A Study of the Religious Subtexts in Doctor Faustus

Editor's Notes

1. Greg does go on to admit in a footnote that ‘Wertenberg’ was ananglicized spelling of ‘Württemberg’, a duchy in South Germany, but isequally dismissive in discounting any suggestion that this is a point ofsignificance: ‘Surely no one but an historian could have imagined . . . thatthe error in A had anything to do with the fact that legend sometimesrepresented the historical Faustus as born at a town in Württemberg.’31‘Wertenberg’, then, has disappeared from Doctor Faustus. At the risk ofbeing branded ‘an historian’, however, Leah Marcus has argued convincinglyagainst the accepted stance, and in favour of the retention of ‘Wertenberg’in the A text; having observed that the locations of Wittenberg andWürttemberg represent opposing religious ideologies, she goes on to statethat: ‘the A text, in placing Faustus in “Wertenberg,” may not be marredby “nominal perversion” after all. Rather, it draws on an alternative traditionassociating Faustus with a German duchy that was a hotbed of left wingProtestantism rather than a place which had become, by the late sixteenthcentury at least, the centre of a more conservative Lutheran orthodoxy.’32