Goethe seems first to have encountered the legend in the form of a puppet play when he was a child, and also to have read at an early stage the 1725 version of the Faust chapbook. Rather surprisingly, he did not himself read Marlowe’s play until 1818 (and even then in a German translation), though indirectly and in vulgarized form he would know something of its contents, especially from the puppet tradition. We do not know exactly when he first thought of using the legend for his own purposes. But Goethe’s age, like Marlowe’s, was one of change and ferment, of emergent humanism, of challenge to cultural establishments; and it is evident that either during or shortly after his student days in Leipzig in the late 1760s he perceived the expressive value of the Faust story, its relevance to his own generation and his own interests. For one thing it was folklore, a folk-tale, the kind of popular anonymous literature which the prevailing taste of the eighteenth century had despised. But the new enthusiasm, inspired by Rousseau, was for the natural, the primitive, the uneducated, and the unspoilt; and nowhere were these ideals embraced with more fervour than by the young Goethe and his Storm and Stress followers. From Herder in 1770 he had learnt the cult of old folk-songs and ballads, an interest reflected in the Urfaust and in his early poetry. This was in large part also a quest for the national past as such, at a time when Germany was not a nation and was seeking a sense of cultural identity. The Storm and Stress Goethe, looking for antecedents and roots, turned his attention to the great age of Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten, of Paracelsus and Luther and Hans Sachs. It was also in 1770 that he conceived his dramatic chronicle of the life of Gottfried von Berlichingen, the ‘knight with the iron hand’: his play (published in its final version as Götz von Berlichingen in 1773) idealized this sixteenth-century robber-baron (1480–1562) as a champion of simple natural German virtues against the sophistication of the Latinized court class (paralleled in Goethe’s time by the French-speaking aristocracy against which the German and middle-class literary revival had to assert itself). It was also a work which provocatively cast aside, as the Urfaust was to do, all the neoclassical dramatic conventions still imposed on Germany by the influence of French taste, and it brought the young Goethe immediate fame in his own country. A clearly parallel project was the idealization and heroicization of Berlichingen’s legendary contemporary ‘Faust’. Prometheus, the rebellious demigod who had symbolized the protest of the human spirit in one of Goethe’s most powerful early poems, could now be unbound.

Marlowe, indeed, who at the time of his early death in 1593 was under threat of prosecution for atheism, had perhaps already taken a step in this direction by investing his Faustus with some measure of heroic dignity, especially in the famous and moving final scene. But the time had now come for dispensing with his damnation as well. By the late eighteenth century it had long been less fashionable to burn heretics, witches, and wizards or even to believe in the Devil; this was common ground between the Storm and Stress and the Enlightenment, and Goethe was not the first important writer to consider Faust’s eligibility for salvation. His immediate precursor, the critic and dramatist Lessing (1729–81), was essentially a sophisticated representative of mature Enlightened culture, but he also decisively influenced the thought and literary values of the incipient Goethezeit. Motivated both by his antagonism to dogmatic supernaturalistic Christianity and by his interest in possible characteristically national themes for German writers, Lessing had himself projected and partly written a Salvationist treatment of the once notorious and now neglected legend. He published one scene of it as an ‘anonymous’ fragment in 1759, but his Salvationist conception was not clear from this and did not become known until much later, some years after his death, although whatever else existed of his Faust manuscript had by then unaccountably disappeared. It is thus not clear to what extent the young Goethe was influenced by Lessing, nor do we in any case know whether or not he intended a Salvationist version of the story at the Urfaust stage. What we do know, however, is that in 1768 a new factor had entered into his interest in the theme, when he immersed himself in the works of various occultistic and alchemistic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Paracelsus (who became in some ways his model for Faust) and Giordano Bruno, as well as the eighteenth-century Swedish theosophist Swedenborg. This was after he had fallen ill in Leipzig and returned to Frankfurt to recover, breaking off his studies. In Book XI of his autobiography Poetry and Truth, written more than forty years later, he recalls how deeply dissatisfied he had been as a student with the aridly rationalistic and materialistic philosophy and cosmology which then, in the name of Enlightenment, dominated the academic world at Leipzig and elsewhere: the French encyclopédistes, he felt, had reduced Nature to a dead system. It must have seemed to Goethe that the bold theological and demonological adventurer ‘Faust’ could well be used as a symbolic mouthpiece for the anti-scientific, antirationalistic, pantheistic, and mystical world-view to which he himself felt drawn. The influence of this conception is quite evident in the opening pages of the Urfaust. The young Goethe’s Faust exists not in a Christian but in a pantheistic frame of reference; he summons up not the traditional Devil but the Earth Spirit (cf. Note 14). There is every indication that in Goethe’s original conception it was not Mephistopheles or God, but this Earth Spirit—representing as it seems the divine yet at the same time demonic creative and destructive forces of Nature and earthly activity—who was to preside over the destiny of his hero.

Goethe evidently found that for the time being at least he could not satisfactorily develop this original and fascinating idea. The Faustus legend had from the first been born out of Christian assumptions, and though the young Goethe personally, after (and no doubt as a result of) his Pietistic phase, was out of sympathy with Christianity, the artistic pull of its tradition was too strong. In the Urfaust, which is of course not dramatically complete or continuous, the hero’s dialogue with the Earth Spirit breaks off inconclusively, and soon after this we encounter for the first time Mephistopheles, engaged in academic badinage with a naive student, his presence and relationship to Faust left unexplained in a vast lacuna corresponding to the still unwritten lines 606 to 1867. Nor did Goethe ever explain, even when this gap came to be filled, why the Urfaust Mephistopheles appears from certain indications in the text (cf.