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…
