Lord Strange's Men: Doctor Faustus: Performance History

Doctor Faustus: Performance History

The date of the first performance of Doctor Faustus is a matter of conjecture. The first performance of which we have a definite record took place on 30 September 1594 at the Rose Theatre, with Edward Alleyn in the title role, and the play was subsequently widely performed throughout the early Stuart period, even as far afield as Graz in Styria in 1608.

A curious account of a performance of the play in 1620 refers to ‘certaine players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the conjurer, who were overcome by the conviction that there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores’.

During the Commonwealth period all theatres were closed, but after the Restoration, Samuel Pepys records taking his wife to see Doctor Faustus at the Red Bull on 26 May 1662. It then seems to have disappeared from the English stage for two centuries, before being revived in 1896 in St George's Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society. The play has since been performed many times, the role of Faustus having been played by many actors of note , including (on radio) Robert Donat, Ralph Richardson and Alec Guiness, (on film) Richard Burton, and (on stage) Orson Welles, Ben Kingsley and Jude Law.

In 1616, John Wright published a longer and radically different version of the play, distinguished as the B-text. It was long considered that the A-text was the more faithful to Marlowe's original, with the additional material in B being the work of other authors; but the current prevailing opinion is that in fact the B-text is the closest to the original, the A-text being a cut-down version, perhaps for use in provincial tours where the full resources of an Elizabethan theatre might not be available; nevertheless, the question is still open to debate.

Doctor Faustus has been the subject of much critical scholarship, and in particular we are indebted to the work of John D. Jump for much of the information contained in this brief summary; any errors are, of course, our own.