Faust

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A long poetic drama loosely set in the idealized past, primarily in sixteenth-century Germany and ancient Greece; published in two parts in German (as Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil [1808] and Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil [1832]), in English in 1838.

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Synopsis
A jaded scholar makes a wager with the Devil. The scholar, Faust, will give up his eternal soul if the Devil can offer him a single moment that he would wish to prolong.

    Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written
    The Play in Focus
    Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place


By common consent, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is the foremost writer Germany has produced. Constantly experimenting with new styles and subjects, the prolific Goethe (pronounced GUR-tuh) continually reinvented his own authorial persona and seldom repeated himself. The widely imitated Goethe established whole new genres with a single work before moving on to something equally original with his next achievement. Aside from Faust, considered his masterpiece, Goethe is best known today for novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and for his lyric poetry. Faust, written over 60 years of Goethe's life, reflects the poet's versatility both in its wide-ranging themes and in its dazzling array of different poetic styles. Goethe adapts the medieval legend of Dr. Faustus, a scholar who sells his soul to the Devil for knowledge and magical powers. Goethe's treatment of this old story-updated for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-offered readers fresh insights into the central problems of their own turbulent age.

For More Information
Atkins, Stuart. Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991–99.
Brown, Jane K. Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Gillies, Alexander. Goethe's Faust: An Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Trans. Barker Fairley. In Selected Works. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Hamlin, Cyrus, ed. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: Norton, 1976.
Mason, Eudo. Goethe's Faust: Its Genesis and Purport. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Stawell, F. Melian, and G. Lowes Dickinson. Goethe and Faust: An Interpretation. New York: Dial Press, 1929.

For more information on Faust, visit Britannica.com.

Faust, a verse tragedy by J. W. Goethe, published in two parts, Der Tragödie erster Teil (1808) and Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (1832).

The dedicatory ode (Zueignung, 1797) prefixed to Part One laments the passing of the years and the death of friends, and expresses Goethe's dedication to the work. The Vorspiel auf dem Theater presents the conflicting interests and arguments of the three theatrical powers, the Director, Poet, and Actor (Lustige Person). The business proper of Faust begins with the Prolog im Himmel. Here God, surrounded by his Archangels, admits the visit of Mephistopheles. Faust is mentioned, and Mephistopheles seeks and obtains permission to tempt him, while the Lord affirms confidence in Faust's steadfastness. Part One, which incorporates almost all the scenes in Urfaust (see also below), begins (in Nacht) with Faust's disgust with the unreality of accepted academic knowledge, his thirst for real, penetrating knowledge, and his summoning of the Earth Spirit (Erdgeist). But the Erdgeist overwhelms him with its dynamism and stature. Faust is next constrasted with the pedant Wagner. Recollecting his failure in the presence of the Erdgeist, Faust is about to take poison, but is checked at the critical moment by the sound of Easter bells and hymn singing. Vor dem Tor presents a kaleidoscope of city life released into the spring landscape of Easter Day; Faust, seen in a state of increasing self-dissatisfaction, finds himself followed by a poodle, who in the next scene (Studierzimmer 1) proves to be Mephistopheles. A pact is suggested, but not yet drawn up. In Studierzimmer 2 Faust proposes the terms of a pact (variously referred to as ‘Pakt’, ‘Wette’, and ‘Bündnis’). As long as he continues to strive, Mephisto shall serve him. If he ever subsides into satisfied indolence, Mephisto shall claim him (‘Werd' ich beruhigt je mich auf ein Faulbett legen, / So sei es gleich um mich getan!’). While Faust withdraws in order to prepare for the journey which the pair are to undertake, Mephisto dons Faust's gown, and gives cynical advice to a first-year student. Faust is thereupon rejuvenated for his new life by a witch's potion (Hexenküche), and begins his peregrination by watching Mephisto perform some hocus-pocus upon the drunken student clientele of Auerbachs Keller. Faust then encounters Margarete (Gretchen) and is seized by lustful desire, which is chastened by the simple integrity of her character. For a time he withdraws from her to the contemplation of nature in the wilderness (Wald und Höhle), but the pull of sex is stronger; he seduces her, persuading her at the same time to give her mother a sleeping potion, which proves fatal. Margarete, becoming pregnant, is distraught; her anguish is augmented when her brother, Valentin, is killed by Faust in a street affray. Mephisto transports Faust to the witches' sabbath (Walpurgisnacht), seeking to drown his memory of Gretchen in crude and earthy sensuality, but her image appears to Faust's eye and draws him back to her. He finds her in prison, condemned to death for infanticide, and seeks to effect her escape by Mephisto's magic, yet she, though the agony is upon her, refuses this evil opportunity, and maintains her integrity in death, invoking the comment of a voice from above ‘Ist gerettet’. Faust is dragged from the scene by Mephisto.

