Andreas Gryphius

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Deceitful Symmetry in Gryphius's Cardenio und Celinde: Or What Rosina Learned at the Theater and Why She Went

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SOURCE: Sperberg-McQueen, M. R. “Deceitful Symmetry in Gryphius's Cardenio und Celinde: Or What Rosina Learned at the Theater and Why She Went.” Chloe 19 (1994): 269-94.

[In the following essay, Sperberg-McQueen deliberates upon the “lessons” Cardenio und Celinde imparts to its female audience members: the futility of female independence and the obvious advantages of a patriarchal society. Sperberg-McQueen also theorizes about the reactions to the play of Rosina Major, whose presence at its March 1661 premiere is known through her father's diary.]

Take “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by Keats. The woman destroys, tricks, entices, kills with ashen aftermath of sexual joy. This too is thralldom—of male to female, for it works both ways, this sexual system. But no matter what happens to the knight, he retains cultural control of the story. The knight's paleness and sickly mourning, his compulsive retellings, his projection of the whole landscape as an emblem of his spent power constitute the culturally sanctioned narrative.

(Rachel Blau DuPlessis: The Pink Guitar, p. 24)

Es ist ein langer Weg, der von [der] “Bevormundung” durch den Mann zur autonomen Person, als die sich die moderne Frau selbst begreift, zur Mündigkeit führt.

(Barbara Becker-Cantarino: Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit, p. 1)

In their introduction to Jacques Ferrand's Treatise on Lovesickness, Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella cite the story, recounted by Valerius Maximus and Plutarch, among others, of Antiochus and Stratonice:

Antiochus, the young son of King Seleucus, was “overwhelmed by an infinite love for his stepmother, Stratonice. … [O]ut of reverence for his father, he hid the merciless wound in his heart. … He lay in his bed like a man at death's door. … The father, prostrate with misery, anticipated the death of his only son. … But the provident intervention of … Erasistratus dissipated the cloud of gloom. … [H]e noticed how the young man blushed and turned pale when Stratonice entered. … [T]aking as if by chance the young man's arm he recognized the disease he suffered by the throb of the arteries, now intense now languid as Stratonice came and went. Immediately he told Seleucus. Without hesitation the king gave his beloved wife to his son, attributing to fate the fact that [Antiochus] had fallen in love, but to his great modesty the fact that he had been ready to dissimulate his passion unto death”.1

Beecher and Ciavolella chronicle how this story was taken up by both literary and medical traditions. Focusing on the latter, they note that Galen left an account of how he used a diagnostic method similar to that employed by Erasistratus. Galen says:

I was called in to see a woman who was tormented by sleeplessness in the night. … Since I found this woman lacking in fever, I began asking … about everything that had happened to her. … However, she answered almost nothing at all, which indicated to me that I was questioning her in vain. … I was certain that her condition did not arise in the body, but rather in the soul—which was confirmed, as it happened, at the very moment I was visiting her. When someone came in from the theater and announced that he had seen Pylades dancing, both the expression on her face and her color changed. Seeing this, I placed my hand on her wrist and detected an uneven pulse. … [T]hus I discovered that the woman was in love with Pylades, a fact confirmed by similar observations in the following days.2

Commenting on these two accounts of lovesickness and its diagnosis, Beecher and Ciavolella remark: “The episode which Galen relates does not differ substantially from those in Valerius Maximus and Plutarch.”3

If we take this statement at face value, we must conclude that for Beecher and Ciavolella, a difference of gender, a man in Valerius Maximus's and Plutarch's account and a woman in Galen's, does not constitute a substantial difference.4 One finds throughout both Ferrand's seventeenth-century treatise on lovesickness and the editors' modern commentary on it an implicit assumption that the sex of the sufferer from love melancholy is irrelevant.5 In fact, however, the many case histories discussed show that the focus of concern is nearly always a male patient languishing for a woman. Galen's unnamed female patient is a rare exception. Attention to one of the standard cures offered for lovesickness, procuring a woman to provide the sufferer with sex, also reveals that the gender neutral term “patient” refers to a male. Such a cure furthermore points to a hierarchy of power in which men (Antiochus's father, for example) treat women as property whose ownership can be transferred as required in order to save another man.6

Andreas Gryphius's Cardenio und Celinde is a play about lovesickness. The constellation of the characters and various aspects of the narrative line suggest that the gender of the characters in the play makes no difference to their conduct or to the lessons they learn from their experiences. I will argue, however, that the apparently symmetrical disposition of characters and plot in Cardenio und Celinde is deceptive and masks substantial asymmetries between the sexes, concealing the very profound consequences that being either male or female has for the characters—and for what we as audience take away from the play. I am particularly concerned about what the play tells the female members of its audience. While this very didactic play seems to present an evenhanded lesson condemning illicit love in men and women, I will argue that the message received by women differs substantially from that received by men.

In looking at what the play says to women, it may be helpful from time to time to think about one particular female member of the audience at the premiere of the play. Cardenio und Celinde as far as we know was first presented by the scholars of the Elisabeth-Gymnasium in Breslau on March 1, 1661; it was offered there alternately with Lohenstein's Cleopatra. The rector of the Gymnasium, Elias Major, kept a record of events touching on school life. He notes that his daughter, Rosina, was present at the performance of Cardenio und Celinde on March 1; she had shortly before seen Cleopatra, from which, it being a long play, she returned rather late, but in the company of friends.7 My examination of the play seeks to discover what Rosina learned at the theater—and why she went.

