Faust (Illustrated Edition)

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [Germany]
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Goethe's Faust takes the ancient German legend of an alchemist selling his soul to the devil for knowledge and youth and turns it on its head, demonstrating the vast, profound, and sublime content of human life, singing an epic of relentless human striving that has echoed across the world to this day. At the beginning of the main text, there is a concise "Prologue to Paradise" that sets the tone for the entire play's theme. Faust is not a work that can be thoroughly understood by reading just a few chapters. Beyond its profound and extensive content, encompassing knowledge from philosophy, theology, mythology, literature, and music, it also features complex forms, including lyrical, descriptive, narrative, and didactic elements, as well as various genres such as tragicomedies, medieval mystery plays, Baroque allegorical plays, masquerades popular during the Renaissance, Italian craft plays, and new techniques on the English stage, modern satirical dramas, and so on—all of these diverse forms employ almost every known Western meter.