The devil is not fundamentally evil, God not essentially good. Faust, though he abandons his beloved to certain death, enters into dubious political schemes and economic swindles, and exploits war to his own advantage, is redeemed. These simple extractions from Goethe's Faust tell of the play's essential modernity, its complexity, and its tendency to confuse. "It is hard to imagine a masterpiece as widely recognized yet as little understood," writes author Jane K. Brown. Yet it is the play's very complexity, she continues, that "has allowed successive ages to read Faust in terms of their own deepest concerns.

In Faust: Theater of the World Brown offers a clearly written explication of the play that leads the reader through many levels of interpretation. Written over the course of 60 years that span most of Goethe's working life and the romantic period, the play bears the mark of Goethe's personal growth and development as an artist as well as that of the significant events of his day. Brown notes the influence of the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, materialism, the decline of religious belief, and the flowering of individualism. Faust portrays both the oppressiveness of the old social order and the spiritlessness, doubt, and alienation of the new.

Since Goethe's time, Faust has been as much a quintessentially German tale as it has been a story of and for the entire Western world. Brown addresses its reception Goethe's homeland, including the Second Empire's disturbing interpretation of Faust's relentless desire to achieve--and the ultimate forgiveness of his transgression--as a call to German expansionism during World Wars I and II. Faust's redemption at the play's end sets Goethe's version of the Faust legend apart from most others. Brown reviews Goethe's rich and problematic development of the story in the context of the Faust canon, particularly Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Goethe's decision to present Faust, God, and Mephistopheles from conflicting perspectives is closely examined as evidence of his attempt to convey the difficulty of surety in the modern world, the ineffability of truth.

It is in his search for a higher, ultimately unknowable truth that Goethe enters the theater of the world--a theater representing human action in relation to the divine cosmos. Central to such drama is its intention to express what is real not in an ordinary sense but in a universal sense. Brown's study manages to convey in down-to-earth language the complex philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic issues raised in Goethe's lofty and often unwieldy masterpiece.