In Cardenio und Celinde the four main characters, two couples, are symmetrically disposed on either side of a line dividing positively valued from negatively valued love.8 On the negative side are both a man and a woman, the title characters, Cardenio and Celinde. We are given to understand that this man and woman share a fundamental similarity: both burn with illicit passion. The plot offers parallels in their cases that suggest that this lovesickness, this illicit passion, poses the same problems for the man, Cardenio, as it does for the woman, Celinde. Cardenio suffers unrequited love for Olympia; Celinde suffers unrequited love for Cardenio. Cardenio is prompted to overcome his sinful thralldom to the world when he is confronted by a specter; Celinde, similarly, turns aside from sin when she comes face to face with a specter. Both characters appear to learn the same lesson: they come to recognize the sinful nature of their passion. On the other side of the line dividing sinful from acceptable love are Lysander and Olympia, the couple who love one another within the sanctioned bonds of marriage. Just as negatively valued carnal love is represented by both a male and a female character, so it is with married love: Lysander and Olympia form the symmetrically contrasting pair, the happily wedded couple.

An initial intimation of the play's gender asymmetry is provided by an incident that appears trivial but that might nonetheless strike some members of the audience, perhaps even Rosina Major, as odd. The incident is recounted by Cardenio in the first act. He tells how, when Olympia's father has rejected his suit, he and Olympia continue to see one another clandestinely. Olympia's brother, Vireno, finding Cardenio under Olympia's window, tells him to cease his attentions to Olympia: “Meyde nur die meiner Eltern Gassen.”9 When Cardenio refuses to take such orders from him, Vireno attacks Cardenio with his sword or dagger: “Er auff das Wort gefecht griff mich mit Eisen an!” (I. 139). Initially Cardenio exhibits restraint in order to avoid a fight. Eventually, however, goaded by Vireno's impugning of his courage (Vireno: “Wol! fleucht der alle trotzt!” [I. 143]), Cardenio stabs Vireno “recht vnter seine Brust” (I. 145). Cardenio flees, leaving behind Vireno's “gleich entseelten Leichen” (I. 146). Vireno survives the wound. Now this is what is odd: one would expect that Vireno, having been nearly killed by Cardenio, would dislike him all the more, or that at best—as happens in Gryphius's source, a story by Juan Pérez de Montalbán—the family might reconcile the combatants for the sake of peace.10 Instead, when Vireno comes to, his hatred of Cardenio has been transformed into good will, and he hopes that his sister Olympia will be worthy of Cardenio's passion: “Er ändert allen Haß in vnverfälschte Gunst ❙ Und wüntscht Olympien werth meiner keuschen Brunst” (I. 159f.).

This motif, in which Vireno switches sides after being stabbed, is a blind one as far as the surface development of the plot goes. Events continue to unfold without the fight or Vireno's changed relationship to Cardenio having any notable influence on them. Gryphius could have skipped both the fight and the reconciliation without confusing the plot. Instead, he has retained the fight and has heightened the reconciliation between the principals from one expediently effected by Olympia's family into a moment in which Vireno becomes Cardenio's avowed champion in his pursuit of Olympia. Harald Steinhagen offers an understanding of this blind motif that perhaps explains Gryphius's retention of it: Vireno's behavior offers an initial model of conversion in this play about conversion.11 I think Steinhagen is correct, but would note that as it stands, Vireno's behavior, though not without religious overtones, can be more usefully interpreted as enacting male homosocial desire, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's term: male rivalry is converted into male bonding.12 Vireno initially views himself as protecting Olympia from an unwanted suitor; he is then brought very close to death by Cardenio, a stronger male adversary; upon recovery the vanquished Vireno is overcome by admiration for the adversary and switches his primary loyalty from what he viewed as Olympia's interests to those of his male attacker.

In general, interpreters of this play have overlooked or excused the oddity of Vireno's behavior. Blake Lee Spahr, for example, explains that “Viren, impressed by the reluctance of [Cardenio's] defense, speaks for Cardenio in his suit for Olympia.”13 This reading is justified by a passage in which Cardenio reports of Vireno that when urged “Den Stoß an mir zu rechen ❙ Begunt [=sagte] er; er wolt ehr selbst seiner Zeit abbrechen; ❙ Als dem zu wider seyn / der / was er frech begehrt ❙ Ihm langsam / vnd getrotzt / hätt' ohne List gewehrt” (I. 153-156). Leaving aside the question whether being attacked later rather than sooner constitutes a convincing reason to like your opponent, I would point to the number of third person masculine pronouns in this passage, whose proliferation and potentially confused antecedents anticipate the proliferation and convergence of male interests in this play. Already, early in Act I, we find two men fighting over a single woman whose lot in life is decided by her father; already the two men have set aside their quarrel and, without consulting the woman over whom they have fought, decided that their interests are identical. This will not be the last time this happens.

While Vireno's “Umkehr” has generally been accepted with few reservations, another conversion in Gryphius's play has been considered highly problematic; this is Olympia's acceptance of Lysander as her husband after her initial and then intermittent preference for Cardenio. Modern critics have reproached Olympia for her fickleness, for the inconstancy of her affection for Cardenio.14 I would submit that Olympia's change of heart occurs for the same reason that Vireno's does: in accepting Lysander, she is submitting to a powerful male just as Vireno submitted to Cardenio. If one accepts Vireno's conversion, one must also accept Olympia's.