The first part has been concerned with the so-called little world (kleine Welt), the world of private emotion. The scene of the second is the great world (große Welt), the field of public affairs, of politics, economics, and education represented by art. Act I sees Faust's recovery through the healing powers of nature from the shock of Gretchen's end (Anmutige Gegend), and presents the Emperor's court in satirical terms. The pleasure-loving Emperor demands money and more money, and the imperial coffers are empty. Faust, with Mephisto, solves his dilemma by the creation of paper currency. The Emperor, far from profiting by his new solvency, demands fresh extravagant entertainment, and Faust is persuaded to conjure up for him the shades of Paris and Helen. He succeeds in doing so, inspite of great difficulties and hazards; he summons the goddesses (see Mütter, Die), but, when the figures appear, he is so taken with Helena's beauty that he attempts to seize her; the shades dissolve, an explosion shakes the hall, and Faust falls senseless to the ground.

Shattered for the second time in the play, Faust is borne back to his old study. While he lies insensible, Mephisto has a short encounter with the Student of the First Part, now grown into a brash, conceited bachelor of arts. Wagner, too, is present, a respected and competent scientist, though his vision still extends no further than the laboratory walls. He is engaged on making a synthetic man, and succeeds in creating a tiny creature (Homunculus), radiating light, and, since he has no true form, unable to exist outside the test-tube in which he is distilled. But Homunculus, though not embodied, has a penetrating intellect and wide knowledge; and he is able to indicate that Faust, if he is to recover, must be taken to the classical witches' sabbath (Klassische Walpurgisnacht, an invention of Goethe's). In the half-darkness of the moonlit southern night are assembled the grotesque, distorted, or horrifying figures of antiquity, griffons, sphinxes, sirens, lamias, etc., as well as the erotic nymphs. Faust begins a healing transition to the classical at the point at which it is nearest to Nordic myth. He meets Chiron, mounts him, and is carried off in search of Helena. The thread of Goethe's scientific interests is picked up in a cosmogonical argument between the believer in primal fire, Anaxagoras, and Thales the protagonist of a watery origin. The scene ends in the triumph of water, the pageant of Neptune, enshrining Galatea, to whom Homunculus is drawn so violently that his enveloping test-tube breaks, and he dissolves in radiance upon the waters. It is a cryptic genetic poem of rich imagination, to the meaning of which Goethe has given no later extraneous hint.

Act III (Vor dem Palaste des Menelas zu Sparta) begins as a classical tragedy. Troy has fallen, Helen is returned to Menelas, who sends her with her handmaidens back to Sparta. They learn that it is his intention to execute them all. Phorkyas (Mephisto disguised as an old woman) offers them rescue. They are transported to a castle (Innerer Burghof) and welcomed by its lord, who is Faust. The advancing forces of Menelas are repulsed, Faust and Helena are united, and a son is born to them, named Euphorion. But Euphorion, in his irrepressible rashness, falls to his death, showing a momentary likeness to Byron as he does so. The catastrophe drives Helena and Faust apart.

The fourth act returns to the world of politics. The Emperor, ruling as badly as ever, is opposed by a rival emperor (Gegenkaiser). In this situation Faust comes to his rescue with magic, and demands for his reward a fief of land at present covered by sea.

When the fifth act begins, the aged Faust has satisfied a dream of activity and economic progress. He has reclaimed the land from the sea, peopled it, and given it prosperity. But his pleasure and pride are not complete. A freehold enclave held by an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, disturbs the unity of his estate. He asks Mephisto to remove them, and the consequence is the burning-down of their house and their murder. Thereupon Faust is visited by Care (Sorge), who blinds him. He orders Mephisto to press on with work on the dam which excludes the sea, but cannot in his blindness perceive that the spades and shovels are in reality digging his grave. Delighted with the growth of his project, Faust, now one hundred years old, speaks a phrase of satisfaction,

Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick,

and falls back dead. Thereupon Mephisto steps in, claiming his own. Heavenly spirits, however, intervene, drive off Mephisto, and reclaim Faust. In the final mystical scene, Bergschluchten, Faust's soul is conveyed in a progress towards Heaven, amidst the intercessions of Gretchen (Una poenitentium), and the play closes with a mystic chorus.

