Renaissance and Baroque Elements in Goethe's Faust: Illustrative Analogues

Abstract

Stuart Atkins completed the essay that follows less than two months before his death in October 2000. One might at first be tempted to misread the array of erudite detail in the same way that Goethe's own last works were for so long. But the Wahlverwandtschaften essay of 1980 and and the Poetry of the of 1972 (both in his Essays on Goethe) show that he had mastered this polyphonic technique long since. Indeed taking notes in his courses in the midsixties was an exhilarating challenge. The style is characteristic of Stuart's dry and reticent irony, a quality I learned from his example to recognize in Goethe. The opening assertion seems straightforward enough: Goethe drew heavily on many Renaissance and Baroque authors, despite his repeated professions of the crucial importance of antiquity for his work. It is, to be sure, a major adjustment to our understanding of Goethe's classicism, but perhaps not so important in today's climate of scholarship. But then the fireworks begin. Most scholars have checked a title at some point in Ruppert's catalog of Goethe's library or Keudell's listing of his borrowings from the Weimar library, but who has actually read at all, much less widely, in those formidable multi-volume works in so many languages? As the details unfold we marvel at the number of major and now arcane works in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French that Stuart (and of course Goethe) drew upon with facility, at the range of genres in which they read, and at their general sense of literary and specifically dramatic practice on a stage with which Goethe had only remnants of living experience and Stuart none. Then we marvel at the range of categories addressed by the commentary. In quick succession paragraphs address a motif (to 6263), a concept and another motif (to 6277), a scene type (to 6393), a technique of Baroque drama (to 6586), the meaning of a particular word (to 6831), specific textual reference (to 6864), an earlier intention for the text (to 6879), the use of Latin versus Greek forms of names (to 8494), Riemer's emendations to Goethe's punctuation (to 8547), and so it goes.