Lysander's power initially manifests itself financially: he has the means at his disposal to bribe a servant who allows him to penetrate Olympia's bedchamber at night, where, however, his presence is discovered. After initial confusion, when it is thought that Cardenio was the intruder, Lysander's responsibility for the deed becomes clear. Just as one might have expected Vireno to hate Cardenio after having been stabbed by him, one might expect Olympia to wish to have nothing ever again to do with Lysander—but instead she, like Vireno, experiences a “conversion” and, when she appears on stage for the first time in act III, she is eagerly awaiting the arrival home of her beloved husband, Lysander. Olympia's and Vireno's conversions are profoundly similar: Cardenio penetrates Vireno with his sword or dagger and brings him to submit to superior male strength and will. Lysander penetrates Olympia's private space, her bedchamber, and she submits to his desire to marry her. She has been metaphorically—and perhaps really—raped.15 Lysander, like Cardenio, possesses a long pointed instrument that can penetrate and enforce submission.

The phallic power that permits Lysander to gain Olympia consists not in brute physical strength, but arises out of a web of converging male interests: in submitting to Lysander, Olympia bows to the social, financial, and religious interests of patriarchy. Gayle Rubin has described marriage as an institution that permits men to form and seal alliances with one another by passing a gift, a woman treated as an item of property, from one male to another.16 Olympia's value to her family resides precisely in her capacity to function as such a gift. Her father panics when, because her reputation has been compromised by the presence of a man in her bedchamber at night, her capacity to function as a gift is in jeopardy. He and the family council he calls realize that their only hope is to exploit what remains of her capacity to function as a gift by betrothing her immediately to the man who has violated her, whether he be Cardenio (I.203-208) or Lysander (I.234-239). Lysander manipulates this system of male interests to his own advantage. By compromising Olympia's reputation in the eyes of all but himself (Olympia: “Vnd die mein Hertz erkanten ❙ Die zogen doch mein Ehr' in Argwon vnd Verdacht!” [III.22f.]), he has ensured that no one else will want such damaged goods and can present himself as the only possible suitor. But this is not to say that the interests of Olympia's father have been overridden by Lysander. On the contrary: her father has been well served by Lysander because their interests coincide. Her father's initial concern was to scotch an alliance between Olympia and Cardenio, a man whose propensity for picking fights with other men rather than forging alliances argued against his desirability as a son-in-law. Lysander, by damaging Olympia's reputation, has made her undesirable to Cardenio (Cardenio: “Jetzt nun sie frembde selbst ins Schlaf-Gemach vertaget ❙ Acht' ich mich was zu hoch vor eines andern Rest” [I.214f.]), thus furthering her father's aims. Lysander, in contrast to Cardenio, is a rather attractive prospect. His ability to offer bribes suggests an attribute perhaps quite attractive to Olympia's father: Lysander is rich. If, as the source suggests, he is an up and coming merchant, an alliance with him may be much more to Olympia's father's liking than an alliance with a nobleman interested only in arms and letters.17

The convergence of male interests pressuring Olympia to accept Lysander is apparent elsewhere. When Olympia begins to regret her engagement to Lysander and to pine for Cardenio again, a father, this time Cardenio's, conveniently intervenes, summoning his son to Toledo where he is needed to help at home and with affairs connected with yet another father figure, the king (I.262). Neither the source nor Gryphius mentions collusion between Olympia's parent and Cardenio's, but the insistent and persistent intervention of patriarchal figures hints at the conspiracy of fathers to compel daughters to obedience. Such intervention may also explain a segment of the tale that seems irritatingly arbitrary: Olympia loses faith in Cardenio while he is away in Toledo because his letters do not reach her. Assigning the role of fate to a sloppy postal system seems unsatisfactory—particularly given that the five letters Cardenio's father sent begging him to come to Toledo arrived without mishap (I.265).18 But Rosina Major, daughter in a household in the time “when fathers ruled”, might have wondered at Olympia's naive assumption that letters from an unsuitable lover could get past her father's guard. Cardenio's letters probably stopped at Olympia's father, not the dead letter office. At the same time, in explaining Olympia's diminishing faith in Cardenio, one may surmise the presence of more overt patriarchal pressure: while Cardenio was in Toledo and apparently neglecting her, Olympia was doubtless being constantly reminded by her father and Lysander of her daughterly duties.

Olympia exhibits intermittent awareness that she is being used as a pawn to forward interests not her own. When her father rejects Cardenio's suit, saying Olympia is already promised, Olympia exclaims: “Bin ich so vnversehns vnd als im Traum versagt: ❙ Nicht als ein freyes Kind / als ein erkauffte Magd?” (I.119f.). She does not give up without a struggle, but, prolonged or brief, her struggle ends in her defeat by a stronger and duplicitous male opponent: Lysander's treacherous entry into her room has robbed her of the powers associated with virginity just as surely as did Gunther's treacherous deflowering of Brünhild.19 Worn down by superior forces, Olympia ceases to function as an independent woman attempting to represent her own wishes, and submits to the interests of the men surrounding her. When Cardenio finally returns from Toledo, he importunes Olympia with letters; she expresses her dismissal of his suit and her acceptance of her lot as Lysander's wife by giving him a blank sheet of paper (“Sie nam kein Schreiben mehr / vnd schickt auff letzte mir / ❙ Stat Antwort / ein verwahrt doch ledig Blat Papir” [I.311f.]), a gesture that aptly represents the erasure of her independent will: as a woman, she does not write the script.20 Cardenio twice attempts to approach Olympia personally, but fails; both times he has disguised himself as a woman. The first time, he tries to engineer an encounter with her in public: “Ich ließ mich / als ein Weib / durch meine Freund anlegen: ❙ Und trat jhr ins Gesicht auff offentlichen Wegen” (I.313f.); she refuses to attend to him. After her marriage, he, as Lysander had done, actually bribes his way into her room: “Und als er [Lysander] einst verreiset; ❙ Hatt ein erkauffte Magd mich in sein Hauß geweiset / ❙ Ich kam denn als ein Weib die Frücht vnd äpffel trägt ❙ Als sich Olympie zur Mittags-Ruh gelegt /” (I.345-348). She immediately recognizes and dismisses him. The female disguises signal Cardenio's failure to follow Lysander's example of exerting phallic power to further male interests. Olympia's dismissal of the cross-dressed Cardenio suggests her tacit recognition of female impotence.

