In Our Time - Faust

Episode Date: December 23, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the myth of Faustus." Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!"So spoke Dr Faustus with unnerving prescience shortly before being dragged off to hell in Christopher Marlowe's historical tragedy. His Faustian pact with the devil Mephistopheles had granted him 24 years of limitless knowledge and power, but at the cost of his soul. His terrible story was told as a dire warning to anyone who would seek to reach beyond the limits of their human lot.Why is Goethe's Faust reprieved, when Marlowe's Faustus gets taken by Satan and what does the story's constant retelling tell us about society's changing attitudes to knowledge, ambition and hellish damnation? But who was the real Faust? Why has his story maintained a 400 year grip on the German and British imaginations, and how has his image changed as each generation embraced the myth?With Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales in Cardiff and Secretary of the Folklore Society; Osman Durrani, Professor of German at the University of Kent at Canterbury; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt atopoulos towers of William? Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies. So spoke Dr. Faustus with some prescience, before being dragged off to hell in Christopher Marlowe's historical tragedy. His Faustian pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, had granted him 24 years of limitless knowledge and power, but at the cost of his soul. His terrible story was told as a dire warning to anyone who would seek to reach beyond the limits of their human lot. But who was the real Faust? Why has his story maintained a 500-year grip on the German and British imaginations,

and how has his image changed, as each generation embraced the myth? We need to discuss Faustor Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales in Cardiff and Secretary of the Folklore Society. Osmond Durrani, Professor of German at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and author of Faust, icon of modern culture, and Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Juliet Wood, the earliest stories about a magician of dubious reputation called Faust

emerged at the very beginning of the 16th century in Germany. Can you tell us about that first reference and what it said? Well, the first reference is about 1507, and then there are half a dozen to about 1540 when supposedly he died. And they're about a real person, or someone who's presented as real, called George Faust rather than Johannes Faust. And we're told that he's a trickster and a charlatan. And we have this on a number of humanists who say this,

who are clearly very disapproving of what he's doing. but it's interesting that he's already becoming and attracting the kind of stories that magicians were centred in and they are things that deal with tricking people and being a trickster and there's a story at which he sort of rides a wine barrel and this is quite amazing and one in which he shows a priest

how to shave his beard and has him burnt with arsenic and there are all these sort of stories. So one gets a picture here of someone who's not so much a magician as a trickster. It's a very negative picture. And then, of course, he dies, and it's a spectacular death. He knows the death is coming. He tells the innkeeper that, you know, don't mind the noise. And the next day the innkeeper goes up to Faust Room,

and here is this body with the neck twisted round. And this is evidence that he'd made a pact with the devil and has died. And they tried to undo his neck, as I read, five times, and put it round it still 180 degrees facing the opposite direction. It keeps twisting back. How real the scholars, what's the possibility of there being a real Dr. Faustus or a real Faustus? What's the state of play on that one? It's a very good possibility.

In fact, I think many of these magicians started out as real people. Certainly in the sense that there's someone who represents a peg to hang the stories on. So there probably was a Faustus who had studied math. or studied medicine. There were dozens of these scholars at the time. Because the references, the letters that are coming out, they come out from other scholars. It isn't as if in the beginning, isn't it?

Those are the letters that we have to carry the first references. Five or six references from five or six different people. And as I say, all to a George Faust, the earliest ones, which suggests that there is a real character there, even though the name changes later on. And the idea is that he's a scholar, the idea is that is a trickster, The idea is he's rather fraudulent, the idea that he's very boastful.

All these things appear, and he's sort of drummed out of town in one of the letters. They say he's kicked out of Heidelberg. He is. He is. They approach him and say, you must confess, you must repent. He says, no, I won't, and so they kick him out of town. There is this idea of a kind of wandering scholar of dubious reputation. And it's quite interesting that the people who are criticising him are themselves rather established scholars, for the most part,

who seem a bit worried about this kind of, you know, new breed who are kind of getting in on the act and not really qualified. So it's coming out of the late 15th century into the early 16th century, Osmond Durrani, but much later in the 16th century, towards the end of it, in 1587, there's the first stories who are brought together in a chapbook. Why did he retain such popularity during that century, do you think? Well, first of all, I'd like to put in a,

robust defence of Dr. Faustus, there are a couple of positive references to him actually. There is a receipt in the accounts of the Bishop of Bamberg, according to which the bishop paid ten golden for a horoscope, which Dr. Faustus provided him with. So that suggests that a high-ranking church official was willing to pay out the equivalent of a year's manual wages for a document which this Dr. Faustus had produced. There is also a reference in Philip von Huttons' correspondence to a Dr. Faustus making a prediction about a journey that he went on to Venezuela and saying that Faustus absolutely hit the nail on the head when he said that things were going to go badly wrong on this expedition. I mean, I suppose no prizes for guessing that this was going to be a risky venture.