The subject of Faust occupied Goethe's mind at intervals throughout almost the whole of his life. As a boy he enjoyed the puppet play (Puppenspiel von Dr. Faust) and read one of the later forms of the Faust Volksbuch. By 1773 he had begun to write a play on the theme, which was at first probably concentrated mainly on Faust's disgust with academic learning and on the shallowness of university life. It developed into the love tragedy in which Faust, with Mephisto's aid, gains the heart of a good and virtuous girl (Gretchen), and forsakes her, driving her to an infanticide for which she is condemned to death. In this form the play exists in a copy made in Weimar about 1776 by Luise von Göchhausen; the copy was discovered among her papers in 1887, and published by Erich Schmidt as Goethes Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt. The Urfaust, as this early version is generally known, contains Faust's opening monologue, the summoning of the Earth Spirit, Faust's interview with his famulus Wagner, Mephisto's mocking scene with the first-year student, the wine magic of Auerbach's cellar, and then the long series of short scenes which make up Gretchen's tragedy. Most of the play is in the irregular 16th-c. metre of Knittelverse, but Auerbachs Keller and the final scene, Kerker, are in prose.

Goethe felt unable to advance the play further while in Weimar, but some years later he decided to incorporate it as a fragment in an edition of his works (Schriften, 1787-90). While in Italy and after his return he added the scenes Hexenküche and Wald und Höhle, turned the prose of Auerbachs Keller into verse, and cut off the last scenes so that the play breaks off at the end of Dom. He published it as Faust, ein Fragment in vol. 7 (1790) of Schriften.

It was at Schiller's instigation that Goethe began in 1797 to work again at Faust, and the idea soon arose of treating the story in two parts. In the next ten years he added the scene Studierzimmer, in which Faust enters into the pact with Mephisto, and the scenes Vor dem Tor and Walpurgisnacht, and published the work, together with the dedicatory ode, the prologue on the stage, and the prologue in Heaven, as Pt. I in 1808.

A section of the third act of Pt. II was written in 1800, and it is likely that certain other passages were written before Pt. I was completed. The main work on the second part fell in the years from 1826 on. Act III (Helena and Faust) was published in 1827 as Helena. Klassischromantische Phantasmagorie. Zwischenspiel zu Faust. Act I appeared in 1828, Act II (Klassische Walpurgisnacht) in 1830. In the same year Act V was completed, and in 1831 Act IV. The whole vast Second Part was published shortly after Goethe's death as vol. 1 (1832) of Nachgelassene Werke, supplemental to the Ausgabe letzter Hand.

Performances of parts of Faust I took place privately in Berlin in 1819, and publicly in Breslau in 1820. The first complete performance was at Brunswick on 19 January 1829 under E. A. F. Klingemann. The first performance in Weimar was given on 29 August 1829. Faust II was first given complete at Hamburg in 1854, though Act III had been performed at Weimar in the centennial celebrations of 1849. The first performance of the complete work (I and II) was given at Weimar in 1875.

The interpretations of Faust are innumerable, but it can at least be said that the play symbolically embraces human life, commenting with irony on human, social, and political phenomena, and insisting on endeavour, striving, and unremitting activity as the fundamental human virtue.

Faust is notable also for the range of verse forms in which it is written. Faust I contains, in addition to Knittelverse, blank verse, hymnic passages, and some strophic songs. Faust II includes ottava rima, terza rima, trimeters, and various rhyming measures, as well as the forms contained in Pt. I. The work has inspired many musical compositions. Prince Anton Radziwill (1775-1833), an accomplished musician, brother-in-law of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, undertook with Goethe's collaboration a musical setting of Pt. I, first performed in 1820, published in extended form in 1835. Freer settings for voices and orchestra include Berlioz's powerful dramatic cantata La Damnation de Faust (1846) and Schumann's six Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844-57), which includes the whole of Pt. II Act V. The most widely known operatic version, Gounod's perennially popular Faust (1859, staged in Germany as ‘Margarethe’), centres on the Marguerite (Gretchen) episode; Boito's Mefistofele (1868), based on Pts. I and II, lacks the appeal of the French version. Faust operas drawing mainly on Volksbuch sources include Faust by Spohr (1816) and Busoni's Doktor Faust (1925). Purely instrumental works include the Faust Overture (1839-40), an early work by R. Wagner deriving from an earlier vocal composition, Sieben Stücke für Goethes Faust, and the atmospheric Faust Symphony (1853-61) of Liszt, which consists of three contrasting movements depicting the main characters. The second half of the vast 8th symphony by G. Mahler (1906-7), sets the closing scene of Pt. II using massive vocal and instrumental forces.

English translations include those by Anna Swanwick (1850 and 1878), A. G. Latham (1902-5), Bayard Taylor (1908), L. MacNeice (1951), Barker Fairley (1970), and David Luke (1987).