Lysander's male interests receive their ultimate backing when Olympia concludes that Heaven has chosen him as her husband: “Gott hat vor mich gewehlet” (III.89). She abandons herself to what she—and presumably Gryphius—interpret as the divine will and accepts Lysander, “den wider meinen Wuntsch der Himmel mir vertraute” (III.124). Lysander himself, in Gryphius's version of the story, gradually acquires the attributes of male divinity. When Lysander first appears on the stage in act IV, he is travelling home, eager to return to his wife. Simultaneously, a veiled figure that appears to be Olympia leaves his house with Cardenio, and suspense arises from uncertainty as to whether the real Olympia will be waiting to greet her husband. Overtones of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) are unmistakable, particularly when Lysander's servant announces Lysander's arrival: “Der Herr ist kommen!” (IV.165). Moments later the real Olympia reassuringly appears at the window to welcome Lysander. Olympia has been transformed from a woman who protests being used as a pawn in her father's alliance-building plans to the wise bride ever ready for the coming of Christ.21

With this scene, Gryphius essentially completes his portrayal of positively valued love by bringing together on stage the married couple, Lysander and Olympia. The paths by which the two characters have been brought to this ostensibly happy ending have been very different, and that what has determined the paths has been the gender of the characters. Lysander has exercised deception and various forms of power to gain his will, whilst Olympia has learned that she is helpless to realize her own will. While apparently simply celebrating love sanctioned by marriage, the example of Lysander and Olympia teaches the characters and, by extension, the audience two different lessons, depending on their gender. Olympia's transformation from a woman who resists being coerced into a submissive and seemingly happy wife demonstrates to playgoers like Rosina Major that protest is useless, submission ennobling. Or, expressed more crudely: since rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. To the men in the audience, Olympia's transformation perpetuates the message that Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini offered when he named the heroine of his novella Lucretia: the woman who says no really means yes.22

Celinde, the kept woman who initiates an affair with Cardenio when he is on the rebound from Olympia, is intended by Gryphius to be viewed as a contrast figure to Olympia. Gryphius is particularly explicit in his prefatory letter to the reader about the fact that the female figures, Olympia and Celinde, are distributed on either side of the line dividing good from bad love: “Mein Vorsatz ist zweyerley Liebe: Eine keusche / sitsame vnd doch inbrünstige in Olympien: Eine rasende / tolle vnd verzweifflende in Celinden / abzubilden” (p. 6). Their conduct and the imagery of day and night, light and dark, reason and passion, are deployed by Gryphius to underscore the contrast between the two women. But are they really so different?

It is interesting that Gryphius filled in Celinde's biographical background, which his source had left blank: we find out that she was orphaned very young, lost her property, and finally gained financial stability by becoming the mistress of Marcellus. It has been suggested that Gryphius provides this background in order to make Celinde more sympathetic.23 It seems to me equally likely that Gryphius regarded Celinde's scandalous behavior as the inevitable result of a lack of male control and that he sought to make the connection clear by adding the biographical vignette. Like the heroine of Schindschersitzky's Jüngst-erbawete Schäfferey / Von der Verliebten Nimfen AMOENA, who carries on with Amandus while her father is away, and like Grimmelshausen's orphaned Courasche, Celinde demonstrates that a woman unguided by men can only exercise bad judgment and fall into depravity. In the preceding century, Juan Luis Vives expressed the basic premise of his Instruction of a Christian Woman in the sentence: “a woma[n] that thynketh alone thinketh euyll”.24 Amoena, Courasche, and Celinde are but three in the long line of fictional women drawn by male authors to illustrate this maxim. Olympia, when she only reluctantly turns away from her own choice of mate, Cardenio, to her father's, Lysander, illustrates Vives's view of women as inherently incapable of the independent exercise of good judgment and as in need of constant surveillance by male reason. Had she not been managed by patriarchy, Olympia would, in this view, have ended up like Celinde. Olympia and Celinde, far from being true opposites, are really sisters under the skin: both demonstrate that women require male control.25

There is another significant similarity between Olympia and Celinde: both love Cardenio and both lose him. I have already noted how Olympia loses Cardenio: the combined interests of Lysander and her father overrule her wishes. The way in which Celinde loses Cardenio is curious. Marcellus, rightly suspecting that Celinde is having an affair, discovers her together with Cardenio and slaps her. Cardenio responds by stabbing him. Marcellus, fearing he is dying of this wound, begs Cardenio to remove him from Celinde's dwelling so that his liaison with her will remain secret. Cardenio consents, and takes Marcellus to his home where, two days later, after repenting his affair with Celinde and crying for God's mercy, he dies in Cardenio's arms. Marcellus's face thereafter haunts Cardenio, driving Celinde from his thoughts.

