Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, wrote a famous play called Doctor Faustus. In it the main character becomes bored by the ordinary pursuit of knowledge
and commits himself to seeking the forbidden knowledge of the black arts. The long-term
consequence is the loss of his soul. The nineteenth-century German writer Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe used the same story in his work, Faust. Where is the boundary between
legitimate and forbidden knowledge? Why would any knowledge be forbidden?