communium collectanex; a Johanne Manlio per multos annos pleraque tum ex lectionibus D. Philippi Melancthonis, tum ex aliorum virorum relationibus excerpta et nuper in ordinem ab eodem redacta), Johann Mennel represents that Reformer as saying: "I knew a man named Faustus, out of Kündling" (Knütlingen), "a little town not far from my own home" (at Bretten, in Baden, Knütlingen being a frontier town of Wurtemburg). "When he studied at Cracow he learnt magic, as it used to be actively taught there, where public lectures were read on the art. Afterwards he roamed about and talked of secret things. sought attention at Venice, he gave out that he would fly. lifted him to some height, but then let him fall, so that he almost died of the bruise. Not many years ago this Johannes Faustus sat, on his last day, greatly troubled, in a Wurtemberg village inn. The innkeeper asked him why he was so much troubled and unlike himself, for he had formerly been a wild fellow, who more than once was nearly killed over his love affairs. Whereupon he replied to that village innkeeper: 'Do not be frightened to-night.' At midnight the house shook. As Faustus had not When he The Devil risen next morning, when it was already noon, the innkeeper went into his room, and found him lying near the bed with his face twisted round. It was so that the Devil killed him. When he yet lived he went about with a dog, who was the Devil." This was published in 1562. In 1563 appeared Wier's wise and generous book, De Præstigiis Dæmonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis, in which there are stories of Faustus. Wier follows Mennel's record as to the magician's birthplace; and in 1585, two years before the publication of the book on Faustus at the Frankfort fair, another book, by Augustin LercheimerBedencken von Zauberey-suggested by indignation against the cruelties practised on witches, who should be placed, said Lercheimer, under the doctor and the divine, not under the criminal judge, told more stories about Faustus, and gave the right form of the name of his birthplace, Knütlingen. Roda, which Marlowe translates Rhodes, first appears as Faust's birthplace in the first edition of the famous prose story, published in Frankfort in 1587, at the autumn book fair. That book was widely read. Before the end of the year John Aylmer, Bishop of London, licensed "A Ballad of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the great Conjuror." In the following year, 1588, there was a new edition of the original German book, with some additions, also a rhymed version in German, and a translation into Low German. From the second edition of the book published at Frankfort, a translation was made into English, and published, without date, in 1588 or 1589, as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. Newly printed, and in convenient places impertinent matter amended, according to the true copy printed at Frankfort, and translated into English by P. R. Gent. At the same time young Christopher Marlowe must have been turning the new story-book into a play. The original German book of 1587 was translated into French by Victor Palma Cayet, whose translation was published in 1589, and in 1592 there appeared a Dutch translation of the second German edition. This translation not only gave 1538 as the year of the death of Faustus, but fixed also the exact time of his being carried off by the Devil. It was in the night between the 23rd and 24th of October. In 1587, when the story of Faustus first appeared at Frankfort, Christopher Marlowe was a young man in the twenty-fourth year of his age. He had been baptized on the 26th of February, 1564 (new style) in the Church of St. George the Martyr, at Canterbury. His father was John Marlowe, a shoemaker. After education at the King's School, in Canterbury, he matri culated as a Pensioner of Benet College, Cambridge. Christopher Marlowe matriculated at Cambridge in March, 1581, and probably owed his college education to the kindness of Sir Roger Manwood. Sir Roger had himself risen from the ranks to which John Marlowe belonged; he was distinguished for munificence, and had his chief mansion near Canterbury. In 1583 Christopher Marlowe took his B.A. degree, and he proceeded to M.A. in 1587, when he had already leapt to fame as a dramatist by the great success of his first play. That play was Tamburlaine the Great. A letter by Thomas Nash, prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, published in 1587, condemns the recent introduction of blank verse upon the stage, and it was Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine, who introduced it. In the next year, 1588, Greene, in an address "to the Gentlemen Readers" prefixed to his novel of Perimedes, the Blacksmith, refers directly to the " daring of God out of Heaven" by " that atheist Tamburlan." Marlowe and Shakespeare were within two months of the same age. Shakespeare came to London about the year 1586, twenty-five years after the production of Gorboduc, our earliest English tragedy. During those twenty-five years few plays of high mark had been produced. The writers had been almost invariably young University men. Shakespeare studied his art as an actor, and as an alterer of other men's plays, for about six years before he declared his strength as an original writer. Those six years of Shakespeare's training time include almost the whole career of Marlowe, the greatest of his predecessors, from the first acting of Tamburlaine, in 1586 or 1587, until his death by a stab in a tavern brawl on the 1st of June, 1593, when he was little more than twenty-nine years old. Marlowe's Tamburlaine -Timour the Tartar-was the story of a Scythian shepherd chief, who began with revolt from Persia, then