The first Faust book, marketed by the printer Johannes Spiess in 1587, was a popular and financial success, which soon spread to the north of Europe by way of an English translation. It appealed powerfully to Christopher Marlowe, who was moved to compose The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus sometime between 1588 and 1593. Marlowe’s drama, in turn, became the basis for puppet and marionette shows that were given at various communal festivities, a ready market for slapstick versions of the damnable life of Faust.

In his autobiography, Goethe noted that “the important puppet fable [of Faust] continued to echo and buzz many-toned within me” (Poetry and Truth II, 10). While Goethe’s and Marlowe’s dramas arose from the same folklore, there is a spiritual and emotional distance between them that reflects a seismic shift in cultural history. To be sure, in one respect all the stories—the puppet-theater versions and the crudely written Faust chapbooks—were alike: in order to acquire limitless riches and power, Faust had succumbed to the blandishments of the devil; for twenty-four years Mephistopheles would do Faust’s bidding, after which he would collect his soul to be roasted in Hell. It was a plot made to order to be a warning not to do as Faust did—not to reach for powers that lay beyond one, not to “speculate the elements,” but to rest content with the approved answers that were provided by the Scriptures and by the inspired and approved ancient philosophers.

To the eighteenth century, however, the interpretation of the Faust story in the dim light of old biases and medieval superstitions must have seemed quaintly picturesque, superannuated, and irrelevant to the sensibilities of modern man. Faust’s chafing at his human limitations could no longer in itself be regarded as sinful. A new pride in the grandeur of the individual, fed by a rekindled confidence in the capacity of human reason to unravel nature’s mysteries, made it possible to see in Faust not only the sinner but also a representative example of what is noble and divine in man: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and an inborn need to explore—by spiritual as well as sensuous means—the limits of human potential. Indeed at the end of the second part of Goethe’s drama Faust has earned the right to divine Grace.

In 1773, as a twenty-four-year-old law student at the University of Strasbourg, Goethe sketched out the first doggerel verses of the opening monologue of Faust—intentionally “bad” verse, a reminiscence of the puppet theater. From then on—though with many interruptions—the ever-growing poetic edifice of Faust remained Goethe’s chief preoccupation, running like a red thread through an immensely productive life.

A momentous Goethean departure from the old legend occurred in Goethe’s version of the transaction between Faust and Mephistopheles. The traditional twenty-four-year contract was done away with and transformed into a wager. Faust says to Mephisto:

               If ever I should tell the moment:

               Oh, stay! You are so beautiful!

               Then you may cast me into chains,

               then I shall smile upon perdition!

(1699–1702)

In his long life as a scholar, Faust has reached the melancholy conclusion that he will never know what is truly worth knowing, that he would be blinded by the light of truth, and must therefore be resigned to live with mere reflections and counterfeit images. Since he has little faith in even the devil’s ability to satisfy his craving to the full, he is confident—though by no means cheerfully so—that he will win the bet. He fully expects that he will continue to live as he lived before, not truly advancing beyond the condition that made him say in the opening monologue:

               yet here I am, a wretched fool,

               no wiser than I was before.

               ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·    ·  ·  ·  ·  ·

               I don’t pretend to know a thing worth knowing,

               I don’t pretend that I can teach,

(358–72)

Faust’s prospects are grim. Despair and the idea of suicide are ever his close companions.

But suppose that Faust were to lose the wager and that through Mephisto’s machinations he indeed were to experience the supreme Moment, the incomparable, all-encompassing pinprick of time. In that case, for a single instant of usurped divinity, Faust would look upon even hellfire as trivial punishment. The stakes of the wager—no doubt by design—are not what they seem to be at first sight. They require “speculation” in the alchemical sense, meaning intellectual probing and testing. As it turns out, an accounting of who won or who lost is not finally at issue in Faust. All is secondary to the quest for the transcendent Moment. It is Faust’s irrepressible striving to extend the human potential and to break through the restrictions inherent in human nature that finally tips the balance in favor of Faust’s salvation, even though, in legalistic terms, he may have lost his bet with Mephisto.

The first part of the drama, Faust I—offered in this volume in an English translation as well as in the original German—sparkles in its manifold poetic modes and impresses us with a substantial integrity. It stands on its own dramatic feet without Faust II and is frequently performed, even though it leaves the hero’s destiny and the outcome of the wager in abeyance. At the end of our play, one sees Gretchen lying on her prison pallet uttering, Ophelia-like, deranged shreds of truth that pierce Faust’s inmost being. She is guilty of murdering her illegitimate baby, whose father is her seducer-lover, Faust. We, as readers of the play, know that Gretchen was moved by love alone and was driven to despair by love. Having seen her despised and humiliated by her own people, we are relieved to see her find mercy in God’s eyes and grateful for a hint that she will be given a luminous place in Heaven. Faust, on the other hand, must continue to live, bound to a minion of Hell and inextricably enmeshed in Evil.

The modes and moods of Goethe’s dramatic discourse are never for long the same or reliably predictable. There is the solemn and metrically uniform celebration of divine majesty manifested in the rolling planetary spheres of the “Prologue in Heaven,” immediately followed by the irregular, doggerel-like verses of the opening monologue. Shakespearean blank verse is never far removed from medieval hymnic chants. Strictly composed four-foot stanzaic lines may still echo in our minds when, near the drama’s end, we reach the ragged and harsh shreds of prose in “Gloomy Day—Field.” It is apparent that we must not look to verse forms as such to provide us with any unifying principle in Faust.