Review of Sara Munson Deats’ The Faust Legend: From Marlowe and Goethe to Contemporary Drama and Film

This is an old-fashioned monograph – agreeably so. It offers, basically, a chronological study of the Faust myth as it appears in myriad forms in myriad genres of myriad cultural works of the West. The story of Faust is contextualized in two millennia of discourses about magi, sorcery and theological anxieties. The conclusion – that the Faust legend means different things to different people in different places at different times – is not unpredictable but this book will work as enjoyable, cerebral reading material and as a sort of glorified textbook for decades. The book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) is bereft of jargon, full of dense information, packed with learning about primary and secondary texts and, despite its payload of factual and contextualizing material, very readable. The author has strong opinions about various matters and differs markedly in opinion from other critics about certain aspects of the Faust story but always expresses herself courteously and elegantly – the book has none of the self-aggrandizement or self-quoting and self-referencing that is a feature in some contemporary monographs. It is not a short book and the chapters are in some cases forbiddingly long: it takes a major effort to read the book fully: it is an effort that is totally worthwhile.

The book has a Prologue, five chapters and an Epilogue. These are augmented with useful illustrations (barring a woodcut from a Marlovian quarto’s frontispiece, none of these are obvious or inevitable), generous notes, a splendid bibliography and an on-point index.…