Faust, First Part
Read this if you…
- have already read dr faustus and want the more famous remake
- love the idea of making a deal with the devil
- want to read the most famous German work ever
- buy the idea that endless striving (never settling, never satisfied) is what makes a life worth living
Skip this if you…
- are expecting all the poetry to survive translation into english
- already know deal with the devil concept, and don't find it interesting
The 
Take
Step up from Marlowes Faustus, and interesting philosophical/theological premise
The lineage through Faust, First Part
- Job by Unknown. Faust, First Part built on it. - The 'Prologue in Heaven' is *Job*'s heavenly wager, transposed — God and the devil bargaining over one striving man - Goethe modeled the scene directly on Job's opening, down to the archaic, scriptural German that signals where it came from - Read Job first and *Faust*'s frame reveals itself: not a fresh invention but a deliberate reworking of the oldest argument about why a good man suffers
- Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Faust, First Part built on it. - The puppet plays Goethe watched as a child trace straight back to Marlowe's *Dr. Faustus* - Marlowe's proud scholar bartering his soul is the seed; Goethe only met the actual English drama later, long after the legend had already shaped him - Read Marlowe to see the bargain in its rawest form — damnation as a closed deal — before Goethe reopens the question and lets Faust strive past it
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Faust, First Part built on it. - *Faust* is steeped in Shakespeare — Goethe called him one of the three writers who made him, and *Hamlet* is the play he reaches for - Gretchen's ruin is shaped on Ophelia's: the cast-off woman, the descent into madness, the brother who dies trying to avenge her - Read *Hamlet* first and the echoes ring clear — Ophelia's mad song in Mephistopheles' mouth, the graveyard turned to Faust's churchyard
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Faust, First Part built on it. - *Faust*'s 'Witch's Kitchen' is Goethe answering the *Macbeth* witches he praised — the cauldron scene was directly in his mind - Gretchen's madness borrows Shakespeare's signature image of guilt: the imagined bloodstain that won't wash off, straight out of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalk - Read *Macbeth* first and you'll catch how Goethe is reaching for the same theatrical power — witchcraft, conscience, a hand stained by murder
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Faust, First Part shaped it. - Goethe's tempter gets reborn in Russia — Dostoevsky read *Faust* in German at seventeen and never let it go - Ivan Karamazov is, by scholarly consensus, "a Russian Faust": the brilliant intellect who reasons his way to despair - And Ivan's devil-visitor descends straight from Mephistopheles — Dostoevsky strips the grand demon down to a threadbare gentleman in a checked coat
- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. Faust, First Part shaped it. - Goethe's *Faust* became Freud's go-to source for naming the unnamable — he quotes it more than any other work in *The Interpretation of Dreams* - Most of those quotations come from Mephistopheles' mouth, the voice Freud reached for when describing how dreams disguise their meaning - A scholarly study traces "Die Traumdeutung" itself back to *Faust* — the play is woven through Freud's account of the dream-work
Depicted in Art
Faust and Margaret meet on a sunlit street, Faust raising his hat as she walks past, Mephistopheles watching from the shadows.
Alexander von Liezen-Mayer, 1876
An aged Faust slumps in his chair amid books and astrolabes, gazing toward an unseen vision.
Ary Scheffer, 1831
Marguerite descends church steps with a downcast face, parishioners receding behind her in the dim doorway.
Ary Scheffer, 1838
Gretchen kneels in a dim church interior among scattered worshippers, weighed down by the evil spirit's whispered accusations.
Enrico Fanfani, 1850
A scholar rises from his desk in a darkened study, transfixed by a luminous magic disc inscribed with letters that hovers at his window.
Rembrandt van Rijn, 1652
Marguerite plucks petals from a daisy beside a hesitant Faust in a leafy garden; Mephistopheles and Martha pass in the background.
Ary Scheffer, 1846
Faust and Mephistopheles race on horseback through a wild night sky, manes and cloaks streaming, in Vrubel's broken-mosaic style.
Mikhail Vrubel, 1896
Faust and Mephistopheles in an oak-paneled interior, the devil leaning over Faust's shoulder as the scholar studies a manuscript by candlelight.
Eugène Siberdt
Faust seated at a chess-like table across from a sharp-featured Mephistopheles, the devil leaning in over the board with a sly grin.
Anton Kaulbach
Faustus in his study at the moment of the pact, an austere robed figure of Mephistopheles standing over the seated scholar.
Jean-Paul Laurens
Recommended Editions
David Luke
Oxford University Press · 2008
David Luke's verse is the consensus English Faust. Supple meter that catches both the lyric stretches and the demonic mischief, with notes that help without burying the page.
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Notable Quotes
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each one desiring to separate from the other.
Screen & Stage
loosePhantom of the Paradise
Film · 1974
Brian De Palma
Faust
Opera · 1859
Charles Gounod
Faust
Film · 1926
F. W. Murnau
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Nikola Tesla, inventor, electrical engineer, 1856–1943: Tesla had memorized Faust; the alternating-current motor came to him in a Budapest park in 1882 as he recited its sunset passage — "Watch me reverse it!" he cried, sketching the design in the dirt.
- Thomas Mann, German novelist, Nobel laureate, 1875–1955: "A man of God who, out of a presumptuous urge for knowledge, surrenders to magic, to the Devil."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, 1803–1882: "He flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has been added for some ages."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, 1844–1900: "Goethe — no mere German, but a European event."
- Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, President of China, 1953–: Read Faust as a young man and, exiled to rural Shaanxi during the Cultural Revolution, walked thirty kilometres to borrow a copy — though he later told Angela Merkel he hadn't fully understood it.