50 Fun Facts About Doctor Faustus

In Doctor Faustus, what does Faustus use as ink to sign the deed giving his soul to Lucifer?

His own blood congeals before he can finish, so Mephistopheles fetches a pan of hot coals to make it flow again.

Which legendary beauty does Faustus conjure for his scholars and later take as a lover?

Helen of Troy never speaks a word on stage, yet her entrance prompts the most quoted speech in the play, about a face that launched a thousand ships.

Which personified group does Lucifer parade before Faustus to stop him thinking of repentance?

The Seven Deadly Sins step forward one by one to describe themselves, starting with Pride, and a delighted Faustus says the sight feeds his soul.

How long must Mephistopheles serve Faustus before Lucifer comes to claim his body and soul?

24 years of luxury is the price Faustus names himself, and the play races through them so quickly that the whole term seems to pass in an evening.

In Doctor Faustus, whose dishes and wine cup does an invisible Faustus snatch away at a banquet?

The Pope crosses himself in alarm as dish and cup vanish, and Faustus answers with a box on the ear that sends the whole table running.

At what hour do devils arrive to carry Faustus to hell, ending his final frantic soliloquy?

Midnight strikes at the end of a soliloquy that squeezes his whole last hour into a few minutes, the clock sounding eleven, then the half hour, then twelve.

At which German university, also the school of Shakespeare's Hamlet, is Faustus a celebrated doctor?

Wittenberg was also where Martin Luther taught and launched the Reformation, a loaded address for a scholar who turns to the devil.

Which Welsh star played Faustus in a 1967 film of Doctor Faustus that he also co-directed?

Richard Burton based the film on an Oxford student production he had starred in, and cast Elizabeth Taylor in a wordless role.

Which pair of spirits keeps visiting Faustus, one urging him to repent and the other to press on?

Two angels, one good and one evil, were borrowed from medieval drama, where The Castle of Perseverance gives its hero the same rival advisers.

Which ancient conqueror's spirit does Faustus conjure at court to impress the Holy Roman Emperor?

Alexander the Great appears with his paramour, and the Emperor checks she is genuine by looking for a mole on her neck.

Which writer's two-part drama Faust, unlike Doctor Faustus, lets its scholar escape damnation?

Goethe finished the second part in 1831, and it reached print only after his death in 1832.

In his last line before devils drag him away, what does Faustus desperately offer to do?

He offers to burn his books, renouncing the learning he once prized above salvation, but the cry comes seconds too late.

Which black art, called cursed in the prologue, does Faustus choose over all his other studies?

Necromancy strictly means conjuring the dead, yet Faustus later admits his court apparitions are only spirits in the likeness of the famous dead, not their real bodies.

What does Faustus make sprout from the head of a knight who mocks him before the Emperor?

A pair of horns was the Elizabethan badge of a cuckold, so Faustus is joking that the sceptical knight has been betrayed at home.

What is the first thing Faustus asks Mephistopheles to fetch him once the pact is sealed?

A wife is a request Mephistopheles dodges: he dismisses marriage as an empty ceremony and brings a devil in a dress, complete with fireworks.

In which subject did Faustus earn the doctorate that gives Marlowe's Doctor Faustus its title?

Theology was his field, which sharpens the irony: the scholar best trained to understand damnation is the one who bargains for it.

Which poetic form, hailed by Ben Jonson as a mighty line, carries Faustus's serious scenes?

Blank verse is kept for Faustus and the devils, while the clowns and servants speak prose, a split the play holds almost throughout.

Faustus seals his pact with the Latin Consummatum est, the dying words of which biblical figure?

Jesus Christ speaks the phrase from the cross in the Latin Gospel of John, so Faustus borrows words of salvation to complete his own damnation.

Which unnamed figure enters in the final act to beg Faustus to repent, and is tormented for it?

An old man pleads with him to seek mercy, and Mephistopheles admits he cannot touch the stranger's soul because his faith is too strong.

Johann Georg Faust, the real conjurer behind Doctor Faustus, reportedly died in what accident?

An alchemy explosion at an inn in Staufen is said to have killed him around 1540, and his enemies took the mangled body as proof the devil had collected.

Which Greek philosopher's logic does Faustus weigh first and cast aside in his opening soliloquy?

Aristotle is dismissed within a few lines: Faustus decides that arguing well is all logic can offer and that he has mastered it already.

Into what does the horse Faustus sells to a dealer turn when it is ridden into a pond?

A bundle of hay, a bottle in the dealer's old-fashioned word, is all he is left sitting on mid-pond after ignoring the one warning Faustus gave him.

Which body part does a cheated horse dealer pull clean off the sleeping Faustus?

His leg comes away in the dealer's hands, a conjuring trick that sends the man running and promising forty dollars more to escape arrest.

Finding Mephistopheles too ugly at first sight, Faustus orders him to return dressed as what?

A Franciscan friar is the disguise he picks, sneering that a holy shape suits a devil best.

Which servant of Faustus scares a clown with two devils and later inherits his master's goods?

Wagner is named heir shortly before the end, and wonders aloud why a dying master would still be feasting with his students.

Which proverb translates the Latin line Mephistopheles gives for why Lucifer wants more souls?

