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Goethe Yearbook 349 2. So observes Johann Friedrich Schink in a review of Mozart's opera, Dramaturgische Fragmente (Graz, 1782) 4:1002. 3. Goethe's 'lphigenie auf Tauris' als Drama der Autonomie (Munich, 1979) 4. Wilson has published a concise English summary of many of his arguments: "Turks on the Eighteenth-Century Operatic Stage and European Political, Military, and Cultural History," Eighteenth Century Life n. s., vol. 9 (1985): 79-92. Williams, John R., Goethe's Faust. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987 (Unwin Critical Library). This series aims to provide "scholarly introductions" that will be "reliable and stimulating works of reference and guidance, embodying the present state of knowledge and opinion in a conveniently accessible form." To create an essential secondary text on Faust that is still accessible to non-specialists is a challenge not fully met here. The book is in two parts. The first, "History, Composition and Reception" begins with a fairly detailed history of the Faust legend from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Williams acknowledges that much of this tradition was unknown to Goethe; other sources for Goethe's text are not discussed, except for brief references to the Book of Job and to Calderón. The second chapter offers a brief biography of Goethe, describes the stages of composition of Faust, and discusses the relation of the parts to each other. This section concludes with a clear survey oÃ- Faust's reception and description of the dominant issues in the .FßiMi-scholarship: the genre of the play, the perfectibilist and unitarian controversies . The rest of the book is divided into a chapter of commentary for the prologues, one for Part I and one for Part II. The commentary describes the action, offers interpretive speculation about details of action and motivation, and discusses selected issues raised by the scholarship. The book ends with a chapter describing the meters oiFaust. Williams's Faust is essentially the Urfaust. He describes the shift in position for Wald und Höhle in Part I as a "further odd, and not entirely happy, change [...]" (33)· The diction leaves unclear whether the same adjectives apply to what filled the "große Lücke" as well. The Walpurgisnachtstraum is a "feeble satirical intermezzo," the Walpurgisnacht takes second place to Schöne's recent reconstruction (on p. 146 the latter is referred to as if it were the canonical text), and the final version of Kerker is "less starkly economical in expression than the Urfaust scene" (34). It is, following Eudo Mason and Albrecht Schöne, a Mephisto-centered reading of a Sturm and Drang Faust, even in Part II. As a result the book minimizes the significance of most of the text as published. On other issues Williams tends to be neutral. In Chapter Two we are told that Parts I and II are related but not unified by a common idea, that Part I is in the tbeatrum mundi tradition but is mimetic and naturalist (and that all drama is 350 Book Reviews naturalist), that Part I has a unique form but is Shakespearean, that Part II is fundamentally different from Part I because it is Calderonian (compounding the confusion as to what is meant by tbeatrum mundi tradition). Sometimes several paragraphs of material are offered and then declared only marginally relevant: after a full page on the history of Mistra, for example, we are told that such information has little bearing on Act III, and that Goethe probably did not have access to the main book on it (168). At a more significant level, there is not only a fundamental split between the two parts of the play, but Part I separates into the tragedies of the scholar and that of Gretchen, and Part II into aesthetic concerns (Acts II and III) and political concerns (Acts I and IV). These are all aspects of a pervasive insecurity about the quality of the play. This book is a genuine commentary: passages are rarely quoted, the discussion proceeds scene by scene, often speech by speech. Since Williams only occasionally draws connections from one scene to the next, the details of scholarly discussion on the play are communicated more successfully than the main issues...

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