Transcript Faust - University of Warwick

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Goethe’s Faust: giving birth to the modern?
Faust looks back:
•Influenced by the allegorical tradition (think mystery and morality play
traditions)…
•…and by Renaissance drama, not least Shakespeare (“A Walpurgis Night’s
Dream”).
•Takes the medieval German legend of Faust, the scholar who sells his soul to the
devil in return for great knowledge and power, as source material.
•Shows Goethe’s interest, in the 1790s especially, in classicism. Note the repeated
use of Choruses and a depiction of a protagonist who wrestles with the limitations
of his own humanity.
Goethe’s Faust: giving birth to the modern?
But Faust also looks forward:
“Goethe was sent by the gods as a boundary stone to mark where the past ends
and modernity begins.”
(Karl Gutzkow, 1836)
It offers us:
•Modern domestic drama (the “Gretchen tragedy”).
•Intense, fraught, self-conscious look at human subjectivity: the frustration and
alienation of the individual in a modern, secular, industrialized world.
•A movement beyond the categories of good and evil.
•The breakdown of genre.
The Faust legend
Dr. Johann Faust or Faustus (c. 1480–1540),
a German scholar of supposedly magical
and arcane powers.
The basic legend:
Faust, in search of greater magical powers,
made an agreement with Mephistopheles
according to which he would literally sell his
soul to the Devil in return for twenty-four
years of knowledge, magical power, and
unlimited pleasure. In the end, of course,
Faust regretted the agreement, understanding the illusory nature of that which
he had apparently gained, and he was taken off to Hell.
1587: Chapbook entitled Historia von D. Johann Fausten published. First known
printed source of the legend of Faust is a small.
c. 1588: Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus written and
performed.
Updating the Faust legend
Goethe radically changes the narrative and emphases of this legend as it appears
in earlier sources, including Marlowe.
Gretchen
He adds the seduction story of Margareta/Gretchen – the part of the play that
was and is most popular and successful with theatre audiences.
As a result the Faust legend is split in two: “the scholar’s tragedy” and
“Gretchen’s tragedy”.
Updating the Faust legend
Mephistopheles and the nature of evil
Mephistopheles no longer the embodiment of evil. He is, as he describes himself:
Part of that Power which would
Do evil constantly, and constantly does good. (1335-6)
He represents a vital cosmic force:
I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish… (1338-40)
In the “Prologue in Heaven”, the Lord tells Mephistopheles that he “Serves well
to stimulate him [man] into action” (343).
In fact, in a celestial bet, he gives Mephistopheles permission to tempt Faust as
part of a divine bet.
Updating the Faust legend
The “pact”
Goethe’s Faust doesn’t make a pact with Mephistopheles at all. Instead, there’s a
“wager” (the second bet in the play):
If any pleasure you can give
Deludes me, me cease to live!
I offer you this wager! […]
If ever the moment I shall say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
Then you may forge your chains to bind me (1696-1701)
Traditional story inverted?
• Faust can only save himself by continually giving into temptation.
• And he wants experience not knowledge: “in my inner self I will
embrace | The experience allotted to the whole | Race of mankind.”
(1770-2)
The Faust story is recast as a conflict, or dialectic, between idealism
and cynicism, the positive and the negative.
Goethe and the composition history of Faust
1749
Born in Frankfurt.
1765-8
Studies at the University of Leipzig.
1772-5
Begins writing Faust.
1774
Publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther.
1788
Resumes work on Faust
1790
Publishes Faust. A Fragment.
1794
Strikes up friendship with poet,
philosopher and playwright Friedrich
Schiller.
1797-1801 Resumes work on Faust at Schiller’s
prompting.
1808
Publishes Faust. The First Part of the
Goethe and the composition history of Faust
1819
Selected scenes from Faust performed
privately at Castle Monbijou, Berlin.
1825-31
Completes Faust Part II.
1827
Publishes Helena, part of Faust Part II.
1829
First public performance of Faust Part I.
1832
Goethe dies, aged 82. Faust Part II
published posthumously.
1876
First performance of Faust Parts I & II, in
Weimar.
Goethe and the composition history of Faust
Three phases of composition:
1. URFAUST (1772-5)
Discovered in manuscripts in 1887. Consists mainly of the tragedy of Gretchen.
“Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Stress”)
•A short‐lived but influential movement in German literature of the 1770s.
•Early precursor of Romanticism. Passionate, individualistic, rebellious.
•Hostile attitude to French neoclassicism and Enlightenment rationalism.
•E.g. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
2. FAUST. A FRAGMENT (1790)
Goethe revises everything to date into verse and adds a few scenes. Published
without the final dungeon scene.
3. FAUST PART I (1808)
Completed 1797-1806. To this stage of the play belong the prologues, the second
half of ‘Night’ with the Easter chorus, the pact scenes and the ‘Walpurgis Night’.
IS FAUST A UNIFIED WORK?
