Study guide
Faust, Part One
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Overview
- Full title
- Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy)
- Author
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
- Written
- Over some thirty-five years: the Urfaust c. 1772–1775; scenes added for Faust: Ein Fragment (1790); the Dedication, Prologue and the 'great gap' of the pact c. 1797–1806
- Published
- 1808, in the Cotta edition of Goethe's works; Part Two followed posthumously in 1832
- Form
- A verse drama of 4,612 lines in 25 scenes, with a dedication and two prologues; the metres range from knittelvers couplets and madrigal verse to blank verse, ottava rima, song and one scene in prose
- Setting
- Heaven; a sixteenth-century German university town; Leipzig; the Harz Mountains on Walpurgis Night
- Main characters
- Faust, Mephistopheles, Margaret (Gretchen), Martha, Wagner, Valentine, the Lord
- Sources
- The legend of the historical Johann Faust (c. 1480–c. 1540), the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), German puppet plays descended from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and the Book of Job
- Translation quoted
- Bayard Taylor (1870), in the original metres; line references follow the standard German numbering
Context
The Faust of legend was a real person: Johann (or Georg) Faust, an itinerant astrologer, physician and conjurer who travelled through southern and central Germany in the early sixteenth century and died around 1540. Contemporary letters describe him as a braggart and a fraud. After his death, stories accumulated around him, and in 1587 the Frankfurt printer Johann Spies published the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, a Lutheran cautionary tale in which a scholar sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure and is torn apart at the end (Baron 1978) (Butler 1952).
An English version, the English Faust Book (1592), was the source of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, first performed around 1588–92 and printed in two different versions in 1604 and 1616. English travelling players brought Marlowe's play back to Germany, where it became a puppet play. Goethe saw one as a child. In 1759 Lessing published a scene from a planned Faust drama, and friends' accounts of the plan suggest that his Faust was to be saved, not damned; Goethe's play is the most famous fulfilment of that idea (Jones 1994) (Marlowe 1993) (Butler 1952).
Goethe began his Faust in the early 1770s, in the years of Sturm und Drang. That first version, the so-called Urfaust, contained the scholar scenes, Auerbach's Cellar and most of the Gretchen tragedy, ending with the Dungeon in prose; it was discovered only in 1887 in a copy by Luise von Göchhausen, a lady of the Weimar court. In 1790 he published Faust: Ein Fragment, which added the Witches' Kitchen and Forest and Cavern but still lacked the pact and broke off in the Cathedral (Mason 1967) (Boyle 1991).
Encouraged by Schiller, he resumed work in 1797, writing the Dedication, the two prologues, the pact scene and Walpurgis Night, and published the completed Part One in 1808. The layers can still be felt: the play mixes the rough knittelvers of the young Goethe with classical and Romantic metres, and some details, such as the role of the Earth Spirit, seem to belong to an earlier plan. Part Two, completed in 1831, appeared after his death in 1832 (Boyle 2000) (Goethe 1994).
Bayard Taylor's translation (1870–71), quoted here, was the most ambitious nineteenth-century attempt to render the poem in its original metres and rhymes. Its archaic diction can feel stiff, but its fidelity to form makes it useful for students who want to hear the variety of Goethe's verse. Line numbers in this guide refer to the standard German text, which Taylor's lines follow only approximately (Goethe 2001).
Plot overview
After a dedication and a comic prelude about the theatre, the play opens in Heaven. Mephistopheles wagers with the Lord that he can lead Faust, a restless scholar, away from the right path; the Lord permits him to try. On earth, Faust despairs of learning, conjures the Earth Spirit and is rejected, and is saved from suicide by the bells of Easter. On an Easter walk a black poodle follows him home and turns into Mephistopheles.
Mephistopheles offers his service. Faust, contemptuous of all earthly satisfaction, wagers that the devil will never content him: if he ever asks a moment to stay, he will be lost. After a trip to a Leipzig tavern and a witch's kitchen, where Faust is rejuvenated, he sees Margaret, a young townswoman, and demands her.
With jewels, the help of Margaret's neighbour Martha and a false report of Martha's husband's death, Faust seduces Margaret. A sleeping potion he gives her to use on her mother kills the mother; Faust, helped by Mephistopheles, kills her brother Valentine in a duel; Margaret becomes pregnant and is shunned. While Faust is distracted on Walpurgis Night, she drowns her child and is condemned to death.
Learning of her fate, Faust forces Mephistopheles to take him to her prison. Margaret, mad with grief, refuses to escape and entrusts herself to God. Mephistopheles declares her judged, a voice from above declares her saved, and Faust leaves with the devil.
Scene by scene
Scene 1: Dedication: the returning forms
ll. 1–32
Summary
Four stanzas of ottava rima in which the poet, not Faust, speaks. The 'hovering forms' of a work begun in youth return to him; he feels again the friendships and first love of those years, mourns the friends who first heard the early scenes and are now dead or scattered, and finds himself shaken by a longing for the spirit world of his poem, so that the present fades and what is past becomes real.
Analysis
The Dedication was written in 1797, when Goethe, encouraged by Schiller, returned to a play he had begun more than twenty years before. It frames the whole drama as an act of memory and resumption rather than a fresh start, and its strict Italian stanza sets it apart from the irregular German verse that follows. The poem acknowledges openly what the rest of Part One conceals: that the play is made of layers written at very different moments of its author's life (Boyle 1991) (Mason 1967).
The stanzas also introduce, in the poet's own voice, the drama's restlessness between longing and loss. The 'forms' that sway him are figures of the imagination, but they act like the spirits Faust will conjure: they come uninvited, they dominate, and they cannot be fully grasped.
Again ye come, ye hovering Forms! I find ye, As early to my clouded sight ye shone! Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye? Still o’er my heart is that illusion thrown?
The opening returns to figures half-seen in youth; the question whether they can be 'seized and bound' anticipates Faust's own desire to hold what passes.
And grasps me now a long-unwonted yearning For that serene and solemn Spirit-Land: My song, to faint Aeolian murmurs turning, Sways like a harp-string by the breezes fanned.
Taylor keeps the image of the Aeolian harp, a Romantic emblem of a mind played on by forces outside it.
Scene 2: Prelude on the Stage: manager, poet and clown
ll. 33–242
Summary
A theatre manager, a dramatic poet and a Merry-Andrew (the comic actor) debate what the coming play should be. The Manager wants a full house and plenty of incident: give the crowd variety and they will go home content. The Poet answers with a lofty account of poetic vocation, the divine harmony that the true poet draws from his heart, and longs for the inspiration of his youth. The Merry-Andrew mediates with practical wit: show life as people live it, and youth will find itself in the play.
The Manager closes the argument by demanding action rather than talk. The stage is free; let the poet use every machine and scene, and stride through the whole circle of creation, 'From Heaven, across the World, to Hell!'.
Analysis
The Prelude, often thought to owe something to the prologue of Kālidāsa's Śakuntalā, which Goethe admired in translation, is a comic piece of theatre about theatre. It sets out three competing claims on the work, commerce, art and entertainment, and leaves them unresolved, so that the audience enters the play already aware of its theatrical artifice (Brown 1986).
Its last lines announce the scope of the drama to come, a movement from Heaven across the world to Hell, which the Prologue in Heaven immediately begins. Critics have often noted that the Manager's demand for a mixture of everything describes Faust itself, a play that combines lyric, farce, tragedy, masque and satire (Brown 1986) (Jantz 1978).
What need to talk of Inspiration? ’Tis no companion of Delay. If Poetry be your vocation, Let Poetry your will obey!
The Manager's impatience with talk of inspiration; his call for deeds rhymes ironically with Faust's later 'In the Beginning was the Act'.
Use both the great and lesser heavenly light,— Squander the stars in any number, Beasts, birds, trees, rocks, and all such lumber, Fire, water, darkness, Day and Night!
The stage may squander the whole of creation: an advertisement for the play's encyclopaedic range.
