Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.

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.