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brucefarrar 's review for:
Faust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The author threw in just about everything but the kitchen sink into these two plays that start off with the story of the medieval academic who strikes a bargain with the devil, and then take off from there in a wild variety of moods and meters. The author, remembering a puppet play that he saw as a child, sketched out a prose drama based on the legend in 1776. But did not publish it; instead he reworked it into 12,110 lines of verse over the next sixty years. Part I was first performed in 1829 to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Part II was published posthumously in 1832. He borrows material, verse forms, and even characters from German ballads, plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, and Shakespeare, Mozart’s operas, Herodotus’s History, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Italian renaissance painting and sculpture, economic ideas about paper money, and early 19th century theories of mountain creation, to name but a few of his sources.
It was hard for me to imagine this work on stage with its sudden shifts of scene, material, and mood, and long sections of plays within the plays as anything but lumpy gravy, i.e., an often tedious experience for the theater goer. However, he left a feast for scholars and interpreters. I read the Norton Critical edition, second edition, over half of which was interpretive notes, charts, illustrations, and literary criticism. Whew! It often felt more like a mountain climb than reading a play. Great poetry, but I’m giving it one star off for obscurity.
It was hard for me to imagine this work on stage with its sudden shifts of scene, material, and mood, and long sections of plays within the plays as anything but lumpy gravy, i.e., an often tedious experience for the theater goer. However, he left a feast for scholars and interpreters. I read the Norton Critical edition, second edition, over half of which was interpretive notes, charts, illustrations, and literary criticism. Whew! It often felt more like a mountain climb than reading a play. Great poetry, but I’m giving it one star off for obscurity.