B00ARI2G5C EBOK Read online

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

  Oxford New York

  Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sãso Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

  Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  © David Luke 1994

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1994

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 Reissued 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available

  ISBN 978-0-19-953620-7

  5

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

  The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Faust

  Part Two

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  DAVID LUKE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  FAUST

  PART TWO

  JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born in 1749, the son of a wellto-do citizen of Frankfurt. As a young man he studied law and briefly practised as a lawyer, but creative writing was his chief concern. In the early 1770s he was the dominating figure of the German literary revival, his tragic novel Werther bringing him international fame.

  In 1775 he settled permanently in the small duchy of Weimar where he became a minister of state and director of the court theatre; in 1782 he was ennobled as ‘von Goethe’. His journey to Italy in 1786-8 influenced the development of his mature classical style; in the 1790s, he and his younger contemporary Schiller (1759-1805) were the joint architects of Weimar Classicism, the central phase of German literary culture.

  Goethe wrote in all the literary genres but his interests extended far beyond literature and included a number of scientific subjects. Faust, written at various stages of his life and in a variety of styles, became a constantly enlarged repository of his personal wisdom. His creative energies never ceased to take new forms and he was still writing original poetry at the age of more than 80. In 1806 he married Christiane Vulpius (1765-1816), having lived with her for eighteen years; they had one surviving son, August (1789–1830). Goethe died in 1832.

  DAVID LUKE was a Student (Fellow) and Tutor in German at Christ Church, Oxford, until 1988. He has edited and translated the Penguin Poets Goethe (1964) and the Oxford World’s Classics Faust Part One (1987, awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989) and Erotic Poems (1997), as well as various other works of German literature including Heinrich von Kleist’s stories, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chronology of Composition and Publication

  Index of Scenes

  FAUST, PART TWO

  Selected Paralipomena

  Explanatory Notes

  Bibliography and Index of Names

  Index of Classical Mythology

  Map of Greece (Acts II and III)

  PREFACE

  ‘Faust, Part Two’ (or as Goethe calls it Faust, der Tragödie zweiter Teil) may arguably be regarded either as a loose, almost independent sequel to ‘Faust, Part One’, or (as the word ‘part’ suggests and as many critics insist) as the continuation of a single work called ‘Faust’. Readers will differ as to which approach makes better sense; in any case, largely for practical reasons, I have not tried to integrate this translation and edition of Part Two with that of Part One in a single bulky ‘Faust’ volume. I have assumed, however, that those who read this sequel, if such it is, will probably be acquainted with Part One in some form or another, and perhaps with my own version of it which was published by Oxford University Press in 1987. In this hope I here occasionally refer (by page or line or scene number) to the Part One text or to my introduction and notes to it. (In both translations I have preserved the standard line-numbering of the German text, and for greater clarity added editorial numbers to Goethe’s scenes; a scene-index appears on p. lxxxiii.)

  As with Part One, the German text is so well established that it makes no significant difference which of the many standard editions one translates from, but I have in fact used the relevant Reclam volume (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, Stuttgart, 1986), which is itself based on volume 15 (Faust, II Teil, ed. Erich Schmidt, 1888) of the venerable Weimar Edition of Goethe’s works (1887-1919). I have also frequently consulted the Faust volume (vol. 8, ed. Gotthard Erler, 1965) of the more modern Berlin Edition, in which Goethe’s different Faust texts, peripheral writings, and other relevant material are presented in a rational and accessible way. The ‘Weimarer Ausgabe’ and ‘Berliner Ausgabe’ are referred to as WA and BA. For the complex problem of the genesis of Act V, which (as in the case of the genesis of Part One) must affect any interpretation of the conclusion and indeed of the whole of Part Two, an indispensable aid has been Ulrich Landeck’s recent text-critical edition of this Act (Der fünfte Akt von Goethes Faust II: kommentierte kritische Ausgabe, Artemis Verlag, Zurich 1981).

  As in the Part One edition, I have tried to condense what seemed to be the most important points for discussion into the introductory essay, using asterisks to relegate specific miscellaneous details to the ‘Explanatory Notes’; the Notes are placed after the text since they annotate it as well. They are also preceded by a few extracts from Goethe’s unpublished sketches and other material on the periphery of Part Two: the so-called paralipomena, which are, so to speak, a penumbral extension of his official text of Faust, without reference to which it is difficult to understand his developing (and therefore his final) con
ception of the whole work. The Notes are followed by a short bibliography of sources used or mentioned in the Introduction or in the Notes themselves; since I also frequently quote from Goethe’s letters and conversations, an index of names is included in this section, giving brief details of his correspondents and conversation-partners. (A more extended bibliography of translations and other literature concerning Faust and Goethe generally, together with a chronological table of relevant events, appears after the Introduction to Part One.) Since Acts II and III of Part Two supposedly take place in Thessaly and the Peloponnese respectively, and contain numerous mythological or other classical allusions, I have also added an index of classical mythology and a map of Greece. Here and elsewhere, with regret but for the sake of consistency, I have in nearly all cases adopted the conventional Latin spellings of Greek names and place-names (Achilles for Akhilleus, Patrodus for Patroklos, Peneus for Peneios, etc.; Helen/Helena has inevitably been Anglicized as well as Latinized).

