Was This The Face That Launched

Spoken by Doctor Faustus in Act 5, Scene 1 of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), as Mephistopheles conjures the shade of Helen of Troy for Faustus to take as his lover. Nearing the end of his twenty-four-year pact with the devil, Faustus addresses the silent vision with these famous lines before kissing her. Marlowe adapted the line from Lucian's second-century dialogues — but it was his iambic pentameter version that entered the language permanently. William Shakespeare later quoted it approvingly through the character Phoebe in As You Like It (Act 3, Scene 5).