Faust Part II
Faust helps the Emperor to solve the financial problems of the Empire by issuing
paper money.
He summons of Helen of Troy and later seduces her. They have a son,
Euphorion, who flies so high that he falls dead at his parents’ feet. Helen takes
him back to the dead with her.
Mephistopheles debates with a homunculus created by Faust's former pupil.
Faust and Mephistopheles attend a “classical Walpurgis night”.
They help the ageing Emperor win a battle; Faust is rewarded with a stretch of
coastal land, which he plans to win from the sea.
Faust is so delighted by his new endeavour that he utters the fatal words that this
moment should last for ever. He dies, and Mephistopheles seems to have won his
wager, but…
…female saints with Gretchen intervene to save him, taking him up into heaven.
Is Faust theatre?
NO!
•It’s more an epic than a play.
•Goethe didn’t stage the play at the Weimar court theatre, of which he was the
director.
•Much of action of the play is almost unstageable.
•Stage action is usually described in a way that suggests an attempt to
compensate for the absence/impossibility of visual realization.
•It constantly makes allusions to and seems to align itself with some of the major
verse narratives of European literature: Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s
Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Is Faust theatre?
YES!
•The “No” case is predicated on a “naturalism fallacy”.
•Allegorical dramas that have a wide cosmic focus – heaven, earth, hell – were
still being widely performed across Europe in the seventeenth century (including
Calderon’s autos sacramenteles).
•Such dramas still staged in the German provinces in his own day. A Faust play
was performed by travelling players in Frankfurt in 1768.
•Faust ignores – indeed flagrantly abuses – the three unities (time, place, action)
of French neoclassical theory… but Goethe wrote many court masques and
libretti that did the same.
Goethe and the theatre
He wrote a number of plays, including:
• Stella (1775)
• Iphigenia in Taurus (1781/7)
• Torquato Tasso (1790)
• The Natural Daughter (1803)
He was director of the Weimar Court Theatre from 1791 to 1817:
• Under his leadership the Theatre achieved national importance.
• Established a repertoire and style founded on a classical aesthetic (antinaturalistic).
• Helped to train young actors.
• Collaborated with Schiller between 1795 and 1805.
• Rejected idea that drama should be preachy. Rather, saw it as an art that
enriched and ennobled those receptive to it.
• The repertoire was mixed and international, and included Voltaire,
• Goldoni, Aristophanes, Calderon, along with German authors such as
Lessing and Goethe himself.
Faust: major productions
1829
First public performance of Part I
(Brunswick).
1876
First production of both parts
together, by Otto Devrient (Weimar).
1933Max Reinhardt’s legendary production
of Part I at the Salzburg Festival.
1938
World premiere of both parts,
unabridged (Dornach, Switzerland)
1957
Gustav Grundgens production in Hamburg (filmed in 1960).
2000
Peter Stein’s complete version for Expo 2000 (Hanover). Total length,
inc. intervals: 21 hours. (Image above)
Drama vs. literature?
Why might scholars want to talk about Faust as “literature” rather than as
“theatre”?
Why do scholars tend to distinguish the “literary” from the “dramatic”?
What’s with the problem with calling Faust a play?
Lyn Gardner, “Are plays proper literature?” (Guardian, 27 May 2010)
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/may/27/are-playsproper-literature
“I suspect it's theatre's brazenly collaborative and transient nature that spooks the
literary gatekeepers. We may think of the literary experience as essentially
solitary: a lone reader's silent encounter with a momentous text. It's a notion
freighted with reverence, nudging literature into a secular religiosity. Surely
literature isn't – or isn't just – about contemplation, let alone meditation. It's
about engagement.”
Faust: a drama about theatre
Prelude on the Stage
DIRECTOR
POET
CLOWN
BUMS ON SEATS
ART AS
TRANSCENDENT
ENTERTAINMENT,
VARIETY, YOUTH
•Wants only “to please the
mob” .
•Wants “quietness”, “love
and friendship” .
•Let’s entertain! Make the
audience laugh and cry.
•Knows an audience want
“action”, “spectacle”,
“excess”.
•Believes in writing – in art –
for “posterity”, not for the
gratification of a paying
audience, “that motley
throng”.
•“Use real life and its rich
variety”.
•A play should be “all in
pieces” because the public
will “just fragment |It
anyway”
•Deeds not words.
•Yearns for his youth.
•A theatre of variety will
attract the youth, who can
still be moved and pleased.
Faust: a drama about theatre
Prelude on the Stage
DIRECTOR
POET
CLOWN
BUMS ON SEATS
ART AS
TRANSCENDENT
ENTERTAINMENT,
VARIETY, YOUTH
•Wants only “to please the
mob” .
•Wants “quietness”, “love
and friendship” .
•Let’s entertain! Make the
audience laugh and cry.
•Knows an audience want
“action”, “spectacle”,
“excess”.
