1. The Origin of Faust
The Faust legend is probably based on the life of a real person named Jorg or George Faust, also referred to as Georgius and as Johannes Faustus. He was a traveling performer or magician, thought to have been born around 1480 in the Württemberg region of southwest Germany, and to have died in the same region around 1540.
The first lengthy historical mention of him occurs in a letter written in 1507 by the Benedictine scholar Johannes Tritheim. The letter is not complimentary of Faust. In it, Tritheim refers to him as one "who has presumed to call himself the prince of necromancers," but who is in fact "a vagabond, a babbler, and a rogue, who deserves to be thrashed so that he may not henceforth rashly venture to profess in public things so execrable and so hostile to the holy Church."
2. The German Source: Historia von D. Johann Fausten
The principal German source of the legend surrounding Faust is the volume edited by Johann Spies in 1587 and published as Historia von D. Johann Fausten. This version, commonly called the Faustbuch, is also referred to as the Volksbuch or the Historia.
This folktale was altered and augmented over time in numerous forms (including puppet shows) and in a variety of languages. The first known English-language publication appeared under the title The Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus.
The basic story is about a magician who makes a pact with the Devil in return for superhuman powers, sexual pleasures, and arcane knowledge. As part of the bargain, the Devil requires Faust's soul and ultimately claims it by torturing Faust's body and dragging him to Hell.
3. The German Faust Book: it's scope and tendency in the title page
¡®History of Dr. John Faust, the celebrated conjuror and master of black magic: How he sold himself to the Devil with effect from an appointed time: What in the meanwhile were the strange adventures he witnessed, himself initiated, and conducted, until at last he received his well- deserved reward. Mostly collected and printed from his own writings which he left behind him, as a terrifying instance and horrible example, and as a friendly warning to all arrogant, insolent-minded, and godless men.¡¯
The German Faust-Book aims above all at edification. It shows the awful consequences of a sinner¡¯s deliberate commitment of himself to evil with a view to gratifying his pride, ambition, and lust. At the same time, the historical Faustus had been a wandering scholar, and even his moralistic biographer was affected by the characteristic influences of his time. So the German Faust-Book allows its hero some slight touches of the Renaissance intellectual curiosity. The century was also that of the Reformation. So it was easy enough for the legend to acquire a markedly anti-papal bias.
During the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and the proponents of the Reformation found the Faust myth a useful tool. It was modified into a warning against what were considered the excesses and idolatrous practices of the Catholic Church. At the same time, the story of Faust's overreaching the normal limits of human knowledge and ability was also directed against Humanism in Renaissance Germany.
4. The First English Biography of Faustus: P.F.'s English translation of the Faustbuch as the direct source for Marlowe's play
P.F.¡¯s own contribution to the legend went beyond the supplying of additional detail to the record of Faustus¡¯ sightseeing. He also gave a distinctly stronger emphasis to the intellectual ardour of his hero. We must be careful not to exaggerate here. P.F. was, after all, a translator, and the tale he tells is in the main that told in his original. But the German gave him no authority, for example, for allowing Faustus in chapter xxii to describe himself as ¡®the unsatiable speculator¡¯. By touches of this kind, P.F. was contributing to Faustus¡¯ development into the representative Renaissance figure that he was to become in Marlowe¡¯s play.
5. The Rainaissance
First, there was the new learning. The humanists were reviving and extending classical studies and so making available to their fellows a wider range of knowledge and ideas; and printing, invented in the fifteenth century helped greatly in the dissemination of the fresh materials. Under the influence of this new learning, there evolved the ideal of the cultivated Renaissance man in whom all the faculties were harmoniously developed, an ideal believed by Englishmen to have been realized by, for example, Sir Philip Sidney.
Second, there was the Reformation. This challenged the view that only as a member of the corporate body, the church, could the individual find salvation. The Protestants, in separating themselves from the Roman Catholic Church, tended to emphasize the individual¡¯s responsibility for finding salvation by reading and interpreting Scripture for himself. In England, the Anglican Church was attempting to take the middle way between Roman Catholic institutionalism and Protestant individualism.
Third, there was the discovery of new lands and new routes. Columbus discovered America; Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope and sailed to India; Magellan penetrated into the Pacific Ocean; and the first circumnavigations of the earth, including that of Sir Francis Drake, occurred. Such voyages had important economic and other practical consequences. In addition, they gave men the sense that in the physical world as in the world of ideas the boundaries of the known were being very rapidly enlarged.
Finally, exploration was proceeding beyond the earth itself. In place of the old view that the entire universe centred on a stationary earth, there was being elaborated the new view that the earth was only one among many planets travelling around the sun. Copernicus put forward this view in 1543, and Galileo, born in the same year as Marlowe and Shakespeare, brought the theory to the practical test of the telescope. It must not be thought that these discoveries had much effect even upon educated Elizabethans. Marlowe, for example, still thought of the universe, in the old Ptolemaic way, as centred on a stationary earth. Nevertheless, the new science was developing; and Bacon was to be one of its early philosophers.
6. The Influences of the Faust Legend
The Faust legend has been a rich source of creative inspiration. Christopher Marlowe wrote one of his most famous plays based on the legend. It was published in 1604 as The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. And in the nineteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Parts I (1808) and II (1832) of his poetic drama, Faust.
Over the centuries, the legend has continued to fascinate novelists, poets, painters, film-makers, and musicians. Whether they see Faust positively as a seeker of benevolent knowledge, negatively as a diabolical harbinger of fascism, or tragically as a symbol of humanity's insatiable curiosity, composers like Louis Hector Berlioz (The Damnation of Faust, 1846), novelists like Thomas Mann (Dr. Faustus, 1947), and poets like Karl Shapiro ("The Progress of Faust," 1968), have turned Faust into a cultural archetype.