Scene 3: Prologue in Heaven: the Lord's wager
ll. 243–353
Summary
The three archangels, Raphael, Gabriel and Michael, sing of the order and splendour of creation: the sun in its round, the turning earth, the storms. Mephistopheles enters among the heavenly host and strikes a different note: he has nothing to say about suns and worlds, only about man's misery, who uses the 'heavenly light' of reason to be more bestial than any beast.
The Lord asks him whether he knows Faust, 'my servant'. Mephistopheles mocks the scholar's restless appetite for the highest stars and the deepest pleasures, and proposes a bet: he can lead Faust down his own road. The Lord grants him leave as long as Faust lives on earth, observing that man errs as long as he strives, and predicting that a good man in his dark impulse will remain aware of the right way. He adds that he gave man the devil as a companion to stir him from idleness. Left alone, Mephistopheles remarks that he likes to see the Old Man from time to time.
Analysis
The scene is modelled on the opening of the Book of Job (Job 1:6–12; 2:1–6), where Satan appears among the sons of God and is permitted to test a righteous man. The difference matters: in Job the trial is of faith under suffering, while here it is of a striving mind under temptation, and the Lord speaks with a serene tolerance that has struck many readers as more Spinozan or Enlightenment than biblical (Durrani 1977) (Mason 1967).
The Prologue gives the audience a certainty that Faust himself never has: the Lord expects his servant to be led 'to a clearer morning'. This frame changes the meaning of everything that follows. The Faust legend had ended in damnation; Goethe announces from the beginning a divine perspective in which error is the condition of striving, not its refutation. Whether the Prologue's optimism is earned by the tragedy of Part One is one of the central questions of the play (Atkins 1958) (Boyle 1987).
Mephistopheles' place in Heaven is also significant. He is not God's rival but one of his instruments, the 'waggish knave' among the denying spirits, and the Lord treats him with an amused condescension that Mephistopheles returns. The devil who claims to work against creation is shown, before he says a word to Faust, to be part of it.
The sun-orb sings, in emulation, ’Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round: His path predestined through Creation He ends with step of thunder-sound.
Raphael's opening hymn: Taylor keeps the image of the singing sun, the music of the spheres.
Forsooth! He serves you after strange devices: No earthly meat or drink the fool suffices: His spirit’s ferment far aspireth; Half conscious of his frenzied, crazed unrest,
Mephistopheles' portrait of Faust: a man whom no earthly food can satisfy.
As long as he on earth shall live, So long I make no prohibition. While Man’s desires and aspirations stir, He cannot choose but err.
Taylor's version of the famous 'Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt': error is the companion of striving.
A good man, through obscurest aspiration, Has still an instinct of the one true way.
The Lord's prophecy, a good man's obscure impulse keeps a sense of the right way, governs the whole play.
Scene 4: Night: Faust's despair, the Earth Spirit and the Easter chorus
ll. 354–807
Summary
In his narrow Gothic study, Faust surveys the four faculties he has mastered, philosophy, law, medicine and theology, and finds that nothing can be known. He has turned to magic in the hope of learning what holds the world together at its core. Opening the book of Nostradamus, he contemplates the sign of the Macrocosm, a vision of the harmonious order of the universe, but it is only a spectacle. He turns to the sign of the Earth Spirit, which is nearer to him, and summons it. The Spirit appears in flame, describes itself as weaving the living garment of the deity at the loom of time, and rejects him: he resembles the spirit he comprehends, not it.
His famulus Wagner, a pedant devoted to books and rhetoric, interrupts. Faust lectures him on the emptiness of learning that does not come from the heart. Alone again, he sinks into despair: he is not like the gods but like the worm in the dust. He takes down a phial of poison and lifts it to his lips as a step into a new sphere of pure activity, but the bells and choirs of Easter morning, singing 'Christ is arisen', stop him. He does not believe their message, but the memory of childhood faith calls him back to life.
Analysis
The opening monologue in knittelvers, the rough rhyming couplets of sixteenth-century German verse, belongs to the earliest layer of the play and gives the scholar the voice of the old Faust-book. The opening survey of the faculties recalls Marlowe's Faustus, who also dismisses the disciplines one by one, but Goethe's Faust turns to magic out of a hunger for living knowledge rather than for power or pleasure (Butler 1952) (Boyle 1987).
The rejection by the Earth Spirit is the first decisive defeat of Faust's ambition. He wants to be the equal of a spirit of pure activity and is told that he is only human. The words 'Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest' haunt the rest of the play, and the Spirit is recalled in the later scenes Forest and Cavern and Dreary Day, where Faust believes that it sent him Mephistopheles. Scholars have long debated whether this belief reflects an earlier plan in which the Earth Spirit, not the Lord, controlled the action (Mason 1967) (Goethe 1994).
The Easter chorus saves Faust not by persuading him but by awakening feeling and memory. His line 'Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given' defines his position for the whole play: a modern man for whom the Christian story is beautiful and moving but no longer credible (Durrani 1977).
And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before:
The end of the famous opening survey of the four faculties, in Taylor's version of Goethe's knittelvers couplets.
That I may detect the inmost force Which binds the world, and guides its course; Its germs, productive powers explore, And rummage in empty words no more!
Faust's motive for magic: to discover what holds the world together, not to gain riches or power.
Thus at Time’s humming loom ’tis my hand prepares The garment of Life which the Deity wears!
The Earth Spirit's self-description, the weaving of life on the loom of time.
Thou’rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!
The rejection that defines Faust's human limit.
Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given; The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.
Faust's response to the Easter message: he hears it but cannot believe it.
Scene 5: Before the City-Gate: Easter walk and two souls
ll. 808–1177
Summary
On Easter Sunday the townspeople pour out of the gate into the spring countryside: apprentices, servant girls, students, citizens, a beggar, soldiers. Faust and Wagner walk among them. Faust delights in the people's sense of resurrection from their cramped houses. Peasants dancing under a linden tree honour him for the help he and his father gave them during the plague, but he tells Wagner that he knows his father's remedies killed as many as they cured.
At sunset Faust longs for wings to follow the sun, and confesses that two souls live in his breast, one clinging to the world, the other striving upwards. A black poodle circles them in widening spirals. Faust sees a trail of fire behind it; Wagner sees only a dog. Faust takes it home.
Analysis
The scene opens the play to the world of society. The crowd's festive voices, each speaking in a different rhythm, offer the first of the play's many choral and popular scenes, and the Easter holiday is a natural, secular echo of the resurrection that saved Faust the night before (Brown 1986).
The episode of the plague complicates Faust's honour: his medical knowledge was a form of guesswork, and his reputation rests on deaths he cannot forget. The 'two souls' speech is the most quoted formulation of Faust's divided nature, and critics have connected it to a broader eighteenth-century dualism of sensual and spiritual life as well as to Goethe's own dramatic method of opposition and polarity (Atkins 1958) (Williams 1987).
The poodle is Goethe's version of the black dog that accompanies Faust in the sixteenth-century legend, and the spiral of fire around it shows that the devil arrives in the shape of the ordinary.
Each will the joy of the sunshine hoard, To honor the Day of the Risen Lord! They feel, themselves, their resurrection: From the low, dark rooms, scarce habitable;
Faust watches the townspeople celebrate their own resurrection into the spring air.
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. One with tenacious organs holds in love And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The 'two souls' passage, the classic statement of Faust's division between earthly desire and spiritual aspiration.
Scene 6: The Study I: the poodle, the Word and the Spirit that Denies
ll. 1178–1529
Summary
Back in his study, calmed by his walk, Faust opens the New Testament to translate the beginning of the Gospel of John into German. He rejects 'Word', tries 'Thought' and 'Power', and settles on 'In the Beginning was the Act'. The poodle grows restless at the sacred text, swells into a monstrous form, and under Faust's incantations turns into Mephistopheles, dressed as a travelling scholar.