The chat book was put together in the late 16th century. We don't know by whom. It's based on a number of short stories which we're beginning to appeal. Can you just tell us what a chapbook is? A chap book is, well, an early form of the novel. It's a book which contains a storyline, but also a lot of different materials, such as useful advice on practical matters,

and also some sermonizing. So it's a novel consisting, not just of the story of the life of this magician, but other elements as well, for example, some people come up to Faustus and ask him about the origin of thunder and he gives them a long lecture as to how thunder occurs and it's all to do with the four winds clashing together and then banging against the crystal spheres that hold the sun and moon in place.

So on the basis of what was known at the time, Faustus provides useful information. Can I come back to my original question, though? What do you think had sustained this popularity in the eight years between the first reference in the Latin 507 and the publication of this chapbook? Well, think about it as something absolutely horrendous. A man concludes a pact with a devil. It's like the equivalent of a sighting of aliens or an alien abduction. People were fascinated at the time by non-terrestrial beings of a... heavenly or diabolical nature. After all, Martin Luther had prepared them for this. Martin Luther himself believed personally in the physical existence of the devil, so much so that he once threw

an ink pot at him in Vapel Castle. You can still see the spot where this happened. And people wanted to know more about the devil. There aren't all that many references to the devil in the Bible. There are just a few. And so these had to be filled in, coloured in, fleshed in. And in the late 16th century, There was a plethora of devil books involving devils, all of whom had a particular brief. They might incite people to drink heavily. They might incite people to waste their money on expensive clothing. They might cause people to commit adultery. And the chapbook about Dr. Faustus and the devil focuses on a very particular kind of devil, an academic devil.

He homes in on the man of learning and tempts him to go further and further. and extend the frontiers of knowledge into forbidden areas, and that's where Faustus then gets his comeuppance. And this was a fascinating subject for 16th century readers. Rosemary Ashton, there was all that, as it were, let's call it high-minded side of Faust, but surely one of the things that kept you going, it was a very low life part of Faust too, wasn't there, going into inns, tricking the landlord to get free drink,

being a charlatan, and that must have appealed? Absolutely, spectacle. and particularly quite a lot of low-life spectacle, as you say, and a lot of theatre, as far as I understand it, in the 16th century, is moving. It's travelling troops going from town to town. And in particular, we know that in the later 16th century, a lot of English dramatic troops went round Germany, took plays around Germany and so on.

So there was an interaction between certainly England and Germany in terms of acting. And yes, a spectacle, you could have low-life in there, but you would have it always bounded, bracketed, as it were, by the moral lesson that was to be learnt from what happened to Faust as a result of his bargain with the devil. Did Fassusk's way into morality plays at the time? Well, I think it's more that morality plays

which were on the wane after the Reformation because Protestants didn't like the idea of too much in the way of religious icons and the Bible being brought onto the stage. It's more that morality plays were on the decline and you might say that Faust fitted in as a rather more secular figure to carry on drama.

But it has, undoubtedly, the first legend and first dramas do have in the 16th century something of the morality about them. So by the end of the 16th century, Osmond Gerardin, we have a fairly complicated character in the chapbook who can go in many different directions. And remarkably soon, just two or three years after the chapbook came out, Christopher Marlow brings forward the first massive work of literature the tragical history of Dr Faustus.

Can you tell us how he got held of the subject and what he did with it? Well, so much is shrouded in doubt concerning Christopher Marley's life that I'm not going to be able to unravel this. To go back very briefly to the morality plays, what is extremely interesting about the story of Dr. Faustus

is that it stands the morality play on its head. In miracle plays and morality plays, you have quite often a character who is tempted by the, devil who gives in to the devil who enjoys the benefits of a kind of pact but who then repents who says terribly sorry I didn't really mean to be wicked and recognizes that the love of God is there to help him to save him and what is different about Dr Faustus is that this this love is no longer there or is no longer able to help somebody who has signed a pact in his own

blood. Marlowe is fascinated by the story and And being of academic bent himself takes the story further into the world of academic learning, takes Faustus claims to be an academic which are really not built up on very much in the chat book, and gives us demonstrations of his wisdom. There are passages in Latin, etc. And has a kind of, towards the end, a kind of grudging admiration for Faustus comes through. Faustus is blind, but he is also tragic. And he is tragic for one particular reason,

and that is that he knows what he has done. He knows the day when he will die. He knows the very moment when he will die. And in that final scene, we have him awaiting the arrival of the devil, and we cannot but feel compassion for him. And so Marlowe takes the first few steps in the direction of turning the villain into a hero. I think that's right. he does actually begin to give Faust a psychology rather than just a sort of narrative.

