Goethe began Faust in the early 1770s with verse and prose scenes showing a high-minded scholar who seeks through magic to escape from academic sterility. Soon this Faust, in the unexplained company of the cynical devil Mephistopheles, loves and seduces, then deserts and destroys Margarete, a small-town girl who atones for killing their child by refusing to be rescued as she is about to be executed for infanticide. In the late 1780s Goethe composed further scenes with Mephistopheles and published them—without the still unversified denouement of Part I—in 1790 with revisions of what he had written as Faust: A Fragment. He worked out his definitive conception of a two-part tragedy (and at last motivated the introduction of Mephistopheles) in the last decade of the 18th century, when at the urging of his friend Friedrich Schiller he largely finished Part I and began Part II, most of which was then actually written from 1825 to 1831. Its genesis at the end of the Age of Reason largely explains the slowness with which Faust was completed: its supernatural motifs, deriving from beliefs no longer taken seriously, could only be reconciled with its secular theme of innate human potential when Goethe replaced the traditional bartering of immortal soul for wealth and power by Faust's Promethean discontent, his defiance of Mephistopheles ever to see him permanently satisfied with any pleasure or achievement.

In the scenes from the 1770s—basically those published in 1887 as Goethe's Faust in Its Original Form and known as the Urfaust—simple, often colloquial verse and prose is skilfully blended with contemporary lyricism and powerful rhetoric; a deliberately simple dramatic technique evokes the folk dramas and puppet plays ultimately deriving from adaptations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus performed in Germany by travelling players through which the figure of Faust was then best known. Into what had become the drama of a representative of highest human aspiration who is seen...