Abstract

The comic scenes in the two principal editions of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus disrupt the tragic progression within the play's overarching linguistic drama. Lower-level, semiotic, comic outbursts of verbal assertion in both quartos batter against upper-level, symbolic, classical-Christian language, and, by the end of act IV (B-text), transform and merge. The semiotic energies of the comic eruptions persist in act V (both editions), within which they become vehicles of religious retribution, but where they also redefine emotional attachment, stimulate serial metamorphosis, and, in Faustus's final utterance (and implicit in the final chorus), join semiotic to symbolic expression.

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