The similarities between this sequence of events and the fight and reconciliation between Cardenio and Vireno are striking. Once again, one man penetrates another with his weapon, and the wounded man, coming close to death, undergoes a conversion and becomes the ally of his attacker. This time, however, the fight and conversion are not a blind motif, but an event with significant consequences. Marcellus is saved by Cardenio from a sinful liaison and given the opportunity to seek God's forgiveness; Cardenio is inspired to leave off what has been depicted as a sinful relationship; Celinde is left out in the cold. As a result of their fight the two men form a mutual assistance society that has overtones of earthly and divine love. Marcellus has “died”—the verb is used in Renaissance love poetry as a metaphor for sexual intercourse—in Cardenio's arms and now haunts Cardenio's dreams as the beloved haunts the lover: “Sein sterbendes Geberd' ermuntert mich die Nacht / ❙ Vnd nimmt Celinden mir vnd alles auß der Acht” (I:507f.). At the same time, Marcellus and Cardenio take on attributes of the savior: Christ-like, Cardenio rescues Marcellus from his sinful life; Christ-like, Marcellus dies for Cardenio's sins. There is no room in this orgy of male bonding for Celinde.26 The conversions precipitated by Cardenio's penetration of Marcellus are ones in which the men realize that their interests converge, and that their interests are not those of the woman over whom they have fought.

It is one of the premises of this play that Celinde and Cardenio resemble one another in suffering the consequences of lovesickness. However, the scene just described reveals fundamental differences between the two arising from their genders. Whereas Cardenio exercises phallic power to bring him allies who share his interests, Celinde becomes, like Olympia, increasingly isolated and powerless and experiences insuperable difficulties in forging alliances. In fact, when she first appears on stage at the beginning of act II, she is preparing to use a knife not, as Cardenio or Lysander would do, to penetrate and subdue someone else to her interests, but to kill herself.

Celinde is restrained from suicide by the intervention of a sorceress, Tyche. The subplot of Celinde and Tyche demonstrates that, in contrast to men, who become Christ-like when they forge alliances, women fail in their alliances and in the aftermath of their failure become once again weak and alone; moreover, an attempted alliance redounds to the woman's discredit. There is a positive wealth of guiding male figures in this play; female mentors and guides are conspicuous only by their absence. Olympia has parents, but only her father is named or active; she has a brother, but there is no reference to any sister; women servants tend to be open to male bribery or to be men in disguise. The only woman figure in the play who seeks to assist another woman is Tyche, and the lessons her behavior offers to a woman spectator like Rosina Major is that women should not be trusted for guidance and that alliances between women lead to disaster.

In Gryphius's source, the woman who attempts to assist Celinde in regaining Cardenio's love by instructing her how to make a love potion is unnamed. In naming this character Tyche after the Greek goddess of irrational and arbitrary justice Gryphius transforms her from just another stock character, the crone-procuress, into the principle directly opposed to the rational workings of providence.27 The play thus assumes a cosmic dimension, in which evil figured as female seeks to defy good figured as male, the Queen of the Night and Zorastro in a less than comic setting. This cosmic dimension has local consequences: the association of black magic, illicit sex, infanticide, and blasphemy with a female figure betrays and perpetuates the belief that individual women like Olympia and Celinde are inherently especially susceptible to evil, perhaps even its source. By overloading Tyche with negative associations, Gryphius distracts us from what those who have studied the history of love potions tell us about the social situation in which the use of such potions arises: “[Der Liebeszauber] hat … zur Voraussetzung sittliche Zustände, die die natürlichen Möglichkeiten der L[iebe]swerbung und L[iebe]sbegegnung als unzulänglich erscheinen lassen (weshalb er im MA. besonders von dem zur eigenen L[iebe]serklärung nicht berechtigten weiblichen Geschlecht und von verlassenen Bräuten geübt wird).”28 Love potions are the last resort of those who have been disempowered by society.29

This is precisely Celinde's situation when she seeks Tyche's assistance. Tyche offers her a supernatural means of reempowerment. Celinde is to enter the church where Marcellus is buried, to disinter him, and to remove his heart; she is to moisten the heart with her blood, burn it, and offer the ashes as a love potion to rekindle Cardenio's passion for her.30 These instructions suggest a parody of Lysander's successful formula for conquering Olympia. As Lysander bribed a maid and gained illicit access to the private space of Olympia's bedchamber at night, so Celinde is to bribe the sacristan and violate the sacred precincts of the church by stealth at night. As Lysander turned the fire of his lust to ashes on his wedding night (“Lysanders Hochzeit-Feur war schon in Asch verkehrt” [I.343]) by penetrating Olympia's hymen and cooling his heart's lust with her virgin blood, so Celinde seeks to penetrate Marcellus's body and spill her (no longer virgin) blood on a heart. Celinde fails: her economic power is insufficient to ensure the assistance of the sacristan, who flees. Though she enters the church, she lacks the equipment to penetrate Marcellus's body. Her attempt to join herself to Cardenio founders in part on her inability to exploit the power of a sacrament, such as legitimized Lysander's possession of Olympia in holy matrimony. Part of men's phallic power consists in their control of the magic of the sacraments; women can either submit to same or fail in the attempt to wield magic power themselves. Celinde, like Olympia, attempts to resist the laws laid down by male power; like Olympia, she fails, albeit more spectacularly.

Perhaps the strongest parallel between the male and female title characters in Gryphius's play is the apparent similarity of the circumstances of their conversions: both, while preparing to commit a crime, encounter an image of death and, terrified, desist, repent, and are converted. But again, this parallel masks differences that separate the two characters along the line of gender.

In the fourth act Cardenio follows the specter of Olympia into a pleasure garden where, aroused by her protestations of continuing love for him, he seeks to remove her garments. At that moment, the stage directions indicate the following: “Der Schaw-Platz verändert sich plötzlich in eine abscheuliche Einöde / Olympie selbst in ein Todten-Gerippe / welches mit Pfeil vnd Bogen auff den Cardenio zielet” (IV.217). Cardenio faints, and when he recovers, he is much changed. There are significant parallels here to the earlier conversions noted in the play. Like Vireno and Marcellus, Cardenio is checked by an opponent who confronts him with a sharp, pointed object.31 Like Vireno and Marcellus, Cardenio falls down as though dead. Like Vireno and Marcellus, Cardenio, when he comes to, is a changed man. The conversions of Vireno and Marcellus initiate male alliances. It may not initially be evident how this is the case in Cardenio's conversion, particularly given that his apparent antagonist is the specter of the female Olympia. But Cardenio's own later description in act V of what he saw in the garden is suggestive: “Ich sah' ein Todten-Bild! ohn Aug / ohn / Lipp vnd Wangen / ❙ Ohn Adern / Haut vnd Fleisch / gehärt mit grünen Schlangen” (V.197f.). That Cardenio had been confronted with a skeleton was clear from the stage directions in act IV, but not that it had snakes as hair.

