Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe’s great trag­ic play, Faust (1808), tells the noto­ri­ous tale of Dr Faust and his deal with the Dev­il, a theme that we see recur­ring in West­ern art and lit­er­a­ture time and time again. Dr Faust is the learned Ger­man schol­ar who is dis­il­lu­sioned by his inabil­i­ty to dis­cov­er life’s true mean­ing despite his mas­tery of the sci­ences and the tra­di­tion­al and con­ven­tion­al modes of thought. In des­per­a­tion, he con­sid­ers resort­ing to the arts of mag­ic to resolve his frus­tra­tion, and this attracts the atten­tion of the demon Mephistophe­les who will tempt Faust into sign­ing a con­tract in blood: a life­time of the Devil’s servi­tude in exchange for Faust’s immor­tal soul.

There’s plen­ty to unpack here and sev­er­al inter­est­ing avenues we can go down. First of all, what of this epony­mous char­ac­ter, Dr Faust? Well, he was based upon a real per­son, one Johann Georg Faust (c.1480 – c.1540), who was an obscure Ger­man itin­er­ant alchemist, astrologer, and magi­cian. In the decades fol­low­ing his death, he became the sub­ject of folk leg­end, trans­mit­ted in so-called chap­books, begin­ning in the 1580s. Chap­books, rather than being books for chaps (at least, not exclu­sive­ly), were actu­al­ly short, low-bud­get street lit­er­a­ture that were very pop­u­lar with the pub­lic through­out Europe (this was before Water­stones).

The leg­end of Faust was seized upon long before Goethe: Christo­pher Mar­lowe adapt­ed the per­sona into his play The Trag­i­cal His­to­ry of the Life and Death of Doc­tor Faus­tus in 1604, and the Faust­buch brand of chap­book sur­vived through­out the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od. Thus, when Goethe wrote Faust, he was drama­tis­ing a long-estab­lished tra­di­tion.

How about the char­ac­ter of Mephistophe­les? Here too, we find Mephistophe­les appear­ing for the first time in the ear­ly Faust­buchs; he is not the Dev­il him­self but a demon work­ing on behalf of the Dev­il, and in fact, since he was invent­ed by the anony­mous author(s) of the Faust­buch, he is sole­ly a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter and doesn’t form part of the tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chy of demonolo­gy. In Goethe’s hands he is not only cold-heart­ed and cyn­i­cal, as you’d expect, but also supreme­ly wit­ty, and has all the best lines (hence we are remind­ed of the mod­ern-day obser­va­tion that “the Dev­il has the best tunes”).

And the deal itself? The dev­il and his fiendish temp­ta­tions have been a lit­er­ary sta­ple ever since Eve bit the prover­bial apple, and mankind has always been grim­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the trope of trad­ing one’s soul for wealth or super­hu­man pow­ers, from Oscar Wilde’s The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray to Ter­ry Gilliam’s The Imag­i­nar­i­um of Dr Par­nas­sus. In the case of Goethe’s Faust, the whole is a sym­bol­ic and panoram­ic com­men­tary on the human con­di­tion, writ­ten in verse through­out, and a clas­sic of Euro­pean lit­er­a­ture. To the Dev­il his due…