy expedient of the A-text memorial reconstruction which had united, or rather associated, the two independent scenes in the original as represented by the B-text. Not much faith can be placed in Greg's surely desperate guess that the two scenes in the A-text may have been alternatives.
A similar splitting of the continuous action of an A-scene, presumably by the reviser, occurs when the Horse-courser episode is staged as an independent scene in the B-text (this Scene xiv suggested as reworked) whereas in the A-text it was continuous with the Emperor Carolus scene.
These duplications or awkwardnesses suggest, as has been remarked in Scene viii at Rome, that he had written out his revisions and additions independently and that the B-text was set from his original papers, a conjecture perhaps assisted by the theatrical nature of his stage-directions in contrast to the non-theatrical nature of directions in the B-text set from the earlier manuscript in places where it had not been retouched save perhaps by the inscriber. In Scene viii he definitely does not seem to have reworked the basic manuscript to fit in his new material. Whatever the nature of the manuscripts available to the inscriber of the final copy sent to the printer of the 1616 quarto (and he may not have reinscribed the reviser's new and worked-over scenes but only the papers of the original manuscript that were seemingly in less clean form), it was clearly not the prompt-book.
Mephistophilis' preliminary to the offer of the book, in what is almost certainly a Marlovian passage, begins with 'Marriage is but a ceremoniall toy' and ends 'Ready to execute what thou commands' (535-549). The interpolation in the A-text (whether by the original collaborator or by actors' gag) follows in prose in which Faustus requests further books but Mephostophilis shows that all the information he wants is in the one he has presented. Then in the A-text without interruption, but in the B-text after Faustus' thanks and in a new scene, Marlowe's part resumes with 'When I behold the heavens then I repent.'
That is, it would be possible to argue that the revision of Mephistophilis' presentation of the book might be laid to the editor (or inscriber) who found that the prose continuation of lines 551.1-13 was not present in his manuscript (and thus would represent unauthoritative A-text expansion) and being at a loss how to close the scene he replaced the lines by the thanks to Lucifer from the next scene. Either speculation is not without its problems, however. Although the A-text transition without scene division is certainly abrupt and may represent some difficulty in the original play, yet a continuous action is not impossible. On the other hand, the start of a new scene in the B-text violates the stage-convention that characters who have just left the stage empty should not immediately re-enter unless the action is to be taken as continuous. It may be that the B-text's direction to Scene vi — 'Enter Faustus in his Study, and Mephostophilis' — was supposed to indicate the passage of time by a difference in locale; nevertheless, it is interesting that someone saw the need for a transition and ineptly inserted the short form of the Chorus 2. Perhaps a new Chorus was intended but was not written or else was lost and the A-text's stage production merely continued the scene. Yet if the basic manuscript the inscriber was consulting for the B-text did not contain the A-text's form of continuation, how did it end the scene; or did it, in turn, continue like the A-text and it was the editor-inscriber who marked the end of one scene and the start of another?
Greg is forced to assume that the B-text represents the version in Marlowe's foul papers which he reworked in the promptbook and thus that his own revision comes down to us in the A-text; but such authorial reworking in the prompt copy itself is unusual and an unnecessarily complex hypothesis. Moreover, in my view this part of the scene is not Marlowe's. The language associates it with his collaborator.
Greg is inclined to accept the lines as Marlowe's (p. 127). In support one may mention the merest gossamer of evidence in the phrase used at 1993 by the Third Scholar, 'At which selfe time the house seem'd all on fire,' a somewhat uncommon idiom that parallels 'Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd, | In one selfe place', 510-511, lines that are indubitably Marlowe's. Yet against this evidence could be placed the phrase 'the Doctor' in 1987, 'Pray heaven the Doctor have escapt the danger', a form of reference characteristic exclusively of the added scenes in the B-text, as in lines 1183, 1222, 1294, 1553, 1557, 1658.
Cf. in Scene viii 'State Pontificall', 870; 'Statutes Decretall', 883; 'authority Apostolicall', 923; 'blessing Apostolicall', 973; and in Scene xi, 'state Majesticall', 1233.
These pronounced Rowleyan characteristics, including a predilection for couplet writing, are confined to the unique B-scenes; hence the presence of Rowley cannot properly be argued for in the original collaboration. As for Birde, no identified specimen of his writing has been preserved. He collaborated with Rowley in a lost play called Judas late in 1601.
Little parallelism exists between the forcible abduction by the three devils of Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino, with the particular punishment of being dragged through the mud meted out to Martino, and the escape of the Germans from Bardolph. His entrance bemired may be only a sight-gag, and the association of the three Germans with the three devils of Scene xii may be fortuitous. The heart of the allusion lies in the speed with which the three Germans escaped as if they were supernatural beings, or three magical Doctor Faustuses. The reference to the magic-making of Doctor Faustus is clear enough, but not necessarily an allusion to this specific scene. Indeed, if a choice had to be made, I should prefer the supposed paraphrase in A Shrew as the more convincing, conventional as it may be with the act of mincing someone's body, or with the quite ordinary use of 'sands' for number as in Dido, III.i. 87-88, 'where Ile offer up | As many kisses as the Sea hath sands,' a parallel scarcely to be confined to Marlowe, of course.
The case certainly cannot be demonstrated, but it would be an oddity for Wright to go to the expense in 1616 of securing a new and improved text of Faustus for a revised edition and then to accept one that did not contain the Rowley-Birde additions that should have retained a prominent part in the new look given the old play and would have been current on the stage, or at least in the memory of various purchasers, in 1616. It is at least worthy of notice that although the 1616 titlepage (which was clearly set under the influence of the quarto of 1611) perhaps inadvertently did not mention the new text, Wright's next edition of 1619 advertised 'With new Additions.' In my view the delay has no significance. Similar advertisements in other dramatic quartos (when they are not false) usually refer to revisions; hence the evidential value of the 1619 titlepage as bearing on the Rowley-Birde question cannot be ignored. It is quite possible to argue that the impetus for the publication of a new text of the play in 1616 was the opportunity that had arisen for Wright to secure these 1602 revisions.
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