rolled a tide of conquest through the Eastern world, and was the scourge of kings. Marlowe represented his swelling pride, that braved at last the Gods themselves, in bombastic phrase, but with the grand energy of a young poet who had also realms to conquer. In a prologue of eight lines Marlowe began with a repudiation of rhyme, and disdain of the base jesting of the clown who intruded himself too freely on the action of our early plays. said Marlowe, and there are no clown scenes in any of his plays, excepting Faustus. Fresh from the display of pride in the strong arm of the flesh defying Heaven, Marlowe was ready to write his second play when the Faust story appeared at Frankfort. Probably the book was brought to England by a company of English players, who are known to have been in the service of Duke Christian of Saxony in October, 1586. But however Marlowe came by the book, in the very year of its first publication, here was a picture of the pride of intellect defiant of its Giver, and although there were many clownish incidents of magic in the original book that were intended to blend jest with earnest, Marlowe probably confined himself to the poetical development of the main thought. Clown scenes, not pertinent to the main story, were, I believe, added at will by the players for the satisfaction of their audiences. This is fairly to be inferred from the fact that the earliest known edition of Marlowe's Faustus was published in 1604, and entries in the diary of Henslowe the player, dated respectively 1597 and 1602, record payments for additions to Faustus." Goethe's Faust was first published in 1806, after a slow development through many years. The ballad of the King of Thule, the first monologue, and the first scene with Wagner, were written in 1774-5; from that time onward Goethe made fragmentary additions from time to time. In 1797 he remodelled the whole work, then added the two Prologues and the Walpurgis night. In 1801 the work was finished. The feebler Second Part of Faust, completed in July, 1831, at the age of 81-Goethe died on the 22nd of March, 1832-was an after thought, continuing to the end association of the Faust legend with thoughts and feelings from his own experience of life. "The marionette fable of Faust," he said, "murmured with many voices in my soul. I too had wandered into every department of knowledge, and had returned early enough satisfied with the vanity of science. And life, too, I had tried under various aspects, and always came back sorrowing and unsatisfied." Here it must be enough to say that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28, 1749. His father was an Imperial Councillor with refined tastes, which he could satisfy, and in which he could train his son. Geothe studied at Leipsic, and afterwards at Strasburg; cared more for the natural sciences than for law; tock the degree of doctor, and at the age of twenty-five represented the sick mind of Europe in the days before the French Revolution with the "Sorrows of the Young Werter," first published in 1774. In 1779 he entered the service of the Duke of Saxe Weimar, by whom he was employed in high offices, loaded with honours, and impeded in the free use of his mind. But after the first ten years at Weimar, a journey to Italy gave impulse to his genius, and bore fruit in Iphigenia, Egmont, Tasso, and much of Faust. This greatest of German poets began his career, like Schiller, with reaction against a literature of classical convention and a life encumbered with dead forms. He gave, for Germany, highest expression to the struggle for a real life, uttering itself in a real literature. Taught by the free spirit of Shakespeare, he turned early from the classical drama to represent in Götz von Berlichingen, a hero out of the old national tradition, who like himself, though in another way, defied authority. As the healthy artist life developed, the poet was the man. From the lightest grace of song to the large conception of his burgher epic, Hermann und Dorothea, most of all in his Faust, all is direct utterance of his own inner life, with the intensity and the repose of thought that through the man himself, and his own life problems, touched all humanity in a time of Revolution, when minds exulted in the new sense of recovered power. Goethe solved no riddle of life, but he expressed himself, and, through himself, a world of newly wakened thought among men, with the full sincerity that is of the essence of all high artistic power. Dr. John Anster, whose version is here given, was the earliest translator of Faust into English. He was born in Cork at the close of the last century, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and called to the Irish Bar in 1824. He graduated as LL.D. in 1826. He had published at one-and-twenty a prize poem, and Poems with Translations from the German, and after contributing to Blackwood's Magazine-in which he was a frequent writerfragments of his translation of Faust, he published the whole in 1835. In 1850 Dr. Anster was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Dublin. He died in June, 1867. His translation of Faust gave pleasure to Coleridge, and is liked in Germany. July, 1883. HENRY MORLEY. Cho. Not marching now in fields of Thrasymene, Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians; Nor sporting in the dalliance of love, In courts of kings, where state is overturn'd, Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds, The fruitful plot of scholarism grac'd, That shortly he was grac'd with doctor's name, Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And glutted now with learning's golden gifts, Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss: And this the man that in his study sits. [Exit. |