SOURCE: "Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience," in PMLA, Vol. LXVII, No. 2, March, 1952, pp. 219-39.

In the following essay, Campbell characterizes the nature of Faustus's sin as that of despair. She finds parallels in the action of Doctor Faustus with the historical account of a sixteenth-century Italian lawyer named Francesco Spiera, who was charged with heresy and forced to recant his sincerely held religious views.

[Anyone attempting to write about Doctor Faustus is bound to feel like invoking Sir Edmund Chambers to write another essay of protest, this one on "The Disintegration of Doctor Faustus." So thorough has been the work of the disintegrators that the study of Marlowe's greatest play has come to revolve almost altogether about bibliographical problems. The sections of the play which form the basis for the arguments of this paper are, however, for the most part those which have the authority of both...