Doctor Faustus
A scholar sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power and knowledge, then wastes them on party tricks. Marlowe wrote the greatest play in English before Shakespeare got going. The final soliloquy, as Faustus watches the clock run out, is the most agonizing countdown in theater.
Against its reputation, the play reads short and thin to some, with the shorter A-text feeling more like a highlight reel of scenes than a fully built drama, and Faustus's repeated near-repentances land as repetitive rather than tension-building through the middle. The comic subplot with the clown and servant characters strikes a number of readers as filler dragging against the main tragedy, and readers unfamiliar with the A-text and B-text dispute find the scholarly apparatus confusing before they even start. One reader admits preferring Shakespeare outright: “I enjoy Shakespeare more than Marlowe.” Without an annotated edition the Elizabethan vocabulary and stacked classical allusions slow the read considerably, and the moral reckoning at the close strikes several as a foregone conclusion, landing, as one critic put it, “much less satisfying than the crimes it follows.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
