Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Published 1604 · 22,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · tragedy, Renaissance drama, morality play
How hard is Doctor Faustus to read?
Doctor Faustus scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Marlowe writes in Elizabethan blank verse dense with classical allusion (Icarus, Helen of Troy, Ovid) and interpolated Latin — Faustus recites the Vulgate and cries 'Homo, fuge!' mid-scene. The vocabulary sits below Ulysses-level obscurity but above The Great Gatsby's plain modern diction, closer to Moby-Dick's specialized, archaic register.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Marlowe's 'mighty line' favors long, propulsive blank-verse sentences built for the stage rather than Jamesian subordination — rhetorical and end-stopped more often than deeply nested. It reads more directly than Absalom, Absalom! but demands more of a reader than 1984's flat declaratives.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The play argues theology and cosmology in soliloquy — predestination, the limits of human knowledge, the nature of the soul — while staying tethered to stage business like pranks and stolen horses. That mix lands between Brothers Karamazov's open philosophical debate and The Great Gatsby's abstraction-through-social-observation.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- References to astronomy, alchemy, scripture, and classical myth arrive steadily, but the play's short length and scene-based structure keep it navigable — denser than Gatsby's compression, well short of War and Peace's layered plotlines.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Faustus announces his ambitions and regrets directly in soliloquy, and the Good and Evil Angels literalize his inner conflict rather than leaving it implicit. That's closer to 1984's direct exposition than to a novel built on inference.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The blood contract, the Seven Deadly Sins pageant, and Helen of Troy's kiss all carry meaning well beyond the literal plot — the play works in the allegorical mode of the morality-play tradition it descends from. It sits near To the Lighthouse's meaning-carrying objects, short of Moby-Dick's totalizing symbol.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- A clownish subplot (Robin and Rafe botching their own bargain with a devil) shadows and undercuts Faustus's tragic pact scene for scene, and Marlowe never lets the audience settle into pure admiration or pure condemnation of his hero. That's a sharper gap between surface and meaning than Brothers Karamazov's sincerity, though less destabilizing than Pale Fire.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Faustus is dragged offstage to hell in the final scene and the closing Chorus draws the moral explicitly ('Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight') — the plot resolves cleanly. The lingering question is theological rather than narrative: whether he was ever free to choose otherwise.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Framing Choruses move the action between Wittenberg, Rome, and two royal courts, and a comic low-plot runs alongside the tragic main plot throughout. It's more episodic than Gatsby's single retrospective frame, though far short of Ulysses's shifting styles.
How Doctor Faustus is regarded
Doctor Faustus holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.