Another Pre-1592 Copy of the English Faust Book

Abstract

The only extant edition of The Historie of the Damnable Life and Death of Doctor John Faust, an English translation of a 1587 German work that served as Marlowe’s source for Doctor Faustus, was printed in 1592. That publication date has long hobbled scholars who have believed that Doctor Faustus, first published in 1604, had been written in 1588 or 1589 rather than in 1592, the year before Marlowe’s death. The discovery of a copy of the English Faust Book, as that source is called, in an undated inventory of books owned by Matthew Parkin, an Oxford student who probably died in in late 1589, provided the first evidence of an earlier edition of the Faust Book.¹ Now Peter Murray Jones, Fellow and Librarian, King’s College, Cambridge, has uncovered a second pre-1592 copy in a more firmly dated list of books catalogued by their owner on 17 February 1589/90 that reinforces the existence of an earlier edition, verifying that Marlowe could have written the play earlier than 1592-93.²

The collection in which this second copy is catalogued is the library of a London apothecary, Edward Barlow. Barlow’s library of nearly two hundred books is primarily a professional library, well over half of which are works of medicine and science in addition to a dozen or so books on alchemy and magic. One cannot be certain that any owner read all the books found in his library, and one is on even shakier grounds speculating about the motive behind his purchases or the use he made of them. Nonetheless the character of the major portion of Barlow’s collection as well as the nature of his profession as an apothecary does suggest a context for his interest in the Faust Book, a context that cannot be derived from the Parkin library, a standard library of a university student with the Faust Book appearing as something of an outlier. Whether Barlow sought to make use of the Faust Book in his professional occupation or whether it held special interest for him because of its treatment of alchemy and magic cannot be known. But its presence in an apothecary’s professional library does indicate that Marlowe’s choice not only served the playwright as a work that fueled his theological views and dramatic interests, but also as a work sufficiently grounded in the subjects of alchemy and the medico-magical to attract an apothecary.

Jones’s discovery, then, of the English Faust Book in a catalogue firmly dated 1589/90, compiled by an apothecary of his own books, definitely establishes the existence of an edition prior to the one extant 1592 edition. Whether Marlowe made use of the 1589/90 edition and wrote Doctor Faustus earlier than 1592 or 1593 cannot, of course, be known. But the Barlow Faust Book, along with the Parkin copy of the same, together make an earlier date definitely possible. Further, whenever Marlowe wrote his play, the medico-magical material he employed had its source in a work that a practicing apothecary had judged valuable enough to have added the book to his professional library.

Footnotes