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Sharpe, Lesley, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 277 pp. $60.00 hardcover, $22.00 paperback. This book is a joy to read for many reasons; three stand out. The fifteen contributors to this Companion are prominent Goethe scholars teaching at British, American, and Canadian universities. Their familiarity with vast amounts of the relevant literature is evident when they distill many years of research and reflection and present their knowledgeable insights in the condensed form of essays of varying lengths (13-24 pages). Second, equally impressive as their command of the subject matter (many have written books about it) is their command of stylistic expression: the essays are eminently readable and free of slant, cant, or fashionable jargon. And third, the book is comprehensive in coverage in respect to both the individual topics and the various aspects of the phenomenon that is Goethe. The epithet "masterful" applies to all essays in this volume, and "superb" especially to the first, "The World Goethe lived in: Germany and Europe, 1750-1830" by Thomas E Saine, also to the last essay by Gerhart Hoffmeister on Goethe's "Reception in Germany and Abroad," and to one in the middle on Faust by Jane K. Brown. While the first essay recalls the events that shaped Goethe's thinking and outlook, the last one traces the impact and import Goethe had on his contemporaries and succeeding generations within and outside Germany. Hoffmeister concludes his essay with a quote from Nicholas Boyle who wrote of Goethe in Der Spiegel (16 August 1999) that "his time has perhaps just arrived." And as he is now also seen "as the precursor of modern chaos theory" (252), the fascination with his uvre continues. Brown presents Faust "as the paradigmatic text of modernity" (84) and leads the reader through the four stages of its genesis discussing them as "four concentric texts, each of which encloses its predecessor in a web of elaboration and reinterpretation" (91). With a few deft phrases she makes the reader recall the hilariously funny and profoundly sad scenes at the end: Mephistopheles "barely escapes being saved as he falls in love with the angels ...," Faust "is saved to continue striving after death for an eternally receding ideal embodied in Margarete and labelled 'das Ewig-Weibliche,'" and "there is little agreement as to whether Faust's apotheosis is affirmative or nihilistic" (98-100). Indeed, is a dirge affirmative or nihilistic? For that is what the last five pages present: a dirge about the demise of the "Machtiger der Erdensohne" expressed in exquisite poetry and thousand-year-old imagery stored in the memory of humankind and made present in Goethe's expressive language (surely mindful of his own imminent departure), and it is so masterfully modulated that it makes the reader, who is sensitive to Goethe's language, laugh and cry at these "sehr ernsten Scherze" (Goethe's epithet about Faust). …

selbst bei der Besprechung des Schlusses den Bruch in Egmonts Haltung -vom Vertreter einer laissez faire Haltung zum Superpatrioten-kritisch erwahnen; wenigstens sollte die Diskussion zu Beobachtungen iber die Problematik der dramatischen Struktur faihren, die ja schon von Schiller kritisiert wurde. Die Diskussion k6nnte nun erwagen, ob Egmonts Wandlung von Goethe Oiberzeugend motiviert worden ist und ob die Traumerscheinung isthetisch befriedigt. Ich pers6nlich wiirde die Fragwi~rdigkeit der isthetischen Qualitat des Traumbildes ohne weiteres zugeben und weiterhin die Erschiegungsszene nicht als wirkliches Ereignis, sondern eher als Ausdruck von Egmonts wiedergefundenem, aber durch Albas Eingreifen verandertem Lebenssinn darstellen. Das heigt, Egmont besitzt jetzt die Kraft, seine neue Lebenshaltung, die durch Albas Gewaltmaglnahmen zu einer patriotisch-nationalen geworden ist, nach augen zu projizieren und sich wieder fOir andere gebend einzusetzen, statt mit ihrer Hilfe zu rechnen.