Faust, Part One

Summary

Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way. On Easter eve Faust sits in his Gothic study, a scholar who has mastered philosophy, law, medicine and theology and knows nothing worth knowing. He turns to magic, summons the Earth Spirit and is crushed by its rebuff; at dawn he lifts a cup of poison to his lips, and is stopped only by the bells and choirs singing that Christ is risen. On an Easter walk with his assistant Wagner, villagers thank him for his help during a plague years before, and he privately confesses that his father's alchemical remedies killed more than the sickness. A black poodle follows him home. As Faust tries to translate the opening of John's Gospel, settling on In the beginning was the Act, the dog turns into Mephistopheles. In a second study scene Faust makes a wager signed in blood: if Mephistopheles can ever bring him to say to a passing moment, stay, thou art so fair, his soul is forfeit. Mephistopheles, in Faust's gown, gives cynical advice to a new student, then takes Faust to the drinkers of Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig and to a Witches' Kitchen, where a potion makes him young. The rest of the play is the tragedy of Margaret, called Gretchen, a pious girl of humble family. Faust meets her in the street, wins her with stolen jewels and the help of her worldly neighbour Martha, and seduces her. When she asks him how he stands on religion, he answers that feeling is everything and names are only sound and smoke. To meet in secret, she gives her mother a sleeping draught supplied by Mephistopheles; the mother dies. Gretchen, pregnant and shamed, prays before an image of the sorrowing Mary. Her brother Valentine, a soldier, fights Faust and is killed, cursing her as he dies, and in the cathedral an Evil Spirit torments her during the Dies irae. Mephistopheles distracts Faust with the witches' revels of Walpurgis Night on the Brocken, followed by a satirical intermezzo. Learning that Gretchen is condemned to death for drowning her child, Faust forces Mephistopheles to help him free her. In the dungeon, half mad, she refuses to flee, shrinks from Faust and commits herself to God. Mephistopheles cries that she is judged; a voice from above answers that she is saved. Faust leaves with Mephistopheles while her voice calls after him. The library text is Bayard Taylor's translation in the original metres (1870), in an illustrated edition with Harry Clarke's drawings.

Top Lessons

• Restlessness as a way of life

  Faust's wager says he will never rest content in any moment. Goethe makes this striving both his greatness and his danger: it lifts him above Wagner's dry contentment and also makes him use Gretchen as one more experience.

• Knowledge without wisdom

  Faust has studied all four faculties and feels he knows nothing; the villagers' gratitude for his plague remedies only reminds him that his learning killed. The play asks what knowledge is for when it does not make a man good or wise.

• The cost borne by the innocent

  Faust's desire and Mephistopheles' means destroy Gretchen's mother, her brother, her child and finally Gretchen herself. Goethe shows the human wreckage of Faust's quest through those who had no part in the wager.

• Judgment and mercy

  In the dungeon Gretchen refuses to escape with Faust and places herself under God's judgment. Mephistopheles declares her condemned, but a voice from above declares her saved, so the play ends with her mercy and leaves Faust's fate unsettled.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Faust is a Doctor of medicine as well as of the other faculties, and the play gives a sharp period picture of the healer's art. On the Easter walk the villagers honour him for treating plague with his father, a Paracelsian alchemist, but Faust privately says their compounded remedies killed thousands, a confession often read against the early modern mix of alchemy and physic. Mephistopheles' advice to the Student mocks medicine as a profession of easy confidence and access to women. The play's plot turns on drugs: Faust's near-suicide with a poisoned cup at dawn on Easter, the witch's rejuvenating potion, and the sleeping draught that kills Gretchen's mother. Gretchen's arc, from love-sickness at the spinning-wheel through guilt and terror in the cathedral to the disordered speech of the dungeon after the drowning of her child, was drawn partly from an eighteenth-century infanticide trial and has often been discussed as a portrait of grief-driven derangement; such readings are interpretive.

• Scene I, Night

  Faust despairs of his learning and lifts a cup of poison to drink at dawn before the Easter bells stop him.

• Scene II, Before the City-Gate

  Peasants thank Faust for his service during a plague; he tells Wagner how his father's alchemical medicine killed more than it cured.

• Scene IV, The Study

  Mephistopheles, in Faust's gown, advises the Student on the faculties, including a cynical account of medical practice.

• Scenes V-VI, Auerbach's Cellar and Witches' Kitchen

  Conjured wine for Leipzig drinkers, and the witch's potion that takes thirty years from Faust's body.

• Scene XVI, Martha's Garden

  Faust gives Gretchen a phial to put her mother to sleep; the later scenes reveal that the mother died of it.

• Scene XXV, Dungeon

  Gretchen, awaiting execution, speaks in broken, wandering verse of her drowned infant and dead mother and does not at first know Faust.