Asked who he is, Mephistopheles answers with a riddle: part of that power which always wills evil and always works good. He is the spirit that denies, whose element is destruction, but he admits that creation keeps resisting him. Faust's pentagram on the threshold, drawn imperfectly, holds him in; he sends spirits to lull Faust to sleep with a song of sensuous landscapes, summons a rat to gnaw away the point of the sign, and escapes. Faust wakes, wondering whether he dreamed.
Analysis
The translation of John 1:1 is a key moment for the play's thought. Faust's preference for 'Act' (Tat) over 'Word' (Wort) expresses his impatience with contemplation and language, and it anticipates his commitment to restless action in the next scene. Critics differ on whether Goethe endorses the choice or ironises it: the devil appears precisely as Faust rejects the Word (Durrani 1977) (Bennett 1986).
Mephistopheles' self-definition is the cleverest paradox in the play. He describes himself in terms that fit the Prologue: he wills evil, but in God's economy his negation stirs man to activity and so serves the good. His contempt for creation, which keeps renewing itself despite floods and earthquakes, shows the limits of his power. He also claims to be a part of the original darkness that gave birth to light, a Manichean or Neoplatonic fancy that the play never confirms (Mason 1967) (Fairley 1953).
’Tis written: “In the Beginning was the Word.” Here am I balked: who, now can help afford? The Word?—impossible so high to rate it; And otherwise must I translate it.
Faust begins to translate John 1:1 and balks at 'Word'.
The Spirit aids me: now I see the light! “In the Beginning was the Act,” I write.
After 'Thought' and 'Power', Faust settles on 'Act'.
Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.
Mephistopheles' riddling self-definition.
I am the Spirit that Denies! And justly so: for all things, from the Void Called forth, deserve to be destroyed: ’Twere better, then, were naught created.
The spirit of negation names his element.
Scene 7: The Study II: the curse, the wager and the student
ll. 1530–2072
Summary
Mephistopheles returns dressed as a young nobleman and invites Faust to try life. Faust answers with a speech of utter weariness and curses everything that ties man to life: ambition, fame, possession, wine, love, hope, faith and above all patience. An invisible spirit chorus laments that he has destroyed the beautiful world and urges him to build it anew within himself.
Mephistopheles offers his service in this world in exchange for Faust's service in the next. Faust, indifferent to the hereafter, turns the bargain into a wager: if Mephistopheles can ever satisfy him so that he lies down in contentment, or if he ever begs the passing moment to delay because it is so fair, Mephistopheles may have him. The bargain is sealed with a drop of blood. Faust declares that he will plunge into the whirl of experience and take into himself all the joy and sorrow of mankind.
While Faust prepares to leave, Mephistopheles puts on his gown and receives a new student. He satirises each faculty in turn, logic, metaphysics, law, theology and medicine, and writes in the student's album the serpent's words from Genesis, 'you shall be as God, knowing good and evil'. Faust returns, and the two set out on Mephistopheles' magic cloak.
Analysis
The first half of this scene, written around 1800 to fill the 'great gap' between the early scholar scenes and the Gretchen action, transforms the traditional pact into something new. In the Faust-book and in Marlowe, the devil serves for a fixed term and then takes the soul. Goethe's Faust makes no time limit. He wagers that Mephistopheles will never be able to satisfy him; his damnation depends not on a date but on the cessation of his striving (Atkins 1958) (Mason 1967).
The wager raises the question of who is wagering what. The Lord's bet in Heaven, that Faust will keep his sense of the right way, and Faust's bet on earth, that no pleasure will ever content him, overlap without being identical. Commentators have disagreed about whether Faust's terms are the same as the Lord's, and about whether Faust can be said to lose the wager at the end of Part Two, when he speaks the decisive words only in the conditional (Atkins 1958) (Brown 1986) (Williams 1987).
The student scene is broad academic satire in the tradition of the scholar's comedy, but it also shows Mephistopheles' talent for telling truths with malicious intent. His advice that 'gray are all theories' is often quoted as Goethe's own wisdom, though it comes from the devil and is offered to corrupt (Boyle 1987).
Cursed be the vine’s transcendent nectar,— The highest favor Love lets fall! Cursed, also, Hope!—cursed Faith, the spectre! And cursed be Patience most of all!
The end of Faust's great curse, culminating in the rejection of patience.
Here, an unwearied slave, I’ll wear thy tether, And to thine every nod obedient be: When There again we come together, Then shalt thou do the same for me.
The traditional pact: service here in exchange for service 'there'.
When thus I hail the Moment flying: “Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!” Then bind me in thy bonds undying, My final ruin then declare!
The terms of the wager, in Taylor's rendering of 'Verweile doch! du bist so schön!'.
Blood is a juice of rarest quality.
Mephistopheles' sardonic comment on signing in blood.
And all of life for all mankind created Shall be within mine inmost being tested: The highest, lowest forms my soul shall borrow, Shall heap upon itself their bliss and sorrow,
Faust's programme of total experience, the meaning of his striving in Part One.
My worthy friend, gray are all theories, And green alone Life’s golden tree.
The devil's most famous aphorism, offered to the student.
Scene 8: Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig: drinking and conjuring
ll. 2073–2336
Summary
Mephistopheles takes Faust first to a cellar tavern in Leipzig, where four students, Frosch, Brander, Siebel and Altmayer, are drinking and singing. Brander sings a song about a rat poisoned in a cellar; Mephistopheles answers with a satirical song about a king who made his flea a minister. He bores holes in the table and draws from them whatever wine each drinker requests. When a drop catches fire and the drinkers attack him, he bewitches them into believing they are in a vineyard holding grapes; when the spell breaks they are holding each other's noses, and Mephistopheles and Faust have vanished.
Analysis
Auerbach's Cellar was a real Leipzig tavern Goethe knew as a student, and a sixteenth-century legend told of Faust riding out of it on a barrel. The scene belongs to the earliest layer of the play, where Faust himself performed the tricks; in the final version, Mephistopheles plays the magician and Faust watches in silence, bored (Mason 1967) (Boyle 1987).
This is the first trial of the wager and it fails: crude pleasure has no hold on Faust. The rat's agony, which the drinkers find funny, parodies the theme of desire burning inside a trapped creature, and the political satire of the flea song shows the devil's appetite for mockery of power.
There was a rat in the cellar-nest, Whom fat and butter made smoother: He had a paunch beneath his vest Like that of Doctor Luther.
The beginning of Brander's rat song, with its Reformation joke.
Is no one laughing? no one drinking? I’ll teach you how to grin, I’m thinking. To-day you’re like wet straw, so tame; And usually you’re all aflame.
Frosch's opening, which sets the tone of student revelry.
Scene 9: Witches' Kitchen: rejuvenation and the mirror
ll. 2337–2604
Summary
In a witch's kitchen full of cauldrons and apes, Faust is disgusted at the idea that such nonsense could take thirty years off his age. While Mephistopheles talks with the apes, Faust sees in a magic mirror the image of a beautiful woman and is enraptured. The witch returns, does not at first recognise Mephistopheles without his horse's hoof and ravens, and then, after a mock-solemn incantation, the 'witch's once-one's-one', gives Faust a potion. Mephistopheles promises that he will soon see the paragon of women alive and, aside, that with this drink in his body he will see Helen in every woman.
Analysis
Goethe wrote this scene in Rome in 1788, and its grotesque comedy marks a deliberate break from the scholar's tragedy. Faust is made young, and the change prepares the Gretchen action; the rejuvenation potion removes the improbability of an aged scholar courting a young girl but also casts doubt on the nature of his desire, which is now partly chemical (Boyle 1991) (Mason 1967).
The witch's arithmetic is nonsense, and Mephistopheles mocks it as an image of theological mystery, an allusion many readers take to the doctrine of the Trinity. The mirror image and the aside about Helen look forward to Part Two, where Faust will summon Helen of Troy herself (Brown 1986).
Thou’lt find, this drink thy blood compelling, Each woman beautiful as Helen!
Mephistopheles' aside: the potion will make every woman seem Helen.
’Tis done, let it be! We speak and we see, We hear and we rhyme!
The apes' doggerel parodies the creative claims of poetry.
