Mephistopheles as the Fool: Agency and Subservience in Goethe's Faust Sara Manlowe College

In Goethe’s Faust, the devil Mephistopheles plays many roles for the benefit of our titular character, but none more overarching, nor all-encompassing, than the Fool. The archetypal Fool can wear many faces, as Mephistopheles assumes the roles of Phorkyas and the Emperor’s Fool, but more than that, the Fool is adaptable, able to contend with the highest of people and the lowest. He is able - and expected - to perform wonders. The Fool can speak truth to his authority figures, in other words the Lord and Faust, without suffering the consequences of someone who does not have his protective veneer of foolishness. Moreover, this ability to walk between the spheres of life and influence gives the Fool a heightened self-awareness in regards to the story unfolding around him, to the extent that he himself is able to manipulate the machinations of the plot. Yet the authority figures that give the Fool leave to use his wits are his ultimate weakness: for all that the Fool knows and sees, he is not his own master; he may have his own ends in mind, but those ends will always end up compromised to the will of a greater power.

The first scene of Faust is the Prologue in Heaven, in which we are introduced to the very first stage of the...