Corpus Part One: School Exercises and Princess of Persia

Although he is one of the major romantic authors in German Literature (he was even crowned “king of romantic”), Ludwig Tieck never benefited from the usual treatment reserved to major literary celebrities: unlike Goethe, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel and co, he was never granted such a thing as a Ludwig Tieck Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe.

It would be preposterous to track this back to only one cause, but it is sure that the state in which his leftover papers are to be found at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK does not invite to any kind of systematical and exhaustive approach. A peek in the inventory realized by Lothar Busch shows how all of Tieck’s activities are thrown together. The poet, the drama author, the tale writer, the literary critique, the Shakespeare scholar are likely to be found in all sorts of texts, fragments, letters, sketches… Also, he was the depository of many of his dead friends’ papers (among which Kleist for instance, which he published after his death). Not everything in there is new, not everything is groundbreaking. But we already digged up two treasures.

Treasure number one is the manuscript of a drama called Roxane, which Johanna Preusse is preparing for our edition. It is a youth drama, and although it is undated, it seems to have been written around 1789. By that time, Ludwig Tieck was still a 16-year old schoolboy, and it seems likely that the drama was written as an extension of a school exercise on the theme “Write a variation on the fable of Ino” (on the fable of Ino, see Hygini Fabvlae, fab. II: Ino).

Other thematic influences are perceptible. The most important one is Felix Weiße’s tragedy Mustapha and Zeangir (1763). Especially the place chosen for the plot – an oriental setting in the wake of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters – as well as the main idea of the plot itself show Weiße’s wide influence. I will not tell you here about where Tieck differs from Weiße, because Johanna is about to write a great paper about it. Let me just tell you this: Roxane, the Sultan’s wife, is really mean!

The manuscript itself shows several peculiarities too. The first act is missing, so the reader has to jump in the midst of the action. But obviously, we are not the first ones to read it. There is more than just Tieck’s handwriting to be found on the pages. You can find traces of Rudolf Köpke‘s posthumous work on Tieck’s papers. And closer to the moment when the text was written yet, the margins also contain remarks in another hand. Lothar Busch and others assume it is the one of his youth friend Wackenroder, commenting on the plot, the protagonists, the writing,…