  I am particularly indebted to Dr John R. Williams of the University of St Andrews, not only for his various specialized published writings on Faust Part Two but also for his kindness in reading my introductory essay and notes, which have benefited considerably from his expertise. Valuable suggestions arising out of the Introduction have also been made by Dr R. W. Truman, Professor Dimitri Obolensky and Mr R. L. Vilain. Mr Vilain was also kind enough to double check the proofs of the whole edition. For the classical material I owe much to the erudition of Professor P.J. Parsons as well as to M. C. Howatson’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989). My remaining errors, in these addenda and in the translation, must await later correction or at least exposure.

  D.L.

  INTRODUCTION

  A story-book full of

  wonders, wisdom and

  far-ranging fancy.

  EMIL STAIGER

  I GOETHE AND FAUST

  In the spring of 1827 Philippe Albert Stapfer, a retired Swiss diplomat living in Paris, who a few years earlier had published a successful translation of Goethe’s dramatic works in four volumes, was planning a new, separate French edition of Faust, Part One, to be illustrated by Delacroix. He had heard that the nearly 78-year-old Goethe was about to publish a sequel or second part, and wrote to him for information. Goethe had in fact recently decided to begin preparing a final collected edition of his works, the so-called Ausgabe letzter Hand (ALH), and this indeed had been the main practical stimulus for his resumption of work on Faust. He was including in it what we now know as Act III of Part Two, the ‘Helena’ Act, printed as a separate dramatic poem; this would be the first published piece of Faust material since the appearance of the ‘First Part of the Tragedy’ in 1808. It duly appeared in April 1827, in volume 4 of the ALH, under the title ‘Helena: a classical-romantic phantasmagoria. Intermezzo (Zwischenspiel) for Faust’. Goethe replied to Stapfer’s letter on 3 April, explaining that for the time being he had nothing to add to Part One, in which no changes were to be made; the forthcoming ‘Helena’ was

  an intermezzo [un interméde] belonging to the second part, and this second part is entirely different from the first in its conception, its execution and its scene of action, which is set in higher regions. It is not yet finished, and I am only publishing this intermezzo as a sample, to be fitted into the rest later.

  Stressing the total stylistic difference between ‘Helena’ and Part One, Goethe assures Stapfer that he will be able to satisfy himself when he reads it that the Helen drama ‘cannot be connected in any way to the first part’, and that the French publisher will prejudice the success of his proposed edition if he attempts to do so. On the other hand, he, Goethe, would of course be happy to see a French edition of ‘Helena’ appear in a separate volume.

  The complete Part Two, the long-awaited ‘sequel’, was unveiled in December 1832, having been deliberately withheld by Goethe until after his death. One other instalment had appeared during his lifetime: the first three and a half scenes of Act I, published in 1828 alongside Part One in volume 12 of the ALH. But ‘Helena’, as he emphasized from the start to Stapfer and others, was a different matter:* how different, for instance, were Faust’s dealings with Helen of Troy from his affair with poor Gretchen, that youthful story from which the author now distanced himself with remarkable asperity. In March or April 1827, just as ‘Helena’ was seeing the light of day, he wrote a review of a now forgotten academic work on ancient drama, in which, referring in passing to Faust, he describes the central tragic theme of Part One dismissively as ‘that earlier relationship, which came to grief in the chaos of misunderstood learning, middle-class narrow-mindedness, moral disorder and superstitious delusions’. By contrast, Faust’s relationship with Helen is one ‘presenting itself in a freer domain of art and pointing to loftier views’. Notwithstanding the strong probability that in his youthful Frankfurt period he also conceived and planned a Faust-Helen story in some form,* the Goethe of 1827 clearly wishes to lay all possible emphasis on the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his newly published version, to keep it pure from all contamination by the tragic Urfaust material which he now seems to regard as belonging almost to a pre-Goethean previous existence. And it is indeed now almost literally true that ‘Helena’ ‘ne peut en aucune façon se rattacher à la première partie’. The old Dr Faustus legend, to be sure, had from its sixteenth-century beginnings included the motif of the return of Helen from the dead to be Faustus’s ‘paramour’.* But even apart from Goethe’s deliberate classical Greek and operatic stylizations, which differentiate ‘Helena’ not only from Part One but from most of the rest of Part Two as well, its story would make almost as much sense on its own if the hero’s name were not Faust but, say, Roland or Rinaldo or Walther von der Vogelweide; Mephistopheles has in any case changed both his name and his sex. A spectator or reader who knew nothing of Part One or of the Faustus legend would be at no great disadvantage. He would be more puzzled by the remaining Acts; but here, even if we know Part One and the legend, some perplexities remain. Why, for instance, is this Second Part called ‘the Second Part of the Tragedy’? The word ‘tragedy’ would be appropriate if the fatal Pact, the ‘blood-scribed document’ which the Devil (for it is he) waves in the face of the dead Faust at the end (Sc. 22) of Act V, were to turn out to have remained in force all along; if the hero, for all his great creative exploits and his visions of beauty in nature and art, were nevertheless utterly destroyed in the end by some ingrown taint, the inescapable perduration of an original decision or curse. But no: that scene is written like the comic ending of a medieval mystery play in which the Devil is foiled after all, in this case by the ambiguous small print of his contract plus the distracting ribaldry of a verbal romp with come-hitherish boy angels.

