DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXI

"The memory comes back to me, because the Gesta actually show something like a return to the musical style of Love's Labour's Lost, while the tone language of the Marvels of the Universe leans more to that of the Apocalypse or even the Faust. Such anticipations and overlappings often occur in creative life; but I can explain to myself the artistic attraction which this material had for my friend: it was an intellectual charm, not without a trace of malice and solvent travesty, springing at it did from a critical rebound after the swollen pomposity of an art epoch nearing its end. The musical drama had taken its materials from the romantic sagas, the myth-world of the Middle Ages, and thus suggested that only such subjects were worthy of music, or suited to its nature. Here the conclusion seemed to be drawn; in a right destructive way, indeed, in that the bizarre, and particularly the farcically erotic, takes the place of the moralizing and priestly, all inflated pomp of production it rejected and the action transferred to the puppet theatre, itself already burlesque."