The Faust legend is a conglomerate of anonymous popular traditions, largely of medieval origin, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century came to be associated with an actual individual of the name of Faustus whose notorious career during the first four decades of the century, as a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany.  The Faust Book of 1587, the earliest collection of these tales, is of prevailingly theological character.  It represents Faust as a sinner and reprobate, and it holds up his compact with Mephistopheles and his subsequent damnation as an example of human recklessness and as a warning to the faithful.

From this Faust Book, that is from its English translation, which appeared in 1588, Marlowe took his tragedy of Dr. Faustus (1589; published 1604).  In Marlowe’s drama Faust appears as a typical man of the Renaissance, as an explorer and adventurer, as a superman craving for extraordinary power, wealth, enjoyment, and worldly eminence.  The finer emotions are hardly touched upon.  Mephistopheles is the medieval devil, harsh and grim and fierce, bent on seduction, without any comprehension of human aspirations.  Helen of Troy is a she-devil, and becomes the final means of Faust’s destruction.  Faust’s career has hardly an element of true greatness.  None of the many tricks, conjurings and miracles, which Faust performs with Mephistopheles’ help, has any relation to the deeper meaning of life.  From the compact on to the end hardly anything happens which brings Faust inwardly nearer either to heaven or hell.  But there is a sturdiness of character and stirring intensity of action, with a happy admixture of buffoonery, through it all.  And we feel something of the pathos and paradox of human passions in the fearful agony of Faust’s final doom.

The German popular Faust drama of the seventeenth century and its outgrowth the puppet plays, are a reflex both of Marlowe’s tragedy and the Faust Book of 1587, although they contain a number of original scenes, notably the Council of the Devils at the beginning.  Here again, the underlying sentiment is the abhorrence of human recklessness and extravagance.  In some of these plays, the vanity of bold ambition is brought out with particular emphasis through the contrast between the daring and dissatisfied Faust and his farcical counterpart, the jolly and contented Casperle.  In the last scene, while Faust in despair and contrition is waiting for the sound of the midnight bell which is to be the signal of his destruction, Casperle, as night watchman, patrols the streets of the town, calling out the hours and singing the traditional verses of admonition to quiet and orderly conduct.

To the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, Faust appeared as a criminal who sins against the eternal laws of life, as a rebel against holiness who ruins his better self and finally earns the merited reward of his misdeeds.  He could not appear thus to the eighteenth century.  The eighteenth century is the age of Rationalism and of Romanticism.  The eighteenth century glorifies human reason and human feeling.  The right of man and the dignity of man are its principal watchwords.  Such an age was bound to see in Faust a champion of freedom, nature, truth.  Such an age was bound to see in Faust a symbol of human striving for completeness of life.