Scene 10: Street: the first meeting
ll. 2605–2677
Summary
Faust sees Margaret (Gretchen) passing in the street and offers her his arm. She refuses briskly and goes home. Faust, captivated, demands that Mephistopheles get her for him at once. Mephistopheles explains that she has just come from confession, where he overheard her: she is innocent, and over her he has no power. Faust insists that he will leave Mephistopheles if he does not have her by midnight; Mephistopheles counsels patience and promises to bring him to her room and to find a gift.
Analysis
Margaret's first words define her: modest, quick and self-possessed. The scene begins the Gretchen tragedy, the heart of the Urfaust and the part of the play that has most deeply affected its readers. Its idiom, a mixture of courtly compliment and everyday speech, is the domestic register in which the tragedy will unfold (Boyle 1987).
Faust's reaction is not idealising love but appetite: he wants her immediately and treats Mephistopheles as a procurer. The episode tests his earlier contempt for sensual satisfaction, and it shows how quickly his striving can become possession.
I’m neither lady, neither fair, And home I can go without your care.
Margaret's first words, a plain refusal of Faust's courtly address.
By Heaven, the girl is wondrous fair! Of all I’ve seen, beyond compare; So sweetly virtuous and pure, And yet a little pert, be sure!
Faust's immediate infatuation.
Scene 11: Evening: Margaret's room and the King of Thule
ll. 2678–2804
Summary
Margaret wonders who the gentleman was. When she leaves, Mephistopheles brings Faust into her small, clean room. Faust is moved by its order and poverty and imagines her childhood there; he feels his lust turning into a mist of love and almost leaves. Mephistopheles places a casket of jewels in her cupboard. Margaret returns, feels a strange oppression, and sings as she undresses the ballad of the King of Thule, who kept his dead mistress's golden goblet until he died and then threw it into the sea. She finds the jewels and tries them on before the mirror.
Analysis
The King of Thule ballad, written in the early 1770s and published separately, is one of Goethe's most celebrated lyrics. Its subject, a love faithful beyond death, contrasts with the love Faust brings, and its lonely golden cup thrown into the sea foreshadows loss. Placed in Margaret's mouth, it shows her imagination formed by folk song and romance (Boyle 1991).
Faust's monologue in her room is one of the play's most tender passages and one of its most ironic. He idealises her humble domesticity at the very moment he and Mephistopheles invade it, and the jewels that tempt her vanity will open her house to the devil.
O dearest hand, to thee ’tis given To change this hut into a lower heaven!
Faust's idealisation of Margaret's domestic world.
There was a King in Thule, Was faithful till the grave,— To whom his mistress, dying, A golden goblet gave.
The opening of the King of Thule ballad.
Scene 12: Promenade: the jewels go to the Church
ll. 2805–2864
Summary
Mephistopheles, furious, tells Faust that Margaret's mother sensed something wrong with the jewels and gave them to a priest, who took them gladly, remarking that the Holy Church has a healthy stomach and can digest ill-gotten goods. Margaret is now restless, thinking about the jewels and the man who left them. Faust orders a second, finer gift, and tells Mephistopheles to work on the neighbour, Martha.
Analysis
The brief scene is comic, and its satire of clerical greed is sharp. Mephistopheles' rage, he would give himself to the devil if he were not a devil himself, is one of the few moments when he is outwitted. But the comedy is ominous: the mother's instinct for danger is right, and Margaret is now curious about the giver (Boyle 1987).
I would myself unto the Devil deliver, If I were not a Devil myself!
Mephistopheles' rage, a joke at his own expense.
Just think, the pocket of a priest should get The trinkets left for Margaret! The mother saw them, and, instanter, A secret dread began to haunt her.
The mother's suspicion and the priest's appropriation of the jewels.
Scene 13: The Neighbor's House: Martha and the news of a death
ll. 2865–3024
Summary
Martha Schwerdtlein, abandoned by her husband, wishes she had a certificate of his death. Margaret comes to show her a second casket of jewels; Martha advises her to keep them secret and wear them at her house. Mephistopheles arrives, flatters both women, and announces that Martha's husband has died in Padua and lies buried near Saint Antony. He invents last words, debts and a careless life. Martha wants the death attested in the paper; Mephistopheles says two witnesses are needed and offers to bring a companion that evening.
Analysis
Martha is a figure of comic realism, a widow more interested in a death certificate and a new husband than in mourning, and her flirtation with Mephistopheles parodies Faust's courtship of Margaret. The devil finds a perfect partner in her worldliness, and she becomes the practical agent of the seduction (Brown 1986).
The scene shows Mephistopheles' skill with lies and the readiness of human society to accept them. A false report, delivered with formal piety, opens the way to the garden meetings.
God forgive my husband, yet he Hasn’t done his duty by me! Off in the world he went straightway,— Left me lie in the straw where I lay.
Martha's opening complaint, half grief and half grievance.
In Padua buried, he is lying Beside the good Saint Antony, Within a grave well consecrated, For cool, eternal rest created.
Mephistopheles' invented account of the husband's burial.
Scene 14: A Street: false witness
ll. 3025–3072
Summary
Mephistopheles tells Faust that he will meet Margaret at Martha's that evening, but first they must swear that they saw Martha's husband dead. Faust refuses to bear false witness. Mephistopheles mocks him: has he never given confident definitions of God, the world and man without knowing anything? And will he not soon swear eternal love to Margaret? Faust insists that his love will be real. He concedes, angrily, because he has no choice.
Analysis
The scene pins down one of the play's moral problems. Faust's feeling for Margaret is sincere, yet it is entangled from the start with deception. Mephistopheles' argument that Faust has always spoken beyond his knowledge identifies him as a sophist, and Faust's protest that his passion is 'endless, eternal' is both moving and self-deceived (Boyle 1987) (Williams 1987).
Then range with all my senses through creation, Craving the speech of inspiration, And call this ardor, so supernal, Endless, eternal and eternal,—
Faust's defence of his feeling as eternal, which Mephistopheles answers with a mocking 'And yet I'm right!'.
Scene 15: Garden: two couples
ll. 3073–3204
Summary
In Martha's garden two couples walk alternately across the stage: Faust and Margaret, Mephistopheles and Martha. Margaret is shy and then frank; she tells Faust about her household, her mother, her brother who is a soldier, and the little sister she nursed and who died. Martha presses Mephistopheles about marriage; he evades. Margaret plucks the petals of a flower to the old refrain of 'loves me, loves me not', and ends with 'He loves me!'. Faust takes her hands and speaks of a rapture that must be eternal.
Analysis
The alternating couples are a classic comic device, and the contrast is sharp: Margaret's openness and Faust's growing tenderness on one side, Martha's calculation and Mephistopheles' cynicism on the other. Margaret's account of her dead sister introduces the motif of an infant's death that returns, horribly, in the Dungeon (Boyle 1987).
The flower oracle, a children's game, is a moment of trust and joy. Faust's answer that the rapture must be eternal, because an end would be despair, catches the moment when love becomes, for him, an image of the infinite, and therefore of the forbidden wish to make a moment stay.
Yes, child! and let this blossom-word For thee be speech divine! He loves thee! Ah, know’st thou what it means? He loves thee!
Faust's answer to Margaret's flower oracle.
To yield one wholly, and to feel a rapture In yielding, that must be eternal! Eternal!—for the end would be despair. No, no,—no ending! no ending!
Faust's longing for an eternal rapture.
Scene 16: A Garden-Arbor: the kiss
ll. 3205–3216
Summary
Margaret runs into a little summer-house, Faust follows, and they kiss. Mephistopheles knocks; it is time to part. After they leave, Margaret wonders what such a learned man can see in a simple girl like her.
Analysis
The shortest scene in the play captures happiness at its height. Margaret's final speech shows her humility and her sense of the difference in rank and learning between them; the imbalance makes her vulnerable (Brown 1986).
Dear God! However is it, such A man can think and know so much? I stand ashamed and in amaze, And answer “Yes” to all he says,
Margaret's wonder at Faust's interest in her.
