Abstract
Among the most inspiring developments in recent Romantic criticism has been the ongoing revival and reappraisal of Romantic drama. As Greg Kuchich noted already a decade ago, British Romantic drama has undergone ‘an important revaluation […] with numbers of critics […] showing that the dismissal of Romantic drama has arisen from conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles’.1 Kucich may overstate his case here, for it is no recent discovery that most canonical Romantics, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron and Shelley, wrote and published plays designed for the stage, most often with limited commercial success. Still, whereas earlier scholars tended to study High Romantic drama in isolation from the period’s dramatic production, and while they, perhaps echoing the canonical Romantics themselves, took a generally dismissive view of popular dramas like M. G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and Charles. R. Maturin’s Bertram (1816), more recent efforts have increasingly been oriented towards recovering and reassessing hitherto neglected forms, authors and plays. One telling manifestation of this trend is Jeffrey N. Cox’s Seven Gothic Dramas, which heroically undertakes to restore an entire genre to critical consciousness.2
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Notes and References
Greg Kucich, “‘A Haunted Ruin”: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment’, Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 64–75 (p. 64).
Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1992).
Gillian Russell, ‘Theatre’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, gen. ed. Iain McCalmain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 223–31 (p. 228).
Allardyce Nicoll, A Histoty of Late Eighteenth Century Drama 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), pp. 56–73.
Theodore Grieder, ‘The German Drama in England, 1790–1800’, Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research, 3 (1964), 39–50 (p. 39).
Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s’, ELH, 58 (1991), 579–610.
Review of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, Lady’s Monthly Museum, 2(1799), 69–71 (pp. 70–1).
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), I, p. 365.
Joyce Crick, ‘Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations on Coleridge’s Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein’, Journal of the English Goethe Society, 54 (1984), 37–75.
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 63.
The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Together With Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, vol. 5 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 2202.
Quoted in Walter Sellier, Kotzebue in England: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der englischen Biihne und der Beziehungen der deutschen Litteratur zur englischen (Leipzig: Oswald Schmidt, 1902), p. 40.
John Mayor, ‘Remarks on Kotzebue’s Pizarro’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 3 (June 1799), 207–10 (pp. 209–10).
John Buchan SirWalterScott (London: Cassell, 1932), pp. 50–1.
Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970), I, p. 186.
Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
Peter Muller, ‘Grundlinien der Entwicklung, Weltanschauung und Asthetik des Sturm und Drang’, in Sturm und Drang: Weltanschauliche und Asthetische Schriflen, ed. Peter Miiller, 2 vols (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1978), I, p. xviii.
See Mark A. Weinstein, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s French Revolution: the British Conservative View’, Scottish Literary Journal, 7 (1980), 31–40.
Georg Lukács, Skizze einer Geschichte der neueren deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), p. 28.
Andreas Huyssen, Drama des Sturm und Drang: Kommentar zu einer Epoche (Munich: Winckler, 1980), p. 140.
Quoted in Der junge Goethe im zeitgenossischen Urteil, ed. Peter Muller (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1969), pp. 68–70.
Renee Lelievre, ‘Le Théâtre Allemand en France’, Revue de Litterature Comparée, 48 (1974), 256–92 (p. 291).
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols (C. H. Beck: Munich, 1974), IV, pp. 73–175 (p. 77).
Goethe, Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron hand: A Tragedy, Translated from the German of Goethe, Author of’The Sorrows of Werter’ etc., trans. Walter Scott (London: Bell, 1799), pp. 4, 6, 13, 37, 38, 57, 67, 80, 109, 140, 148, 154, 161, 183.
The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London, Constable: 1932), X, p. 282.
Paul M Ochojski, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Continuous Interest in Germany’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1966), 164–73.
William Preston, ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1802), 353–61, 406–08; 21 (1802), 9–18, 89–96 (p. 90).
Rose Lawrence, Gortz Of Berlingen, with the Iron Hand. An Historical Drama, or the Fifteenth Century. Translated From the German of Goethe (Liverpool: n.p., 1799), p. xiii.
See Jonathan Bate, Shakespearen Constitutions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).
For a detailed discussion, see Kurt Ermann, Goethes Shakespeare-Bild (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983).
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edn Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), II, pp. 724–25.
1 derive the concept of ‘foreignizing’ translation from Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995).
J. G. Lockhart, ‘Goetz von Berlichingen, a Tragedy, by Goethe’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 16 (1824), 369–385 (p. 371).
Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899), XXV, p. 13.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 116; Terence Hoagwood, ‘Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 49–64 (p. 54).
Reeve Parker, “‘In Some Sort Seeing With My Proper Eyes”: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris’, Studies in Romanticism, 27 (1988), 369–90.
For accounts of Schiller’s and The Robbers’s reception, popularity and notoriety in England, see L. A. Willoughby, ‘English Translations and Adaptations of Schiller’s The Robbers’, Modern Language Review, 27 (1921), 297–315; and Douglas Millburn, Jr., ‘The First English Translation of Die Rduber: French Bards and Scottish Translators’, Monatshefte, 59 (1967), 41–53.
Henry Mackenzie, ‘Account of the German Theatre’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2 (1790), 154–92 (p. 190).
Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. Alexander F. Tytler, 2nd edn (London: n.p., 1795), p. v.
Keppel Craven, The Robbers, A Tragedy in Five Acts. Translated and Altered from the German. As it was Performed at Brandenburgh-House Theatre (London: n.p., 1799), pp. 3–4. The prologue was written by Craven’s mother Elizabeth, also known as Her Serene Highness the Margravine of Anspach.
Schiller, Die Rduber: Ein Schauspiel, ed. Herbert Stubenrauch (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1953), p. 70.
Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F. J. Lamport (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 89–90.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Joseph George Holman, TheRed-CrossKnights.A Play (… JFounded on the Robbers of Schiller (London: n.p., 1799), p. 6.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 283–319.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 15.
‘Schiller’s Tragedy of the Robbers, which inflamed the young nobility of Germany to enlist themselves into a band of highwaymen to rob in the forests of Bohemia, is now acting in England by persons of quality!’ Hannah More, Strictures on the Modem System of Female Education (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), p. 42.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 208.
For Hazlitt’s comments on Die Rduber, see Lectures on the Age ot Elizabeth (1818), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent 1932), VI, pp. 362–3.
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© 2004 Peter Mortensen
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Mortensen, P. (2004). ‘Partizans of the German Theatre’: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Dramatic Translation. In: British Romanticism and Continental Influences. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512207_5
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