ABSTRACT
Doctor Faustus, most concentrated of Elizabethan tragedies before Macbeth, also ranges widely and is composed from the union of several older traditions. The reckless jesting which was associated with Marlowe had its counterpart in the recklessness of Tarlton and other early clowns, and so contributed to the force of the comic scenes in Doctor Faustus; Wagner's assumption of the voice of a precisian is very like that of Tarlton in the jestbook. The "savage comic humour" which T. S. Eliot felt in Marlowe has a historic basis in the eldritch tradition, here and in parts of The Jew of Malta. Today these are relatively inaccessible; they can be recovered best, perhaps, from the fooling in the tragedies of Shakespeare, especially of course in King Lear; but Shakespeare is so much subtler than Marlowe that the comparison does not greatly help.