Scene 17: Forest and Cavern: Faust's retreat
ll. 3217–3373
Summary
Faust has fled into the wilderness. He thanks the 'Spirit sublime' for giving him nature as a kingdom and teaching him to know his brothers in air, water and wood, but he admits that nothing perfect is granted to man: with his joy came the companion who degrades him. Mephistopheles arrives and mocks his retreat as a pastime of a man who should be with his girl. He describes Margaret's longing for him. Faust, tormented, calls himself a cataract plunging towards the abyss and her peaceful life the hut it will destroy. He resolves to return, knowing he will ruin her.
Analysis
The monologue in blank verse is Goethe's most sustained hymn to nature in the play and reflects his scientific and philosophical interests of the 1780s. It addresses the Spirit who appeared 'in fire', apparently the Earth Spirit, and claims that the Spirit gave him Mephistopheles as companion, a statement at odds with the Prologue that has been explained by the layered history of the play (Mason 1967) (Goethe 1994).
The scene stood in a different place in the Fragment of 1790, where it came after the fountain scene and so after Margaret's seduction; in 1808 Goethe placed it before. The change makes Faust's return a fully conscious choice: he knows he will destroy her peace and goes anyway (Boyle 1987) (Mason 1967).
Spirit sublime, thou gav’st me, gav’st me all For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire. Thou gav’st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
The opening of the hymn to the 'Spirit sublime'.
I am the fugitive, all houseless roaming, The monster without air or rest, That like a cataract, down rocks and gorges foaming, Leaps, maddened, into the abyss’s breast!
Faust's self-image as the destroying torrent.
She and her peace I yet must undermine: Thou, Hell, hast claimed this sacrifice as thine! Help, Devil! through the coming pangs to push me; What must be, let it quickly be!
Faust chooses the ruin he foresees.
Scene 18: Margaret's Room: the spinning-wheel song
ll. 3374–3413
Summary
Alone at her spinning wheel, Margaret sings that her peace is gone and her heart heavy. Without him the world is a grave; she sees only him; she remembers his walk, his smile, his kiss, and longs to hold him and to die under his kisses.
Analysis
The song, set to music by Franz Schubert as Gretchen am Spinnrade in 1814, is one of the best-known lyrics in German. Its short lines and refrain imitate the turning of the wheel and the obsessive return of thought. Margaret's longing is innocent in language but undisguised in desire, and her last stanza already joins love and death (Boyle 1991).
My peace is gone, My heart is sore: I never shall find it, Ah, nevermore!
The refrain.
Save I have him near. The grave is here; The world is gall And bitterness all.
Love's absence as a living death.
Scene 19: Martha's Garden: the question of religion
ll. 3414–3543
Summary
Margaret asks Faust how he stands with religion. He evades; she presses: does he believe in God? Faust answers with a lyrical credo: no one can say he believes or disbelieves in Him; the all-embracing, all-sustaining force fills heaven and earth and their own hearts; call it happiness, heart, love, God; feeling is everything, names are sound and smoke. Margaret answers that the priest says much the same, in other words.
She tells him that she instinctively hates his companion. Faust dismisses this. She longs to receive him at night but fears her mother; he gives her a sleeping potion, three drops of which will make her mother sleep soundly. She agrees. Mephistopheles enters, mocking the catechism he has overheard and Margaret's intuition about him.
Analysis
Faust's answer to 'the Gretchen question', a phrase that has entered the German language for any probing question of conviction, is the play's fullest statement of a pantheistic or Spinozan religion of feeling. Its beauty is undeniable, but its context is ambiguous: it is a seducer's answer to a pious girl, and it evades the question of the Church, the sacraments and the moral law (Durrani 1977) (Boyle 1987).
Margaret's instinct about Mephistopheles is a sign of the Lord's prophecy fulfilled in her rather than in Faust: she has the good person's sense of the right way. The sleeping potion, offered almost carelessly, turns love into the instrument of her mother's death.
How is’t with thy religion, pray? Thou art a dear, good-hearted man, And yet, I think, dost not incline that way.
The 'Gretchen question'.
The All-enfolding, The All-upholding, Folds and upholds he not Thee, me, Himself?
Faust's refusal to name God.
Call it, then, what thou wilt,— Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God! I have no name to give it!
The climax of Faust's credo of feeling: God has no adequate name.
Here is a phial: in her drink But three drops of it measure, And deepest sleep will on her senses sink.
The sleeping potion.
Scene 20: At the Fountain: Barbara's disgrace
ll. 3544–3586
Summary
At the well, Lisbeth tells Margaret with relish that Barbara has been seduced and is pregnant, her lover gone; she will do public penance and the village boys will tear her bridal wreath. Margaret, who once condemned such girls herself, goes home and confesses that she too is now in sin, yet everything that led her there was so good and dear.
Analysis
The scene shows the moral world of the small town in which Margaret will be judged: gossip, public shame and the rituals of humiliation for unmarried mothers. Its tone of malicious pleasure prepares the full weight of the punishment Margaret fears. Her closing lines are a self-accusation that does not renounce love (Brown 1986) (Boyle 1987).
And blessed myself, and boasted high,— And now—a living sin am I! Yet—all that drove my heart thereto, God! was so good, so dear, so true!
Margaret recognises her own fall in Barbara's.
Scene 21: Donjon: prayer to the Mater Dolorosa
ll. 3587–3619
Summary
In a niche of the town wall stands an image of the Sorrowful Mother. Margaret places flowers before it and prays to her to look down on her distress. She cannot sleep, she weeps at dawn, and she begs to be saved from shame and death.
Analysis
The prayer echoes the medieval sequence Stabat mater dolorosa, in which the Virgin stands at the cross. Margaret, already pregnant and abandoned, turns to the one figure who can understand a mother's grief. The scene's lyric form and Catholic imagery mark it as the spiritual counterpart of the spinning-wheel song (Durrani 1977).
Incline, O Maiden, Thou sorrow-laden, Thy gracious countenance upon my pain!
The opening of the prayer.
Scene 22: Night: Valentine's death
ll. 3620–3775
Summary
Valentine, Margaret's brother, a soldier, recalls how proudly he once praised his sister and how now every tongue mocks him. Faust and Mephistopheles arrive; Mephistopheles sings an obscene serenade under her window. Valentine attacks; with Mephistopheles parrying his blows, Faust stabs him. As townspeople gather, Valentine dying curses Margaret as a whore, predicts her ostracism and public shame, and dies as a soldier. Faust and Mephistopheles flee.
Analysis
Valentine's speech gives voice to the harsh code of family honour in Margaret's world. His death makes Faust a murderer, and his public curse turns Margaret's private sin into a scandal. Apart from a short early draft of Valentine's monologue, the scene was written for the 1808 version; it does not appear in the Fragment of 1790 (Mason 1967) (Goethe 1994).
His last words, which commend him to God as a brave soldier while damning his sister, show how this world distributes guilt. Faust, who struck the blow, is gone; Margaret remains to bear the consequences.
The time I verily can discern When all the honest folk will turn From thee, thou jade! and seek protection As from a corpse that breeds infection.
Valentine predicts Margaret's ostracism.
When thou from honor didst depart It stabbed me to the very heart. Now through the slumber of the grave I go to God as a soldier brave.
Valentine's last words.
Scene 23: Cathedral: Dies irae
ll. 3776–3834
Summary
At a church service (in the Urfaust, the requiem for her mother), Margaret stands among the congregation while an Evil Spirit whispers behind her. It reminds her of her innocent childhood prayers and accuses her: her mother died from the sleeping draught, her brother's blood is on her threshold, and a child stirs beneath her heart. The choir sings the Dies irae, the hymn of the Last Judgement. Margaret feels the walls closing in, cannot breathe, and faints, crying to her neighbour for her cordial.
