--Dr. Faustus (B text)

(Okay, this is taking a bit longer than I'd planned. I'd originally expected the "Bridging the Gap" series to have seven entries, but time's marched on, and I've only gotten more behind. So once again, I'm filling these entries with whatever strikes my fancy, with an emphasis on getting them over with, after which I hope to return to the regularly scheduled programming.)

What a world of difference there is.

See, the A text is a lot shorter, and seems more like an outline than a full play. You get a couple of scenes here and there that are supposed to take place over the course of 24 years, but they're fragmented, disjointed, and interspliced with scenes of low comedy that don't seem to have much to do with the rest of the play. The reader/viewer is left to decide for herself what Faustus does with most of his time, and why, as the play leaves it so wide open that pretty much anything is possible.

The B text fills in a lot of the blanks, and stands as a complete work. And it rocks.

It should be noted that it's generally believed that a lot of the added stuff in the B text (and some of the stuff in the A text) was not actually written by Marlowe, but, rather, was filled in by other writers. This doesn't particularly bother me. Any play is ultimately a collaboration between the original writer, the director, the actors, and so on. And the A text is so clearly a stripped-down version of the play, just waiting to be filled out, that it seems to me that a text that incorporates scenes that would've been added for performance is ultimately truer to the work than one which just gives you the basic skeleton.

(Another possilibity offered, incidentally, is that the B text is closer to the original, and the A text was a stripped-down, abridged version, for performance in theaters that lacked the necessary equipment the full production needed. This doesn't hurt my argument any.)