SOURCE: “Faust and Anti-Faust in Modern Drama,” in Drama Survey, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring, 1966, pp. 39-52.

In the following essay, Cole discusses The Death of Doctor Faust as a modernist interpretation of the Faust myth.

Damned or redeemed, tragical or travestied, noble, foolish, or darkly sinister, Faust has been a recurrent figure in European drama for nearly four centuries. Marlowe's tragic hero of the Elizabethan age, though transformed into a vehicle for burlesque and pantomime farce in the eighteenth century, was reincarnated with new grandeur by the life-long work of Goethe, who more than any other artist is responsible for endowing Faust with mythic proportions. Goethe's Faust has become the paradigm for the Faustian legend: it has managed to overshadow the dozens of imitations, continuations, and alterations that accompany it in the history of dramatic literature. But a mythic figure so closely tied to the intellectual history of Western...