There's a very interesting point at which when Mephistopheles is saying, come on, come on, make the pact. Faust gets very excited at the whole idea, of course, of getting out of the study where he's been disappointed and not managed to learn enough for all his hard work. And Faust says, all right, well, I'm going to make this pact. And he says, but, you know, where do you come from? and Mephistophiles says, well, I'm like Lucifer. I fell from heaven and I was sent to hell.

And Faustus, but you're not in hell now, you're here. And Mephistopheles says, but this is hell, nor am I out of it. So he tells Faustus that, you know, hell is what awaits. But Faustus has got the bit between his teeth now. He wants to transgress and Faustus turns round and says, they reverse roles and says, oh, no, no, Mephistopheles, you mustn't be such a wimp, you know, courage, Let's go onwards. And that seems to me to be quite a psychologically interesting moment,

which I don't think you get in the earlier stories. No, you don't. I mean, they're very popular stories. But there is, I think Marlowe is developing things that are at least there, coded in the structure, in that many of these stories challenge authority, Faust challenges authority, challenges it in a very bawdy way. All of the drinking, all of the getting one over on authority,

the monks and the in-keep. and things like that. But of course, this literature was very popular and very widespread. And I think the people liked it. This was a time of great social change. And certainly you have what we see in Faust, which is the intellectual and the psychological thing.

But I think also there was a social facet to this. And you get this in the puppet plays about Faust, which were popular theatre, and certainly not the same quality as Marlowe in terms of subtlety. But they had the same impact. And of course they would have an impact on a very, very broad sense. So while Faust dies at the end, you get this nice comfortable morality,

well, you know, everything is safe. In between, he is a real challenge to authority figure, and I think that had a resonance. I think that did have a resonance. Osmond, can you give us some more meat about the Malo play for those who might not be very familiar with it? Well, the first thing to note is that we're dealing with an extremely unstable text. There are two versions of the Malo play.

We refer to it as the Marlowe play, but there's a text dating from 1604, and there's a very different text dating from 1616. And we are not certain as to which parts were written by Marlowe and which were not. One eminent critic described Marlowe's Dr Faustus as a cathedral hit by a bomb. We can see the outlines. We can see a ruined structure. So we do not really know what Marlowe intended. But after the Marlowe play, as it were, looking at it.

in this rather a straightforward sweep. The puppet theatre keeps it going, and the next great figure to get held of it is Goethe, back in Germany, of course, in the 18th century, who spent over 60 years writing versions. Can you tell us what attraction it had for Goethe and why he was so, well, I think 60 years on one subject could be called obsessed by it?

Well, we have to take a look at what was happening in Germany in the 18th century. Germany was in a very different position from most other countries in Europe. Germany did not have a national culture to look back to in the way that England, France, Italy, Spain and other countries did. Even Portugal had its cameoish. Spain had its golden age, the Elizabethans in England.

There wasn't very much there in Germany. And in the 18th century, when young people started being educated in large numbers, remember that in the mid-18th century Germany had 27 universities when England only had two, and people were beginning to take a lively, interest in their own culture. They looked back a few hundred years and they found very little there. They found religious debates in the wake of Luther's Reformation. They found some medieval epics. There many of those turned out to be translations from the French. So they wanted to,

they wanted to be able to prove that German culture was as great as that of other countries. And so they hit on an idea, which is really quite remarkable, and that is to look at, to look in a different place, to look at folk literature. to look at folk songs, to look at fairy tales. And that is how Faustus was rediscovered, because Goethe was at the forefront of this campaign to put Germany on the map. Why did he devote 60 years of it?

