ABSTRACT
As two plays whose themes and structures so much depend on the format of the fifteenth-century morality play, it comes as no real surprise that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1589) (Laroque and Villquin 1997) and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604) should both foreground the interdependent themes of transmission and transgression. Transmission indeed has to do with the transference or delivering of knowledge to students or scholars or with the initiation to some art or craft, while transgression deals with the infringement of the law and an incursion into forbidden realms of territories. In this play, transgression is clearly identified which magic which ‘ravishes’ Faustus.
