NO WORK BY A SINGLE AUTHOR ever had so long a genesis as Goethe’s Faust: over thirty years from the young poet's first drafts at some point in the early 1770s down to the publication of the completed Part One in 1808, then a further quarter-century until the last of twelve thousand lines were written in 1832, just in time before the poet died. Over that sixty-year time-span, organic change and external chance were enough by themselves to undermine any consistent conception and final unity. But from the very start the writer was at cross-purposes with his chosen subject; and when a second story-line forced its way into the plot, the two strands were at cross-purposes with each other. This never-resolved dual disharmony complicated the genesis and shaped the text right to the end.

A Problem Subject

Why should the rising star of German literature in the 1770s have chosen to revive the old Faust story at all? Goethe's early successes were firmly contemporary and he was firmly secular. The Shakespeare-style history play Götz von Berlichingen fed a growing present interest in the German past and had a message for the political present. The novel of unhappy love and suicide, The Sorrows of Young Werther, captured the younger generation's emotional and social unease and became a European sensation. Goethe was also writing poems, as yet unknown to a wider public, celebrating earthly existence with an intensity never before achieved in the German language and never surpassed since. In contrast, Faust belongs to an already fading scene of fears and fables, where the destiny of a sinning soul is played out between heaven and hell, with damnation his inevitable end. This deeply Christian moral tale was narrated in Spiess's chapbook of 1587 and dramatized in the same spirit in 1590 by Christopher Marlowe as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

But by the late eighteenth century, Germany as one center of the European Enlightenment was slipping the bonds of Christianity and the constricting view of the world it imposed, Goethe as much as anyone. Brought up in a household no more than conventionally Christian, he was a born free spirit with an impulse to see and think for himself, central principles of the Enlightenment in whose atmosphere he grew up.