For seeing Fryer Bacons Story,
(In whom Oxford still may glory)
For want of better pen comes forth,
Compos’d in Rymes of no great worth:
I call’d my Muse to task, and pend
Faustus life, and death, and end.
And when it cometh forth in print,
If you like it not, the Devil’s in’t.”
A farce by the actor W. Mountford, Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, with the Humours of Harlequin and Scaramuch, was acted at the Queen’s Theatre in Dorset Gardens between 1684 and 1688, and revived later at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was borrowed for the most part, with the exception, of course, of the harlequinade, from Marlowe.
The poet Alexander Pope declares that Faust was the subject of a set of farces, which lasted in vogue two or three seasons, and in which both Drury Lane and Covent Garden strove to outdo each other for some years. John Thurmond, a dancing master, composed a Harlequin Dr. Faustus, which was performed at Drury Lane, and published in the year 1724, and there is a record of a Harlequin Dr. Faustus, Pantomime; altered from the Necromancer, by a Mr. Woodward, which was acted at Covent Garden as late as 1766. These are but casual references to what must have been numerous Faust farces, and there were in addition performances of Faust puppet-plays in the Punch and Judy Theatre of Martin Powell opposite St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. Neither the pantomimes nor the puppet-plays appear to derive from Marlowe, but since the appearance of the latter’s tragedy, the Faust story appears definitely to have abandoned the epic form for the dramatic, and it is in its original home, Germany, that further development took place. Although in England the theme degenerated until it was employed for the most insipid type of theatrical entertainment, it was the English dramatist who first gave it the form in which, two centuries later, it was to inspire the greatest of all the poets who have sought to express the strivings of humanity in the figure of Faust.