Faust

Overview

Faust is two plays that do not match. Part One, published in 1808 out of material Goethe had been drafting since his twenties, is a tragedy with a plot: a man ruins a woman. Part Two, finished in 1831 and sealed for publication after his death the following year, is five acts of loosely connected allegory in which the same man moves through European history and myth. Readers who love the first often dislike the second, and the reverse happens too.

Neither part was written for the stage as we normally understand it. The metres change constantly, from doggerel to blank verse to classical trimeters to rhymed lyric, and the changes carry meaning: Gretchen sings in ballad measures, Helen speaks in the metres of Greek tragedy. Any translation has to decide how much of this to reproduce, and the good ones tell you what they gave up.

Before the action there are three prologues, which matter. A dedication to figures now dead, a comic scene in which a theatre manager, a poet and a clown argue about what an audience wants, and then a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the opening of Job, where the Lord permits Mephistopheles to try Faust and predicts he will fail. That scene fixes the outcome in advance, so the play is not about whether Faust is damned but about what he will do with the time.

What happens

Part One. Faust, old and learned, has mastered philosophy, law, medicine and theology and is no wiser for it. He tries magic, summons an earth spirit that overwhelms him, and is prevented from suicide only by hearing Easter bells. A stray poodle follows him home and turns into Mephistopheles. They agree terms: the devil will serve Faust here and Faust will serve him afterward, but the forfeit falls only if Faust is ever brought to a moment he wishes to keep.

They visit a drinking cellar, then a witch’s kitchen where Faust is made young. He sees Gretchen in the street and demands her. Mephistopheles supplies jewels and arranges the meetings, and her neighbour Martha helps. Faust kills Gretchen’s brother Valentine in a street fight and flees. Gretchen has given her mother a sleeping draught that killed her, and is pregnant. While she is abandoned, Faust is on a mountain at the witches’ sabbath. He learns too late that she has drowned the baby and is in prison awaiting execution, rides back to rescue her, and finds she will not go. As Mephistopheles claims her, a voice from above says she is saved.

Part Two. Act I: Faust wakes healed of memory in a beautiful landscape, then arrives at an imperial court in financial collapse, where Mephistopheles solves the crisis by inventing paper money backed by undiscovered treasure. Asked to produce Helen of Troy for a court entertainment, Faust descends to the Mothers to fetch her image and destroys the illusion by seizing it. Act II returns to his old study, where his former assistant Wagner has made an artificial man in a bottle, Homunculus, who leads them to a classical night on the Greek coast. Act III stages a whole Greek tragedy: Helen at Sparta, then Faust as a medieval lord and Helen as his wife in a pastoral kingdom, and their son Euphorion, who insists on flying and falls, taking his mother with him into the air.

Act IV: Faust helps the emperor win a war by magical means and is given a stretch of coastline as reward. Act V: decades later he has drained the sea and built a state on the reclaimed land, but an old couple’s cottage and its lime trees interrupt his view, and his men burn them alive. Care breathes on him and he goes blind. Mistaking the sound of his own grave being dug for the sound of his drainage works, he speaks the forbidden words about a future he imagines rather than a present he enjoys. Mephistopheles claims the wager; angels scatter him with rose petals and carry the soul off, and a final mystical chorus completes the ascent.

How to read it

Read Part One first, in one translation, and do not stop until Gretchen is in the cell. It is fast, funny, and much more brutal than its reputation.

Then decide about Part Two. If you have one week, read Act I scenes at the court, Act III on Helen, and all of Act V. That gives you the paper money, the union with antiquity and the ending, which is what any discussion will be about. If you have longer, read it whole with the notes and accept that some scenes will stay opaque; Goethe called it incommensurable and meant it.

Keep the wager in front of you. The forfeit is not triggered by sin but by satisfaction, which changes how you read every episode. And notice the exact wording of the final scene, where Faust is describing something anticipated rather than something possessed. Whether that means he wins or loses on a technicality is a real argument and a good one for a seminar.

Watch how the verse form shifts and what each shift is doing. Even in translation, a change from rhymed couplets to long classical lines signals a change of world.

The main misreading is that Faust sells his soul for knowledge. He has the knowledge already, has given up on it by line thirty, and what he wants is experience. The second is treating Mephistopheles as evil incarnate. He is a cynic and a realist, often the most sensible voice on stage, and the Lord says in the prologue that he is useful.

Luke’s Part One is the best verse English. Kaufmann gives you facing German. Greenberg if you want both parts complete in one hand.

Questions it raises

• Faust is saved without repenting. Is striving really enough, and what does that do to Gretchen’s ruin?
• Mephistopheles keeps his side of the bargain and loses anyway. Has he been cheated?
• The Gretchen tragedy is never mentioned again after Part One. Is that forgetting Goethe’s failure or Faust’s?
• In Act V a project that drains marshes and feeds thousands requires two deaths. How does the play weigh that?
• Why does Goethe make the union with Helen produce a son who cannot stay on the ground?
• The wager forbids satisfaction. Can a life with no moment worth keeping be called a good one?