  Answers to this can be offered: we can point out for instance that the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ at the beginning of Part One, in which the non-tragic ending is predicted, is in fact not printed as a prologue to ‘the First Part of the Tragedy’ but to Faust as a whole. We can then maintain that the two scenes following Faust’s death (Sc. 22 and 23 in the present edition) are jointly an epilogue to the whole drama, which thus becomes a tragedy in two parts framed within a mystery play. Nevertheless, confronted with a ‘Second Part’ which the author himself insists is ‘complétement différente de la premiére’, and which turns so decisively away from the ultimately naturalistic consistency of tragic drama towards epic and lyric digressiveness, towards the operatic mode, towards allegorical disguise and masquerade, pageant and festival, and not least towards comedy,* only the most persistently naïve commentator will seek to interpret it from beginning to end, or indeed at all, in terms of such concepts of traditional dramatic naturalism as the unfolding of a consistent action or Faust’s moral progress; still less should we cling to reading it in terms of the traditional devil’s-bargain story to which the ‘blood-scribed document’ belongs. This much-discussed Pact or Wager, as we saw, already creates much confusion in Part One, its terms having been devised
by Goethe about a quarter of a century after he wrote the Gretchen tragedy, with which they are flatly inconsistent; and another quarter-century was to elapse before his main work on Part Two was even begun. In fact the Wager scene only really makes sense if we forget about it completely during the Gretchen tragedy and during Part Two, Acts I—IV.* In Act V, Scene 22, it at last comes into its own, and Goethe consents to close the ring of dramatic form by bringing back a motif that had, essentially, been devised as belonging to the ending. Faust is not ‘damned’ by the ‘loss’ of the Wager, because the contrary outcome had been built into both the Wager scene and the ‘Prologue’ when they were written at the turn of the century; his ‘salvation’, already foreseen in the ‘Prologue’ and enacted at the end of Act V, is the Wager’s proper and only intelligible context.

  Goethe wrote Faust intermittently over a period of about sixty years, in four widely separated phases of composition which have already been partly considered in the context of Part One.* The third of them was at the turn of the century: the annus mirabilis 1797 and a few years after that, during which both Goethe and his close intellectual partner Schiller published or wrote or began, and intensively discussed with each other, much of their finest work. These were the ‘classical’ years, the Schiller years, which Goethe later called his ‘best period’ (conversation with Boisserée, 3 August 1815); they were the years in which he was most strongly under the influence of Greek tragedy and epic, and in which he began to write ‘Helena’. In June 1797, when he again resumed work on Faust, nothing of it had been published except the puzzling and truncated ‘Fragment’ of 1790. It was now that he wrote the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ and decided to divide the whole drama into two parts. He concentrated for the time being on supplying the missing material for the first, but also produced some fragments for the second, writing c.1800 a version of the first 269 lines of ‘Helena’ and sketching, or at least planning, some of the scenes of Act V. His correspondence with Schiller during these years contains not only a number of exchanges on Faust but also, in 1797, an important discussion of the nature of dramatic and epic form and their differentiation. According to their agreed theory, drama as such is characterized by logical consistency and economy, the precipitation of the action towards the denouement, the subordination of the parts to a single purpose which the end will bring to fulfilment. In the epic style, on the other hand, ‘sensuous breadth’ is of the essence: a certain discursive lingering over pleasing detail and episode for its own sake, a tendency of the parts to pursue their own enjoyable autonomy rather than remain functions of a tightly controlled, enddirected whole. All the evidence suggests that whereas Schiller’s instincts inclined him in practice towards drama, and specifically towards tragic drama in which the form is at its purest, Goethe was by nature an epic and lyric writer. Or, more exactly, what Goethe really wanted to do was to write dramatically nuanced epic, or epically and lyrically enriched drama. In the former genre he published, also in 1797, his idyllic short narrative poem of German middle-class life, Hermann and Dorothea, which was a brilliant popular and artistic success. He did not repeat this achievement, but its influence is evident in some of the new scenes for Part One written at this time.* They reflect a shift towards a more liberal, less austere style of drama, including a tendency towards opera, a form of which both Goethe and Schiller approved for its decisively anti-naturalistic character. With his songs, chants and choruses of soldiers, dancing revellers, angels, demons, and witches in the 1797-1801 scenes, Goethe introduced an element that was to come further into its own in Part Two. Drama does not drop out of sight, but it moves still further from naturalism, and drifts increasingly into epic and other more relaxed modes. His willingness to publish separate instalments of Part Two is itself significant. Even the advance announcement of a non-tragic or supra-tragic denouement in the Prologue could be counted as an additional epic feature; such a procedure (as he had written to Schiller on 22 April 1797) must remove a work from the vulgar sphere of dramatic suspense. As an example he cited Homer’s Odyssey, in which the hero’s eventual safe return from his wanderings is implied in the opening lines.