Faust by Goethe: A Summary of the Play and Why It Endures
What Faust is about
Faust is a tragic play in two parts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in English as Faust, Part One and Faust, Part Two. It takes its story from the German folk legend of Faust, the scholar who strikes a bargain with the devil. Goethe did not invent the figure. He inherited him from popular tradition and turned him into something far larger: a study of what a person will trade for knowledge, experience and power.
The shape of the work is unusual. Nearly all of Part One and the majority of Part Two are written in rhymed verse. It is a play, but it is rarely staged in full, and reading it is how most people meet it. Part One is the shorter and more direct of the two, and it is the part that carries the famous bargain. Faust's soul is sold to the devil, and the drama of Part One turns on what that costs him.
Part Two moves somewhere else entirely. Goethe shifts the focus away from the fate of Faust's soul and towards social phenomena: psychology, history and politics, alongside mystical and philosophical material. It is wider, stranger and less tied to a single human story. Readers who come to Part Two expecting more of Part One are often surprised. The second part was the main occupation of Goethe's final years, and it reads like the summing up of a long life of thinking.
The main characters
Faust himself is the centre of the work, and he is not a simple villain or a simple victim. He is a man who wants more than the life available to him, and who is willing to put his soul against that want. The bargain with the devil drives Part One and hangs over everything that follows. Goethe's achievement is to make the wanting itself the subject. Faust is restless rather than wicked, and that restlessness is what the devil works with.
The devil is the second great presence. In the folk legend the deal is a trap and the scholar is the fool who walks into it. Goethe keeps the deal but complicates the terms, so that the question of what is actually being won or lost stays open across thousands of lines of verse. By Part Two, where the soul is no longer the focus, the relationship has become something closer to a long argument about how a human life should be spent.
The themes
Ambition is the engine. Faust is a man who has reached the limits of what study can give him and refuses to accept those limits. The bargain is the logical end of that refusal. Goethe treats the impulse seriously rather than simply condemning it, which is part of why the play has stayed alive. The hunger that destroys Faust is the same hunger that makes him interesting.
Power runs alongside it, and it becomes more visible in Part Two, where politics and history enter the frame. Once the private soul is no longer the subject, the question becomes what a person with extraordinary capability does in the world, and what the world does with him.
Morality and redemption are the pressure points. A soul has been sold. That fact sits at the centre of the work and cannot be argued away. What Goethe does with it, across two parts written decades apart, is the reason scholars have never stopped writing about this play. The early folk legend offered a straightforward moral. Goethe offered a far less comfortable one.
How it came to be written
Faust occupied Goethe for most of his adult life. The earliest version, known as the Urfaust, was developed between 1772 and 1775, though the details of that development are not entirely clear. It has twenty-two scenes, one in prose, two largely in prose, and the remaining 1,441 lines in rhymed verse. The manuscript was lost, and a copy was only discovered in 1886.
The work first appeared in print as Faust, a Fragment in 1790. Goethe completed a preliminary version of what is now Part One in 1806, published in 1808, with a revised edition in 1828 to 1829, the last he edited himself. He finished Part Two in 1831 and it was published after his death the following year. That is roughly sixty years of work on one subject.
Why it still matters
Faust is considered by many to be Goethe's finest achievement and the greatest work of German literature. Despite rarely being staged in its entirety, it is the play with the largest audience numbers on German-language stages, which tells you how deep it sits in the culture that produced it.
It suits readers who want a work that rewards slow attention, who are interested in the bargain as a moral idea rather than just a plot device, and who do not mind a book that changes its mind about what it is halfway through. Part One can be read on its own and often is. Part Two is the harder climb and the stranger reward.
