I have the “Masterpiece” column in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, on Kit Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

The central event of “Doctor Faustus” is well known: a deal with the devil. In this first “Faustian bargain,” the title character sells his soul in exchange for living his next 24 years “in all voluptuousness.” This is the opposite of deferred gratification. It’s deferred damnation, and Marlowe’s play about power, knowledge and fate fueled a narrative tradition that runs through Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s “Faust” to “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band.
Marlowe didn’t invent Faust. The legend of John Faust, who was apparently an actual person, arose in Germany. Marlowe borrowed from a translated account of his life. For demonological inspiration, the dramatist drew upon the Bible and folklore. Even so, his Mephostophiles is something new in literature. He is a three-dimensional devil, the sinister trickster of convention and also a fully intellectual and even sympathetic figure.