Faust (foust), Faustus (fô'stəs, fou'-), or Johann Faust (yō'hän), fl. 16th cent., learned German doctor who traveled widely, performed magical feats, and died under mysterious circumstances. According to legend he had sold his soul to the devil (personified by Mephistopheles in many literary versions) in exchange for youth, knowledge, and magical power.

Innumerable folk tales and invented stories were attached to his name. The first printed version is the Volksbuch (1587) of Johann Spiess, which, in English translation, was the basis of Christopher Marlowe's play Dr. Faustus (c.1588). Many versions followed, ranging from popular buffoonery to highly developed art forms. Spiess and Marlowe represent Faust as a scoundrel justly punished with eternal damnation, but Lessing instead saw in him the symbol of man's heroic striving for knowledge and power and therefore as worthy of praise and salvation.

Lessing's view of Faust as seeker was continued by Goethe in one of the greatest dramatic poems ever written. He enlarged upon the old legend, adding the element of love and the saving power of woman and giving the story a philosophical treatment. Goethe first came to grips with the theme in 1774 (in what is called the Urfaust). The first part of Faust appeared in 1808; it is more suitable for the theater than the more profound and philosophic second part (1833).

The many subsequent Faust novels and dramas, among them those of Klinger, Chamisso, Grabbe, and Lenau, could not rival the power and fame of Goethe's work. A recent variant of the Faust legend is Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947, tr. 1948). Goethe's Faust inspired innumerable composers of operas, oratorios, stage music, and symphonic works, including Berlioz, Gounod, Schumann, Liszt, and Boito. Spohr's and Busoni's Faust operas are based on other literary models.

Bibliography

See H. G. Meek, Johann Faust (1930); P. M. Palmer and R. P. More, Sources of the Faust Tradition (1936).

A legendary occult magician of the sixteenth century, famous in literature. There is some evidence that such a person existed. Trithemius mentioned him in a letter written in 1507, in which he referred to him as a fool and a mountebank who pretended he could restore the writings of the ancients if they were wiped out of human memory, and blasphemed concerning the miracles of Christ. In 1513 Konrad Mudt, a canon of the German Church, also alluded to Faust in a letter as a charlatan.

In 1543 Johann Gast, a Protestant pastor of Basel, apparently knew Faust, and considered a horse and dog belonging to the magician to have been familiar spirits.

Johan Weyer, who opposed the excesses of witch-hunters, mentioned Faust in a work of his as a drunkard who had studied magic at Cracow. He also mentioned that in the end Satan strangled Faust after his house had been shaken by a terrific din.

From other evidence it seems likely that Faust was a wandering magician or necromancer whose picturesque character won him notoriety. No doubt the historic Faust was confused in legend with Johan Fust, the pioneer of early printing, whose multiplication of books must have been ascribed to magic. By the end of the century in which Faust flourished, he had become the model of the medieval magician, and his name was forever linked with those of Virgil, Roger Bacon, Pope Silvester II, and others.

The origins of the Faust legend are ancient. The essentials underlying the story are the pact with Satan, and the supposed vicious character of purely human learning. The idea of the pact with Satan belongs to both Jewish and Christian magico-religious belief, but is probably more truly Kabalistic. The belief can scarcely be traced further back, unless it resides in the idea that a sacrificed person takes the place of the deity to which he gives up his life.

The Faust tale soon spread over Europe and the story of Faust and his pact with the devil was celebrated in broadside ballads. The first dramatic representation of the story was Christopher Marlowe's Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus. The dramatist G. E. Lessing wrote a Faust play during the German literary revival of the eighteenth century, but it remained for Goethe to grant Faust some degree of immortality through the creation of one of the great psychological dramas of all time. Goethe differed from his predecessors in his treatment of the story in that he gave a different character to the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles, whose nature is totally at variance with the devils of the old Faust books. Goethe took the idea of Faust's final salvation from Lessing. It may be said that although in some respects Goethe adopted the letter of the old legend he did not adopt its spirit. Probably the story of Faust has given to thousands their only idea of medieval magic, and this idea has lost nothing in the hands of Goethe, who cast about the subject a much greater halo of mystery than it contained.

Sources:

Bates, Paul A., ed. Faust: Sources, Works, Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968.

Grim, William E. The Faust Legend in Music and Literature. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.

Palmer, Philip M., and Robert P. More. Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1965.

For a list of words related to Faust, see:

• Mythological and Folkloric Beings - Faust: character in medieval legend who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge and power

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See words rhyming with "Faustian."

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