I have also consulted this edition and the text and annotations in certain others, such as that by Erich Trunz (in the ‘Hamburger Ausgabe’ of Goethe’s works, vol. 3, 1949) and that by Ernst Beutler in vol. 5 (1953) of the Zürich ‘Gedenkausgabe’. Goethe’s text has been transmitted by these and other standard modern editions virtually without variation or dispute. The prehistory or ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, however, of this 1808 version of his Faust drama (that is, the process of its development from earlier fragmentary conceptions) is a more significant and complex matter, necessarily affecting any interpretation of the work and especially of this ‘first part’, which Goethe composed at intervals over a period of more than thirty years. This fundamental genetic problem is discussed in the Introduction, which is followed by a diagrammatic synopsis (pp. lvi f.). Additionally I have entered the abbreviations used in this synopsis (‘UR’, ‘FRA’, and ‘F.I’) alongside the text itself; these inform the reader to which of the widely separated ‘phases of composition’ any particular passage, or its unrevised equivalent, originally belonged.

Matters of detail and miscellaneous points requiring explanation or comment are dealt with in the Notes, on pp. 149–76, to which the asterisks in the text refer. The line-numbering of the English text corresponds to that of the German throughout. For convenience of reference I have also numbered the scenes (1–28), though this is not done by Goethe.

Special thanks are due to the Rockefeller Foundation for generously enabling me to spend a month in 1985 at its study-centre in Bellagio during work on this edition.

D.L.

INTRODUCTION

THE legend of Faust grew up in the sixteenth century, an age of renewal and rebirth in Germany and Europe, a time of transition between medieval and modern culture. Goethe’s Faust was conceived in the 1770s, when his own creativity in its first flower was giving a new impetus to the German literary revival, and when as in the later eighteenth century generally Europe stood at a turning-point between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Faust could thus hardly fail to become something like a myth of European man, as well as a myth of the young poet’s own development. It is certainly his most famous single work, regarded both in and outside Germany as—along with his poetry—the most characteristic product of his genius. Both it and the poems did indeed have a certain centrality in his long creative career, which extended (if we disregard its first immature phase) from 1770 until his death in 1832. The poems are central in the fairly simple sense that, during these sixty years or so, he never really ceased writing them or developing as a poet, the result being a corpus of lyric and other shorter poems which is even now commonly underestimated in its range and complexity, far exceeding as it does the relatively small collection of texts that have been familiarized internationally by the great composers. Faust also, which is the work of a poet at least as much as of a dramatist, may be said to have accompanied Goethe through his life (Part One until he was in his fifties, Part Two mainly much later) though not, of course, in the sense that he was constantly preoccupied with it. He wrote it at intervals over the sixty years, in four clearly distinguishable and widely separated phases—short periods of creative work on a project which, as we might therefore expect and as Goethe himself conceded, turned out to be something rather less than unitary in its conception or homogeneous in its execution. We must here leave aside the complex question of whether the posthumously published ‘Part Two’ can properly be regarded, or was even strictly intended, as a completion of Part One or anything other than a rather tenuously connected sequel to it; to divide the whole work into two parts was in any case certainly not Goethe’s original plan. As it is, we are here confronted with the extraordinary and unique phenomenon of ‘Part One’ itself, about which there are problems enough. It was begun when Goethe was in his early twenties, then set aside unpublished for about fifteen years, then revised and slightly extended (though also cut) for publication in this incomplete form (Faust. A Fragment, 1790) in the first edition of his collected works; then perhaps even abandoned as a project before being taken up again when he was nearly 50. In this third phase of composition, mainly from June 1797 to April 1801, it was enlarged very significantly; Goethe then lost interest in it again for a few years, but decided in 1805 to publish nearly all he had done so far, as a ‘first part’. After further revisions and some delay due to external causes, this appeared in 1808 as Faust. The First Part of the Tragedy. A few scenes for Part Two had also been sketched at the turn of the century, but a long period of abandonment or latency now followed. Part Two, the in many ways very different continuation (and its differences rather than its links with Part One are what Goethe’s own recorded comments emphasize), belongs essentially to the last years of his life (fourth phase of composition, 1825–31) and in accordance with his wish was first delivered to the bemused public in 1832 when he was safely in his grave.

The whole complex poetic drama or dramatic poem, which defies all normal categories in both form and content, thus combines a number of genetically disparate elements into an extraordinary and puzzling synthesis. Its poetic vitality is undeniable and probably only enhanced by its stylistic diversity and what Goethe himself called its ‘fragmentariness’ and ‘incommensurability’. But ever since his own lifetime the history of Faust criticism has been that of a controversy between two methods. One is the historical or genetic approach which emphasizes the discrepancies, inconsistencies, or incongruities in the text and is content to explain them in terms of the long and complicated process of composition and Goethe’s changes of plan or sheer forgetfulness in the course of it.