That's a very comprehensive and helpful summary. Why did he spend 60 years on it? Well, one of the reasons is because Goethe's own attitudes changed. Goethe moved from being a kind of German chauvinist in the 1770s to being an internationalist, later on. And so he abandoned his Faust. Then his publisher came along around about 1790 and said, look, we know that you've been working on Faust for so many years. We know that you've got a manuscript there. It was in a very loose and confused form in his Faust sack or Faust Paltch. Get these

fragments out and put together a play and we'll publish it. And Goethe did this in 1790. But it was a fragment. It ends halfway through Part 1. It ends with the cathedral scene. and he was reluctant to continue with it. And one reason why he was reluctant was that he found it very difficult to think of a way of introducing the devil, after all, Gouet himself didn't believe in the devil, and many enlightened people in the 18th century didn't.

So how could you put the devil on stage? So this became the great gap in the text, and Gute had partly agonized about this, but also put it on the back burner. And it wasn't until he formed his friendship with Schiller. and in the early years of the 19th century was persuaded by Schiller to get on with it and conclude this play that everybody's waiting for

that he actually, it was after Schiller's death in 1805, he started working on a final version of Part 1 and that came out in 1808. Juliet Wood, in Marla's Faust, Faust is dragged off to hell, but in Gertes Faust he makes it to heaven. quite a difference. Can you just tell us what or two of the other differences?

What is, who is, we have some idea of Marlow's Faust. We have some idea of the Chapbook Faust, so we've got a 60th century idea. Now what about Gertes Faust? What's he like? Gertes Fowth has moved more into an enlightenment world where questioning your limitations was not only all right, but what actually was something one was supposed to do. Knowledge is very, very important, although there's a conflict.

reflecting Goethe's Vast between knowledge and experience. This chaotic experience Gerta has a little bit of problems with. But certainly we're moving into a romantic age as well. And the whole concept of Faust was beginning to change. I mean, by the time Gerta's Faust comes out, you have other kind of Faustian figures. This kind of concept of a Faustian hero

is beginning to spread outward. So Gertr is pulling on a sense of Faust, which comes originally from folklore, but also a sense of man's nature which actually comes from philosophy and culture, and that being Enlightenment, early 19th century philosophy and culture. Can we develop that or take that on just a little, please, Rosemary. I mean, you could say, broadly speaking,

from the little we know about Marlowe, Malo's Faust might look quite a bit like Marlowe as well as Faust. And how much does Gertes Faust look like Gertr? Well, quite a lot, I think, as Osman would have been suggesting, because Goethe always said that he did feel like Faust that he was a learned man. I mean, he wrote scientific treaties, he wrote about art, he wrote in every genre. So Goethe was aiming to be a kind of universal man, a universal learned person. But he too had his disappointment and dissatisfactions with his own life and his own knowledge and so on.

And he actually said more than once that he felt exactly what Faust had felt. felt in terms of dissatisfaction, the human condition really, and I think that's where we have moved into the romantic period where it isn't wrong to strive, where we've got theories, both in England and Germany, and here you have a consonance, I think, between the two countries, you have theories of the imagination where the writer is a creator. The writer is a kind of, is usurping God by creating through this faculty of the imagination, by going beyond the bounds of experience. this whole notion that the writer is a creator, but of course takes risks. And Gertr was preeminently a writer, and he wanted to take risks.

And I think he felt, although Faust isn't in his play, an artist, I think he felt that kind of affinity with Faust's overreaching, if you like. But he does set the intellectual overreaching against the immorality that Faust indulges in. There are two separate things, I think. And you've alluded to the fact that, that Goethe's version spread out, as it were. Osman alluded to it beforehand, he became international as a second version. He's becoming an individual, isn't he?

He's become an oppositional individual. He is, very definitely. He's reflecting the time. He's taking on signs, as it were, as it were. Well, we know that the magicians were getting towards signs in their own way, in Goet himself as a scientist and so and so, but it's entering into things like the Frankenstein pact. It is.

Can you develop that a little bit? Well, Frank, Mary Shelley, certainly, was admired Gerta. And her Frankenstein, her doctor Frankenstein, creates a monster. Now, interestingly, in a sense, Mephistopheles and Faust get sort of squashed together, and that Mephistopheles is an aspect of the mind of the scientist. You don't have a deliberate temptation,

in a sense, it's all happening inside Dr. Frankenstein. But he goes beyond the realms of knowledge into science, whereas the other Fausts were looking for different kinds of power, sometimes youth or whatever. And of course he creates this monster and finds he can't control it. And it's not that he's condemned to hell, but everything he loves is destroyed.