What Cardenio saw, at least in retrospect, was the head of the Medusa, that image that, as Freud argues, is a terrifying reminder of the memberless female genitals and that, when seen by the young boy, signifies his own potential castration and frightens him into repressing his illicit love for a woman forbidden to him and teaches him instead to identify with his father.32 The disrobed specter-Olympia, the Lady World figure with serpentine hair, has the power of the Medusa's head. Cardenio, beholding her, is terrified, and falls down lifeless. When he recovers, he has learned essentially the same lesson as Freud's little boy. He has been terrified into giving up his desire for a woman forbidden to him by an omnipotent father (God) and, taught instead, to identify with that father: Cardenio cries out: “Mein Vater! ich kehr' vmb!” (IV.301). Like Vireno and Marcellus, he has been subdued by a more powerful male and, upon recognizing his own relative impotence, throws in his lot with his subduer.

It is important to recall that the person protected from Cardenio's pursuit by the metamorphosis of Olympia's ghost is not actually Olympia: Cardenio has already exorcised the remnants of his passion for her by burning the memorabilia of their liaison.33 The effect of the skeleton or Medusa's head is, rather, to deflect him from his vengeful plan to murder Lysander. The special effects that form the centerpiece of this drama are deployed to save this dubious figure, Lysander, the man who gained Olympia through duplicity and then came to resemble Christ the bridegroom. If we assume—and I think we must, though this point is not uncontroversial—that the specter of Olympia has been sent by God,34 then we must conclude that God and Lysander's interests coincide. When Cardenio then switches sides, that is, when he leaves off his murderous pursuit of Lysander and repents, he is joining that alliance of divine male interests.

Problems surround Gryphius's use of the specter of Olympia. There is the question whether Gryphius's presentation of this scene, which is after all, in his source, proves or disproves a belief in magic or ghosts. More interesting is another concern that has been raised: that this agent of the divine employs deception. The specter initially says it has just come from visiting Olympia and then claims to be Olympia and to have always been and to be still in love with Cardenio. Jean F.-A. Ricci asks “comment admettre que ce spectre menteur soit un envoyé du Ciel?”35 The answer is that the male figures in this play who possess power, whether in this world or the next, repeatedly resort, with impunity and no apparent authorial disapproval, to deception. Olympia's father lied but suffered no ill effects when he rejected Cardenio's suit with the statement that she was already promised (I. 108); Lysander resorted to deception to gain admittance to Olympia's bedchamber, and his punishment was to be awarded Olympia. It should hardly come as a surprise that the divinity, the ultimate model of patriarchal authority, should be similarly corrupt.

It should also come as no surprise that when Cardenio is converted and casts his lot with God and Lysander, a woman loses out. Cardenio is brought to regard Olympia as an object of horror; what is worse, Olympia herself then comes to regard herself as such. In the final scene, she acknowledges that the true image of herself is the image seen by Cardenio in the garden: “nun hat die wahre Nacht ❙ Mein Antlitz recht entdeckt” (V.407f.). Her resemblance to Medusa goes beyond what has been suggested thus far and is profound and profoundly tragic. Ovid recounts (Metamorphoses, book IV) how Medusa was originally an extraordinarily beautiful woman with especially lovely hair. She was raped by Neptune and was turned into a monster as punishment for her loss of her virginity. In the form of a monster, she was then employed by Perseus to protect himself and conquer rivals. Olympia also has lost her virginity in circumstances that suggest coercion; she also has then been turned into a visual monstrosity; as such she is employed to protect Lysander and defeat Cardenio.

Cardenio defeated is not, however, a man entirely impotent. He is able to redirect his potency to further the interests of his subduer. Stumbling homeward in the aftermath of his frightening experience, he notices that the church is open and suspects it is being burgled: proof of his conversion and his continued potency are evident in his remark that he immediately decided “das Schwerdt einmal vor Gott zu zucken” (IV.313).36 When he enters with the intention of defending the house of God he finds not burglars but the despairing Celinde crouching in Marcellus's grave. She implicitly recognizes his conversion and newly forged alliance with God when she cries out “Schickt jhn der Himmel mir!” (IV.351). Just as Marcellus and Cardenio were able to function as Christ figures to one another in the aftermath of their altercation, so Cardenio is now able to function as Celinde's savior. Celinde herself, however, has been entirely deprived of the ability to function as an agent. Instead of gaining strength from her alliance with a figure of the same sex, Tyche, she has been isolated and deprived of the ability to act: the “Wunderwerck” she seeks to undertake, is, she says “mir leider viel zu schwer” (IV.356). Her only hope is to be saved by a man.