Analysis
The scene combines the medieval liturgy of judgement with Margaret's inward guilt. The Evil Spirit may be read as a devil, as her conscience, or as the voice of the community, and the play does not decide. The Latin hymn's verses on the trumpet and the opened book of judgement intensify her despair (Durrani 1977) (Boyle 1987).
This was the last scene of the Gretchen action in the Fragment of 1790, where the story broke off with her collapse; only in 1808 did Goethe complete the tragedy (Mason 1967).
HOW otherwise was it, Margaret, When thou, still innocent, Here to the altar cam’st, And from the worn and fingered book
The Evil Spirit recalls her innocent childhood.
Pray’st thou for mercy on thy mother’s soul, That fell asleep to long, long torment, and through thee? Upon thy threshold whose the blood?
The catalogue of her guilt: her mother's death and her brother's blood.
Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla!
The opening of the Dies irae.
Scene 24: Walpurgis-Night: the Brocken
ll. 3835–4222
Summary
On the night of 30 April, Mephistopheles leads Faust up the Brocken in the Harz Mountains to the witches' sabbath. A will-o'-the-wisp guides them; trees, rocks and lights seem to whirl around them; the mountain glows with Mammon's gold. Witches and wizards stream past to the summit. Mephistopheles, calling himself Squire Voland, leads Faust to a group of retired dignitaries, a general, a minister, a parvenu and an author, who complain about the decline of the times, and to a peddler-witch selling instruments of crime.
Faust dances with a young witch until a red mouse jumps from her mouth; Mephistopheles mocks a 'Proktophantasmist', a rationalist who denies ghosts. Then Faust sees a pale girl in the distance, moving as if her feet were chained, and recognises Margaret. Mephistopheles tells him it is an idol, a Medusa, but Faust sees a red line around her neck, no broader than the back of a knife. Mephistopheles drags him away to a theatre.
Analysis
Goethe drew on folk tradition and on the sixteenth-century Faust-book for the witches' sabbath, but the scene's grotesque satire is his own. Its fragmentary episodes, many satirical of contemporaries, suggest Faust's distraction as Mephistopheles tries to make him forget Margaret. Goethe drafted a climactic scene with Satan on the summit but did not include it in the published text (Goethe 1994) (Mason 1967).
The vision of Margaret with a red line round her throat, the sign of beheading, is the turning point. It breaks through the sensual illusions of the sabbath and announces the execution Faust is not yet aware of. Mephistopheles' comparison with Medusa recalls both the stony stare of death and the female head severed by Perseus.
All is turning, whirling, blending, Trees and rocks with grinning faces, Wandering lights that spin in mazes, Still increasing and expanding!
The disorienting ascent.
The whirlpool swirls to get above: Thou’rt shoved thyself, imagining to shove.
Mephistopheles' line on the illusion of power.
Mephisto, seest thou there, Alone and far, a girl most pale and fair? She falters on, her way scarce knowing, As if with fettered feet that stay her going.
The vision of Margaret.
And, strange! around her fairest throat A single scarlet band is gleaming, No broader than a knife-blade seeming!
The red line around her throat.
Scene 25: Walpurgis-Night's Dream: the Intermezzo
ll. 4223–4398
Summary
A short masque, 'Oberon and Titania's Golden Wedding', is performed with music. Puck, Ariel, Oberon and Titania appear with a stream of figures from literature, philosophy and fashion: dilettantes, critics, philosophers of various schools, a weathercock, a Northern artist, a purist. Each speaks a satirical quatrain, and the masque ends when the orchestra plays pianissimo and everything vanishes like a cloud.
Analysis
The Intermezzo was first written in 1797 as a sequel to the Xenien, the satirical epigrams Goethe and Schiller published against their critics, and was later inserted into Faust. Its targets include contemporary writers and philosophical schools, many now obscure, and it is often cut in performance (Goethe 1994) (Boyle 2000).
Its relation to the tragedy is disputed. Some readers see it as an indulgence that interrupts the action; others argue that its emptiness is the point, a world of literary and intellectual vanity that keeps Faust from Margaret's suffering (Brown 1986) (Jantz 1978).
Sons of Mieding, rest to-day! Needless your machinery: Misty vale and mountain gray, That is all the scenery.
The Manager's opening quatrain: the theatre of illusion needs no machinery.
Cometh Puck, and, light of limb, Whisks and whirls in measure: Come a hundred after him, To share with him the pleasure.
Puck's entrance.
Scene 26: Dreary Day. A Field: the prose outburst
Prose scene (no verse numbers)
Summary
Faust learns that Margaret has been imprisoned as a criminal. In prose he rages at Mephistopheles for hiding her misery while distracting him with 'insipid dissipations'. Mephistopheles answers coldly: 'She is not the first.' Faust calls on the Infinite Spirit to transform him back into a dog. Mephistopheles asks who drove her to ruin, Faust or he, and agrees to take Faust to the prison, warning him of the blood-guilt hanging over him in the town.
Analysis
This is the only prose scene in the play and survives almost unchanged from the Urfaust. Its raw, unmetred speech is a deliberate shock after the Walpurgis Night verse. Goethe kept it when he versified the Dungeon scene, perhaps because its violence could not be put in verse without loss (Mason 1967) (Boyle 1987).
Mephistopheles' 'She is not the first' strikes many readers as the most chilling line in the play: it denies Margaret's individual suffering. His counter-question, 'Who was it that plunged her into ruin? I, or thou?', places guilt where the play itself places it, on Faust.
She is not the first.
Mephistopheles' answer to Faust's outrage.
Who was it that plunged her into ruin? I, or thou?
Mephistopheles returns the guilt to Faust.
Scene 27: Night. Open Field: the raven-stone
ll. 4399–4404
Summary
Faust and Mephistopheles ride past the place of execution on black horses. Faust sees figures moving around the 'raven-stone'; Mephistopheles says they are witches and urges him on.
Analysis
Six lines of verse, the shortest scene in the play, act as an omen. The ravenstone (Rabenstein) was the stone platform of execution, and the spectral figures prefigure Margaret's death. The breathless exchanges anticipate the Dungeon's dread (Boyle 1987).
What weave they there round the raven-stone?
Faust glimpses figures at the place of execution.
Scene 28: Dungeon: 'She is judged! – She is saved!'
ll. 4405–4612
Summary
Faust enters Margaret's cell with the keys. She is out of her mind, singing a folk song of a murdered child; she takes him for the executioner and begs to be allowed to nurse her baby. When she recognises him, she rejoices: she is saved. Then she notices that his kisses are cold. She tells him that she drowned their child, that her mother is dead, and she asks him to bury them all: her mother, her brother, herself and the child.
Faust urges her to flee; she refuses, haunted by visions of the pond and her mother on a stone. The day is breaking, her wedding day, she says, and the day of her execution. When Mephistopheles appears, she recoils, entrusts herself to the judgement of God and calls on the angels. Mephistopheles declares 'She is judged!'; a voice from above answers 'She is saved!'. Mephistopheles drags Faust away; from within, Margaret's voice calls after him: 'Henry! Henry!'
Analysis
The Dungeon was written in prose in the Urfaust and versified for the 1808 edition. Margaret's madness, with its broken memory and folk song, is among the greatest achievements of German tragic writing. The case of Susanna Margaretha Brandt, executed in Frankfurt in 1772 for killing her newborn child, has often been cited as an influence on Goethe's treatment of infanticide (Boyle 1991) (Goethe 1994).
Margaret's refusal to escape is her decisive act. She submits to divine and human judgement rather than flee with the man whose companion she now recognises as the devil. The voice from above, absent from the Urfaust, declares her saved, and so gives the Gretchen tragedy a religious resolution that the play has refused to Faust himself (Mason 1967) (Boyle 1987).
The scene ends Part One without ending Faust's story. He leaves with Mephistopheles, his wager unresolved and his guilt immense. Part Two (1832), in five acts, takes him through the imperial court, classical Greece and Helen, and a career of land reclamation, before angels carry his immortal part to heaven, where Margaret, as one of the penitents, intercedes for him. The angels' famous lines there, declaring that whoever strives with constant effort can be redeemed, give the final answer to the wager of the Prologue (Atkins 1958) (Williams 1987).
