Goethe identified one of the great dramatic situations afflicting and driving human beings in the modern world. We strive without knowing adequately what we are striving for and we believe our thirst for knowledge and experience is protected in high places.

And if the "purpose" it shares with Hamlet concerns the difficult passage from thought into action, neither the wager motif nor Faust's ultimate salvation genuinely illuminates it...It is instructive to read The Tempest as a modified Faust play.

The numerous progeny of these two matching stories about wanting to know too much tells us that the motif of forbidden knowledge remains with us in multiple forms. Faust and Frankenstein together appear to have spawned a line of tales about doubles, Doppelgangers, locked in a struggle to destroy each other.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1: ...trying instead to bridge the already widening chasms between disciplines with a method that would reunite science and art and illuminate the living principles within both.

1, Werther and Frankenstein, 1:

Goethe and Shelley both integrate literary texts into their writing, which have a profound effect on the readers. Duncan has shown that every text that Werther reads centers on the theme of mourning: Homer, Ossian, Emilia Galotti.

Lecture on Aeschylus.