Celinde's ghost-induced conversion experience, though it superficially resembles Cardenio's, has actually been quite different. The specter that blocks her carrying out the plan suggested by Tyche is a revivified cadaver, not a woman made to appear like a corpse. The ghost of Marcellus foils Celinde's plans by rising up and walking away from her. It is notable that in the entire story of Cardenio and Celinde there is but one real corpse, Marcellus, but that that male corpse does not provide the play's central image of death and decay. Rather, it comes back to life in order to thwart plans designed by women. What Celinde finds is that men, even when they are dead, possess power. Judith Fetterley remarked that in much literature “the only good woman is a dead one, and even then there are questions.”37 The fundamental asymmetry of the experiences of Cardenio and Celinde can be summarized by a paraphrase of this depressing epigram. Cardenio learns that the only good woman is a dead one or one that at least looks like a corpse. Celinde learns that there are no bad men; even the dead ones are agents of God.

Several critics, particularly those impressed by the fact that the four principals are alive at the end of this Trauerspiel and by the semi-bourgeois social status of the characters, have suggested that the ending of Cardenio und Celinde is a happy one, one that may even anticipate Enlightenment notions of Utopia. Steinhagen refers to “die gesellschaftliche Versöhnung; die Utopie, die hier im Drama als realisierbar vorgestellt wird. …”38 Clark describes how “Gryphius … leads his characters from a world of confusion and misinterpretation to a utopic vision of society reflective of early pietistic sentiment.”39 Perhaps these critics speak more truly than they realize. The first Utopia presented a vision of men living together harmoniously in a society from which many of the hierarchical distinctions that structured contemporary English society had either been removed or were mitigated by democratic principles. But Thomas More did not discard the hierarchical relationship between men and women: in Utopia “women are subject to husbands”40; men choose wives, not vice versa41; “husbands punish their wives”42; a woman's most valuable qualities are “uprightness and obedience”, “virtue and compliance”.43 The critics cited presumably did not have this kind of sexist society in mind when they characterized Cardenio und Celinde as potentially utopian, but this is precisely because they have proceeded on the assumption that gender doesn't matter. On the contrary: it matters very much, and, far from presenting a vision of a society equally utopian for men and for women, Gryphius's play champions drastic asymmetry of authority and agency insofar as they are apportioned to men or women. The championship is all the more insidious for the extent to which the inequality is masked by deceitful symmetry, the various strategies that suggest that the apportionment occurs irrespective of gender.

What did Rosina learn at the theater? Many of the lessons this play conveys to female audience members are by now fairly clear. They could be summed up in the admonition to obey the Father. Resistance is fruitless, as Olympia demonstrates, and the attempt to seek a maternal alliance instead is disastrous, as Celinde shows. Gail K. Hart has argued that Goethe's Stella, with its society of women, enacts and defeats “patriarchal anxiety scenarios”44: that is, it depicts moments of female independence and resistance that threaten patriarchy only to prove that they are not viable, thus reestablishing patriarchy as the sole option all the more firmly. Olympia and Celinde enact and defeat patriarchal anxiety scenarios: far from being opposites, the two women figures each represent a possible threat to patriarchal authority. Each is defeated and presented as an object lesson to other women who might harbor similar plans. Olympia, surrounded by male figures, admits defeat sooner, but she is really very much like Celinde in her attempt at resistance and in her defeat.

Rosina Major, in the course of two evenings, saw three heroines lose out. First she watched Cleopatra defeated by Augustus, then the next evening she saw two women closer to her in time and social status capitulate to the rule of men. Why did she attend these depressing spectacles? Why did she go to the theater? The answer may lie in her father's diary. Elias Major reported in it that Rosina had attended Lohenstein's Cleopatra and that the next evening “Ab iisdem Elisabetanis, in iisdem aedibus acta Dn. Andr. Gryphii Tragoedia, Cardenius & Celinde”: “by the same students of the Elisabeth-Gymnasium in the same building was enacted Andreas Gryphius's tragedy Cardenio und Celinde.” He goes on: “Iterum interfuit filia Rosina”: “Again my daughter Rosina attended.” But he did not originally write “Iterum interfuit filia Rosina”; what he originally wrote was “Iterum interfuit filia Celinde.” “Celinde” is crossed out and replaced with his daughter's name.45

This slip of the pen suggests a truly anxious father, one who identifies his daughter with the dangerously defiant and dangerously fatherless heroine of the play. Perhaps patriarchal anxiety that all women are potentially Celindes prompted Elias Major to send his daughter to the theater to learn what happens to women who lack male guidance, those women, who, as Vives would say, “think alone”. When daughters go to the theater to learn such lessons for such reasons, is it any wonder that “der Weg zur Mündigkeit” was so long?

Notes

  1. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella: “Critical Introduction” to their edition of Jacques Ferrand's A Treatise on Lovesickness. Syracuse 1990, pp. 48f.

  2. Beecher and Ciavollela: “Critical Introduction,” p. 51.

  3. Beecher and Ciavollela: “Critical Introduction,” p. 51.

  4. Making a distinction between biological sex and culturally-constructed gender has been crucial to advances in feminist theory, as has the recent questioning of the validity and implications of such a distinction; see, for example, Judith Butler: Gender Trouble. New York & London 1990. In this article I am concerned with the way culture has regulated and restricted the activity of women differently from that of men, but I am neither explicitly examining how gender is constructed nor weighing in on either side of the controversy about the validity of the sex/gender distinction; I use the terms interchangeably.

  5. In his Treatise on Lovesickness, Ferrand explicitly devotes two chapters to female patients as sufferers from lovesickness. In chapter 12, he asks “Whether Uterine Fury Is a Species of Love Melancholy”; in chapter 28 he treats the question “Whether Love in Women is Greater and Therefore Worse Than in Men.” (The answer is “yes” to both questions.) That the former question had to be asked in order to establish that women, too, can suffer from love, highlights the fact that the “patient” in much of the rest of the text is actually male.

