Faust. Eine Tragödie. Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1808.
First edition of Faust I, 309 pp. Hagen 310 records the edition and the reimposed setting of gathering A, the press-corrections chiefly orthographic and punctuational; three scenes had appeared in Cotta's Morgenblatt für gebildete Ständein April–May 1808, just before the volume itself. Small quarto (124 × 100 mm).
The copy carries the handwritten entry of its first owner, Friedrich von Günther, Prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt.
Contemporary striped paste-paper boards, later spine label (very good to near-fine; internally beautiful and almost free of spotting), with the manuscript ownership inscription of Friedrich Günther, Prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt.
Its first owner, Friedrich Günther (1793–1867), was the sovereign of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, a Thuringian principality neighbouring Weimar; in its original striped boards and with his inscription, the copy survives substantially as first issued.
If the 1790 Fragment lets us watch Faust in the act of becoming, the first edition of 1808 presents the completed tragedy, the form through which Faust entered the literary imagination of Europe. The road between them was not one of simple expansion. Writing to Schiller in June 1797, Goethe described the task as reconstruction, dissolving what had been printed and arranging it anew, with the completed and newly invented material, "in large masses" [Goethe to Schiller, 22 June 1797]. Schiller at once grasped what Goethe took to be the work's centre, naming the "duplicity of human nature" and humanity's failed striving to unite the divine and the physical [Schiller to Goethe, 23 June 1797], still one of the most penetrating contemporary responses to the poem.
Schiller and other early admirers prized it, but Wieland doubted its prospects [Wieland to F. von Retzer, 20 June 1808] and Jean Paul judged it aimed at the "Titanen-Frechheit" its author knew in himself [Jean Paul to F. H. Jacobi, 4 October 1809]; from the outset readers disagreed over whether Faust was a model of striving or a warning against presumption [Durrani, "Biblical Borrowings in Goethe's Faust," Modern Language Review]. The chapter in Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne (1813) made Faust known across Europe and read it as a parody of belief: for her "le diable est le héros de cette pièce," the devil the hero, and she foretold that Goethe meant Faust's life to be saved but his soul lost — "que la vie de Faust soit sauvée, mais que son âme soit perdue" [de Staël, De l'Allemagne (London, 1813), ii, 216, 220]. Her enthusiasm for a work she took as irreligious made it the more suspect to German readers [Durrani]. In Britain reviewers returned to the same three charges — absurdity, obscenity, blasphemy — and Coleridge, repeatedly pressed to translate the play, declined over language he found "vulgar, licentious and blasphemous" [Coleridge, Table Talk]. Told that Lord Gower had left the Prologue in Heaven untranslated, Goethe answered that it was "quite unobjectionable — the idea is in Job" [Goethe to H. C. Robinson, August 1829].
It was through de Staël's pages that Byron first met Faust, and out of it made his Manfred; reviewing the English play in 1820, Goethe wrote that Byron "has taken my Faustus to himself" and drew from it "the strangest nourishment," and he set the dead Byron, as Euphorion, into the Second Part [Goethe on Byron's Manfred, Über Kunst und Alterthum, 1820; Eckermann, 24 February 1825]. Nicholas Boyle calls Faust's wager—staked not for a term of years but on the certainty that no moment will ever content him—"the morality of modernity itself" [Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, I]. Eighteen years separate the Fragment from this edition, across which Goethe reshaped the material into a single dramatic structure and completed the Gretchen tragedy. Asked what "idea" the work embodied, he denied there was one; "From heaven, through the world, to hell," he told Eckermann, "would indeed be something, but this is no idea, only a course of action" [Eckermann, 6 May 1827].
PROVENANCE
Friedrich Günther, Prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1793–1867), with manuscript ownership inscription.
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Goedeke IV/3, 613; Hagen 310; Kippenberg I, 2385; Hirzel A 265; Brieger 671; Wilpert/Gühring 80.
Goethe to Schiller, 22 June 1797; Schiller to Goethe, 23 June 1797; Goethe to Schiller, 27 June 1797; Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 1808, nos. 84, 89, 108; J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 6 May 1827; Thomas Mann, "Goethe" (1932); Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, I (Oxford, 1991); Germaine de Staël, De l'Allemagne (London, 1813), ii; C. M. Wieland to F. von Retzer, 20 June 1808; Jean Paul to F. H. Jacobi, 4 October 1809; S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk; Goethe to H. C. Robinson, August 1829; Goethe on Byron's Manfred, Über Kunst und Alterthum (1820); Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 24 February 1825; Osman Durrani, "Biblical Borrowings in Goethe's Faust: A Historical Survey of Their Interpretation," Modern Language Review.
