From the mid-eighteenth century when interest in Doctor Faustus revived, critical attention on the play has largely focused on what may be termed its metaphysical concerns. Is Marlowe challenging conventional Christian perspectives on hell and heaven, or does his play ultimately conform with them? Is Faustus a tragic hero or a misguided sinner? Though scholarship on Doctor Faustus has increasingly complicated issues surrounding the origin and status of the play's two main versions, ideas of what may be termed high seriousness have dominated debate about its content. For both readers of a text and spectators at performances, attention is commonly concentrated on those scenes that engage most thoroughly with a tragic dimension. The scenes of farce attract much less attention. But what type of play engaged early spectators? How might Doctor Faustus have been performed in the theatres of Elizabethan England? This chapter seeks to re-examine the modern preoccupation with Faustus as metaphysical tragedy by thinking about it in the cultural milieu from which it first arose. Interestingly, many of the issues raised by the place of the stage in early modern London still seem to resonate strangely within current critical debates about Doctor Faustus.