The history of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus, 1592, together with The second report of Faustus, containing his appearances and the deeds of Wagner, 1594.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Broadway Translations
“ Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. ”
AN ALLEGED FAUST PORTRAIT By Jan Joris van Vliet After a Sketch by Rembrandt. About 1630
Broadway Translations
1592
TOGETHER WITH THE SECOND REPORT OF FAUSTUS CONTAINING HIS APPEARANCES AND THE DEEDS OF WAGNER 1594 Both modernized and edited by WILLIAM ROSE, M.A., Ph.D. LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, KING’S COLLEGE With an Introduction With 24 Illustrations chiefly from Woodcuts
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE MAYFLOWER PRESS, WILLIAM BRENDON AND SONS LTD.
Those who wish to read the Faust and Wagner Books in the old orthography, I would refer to the careful editions of these two scholars. I have only modernized the old spellings and occasionally, for the sake of clarity, the punctuation, but have made no syntactical alterations whatever. Even where, in the case of the Wagner Book, the syntax sometimes obscured the meaning, I have thought it best to let it stand.
The versions printed by Thoms in his Early English Prose Romances are later than those printed in this volume. His Faust Book is undated, but the British Museum Catalogue gives it the suppositional date 1700. His Wagner Book reproduces the text of 1680. His introduction is, of course, out of date and practically useless.
W. R.
THE story of the man who sells his soul to the powers of evil in return for material gain, is one of the most ancient in the history of humanity. It is perhaps as old as humanity, for when the light of self-consciousness first began to dawn on man, he no doubt desired to know more than his limited intellect could tell him, or to possess something that the world could not or would not give him. When he looked around, and was frightened at his own littleness, he created gods for his protection, and these gods he endeavoured to propitiate, until they became his tyrants. They were the symbols of his hopes and fears, so that when he was propitiating his gods he was stereotyping the limitations of his own mind. And the most important of those limitations was that he must not look beyond his manufactured gods for the hidden causes of things. A profound instinct nevertheless urged him to probe beyond, and the resulting spiritual unrest, which has always manifested itself spasmodically in the human race, underwent various personifications at different times. The elements of the Faust story were already present in the Garden of Eden—the Tree of Knowledge, the personification of Evil in the Serpent, and the Woman who was tempted to overstep the bounds of what was permitted by the orthodox authority, in order to grasp the Forbidden Fruit. It is significant for the peculiar construction of the human mind, that it was always the Spirit of Evil which led the way to spiritual emancipation. In order to give concrete expression to his almost unconscious thirst for greater knowledge, man had to pretend to himself that this craving was pernicious. His very attempts to free himself from superstition provide the strongest evidence of the tortuous way in which his mind had to work, for it could only rise to a higher conception of its own worth by playing a game of self-deception.