Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1592)

The clock strikes eleven, and a man who once called himself a demi-god begs the stars to stop turning. He has one hour left of the twenty-four years he bought, in his own blood, for all the forbidden knowledge of the world. Christopher Marlowe's scholar mastered every discipline learning could offer and found each one hollow, so he signed his soul away to a demon named Mephistopheles and got, in return, the chance to play pranks on cardinals and conjure a ghost for a duke's dinner. The waste is the horror, not the hellfire. And it is Mephistopheles, not Faustus, who speaks the play's most terrible truth, calmly, almost gently: hell is not a place you are sent but a condition you carry, and wherever the damned stand, there it already is. Four centuries on, that final soliloquy remains the most desperate hour in English verse, a learned man watching midnight come and knowing the stars will not slow for him.