We made a deal with a devil this week to talk about Christopher Marlowe's 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The core premise of this play is so pervasive in current media and storytelling that there's even a name for it: a "Faustian Bargain."

Our discussion touches on the life of Marlowe himself and early theater productions of the play, its source material in Goethe and others' Faust tales, as well as the echoes and references to this monomythic story throughout literature and media. These echoes range from Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, to DC and Marvel comics, to children's media like Disney's The Little Mermaid and the Animaniacs, to current popular fiction like V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, to, of course, Star Wars.

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