In the year 1599 there was published at Hamburg a considerably enlarged edition, of which the end of each chapter was adorned with an edifying commentary, called an Erinnerung, or Remonstrance, and it is this version which became the basis of the subsequent editions. The story becomes more anti-Catholic than in the earlier editions, and the anti-papal moral is driven home in each Erinnerung. The editor, Georg Rudolf Widman, has successfully eliminated any element of titanism or poetry which may have been present in the original book, and Faust becomes merely a young man led astray by the Church of Rome. Widman has even been delicate enough to condense the Helena episode to a mere reference in a footnote.
Widman’s version was again subjected to re-arrangement in the year 1674, by the Nuremberg physician Johann Nicolaus Pfitzer, who modified the former polemic against the Catholic Church, and in 1725 Pfitzer’s version was published in abbreviated form by an anonymous editor who called himself a Christlich-Meynender, or Man of Christian Sentiments. This volume is exceedingly slim, but it was sold everywhere and became the popular chap-book. It is important in that it contains the germ of the Gretchen episode in Goethe’s drama. Faust tries to seduce a servant-girl, but she is proof against temptation and he offers to marry her; Lucifer, however, dissuades him and gives him Helena instead.
Footnotes
[5] By Gustav Milchsack in the library at Wolfenbüttel, and edited by him in Historia D. Johannis Fausti des Zauberers [Wolfenbüttel, 1892-7]. Milchsack promised at the time to follow up this publication with a second volume containing the results of his researches, but he has not yet done so, and according to German custom, other scholars have hitherto refrained from trespassing on his preserves, so the problems raised by the discovery of this manuscript have not yet been fully investigated.
[6] W. Scherer: Das älteste Faustbuch [Berlin, 1884].
[7] Eugen Wolff: Faust und Luther [Halle, 1912].
[8] By Wilhelm Meyer, and edited by him in Nürnberger Faustgeschichten [Munich, 1895].
III
Faust in England
The earliest mention of Faust in England is in a translation by R. H. of a book by Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites, published in 1572:—
“There are also conjurers founde even at this day, who bragge of themselves that they can so by inchauntments saddle an horse, that in a fewe houres they will dispatch a very long journey. God at the last will chasten these men with deserved punishment. What straunge things are reported of one Faustus a German, which he did in these our dayes by inchauntments?”
The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, which was published in London in 1592, was, as the title-page announces, newly printed and in places amended, so there must have been an earlier edition of which all trace is lost. This was in all likelihood translated from the editio princeps of 1587, but as we are uncertain of its date, it is not impossible that one of the slightly later German editions was used. There occurs in the Stationers’ Registers under the date 28th of February, 1589, the entry of “A ballad of the life and deathe of Doctor Faustus the great Cunngerer. Allowed under the hand of the Bishop of London.”
This ballad has been preserved only in later versions of the seventeenth century,[9] and it is not possible to say definitely whether or no it was founded on the English translation of the German Faust book, though that is the most likely theory. There is little doubt that the latter appeared before the ballad. In any case, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe, which was in all probability on the stage as early as 1589, was based directly, as is shown by internal evidence, on the English Faust book, and it is unlikely that Marlowe was acquainted with the German version.[10] So even if the ballad was founded on Marlowe’s tragedy, which is very improbable, and not on the English Faust book, the latter must have been published an astonishingly short time after the appearance of the original German Historia. The translator is called P. F. Gent. (i.e. Gentleman, and not, as some editors have thought, his surname), but in later editions these initials appear as P. R. or P. K. His identity cannot be established, and it is not even possible to estimate definitely his knowledge of German. To quote Logeman; “That P. F.... must have known some German is of course evident from the whole of the translation and more especially from some passages where a smaller light would have blundered. But that his own cannot have shone very brightly is apparent from the number of lesser and greater blunders in which we have caught our translator, and also from the fact that some passages which present considerable difficulties will be found to have been omitted.” We cannot, however, judge a sixteenth-century translator by present-day standards, for he was at liberty to adapt or modify as he listed. For example, where the German original states that Faust blew in the pope’s face, the translator renders blew by smote, thus altering the whole sense, and it is doubtful whether the false translation is due to P. F.’s sense of humour or his ignorance of German. The description of Florence is even more confused than in the original, and he adds strange lore of his own, such as the mythical story of the Brazen Virgin on the bridge at Breslaw, who was used for the disposal of unruly children. It is possible that P. F. had really visited eastern Germany and the Polish or Galician regions, such as Prague and Cracow, but it is just as likely that he obtained his extra knowledge from a travelled friend. He frequently tones down the German author’s denunciation of Faust’s wicked ways, and emphasizes the fantasies and cogitations rather than the presumption and arrogance of the sorcerer. The English Faust book is therefore the first step in the deepening of the Faust character, and this conception is developed by Marlowe.[11]