University of Virginia Library

I

Few bibliographical theories are so apparently unassailable and, paradoxically, so constantly assailed as the prevailing belief that the 1604 quarto of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the "A-text") is a corrupt, memorially reconstructed, "bad" quarto. Ever since the argument was first advanced by Leo Kirschbaum in 1946 and supplemented by W. W. Greg in 1950, the memorial reconstruction theory has enjoyed the status of fact.[1] In 1952, Fredson Bowers was wholly convinced ("we may take it as fully proved that the A-text is a reconstruction from memory of the play as originally performed"), and he remained so in 1973: "facts are facts."[2] Thus dismissed as a "bad" quarto, the A-text has been relegated to the appendixes in nearly every edition of the play completed in the last half-century. And even those who choose to edit the A-text acknowledge that "signs that it has been memorially reconstructed are incontestable."[3]

Though seemingly incontestable, the fact of the A-text's memorial origins has encountered nearly a half-century of contestation. Bowers himself, pointing out that the B-text contains entire scenes that are not in the A-text, observed that "the reporter of the A-text would need to have suffered a complete blackout."[4] Alternatively, Bowers argued that the substantial differences between the two textual versions of Faustus might best be attributed

not to memory failures on the part of a reporter but to the presence in the B-text of additional passages, probably the "adicyones in docter fostes" for which Henslowe paid £4 to William Birde and Samuel Rowley in 1602, that are absent from the A-text. Although Bowers is not prepared to abandon memorial reconstruction ("the case for A1 as a bad quarto is weakened but not, I am strongly inclined to think, destroyed"), he now finds virtue in an if: "the A-text, if it is a report . . ." ("The 1602 Additions," p. 2n., 4). Other Marlowe scholars are more skeptical still. Constance Brown Kuriyama contends that "the case for A's being a reported text rather than a heavily cut and otherwise debased text is hardly conclusive." Michael Warren also expresses doubts: "the 'reported text' hypothesis is poor in relation to the A-text." And, in a posthumously published essay on Faustus, William Empson can hardly contain his contempt for "memorial reconstruction, that romantic darling of the modern expert."[5]

The theory of the A-text as a memorial reconstruction is further cast into doubt by its enthusiastic critical reception, both early and late. No other "bad" quarto went through three editions in the seventeenth century, and no other supposedly corrupt Renaissance text has found such favor in the twentieth. Although literary interpreters have little use for the "bad" quartos of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, influential critics such as C. L. Barber and Stephen Greenblatt employ the A-text of Faustus despite its apparently unauthoritative status. As Barber explains, "my experience as a reader runs counter to the conclusions . . . which W. W. Greg arrives at from textual study."[6] So too, if a Shakespearean "bad" quarto text is ever performed it is only as a dramatic curiosity; and yet, both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chicago's Court Theater chose the A-text of Faustus for their 1989 productions of the play. There appears to be a zeitgeist at work as scholars and theater companies embrace the A-text and so reject (or simply ignore) the rulings of bibliographers. It would seem that the time has come to reappraise the bibliographical facts and re-evaluate the theories surrounding the A-text of Doctor Faustus.