Misery loves company is the gist of his Latin tag, and when Faustus asks whether devils feel pain too, he says they suffer as much as human souls.

Which Italian motto, echoed centuries later in a Doris Day hit, does Faustus quote in Act 1?

Che sera, sera is how Faustus shrugs off sin and death, translating it on the spot as what will be, shall be.

Which device from ancient Greek drama opens and closes Doctor Faustus as a narrator?

A chorus introduces Faustus as a scholar of humble birth and returns at the end to draw the moral, never once speaking to another character.

Which out-of-season treat does Faustus fetch in January for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt?

Ripe grapes arrive within moments, and Faustus explains that a swift spirit picked them on the far side of the globe, where it is summer.

Which high-flyer of Greek myth does the prologue invoke to foretell the fall of Faustus?

Icarus is never named, but the prologue speaks of waxen wings that melt once a clever scholar mounts above his reach.

Which two magician friends does Faustus invite to dinner so they can teach him to conjure?

Valdes and Cornelius promise that spirits will fetch gold from America and guard him like lions, then vanish from the play after a single scene.

Which Latin warning, telling a man to flee, appears on Faustus's arm as he signs away his soul?

Homo, fuge appears, fades and returns, and Faustus reasons that he has nowhere left to run: if he fled to God, he would be thrown down to hell.

Which question from Faustus does Mephistopheles refuse to answer, calling it against his kingdom?

Who made the world would force him to name God, so he tells Faustus to think on hell instead, and the refusal jolts Faustus into trying to repent.

Which beasts pull the blazing chariot in which Faustus climbs Olympus to study the stars?

Dragons draw him up to learn astronomy at first hand, a flight the audience never sees: a narrator reports it between scenes.

Which animals do the clowns Robin and Rafe become after annoying Mephistopheles with a stolen spell?

An ape and a dog are their fates, and Robin is thrilled: as an ape he expects fine sport with the boys and plenty of nuts and apples.

Which prince of hell enters beside Lucifer to stop Faustus when he begins to pray for mercy?

Beelzebub arrives as Lucifer's companion prince, and a cowed Faustus vows never to look to heaven again.

Which novelist borrowed the title Doctor Faustus in 1947 for a tale of a composer's pact?

Thomas Mann moved the bargain to modern Germany, where the composer Adrian Leverkühn trades his health and sanity for creative genius.

Which medieval theatrical form, best known through Everyman, shapes the fight for Faustus's soul?

The morality play surrounded an everyman figure with personified virtues and vices, and Marlowe keeps the allegory but gives his sinner a name and a degree.

As the clock strikes in his final speech, what does Faustus beg his soul be changed into?

Drops of water lost in the ocean could never be found, he reasons, having just envied animals whose souls simply dissolve when they die.

Which Game of Thrones star played Faustus in a 2016 West End staging of Doctor Faustus?

Kit Harington took the role while still playing Jon Snow on television, though reviews of the production itself were largely unkind.

Which Elizabethan acting troupe revived Doctor Faustus again and again between 1594 and 1597?

The Admiral's Men leaned heavily on Marlowe: of his plays, only the first part of Tamburlaine was acted more often in their 1594-95 season.

Which star tragedian, later the founder of Dulwich College, is thought to have first played Marlowe's Faustus?

Edward Alleyn probably created the role, and a legend recorded by John Aubrey says a real devil appearing on stage frightened him into his later charity.

Doctor Faustus survives in a short 1604 version and a longer 1616 one, known by which labels?

A-text and B-text differ by hundreds of lines and by single words: one says it is never too late if Faustus can repent, the other if he will.

Faustus's most quoted line, addressed to a spirit, reworks a phrase from which ancient satirist?

Lucian wrote it for his Dialogues of the Dead, where a newcomer to the underworld is shown a famous beauty's skull, a grim joke Marlowe turns into a love speech.

Faustus's last speech quotes a Latin plea for night's horses to run slowly, from which Roman poet?

Ovid wrote the line for a lover wishing dawn would wait, so Faustus borrows a plea for more pleasure to beg for more time before hell.

Which famed physician does Faustus name as he weighs and then abandons medicine in his first speech?

Galen gets a brisk farewell: Faustus boasts that his prescriptions have saved whole cities from plague, yet he still cannot bring back the dead.

Which Holy Roman Emperor, who outlawed Luther at the Diet of Worms, hosts Faustus at his court?

Charles V is called Carolus the Fifth in the script, which pins the action to the first half of the 1500s, when the real Faust was alive.

Critics debate whether Doctor Faustus endorses the predestination doctrine of which reformer?

John Calvin taught that God chooses the saved and the damned in advance, which would make every plea for Faustus to repent a hopeless one.

Whose diary, kept while running the Rose playhouse, records £4 paid for additions to Doctor Faustus?

Philip Henslowe paid Samuel Rowley and William Bird the money in 1602, one reason scholars suspect other hands in the longer 1616 printing.

The epilogue of Doctor Faustus mourns a charred laurel bough belonging to which Greek god?

Apollo held the laurel sacred as god of poetry, so its ruin stands for the gifted scholar Faustus might have remained.