Faust: Part Two

‘Faust, Part Two’ (or as Goethe calls it Faust, der Tragödie zweiter Teil) may arguably be regarded either as a loose, almost independent sequel to ‘Faust, Part One’, or (as the word ‘part’ suggests and as many critics insist) as the continuation of a single work called ‘Faust’. Readers will differ as to which approach makes better sense; in any case, largely for practical reasons, I have not tried to integrate this translation and edition of Part Two with that of Part One in a single bulky ‘Faust’ volume. I have assumed, however, that those who read this sequel, if such it is, will probably be acquainted with Part One in some form or another, and perhaps with my own version of it which was published by Oxford University Press in 1987. In this hope I here occasionally refer (by page or line or scene number) to the Part One text or to my introduction and notes to it. (In both translations I have preserved the standard line-numbering of the German text, and for greater clarity added editorial numbers to Goethe’s scenes; a scene-index appears on p. lxxxiii.)

As with Part One, the German text is so well established that it makes no significant difference which of the many standard editions one translates from, but I have in fact used the relevant Reclam volume (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, Stuttgart, 1986), which is itself based on volume 15 (Faust, II Teil, ed. Erich Schmidt, 1888) of the venerable Weimar Edition of Goethe’s works (1887-1919). I have also frequently consulted the Faust volume (vol. 8, ed. Gotthard Erler, 1965) of the more modern Berlin Edition, in which Goethe’s different Faust texts, peripheral writings, and other relevant material are presented in a rational and accessible way. The ‘Weimarer Ausgabe’ and ‘Berliner Ausgabe’ are referred to as WA and BA. For the complex problem of the genesis of Act V, which (as in the case of