In her introduction, Lorna Fitzsimmons quotes Jane K. Brown, who noted Faust's ‘incorrigible responsiveness to any question posed to it’ (p. 4). The fifteen essays in her wide-ranging collection that was prepared with the bicentennial of Goethe's Faust in mind do pose many questions indeed. The first part, ‘Anteriorites’, reads Faust back into historical context, examining likenesses between Faust and Alexander the Great, and placing the drama in the tradition of the German Hanswurst plays (Jane Curran offers a convincing argument for continuity between Germany's popular historical folk tradition and its most classical of authors). Part II, ‘Faust: In Context’, examines discrete aspects, mostly (though not entirely) in textual terms. Alan Corkhill, for example, explores the use of sound (both in terms of how the text suggests diegetic sound for staging, how those sounds have been staged, and how the dialogue itself provides its own soundscape). Part III explores the well-worn ‘Romantic Intertexts’: the oft-discussed links to Lord Byron are Fred Parker's topic, while Frederick Burwick argues that Coleridge, despite his denials, played a significant role in the early English translation.

Part IV, in a major shift, turns to the Asian stage. Adrian Hsia covers an exceptional amount of ground, tracing early responses to and attempts to translate or adapt Faust, offering intriguing insights into how religion, culture, and colonization each played crucial roles in reinventions of the work. David G. John examines a single production, Aymanam Krishna Kaimal's 1976 Kathakali version, and Antje Budde discusses the reception of Faust in China. The last part presents an organizational problem for the editor. As ‘leftovers’ from the clearly structured previous sections, there is little that comfortably links all five of these essays together, leading Fitzsimmons to invent the subtitle ‘The Americas, Europe, Africa and Britain’, yet the geographical appellation is only truly relevant to one of the essays. Robert Ilgner assesses the influence on the 1981 novel The Rebel Angels by Canadian writer Robertson Davies; Paul M. Malone gives an intriguing (if perhaps overly dismissive) overview of rock musicals that have, to a greater or lesser degree, embraced the Faust theme and plot; while Gabriele Becheri examines Edoardo Sanguineti and Luca Lombardi's Italian operatic adaptation.

The final two essays, are among the strongest in the collection. Katharina Keim presents a complex and engrossing study of the elements of colonialization seen both within Goethe's text and on two major productions, Faustus in Africa! by South African William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company (1995) and Fausto Zero by Márcio Meirelles and the Teatro dos Novos in Salvador de Bahia (1999). She demonstrates ways in which Faust has joined Shakespeare's plays (most notably The Tempest) among classical works that may be used to elucidate aspects of the lingering effects and general condition of colonialization. Bree Hadley demonstrates how Ravenhill's 1997 Faust is Dead, while likely a more significant deviation from its source than any of the works discussed elsewhere, nevertheless demonstrates continuity with the original. At the same time, she shows how the Faust theme fits perfectly into a postmodern context, and into that of the ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of 1990s Britain. While Fitzsimmons on occasion may have demanded more thematic continuity from her contributors (in a few essays, Faust appears almost incidental to a discussion of another topic), the collection nevertheless manages to make, mostly, a very strong contribution to a field that has already been very much studied.