•Believes in writing – in art –
for “posterity”, not for the
gratification of a paying
audience, “that motley
throng”.
•“Use real life and its rich
variety”.
•A play should be “all in
pieces” because the public
will “just fragment |It
anyway”
•A theatre of variety will
attract the youth, who can
still be moved and pleased.
•Yearns for his youth.
•Deeds not words.
MEPHISTOPHELES?
THE LORD?
FAUST?
Faust: a drama about theatre
Night
Faust, looking at the Sign of the Macrocosm: “How
great a spectacle! But that, I fear, | Is all it is.”
(Night, 454-5)
Wagner enters, believing he has heard Faust
“reading a Greek tragedy” (523). Faust then attacks
history as capturing not the “spirit” but rather the
“image” of the past (578):
At best a royal tragedy—bombastic stuff
Full of old saws, most edifying for us,
The strutting speeches of a puppet chorus. (583-5)
Faust: a drama about theatre
Faust’s Study (I) & (II)
Theatre as distraction…
•Faust asks Mephistopheles, trapped in his study, to give him “an amusing show”
(1435).
•The show then puts Faust to sleep, allowing Mephistopheles to escape.
Theatre as metaphor…
•Mephistopheles on human pretension to greatness:
Wear wigs, full-bottomed, each with a million locks,
Stand up yards high on stilts or actor’s socks—
You’re what you are, you’ll still be the same man still. (1807-9)
Faust: a drama about theatre
Walpurgis Night
An “intermezzo”: a short piece introduced between the acts or scenes of a larger
work of dramatic or musical performance.
Faust describes the scene of Walpurgis Night as a “fairground” (4115).
All about the carnivalesque (think back to Bakhtin): licensed transgression and
excess; the celebration of bodies and sexuality.
MEPHIST [with an old witch] A naughty dream once came to me:
I saw a cleft and cloven tree.
It was monstrous hole, for shame!
But I like big holes just the same.
OLD WITCH: Greetings, Sir Cloven-Hoof, my dear!
Such gallant knights are welcome here.
Don’t mind the outsize hole; indeed
An outsize plug is what we need! (4136-43)
Faust: a drama about theatre
A Walpurgis Night’s Dream: “It’s actually a theatre.” (4213)
Already Walpurgis Night has the feel of a play-within-a-play. So “Walpurgis
Night’s Dream” is a play-within-a-play-within-a-play…
Theatre – the “show” – again a distraction here.
When Faust learns that Margareta has been arrested while he enjoyed the
entertainments, he lambasts Mephistopheles:
A prisoner! In utter ruin, delivered over to evil spirits and the judgement
of cold heartless mankind! And meanwhile you lull me with vulgar
diversions…” (A Gloomy Day. Open Country, <8-10>)
Faust: a drama about theatre
Martin Swales, “Goethe's Faust: theatre, meta-theatre, tragedy”
“Faust oscillates between wanting to be both on the stage of life and a spectator
at it. Mephisto offers him life as a theatrical extravaganza – immensely
appealing, quick-fire experience, yet ultimately (in his, Mephisto’s, view)
tawdry and worthless.”
“Theatre is a key metaphor for human existence in Goethe’s Faust; and this
changes the way we receive the play in the theatre. It becomes allegorically
charged at every turn.”
In Goethe’s Faust: The Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte, John Noyes, and Pia Kleber
(Cambridge: Canbridge University Press, 2011).
FAUST THE ACTOR:
Night, Study (II), the Gretchen scenes
FAUST THE SPECTATOR:
Study (I), A Witch’s Kitchen, Walpurgis Night, A Walpurgis Night’s Dream
Faust: a tragedy?
For
•Goethe entitles it “tragedy”.
•Faust in many ways like the classical tragic hero (e.g. Oedipus): the human who
would be more than human.
•There are a number of choruses: of angels, women, disciples (Night); of villagers
(Outside the Town Walls); of merrymakers (Auerbach’s tavern)…
Is there a change in tragic form across Faust? So we move from classical tragedy
(the scholar’s tragedy) to what bourgeois domestic tragedy (the Gretchen
tragedy)?
After the entrance of Margareta/Gretchen, the choral element almost disappears. Goethe
offers:
•The choir (A Cathedral). Not described as a “chorus”.
•A chorus of witches (A Walpurgis Night). Appears in a scene expressly positioned as an
interlude. And is this chorus tragic?
Faust: a tragedy?
Against
•Margareta/Gretchen is saved at the close of Part I: “She is redeemed”.
•Faust is redeemed at the close of Part II.
•Faust a mix of some many forms and allusions.
More complex than one side or the other…
“Faust is not an avoidance of tragedy; rather, it makes an issue of tragedy.”
(Martin Swales)
“The individual, Faust, is never the tragic target. It is essential that we understand
him as the representative of the human condition. Then suddenly a new
dimension opens up, tragedy fills the space, and we are part of it.”
(Peter Stein)