So it pushes Faust into a different area, much of the same area that ETA Hoffman did as well with Coppelius, although Dr. Coppelius is less well known. But this idea of magic shading into science and of Methistopheles becoming an aspect of Faust's psyche rather than an external tempter. Another very important element, I think, that we can trace back to Goethe,

is the notion of the two souls. There's a point in Goethe's Faust, where Faust speaks of himself as a man with two souls, torn in different directions, one soul flying up to heaven, the other pulled down to the earth, down into the dust, into the gutter. And we see this that in many 19th century stories,

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would be a good example of the polarity of the human spirit. And this is something that I think Goetheed to European culture and which is taken up then in the 19th century all the way down to Oscar Wilde's picture of Dorian Gray. Well, Oscar Wilde uses that phrase, doesn't he? Something like, I'll give my soul for that. I mean, he just comes straight in with that, doesn't it?

And that is the Faustian pact he made. That is the Faustian pact. But again, there's sort of no... To be forever young, that is. To be forever, youth, yes, which. in fact the original Faust asked for it. It takes us back again to the original story. But again, there's no external tempter.

Dorian, yes, looks at the cat. And this is supposedly where he's making the bargain with some sort of Egyptian monstrosity. But there's no one who says to Dorian, you know, what do you want? It's kind of Dorian works this out for himself. He says, what I really want is to be young. And then suddenly he found he's got it.

And it's terrible. So we've had Faust as a trickster and as a low life. We've had him as a scholar. and he's been a theologian and so on, as I was mentioned in the chapbooks, he gives his views. Then he begins to be used as the artist. He is an artist. He represents, he can be used as the modern artists, struggling, and so on.

And Thomas Mann's massive novel is the biggest testament to that. So can you, very difficult to briefly summarize that very long and complicated novel, but there you go. Mann has the artist make a bargain to create art at all costs. Now, Mann was very attracted to this. is the romantic idea that if you are an artist, whatever you have to pay for it, that is fine. But man also has the artist deteriorate. Man's musician deteriorates as a person as he becomes better known as an artist. And man does this in two ways, one by allowing him to be diseased.

He gets venereal disease. This brings the woman, the woman into it. But man also spins it into politics as well, because man is writing in 1950, and he's talking about how Germany has bankrupted itself by going back to this world of primitive dissonance. By making a pact with the devil. By making a pact with the devil. And so instead of the order that you have in Gerta's world and in Beethoven's music, you have sort of disorder and dissonance. And of course, Mann was interested in the theories of Schoenberg.

I mean, you know, Mann's novel is immensely complex. But this political spin, again, I think, is always there because of this challenge to authority. But you get it very, very strongly in the 20th century. I think what is extremely important is that the image of Faustus had become more and more positive in the course of the 19th century. And in the 20th century, he was almost universally portrayed as somebody who was extending human knowledge, who was brave, who was daring to do things that other people did not dare to do. And so he was a ready-made icon for the National Socialists. And what man does is he takes this up and he shows the reality.

He shows a man who is sick, a man who is sick, a man who. who is misguided, a man who destroys himself. And you got it earlier in F.W. Murnau's film as well, which wasn't very popular in Germany. Indeed, Monard left Germany, is the mid-20s, where you get Faust becoming disenchanted with knowledge because the devil is a plague, and Faust can't cure people, and he rejects knowledge.

But again, there's also this sense of the plague is political as well as medicinal. So in the 20th century, but Faustus part of the Nazi myth and then Mann trying to reclaim Faust and yet going through that experience in the writing of the book. And we come back to our beginning because the Faust that

Thomas Mann creates is based entirely on the chapbook and not on Goethe. Man ignores Goethe and takes all the analogies from the chat book. In fact Adrian Leva Kuhn, the central character of Dr Faustus

imagines that He is a modern Faustus to the extent of imitating the language of the chapbook and imitating this old-fashioned German, which becomes his personal house style. Rosary? Yes, I mean, I think that's very interesting. I wonder if Nietzsche just ought to be mentioned briefly here, too, as part of the sort of perversion, the process of perversion of the Faustus figure, the Uber-Mensch, the Superman, the anti-Christian, in particular Nietzsche,

who thought that Christianity with its humility and so on was all wrong, and that in fact striving beyond good and evil was what you had to do. And unfortunately, that then feeds into Nazism as well, whereas Thomas Mann is more concerned with culture. Quite a journey from a letter in 1507 talking about this trickster at Inns and this wandering, vagrant, vagrant charlatan scholar. But thank you very much for that. Next week I'll be discussing the Roman Republic. Thank you for listening.

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