A shudder, long unfelt, comes o’er me; Mankind’s collected woe o’erwhelms me, here. She dwells within the dark, damp walls before me, And all her crime was a delusion dear!
Faust before the door of the cell.
’Tis he! ’tis he! Where now is all my pain? The anguish of the dungeon, and the chain? ’Tis thou! Thou comest to save me, And I am saved!—
Margaret recognises Faust and believes herself saved.
The death-bell tolls, the wand is broken. I am seized, and bound, and delivered— Shoved to the block—they give the sign!
Margaret's vision of her own execution.
Henry! I shudder to think of thee.
Margaret's last words to Faust, recoiling from the man she loved.
She is judged!
Mephistopheles' verdict.
She is saved!
The voice from above answers him.
Characters
The scholar
- Faust
- A doctor of the university town who has mastered all four faculties and found them empty. Turning to magic, then to the devil, he bargains not for a term of pleasure but on the claim that nothing will ever satisfy him. In Part One his striving leads to the seduction and destruction of Margaret; he is tender, self-deceived and in the end guilty of her ruin, though never wholly indifferent to it.
- Wagner
- Faust's assistant, a pedant devoted to books and rhetoric, content with learning that Faust despises. In Part Two he creates an artificial man, Homunculus.
- The Student
- A newcomer to the university whom Mephistopheles, wearing Faust's gown, advises with cynical satire of the faculties.
The supernatural
- Mephistopheles
- The devil, 'the spirit that denies', whom the Lord allows to tempt Faust. Witty, cynical and often truthful, he plays many parts: poodle, wandering scholar, nobleman, professor, matchmaker and magician. He wills evil but, in the Lord's economy, stirs man to activity. Goethe's Mephistopheles is a far more ironic and modern figure than the devil of the Faust-book and of Marlowe.
- The Lord
- God in the Prologue in Heaven, who allows Mephistopheles to tempt Faust in the confidence that a good man keeps a sense of the right way. His tolerant, almost humorous manner is a key to the play's theodicy.
- The Earth Spirit
- A spirit of the active life of nature whom Faust conjures in the opening scene and who rejects him. Faust later believes that this spirit sent Mephistopheles to him.
- The Evil Spirit
- The voice that torments Margaret in the Cathedral, readable as a demon, her conscience or the judgement of her community.
The town
- Margaret (Gretchen)
- A young woman of modest family, pious and quick-witted, who loves Faust with complete sincerity. Seduced, she unknowingly poisons her mother with Faust's sleeping draught, loses her brother, drowns her child and is condemned to death. Her refusal to escape and her trust in God's judgement win the play's only explicit promise of salvation.
- Martha Schwerdtlein
- Margaret's neighbour, abandoned by her husband. Shrewd, worldly and eager to remarry, she flirts with Mephistopheles and arranges the meetings in her garden.
- Valentine
- Margaret's brother, a soldier proud of her honour. Killed by Faust in a duel, he curses her publicly as he dies.
- Lisbeth
- A gossip who tells Margaret about the pregnancy and disgrace of their acquaintance Barbara.
- Frosch, Brander, Siebel and Altmayer
- The drinking students in Auerbach's Cellar, the victims of Mephistopheles' tricks.
Themes
Striving and its limits
The Lord says that man errs as long as he strives (Streben), and Faust stakes his soul on never ceasing to strive. Restless desire is the source of his greatness, his refusal of every comfortable answer, and of his guilt, since it treats people and experiences as means to an infinite end. Part One shows what striving costs others; Part Two claims that striving itself is redemptive (Atkins 1958) (Williams 1987).
The ideal has been read in very different ways: as a humane ethic of self-development, as a myth of modern capitalism and industry, or as a warning against Promethean self-assertion. Its ambiguity is part of the play's power (Berman 1982) (Lukács 1968).
Knowledge and life
Faust begins by rejecting book-learning for living knowledge, and the play is full of figures of the scholar: Faust, Wagner, the Student, the Proktophantasmist. Mephistopheles' 'gray are all theories' sums up one side of the argument, but the play does not simply endorse life against thought; the Earth Spirit reminds Faust that he can comprehend only what he resembles (Fairley 1953) (Boyle 1987).
Love, seduction and guilt
The Gretchen tragedy shows love as both the highest experience and an act of destruction. Faust's feeling is genuine, but it is mediated by the devil's jewels, Martha's intrigue and a false oath, and its consequences fall on Margaret alone. The play's sympathy is with the woman, and her suffering is its moral centre (Boyle 1987) (Brown 1986).
Good, evil and divine order
The Prologue places Mephistopheles within God's plan, and his self-description as the force that works good while willing evil makes evil an instrument of creation. Critics have related this to the Book of Job, to Leibniz and Spinoza, and to Goethe's own idea of polarity. Yet the Gretchen tragedy tests the theodicy severely: it is hard to see Margaret's suffering as part of a benign design (Durrani 1977) (Mason 1967).
Religion and feeling
Faust is moved by the Easter bells but cannot believe; he answers Margaret's question with a religion of feeling; Margaret's faith is traditional and Catholic, and it is she who is saved. The play holds these positions in tension without resolving them (Durrani 1977).
Theatre and illusion
From the Prelude on the Stage to the Walpurgis Night theatre, the play is aware of itself as spectacle. Mephistopheles is a master of illusion, and Faust repeatedly confuses images with reality: the woman in the mirror, the grapes in the cellar, the eidolon of Margaret. The theme connects the play's theatrical self-consciousness with its moral questions about desire and deception (Brown 1986) (Bennett 1986).
Motifs
The moment
The wager turns on whether Faust will ever ask a moment to stay. The word recurs in his speeches of longing and in his love scenes with Margaret, where the wish to make rapture eternal shows how close he comes to the forbidden words.
Spirits and conjuring
The Macrocosm, the Earth Spirit, the spirit choruses and the incantations over the poodle mark Faust's turn from learning to magic and keep the boundary between the natural and supernatural porous.
Song
Songs punctuate the play: the Easter choruses, the rat and flea songs, the King of Thule, the spinning-wheel song, the prayer to the Mater Dolorosa, the Dies irae and Margaret's mad song in the Dungeon. They give the Gretchen tragedy much of its lyric intensity.
Thresholds
The pentagram on Faust's threshold, Margaret's room, the blood on her doorstep, the prison door: crossings of boundaries mark each stage of Faust's intrusion into other lives.
Blood
The pact signed in blood, Valentine's blood on the threshold and the red line round Margaret's throat connect the bargain with the violence it causes.
Symbols
The poodle
The black dog of the Faust legend, transformed by Goethe into an ordinary-looking poodle with a trail of fire: the devil arrives in a domestic form.
The jewels
The devil's gifts to Margaret tempt her innocent vanity, alert her mother and draw Martha into the intrigue. They stand for the corrupting power of wealth in a world of modest virtue.
The golden goblet of Thule
The king's cup is a symbol of faithful love beyond death, the opposite of Faust's love, and its loss in the sea foreshadows Margaret's.
The phials
Faust's poison in the opening scene and the sleeping potion he gives Margaret link his despair to her ruin: the means of self-destruction become an instrument of another's death.
The red line
The thin mark around the neck of Margaret's phantom on the Brocken signifies her execution by the sword and breaks through the illusions of Walpurgis Night.
Critical debates
Unity or fragment?
Because Part One was written over more than thirty years, critics long asked whether it is a unified work or an assemblage of layers. Older scholarship searched for contradictions, such as the Earth Spirit's role, and assigned scenes to periods. More recent criticism has treated the play's heterogeneity as deliberate, a modern form that combines many genres (Mason 1967) (Jantz 1978) (Brown 1986).
Goethe himself called the work 'incommensurable', and editors such as Schöne have shown how much of its meaning depends on its history of composition (Goethe 1994).
