Assuming that one cannot fully appreciate the later adaptations/appropriations of the Faust legend without some knowledge of the legend’s origin, this chapter examines the sources of the Faust legend. The Magus legend provides one of these sources, since many of the stories later told about Faust appeared earlier in the accounts of charismatic conjurers such as Simon Magus, St. Cyprian, and Theophilus, all possible forerunners of Faust. The medieval biblical cycle plays, featuring malicious Devils and presumptuous Antichrists, and the medieval morality plays, with their cunning Vice tempters and psychomachiae between good and evil, provide another important source. Having canvassed the literary influences on the Faust legend, this chapter undertakes a search for the historical Faust. In 1587, the numerous accounts of a rather shady miracle worker named Faust were published by Johann Spies in a book popularly known as The German Faustbook. Later sometime between 1587 and 1592, a mysterious figure, identified only as P. F. Gent (Gentleman), adapted this text into English. This chapter concludes by comparing the German and English Faustbooks, delineating how each contributes its own vision to the Faust legend.

After tracing the debasement of the Faust legend in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Faust story was dramatized in truncated revivals of Marlowe’s play and in puppet shows throughout Europe, Chapter III focuses on Goethe’s recuperation of Faust in his monumental two-part drama, a phantasmagoric epic that defies all genric classification. Chapter III compares Goethe’s masterpiece to Marlowe’s tragedy and demonstrates how each play mirrors the Zeitgeist of its own historical period as well as the vision of its creator. However, no matter how different the ethos animating these two versions of the Faust story, Goethe’s drama continues the innovations introduced by Marlowe, creating one of the great interrogative dramas of all times. As with Marlowe’s tragedy, Goethe offers two contrary readings of his hero and his quest, one celebratory, one ironic. After seeking to guide the reader through the mountain of scholarship on the drama, I conclude that, as with Marlowe’s play, Goethe’s masterpiece validates both the celebratory and ironic readings, balancing both interpretations with stunning equipoise as it convincingly argues on both sides of the question.

ew works of literature have occasioned such vehement controversy as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Almost every aspect of the play has been debated: the date, the text, the authorship, and, most significant, the ethos of the drama. Commentators adopting a heroic interpretation of the tragedy see the play as a celebration of Faustus, the humanist hero of Renaissance individualism, who barters his soul in return for all the things the Renaissance privileged: knowledge, beauty, power. Conversely, Christian apologists read the play as a religiously orthodox drama condemning Faustus as a damned sinner. After seeking to guide the reader through the labyrinth of critical controversy surrounding the tragedy, I conclude that the play validates both the Christian and humanist readings, depicting a hero whom we can simultaneously admire and censure, sympathize with and deplore. The presence of contradictory perspectives evoking markedly divergent responses to the multifaceted hero suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe penned an interrogative drama that brilliantly argues on both sides of the question.