ABSTRACT
The opening monologue is the classic formulation of the Faustian situation; while only a distant echo of Marlowe’s version, it is remarkably close to it in spirit. The four faculties are contemptuously dismissed, as is the whole apparatus of conventional scholarship - teaching, titles, learning itself- as a means to truth, to knowledge, or to their effective application to the human condition. It is unprofitable to argue over the precise age of Faust at this point, though he is traditionally understood as a man of advanced age. It is not certain that Goethe, in modifying the ‘Doctor and Professor’ of the Urfaust to ‘Magister and Doctor’, intended to reduce either Faust’s age or his academic status; it would be anachronistic to assume that ‘Doctor’, in sixteenth- or in eighteenth-century usage, was junior to ‘Professor’. Faust has been teaching for some ten years, and yet he must lose thirty years in the witch’s kitchen to become the young lover of Gretchen. This would indicate a lengthy and arduous period of study, some twenty years or more, before his teaching career even began - long enough, perhaps, to reach the limits of conventional book-learning.