Pact and wager
Goethe replaces the traditional pact with a wager, and adds a second wager in Heaven. Critics disagree about how the two relate: whether Faust's terms are the same as the Lord's, whether the blood signature makes the wager a contract, and whether Faust can be said to lose when, at the end of Part Two, he imagines saying the fatal words (Atkins 1958) (Williams 1987).
Some readers argue that the wager makes damnation turn on psychological stagnation rather than sin, a modern revision of the legend; others stress that the bargain still implicates Faust in real crimes (Boyle 1987) (Mason 1967).
Mephistopheles and the theodicy
Is Mephistopheles a devil in the Christian sense, a spirit of negation in a Spinozan universe, or a dramatised aspect of Faust? The Prologue's echo of Job places him under God's authority, and his own self-definition makes him an unwilling servant of the good. Critics who read the play as a theodicy must reckon with the Gretchen tragedy, which shows the cost of the devil's 'useful' activity (Durrani 1977) (Fairley 1953) (Mason 1967).
Margaret's tragedy and Faust's guilt
The Gretchen action, written first and drawing on the realities of infanticide trials, has often been seen as the emotional centre of Part One, and some critics have argued that it overwhelms the philosophical frame. The question of Faust's guilt is sharp: he is responsible for three deaths and the ruin of the woman he loves (Boyle 1987) (Brown 1986).
The voice from above declaring Margaret saved has been read as a sincere religious resolution, as a dramatic necessity for the continuation in Part Two, and as a sign that the play separates her fate from his (Atkins 1958) (Goethe 1994).
The 'Faustian' and modernity
Since the nineteenth century Faust has been read as the representative of modern man: restless, scientific, expansive. Marxist critics such as Lukács saw in the play a portrait of bourgeois development, and Berman made Faust the first tragedy of modernisation; Binswanger read Part Two as an allegory of the modern money economy (Lukács 1968) (Berman 1982) (Binswanger 1994).
Others warn that 'Faustian' ideology owes more to later nationalist and philosophical appropriations than to Goethe's ironic text (Boyle 1987) (Williams 1987).
Goethe, Marlowe and the legend
Goethe's Faust departs radically from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Faust-book in its prologue, its wager, the Gretchen tragedy and its eventual salvation. Critics compare the Protestant theology of the earlier versions with Goethe's humanism and assess how much he knew of Marlowe, whom he probably met only through the puppet plays (Butler 1952) (Marlowe 1993) (Jones 1994).
Drama for the stage or the mind?
Part One has a long stage history, but its length, variety and set pieces like the Walpurgis Night Intermezzo have led some critics to treat it as a 'world theatre' or closet drama more than a stage play. Brown and others place it in the tradition of medieval and baroque world theatre, others in the Romantic poetic drama (Brown 1986) (Bennett 1986).
Key passages
As long as he on earth shall live, So long I make no prohibition. While Man’s desires and aspirations stir, He cannot choose but err.
The Lord grants Mephistopheles leave to tempt Faust as long as he lives on earth, and explains why error is no reason for despair: aspiration and error belong together. The principle governs the drama, since it makes Faust's mistakes part of his striving rather than the end of it.
A good man, through obscurest aspiration, Has still an instinct of the one true way.
The Lord's prophecy is the basis of the wager in Heaven. Faust will err, but he will keep some instinct for the right way. Part One tests that prophecy through the Gretchen tragedy; Part Two claims to fulfil it.
Thou’rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!
The Earth Spirit humiliates Faust, who claims to be its equal. The words name his human limit and the gap between his longing and his capacities, which drives him to despair, to the phial of poison and eventually to Mephistopheles.
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. One with tenacious organs holds in love And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
Faust tells Wagner that he is divided between sensual attachment to the world and spiritual aspiration. The speech states the conflict that Mephistopheles exploits and that critics have long treated as the definitive image of the 'Faustian' personality.
Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.
Mephistopheles' riddling answer to 'Who art thou?' reverses the devil's usual image. He wills evil, but his negation ends in good. The paradox makes sense only in the light of the Prologue, where the Lord gave man the devil as an irritant to keep him active.
“In the Beginning was the Act,” I write.
Faust's translation of John 1:1 rejects the Word, the Thought and the Power. His choice of Act expresses his ethic of action and his impatience with language and contemplation. The devil appears immediately afterwards.
When thus I hail the Moment flying: “Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!” Then bind me in thy bonds undying, My final ruin then declare!
The wager's terms: if Faust ever asks a moment to stay because it is beautiful, he will be lost. Satisfaction and rest, not sin as such, are what would damn him. Taylor's 'still delay' renders the famous German 'Verweile doch'.
Restless activity proves the man!
Faust's motto, which links his wager to the Lord's description of man in the Prologue. It sums up the activist ethic that critics have identified with the Faustian spirit, for good and ill.
Feeling is all in all: The Name is sound and smoke, Obscuring Heaven’s clear glow.
The end of Faust's answer to Margaret's question about religion. His pantheistic credo rejects definitions in favour of feeling. It is beautiful and evasive: it consoles her without giving the commitment she asks for.
Judgment of God! myself to thee I give.
Margaret refuses to escape and entrusts herself to the judgement of God. Moments later Mephistopheles declares her judged and a voice from above declares her saved, a verdict absent from the Urfaust that gives the Gretchen tragedy a religious resolution and leaves Faust's own fate open.
Questions for study
How does the Prologue in Heaven change the meaning of the Faust legend?
Compare the Book of Job and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; consider what the Lord expects and what Mephistopheles thinks he can achieve.
What does Faust's rejection by the Earth Spirit reveal about his ambitions and limitations?
Look closely at 'Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest' and at Faust's later address to the 'Spirit sublime' in Forest and Cavern.
Why does Faust translate 'In the beginning was the Word' as 'In the beginning was the Act'?
Think about his impatience with books and language, and about what happens immediately afterwards.
How do the terms of Faust's wager differ from the traditional pact with the devil?
Compare the twenty-four years of the Faust-book with Faust's conditions; consider what would count as 'losing'.
Is Mephistopheles a figure of evil, or a necessary part of the world's order?
Use his self-definition in The Study I and the Lord's words at the end of the Prologue.
How sincere is Faust's love for Margaret?
Weigh Evening, A Street, Forest and Cavern and Martha's Garden against one another.
What is the significance of Faust's answer to the 'Gretchen question'?
Consider its pantheism, its beauty, and the dramatic situation in which it is spoken.
How does the town's moral world shape Margaret's tragedy?
Consider Lisbeth, Valentine and the Cathedral; how is guilt distributed between Margaret and Faust?
What is the function of Walpurgis Night and its Intermezzo in the structure of the play?
Think about distraction, illusion and the vision of Margaret with the red line.
Why is Margaret saved at the end of Part One, and what does this leave open for Faust?
Consider her refusal to escape, her appeal to God's judgement, and the different endings of the Urfaust and the 1808 text.
Further reading
- Atkins, Stuart. Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
- Baron, Frank. Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978.
- Bennett, Benjamin. Goethe's Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
- Binswanger, Hans Christoph. Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe's Faust. Trans. J. E. Harrison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
- Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: Faust, Part One. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. 2, Revolution and Renunciation (1790–1803). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
- Brown, Jane K. Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- Butler, E. M. The Fortunes of Faust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952.
- Durrani, Osman. Faust and the Bible: A Study of Goethe's Use of Scriptural Allusions and Christian Religious Motifs in Faust I and II. Bern: Peter Lang, 1977.
- Fairley, Barker. Goethe's Faust: Six Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953.
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy. Trans. Walter Arndt. Ed. Cyrus Hamlin. 2nd ed. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Texte und Kommentare. Ed. Albrecht Schöne. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994.
- Jantz, Harold. The Form of Faust: The Work of Art and Its Intrinsic Structures. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
- Jones, John Henry, ed. The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Lukács, Georg. Goethe and His Age. Trans. Robert Anchor. London: Merlin Press, 1968.
- Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616). Ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.
- Mason, Eudo C. Goethe's Faust: Its Genesis and Purport. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
- Williams, John R. Goethe's Faust. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.