  6. Beecher has offered an interesting survey of the variants of the Antiochus and Stratonice legend in his article, “Antiochus and Stratonice. The Heritage of a Medico-Literary Motif in the Theatre of the English Renaissance.” In: The Seventeenth Century 5 (1990), pp. 113-132. There, too, an opening reference to “persons of melancholy temperament” (p. 113) who suffer the disease suggests the affliction is universal, while the specific examples make clear that it is nearly always a “lover, sensitive to the obstacles that separated him from the object of desire” (p. 113, my emphasis). The atypical symptoms exhibited by the rare exception, Palamon in Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen prompt Beecher to conjecture “genderal differences in the manifestations of the disease” (p. 119), but not to comment on the lopsidedness of the putatively affected population. While Beecher notes that on occasion the figure of the sufferer from melancholy is satirized or revealed as feigning and that sometimes the Stratonice figure is presented as either a willing partner in deceiving the Antiochus figure or one who sees through the sexual blackmail, he does not note the absence of accounts in which the gender roles are reversed: that is, in which a suffering woman is cured by being presented with the male “object” of her desire by another woman.

  7. For her attendance at Cardenio und Celinde, see Gerhard Spellerberg: “Szenare zu den Breslauer Aufführungen Gryphischer Trauerspiele.” In: Daphnis 7 (1978), p. 258. Spellerberg cites from Major's diary in the university library in Wroclaw. For details of her attendance at Cleopatra, see Max Hippe: “Aus dem Tagebuche eines Breslauer Schulmannes im siebzehnten Jahrhundert.” In: Breslauer Studien. Festschrift des Vereins für Geschichte und Alterthum Schlesiens zum fünfundzwanzigjährigen Amtsjubiläm seines Vicepräses Hermann Markgraf. Breslau 1901 (=Zeitschrift des Vereins für Geschichte und Alterthum Schlesiens, Vol. 36, No. 1), p. 186.

  8. The symmetrical disposition is generally accepted in the secondary literature, which draws parallels between the title characters and tends to view Olympia (and to a lesser extent Lysander) as contrasting with the title characters. See, for example, Mary E. Gilbert: Gryphius's “Cardenio und Celinde”. In: Modern Language Review 45 (1950), pp. 483-496. Gilbert's depiction of the parallels has not been seriously questioned: “The first two acts are parallel” (p. 483); “He [Cardenio] becomes ‘ein Schimpff der alten Ahnen’. It is the same with Celinde …” (pp. 488f.). “The second vice that assails him [Cardenio], … is blind passion (‘schnöde Lust’), and again we have the parallel in Celinde's life (‘als mich der Westen Wind der Geilheit überfil’)” (p. 489). “Gryphius makes both Cardenio and Celinde guilty of the quintessence of fleshly sins, of ‘Wollust’” (p. 489). “Cardenio—and Celinde also for that matter—are ill, poisoned, …” (p. 489). “On the other hand, Olympia, the model of human perfection, is likened to the sun, light …” (p. 485). “Celinde is the embodiment of passion and fickleness whilst Olympia stands for prudence and constancy …” (p. 493). Later critics (see below, note 14) have questioned Olympia's exemplarity, but not the basic assumption of contrast between her and Celinde.

  9. I.137. Quotations, hereafter cited in my text by act and line number (or by page for Gryphius's prefatory material), are from Rolf Tarot's edition of Cardenio und Celinde (Stuttgart 1968), which is based on the first edition, published in 1657.

  10. In Pérez de Montalbán's tale, the parents of Narcisa (the Olympia figure) blame her as the cause of the fight, and it is presumably they who see to it that peace is reestablished between the two men: “El sentimiento de los padres de Narcisa viendo esta desdicha fué grande, y el de Teodoro, sin comparación, mayor, por el disgusto que tendría ella, pues de todo le habían de dar la culpa, como causa de aquellos efectos. En tanto que se hacían las amistades entre Teodoro y su enemigo …” (Juan Pérez de Montalbán: “La fuerza del desengaño.” In his: Sucesos y prodigios de amor en ocho novelas ejemplares. Ed. by Agustín González de Amezúa. Madrid 1949, pp. 61f.). The Italian translation, the version that Gryphius probably knew, is nearly identical: “Il sentimento de' Padri di Narcisa, per l'accidente occorso, fù grande, ma quello di Teodoro fù senza comparazione maggiore, temendo delle angoscie, in che fosse per trouarsi Narcisa, stimata per auuentura l'vnica cagione di quei disconci. Mentre si trattaua la pace trà Teodoro, e'l suo Auuersario …” (Biasio Cialdini, tr.: “La forza del disinganno.” In: Cialdini's Prodigi d'amore rappresentati in varie novelle dal dottore Montalbano. Venice 1637, p. 59). Neubauer's translation reads: “Sein [Teodoros] Verdruß war größer als der von Narcisas Eltern, weil er für das Mädchen böse Stunden fürchtete; mußten doch die Eltern ihre Tochter für die alleinige Ursache des Zusammenstoßes halten. Während nun zwischen den beiden Gegnern Friede gestiftet wurde …” (Karl Neubauer: “Zur Quellenfrage von Andreas Gryphius' ‘Cardenio und Celinde.’” In: Studien zur vergleichenden Litteraturgeschichte 2 [1902], p. 436).

  11. Harald Steinhagen, arguing against an interpretation of the specters of Olympia and Marcellus as supernatural, insists that Gryphius intends the audience to understand that one can, by exercising free will, in this world and without supernatural intervention, choose the path of good; he notes that Virenus provides an example for such freely chosen conversion: “Sinnvoll wird es erst, wenn die Umkehr—das Beispiel dafür gibt Virenus—auch ohne übernatürliche Mitwirkung möglich ist, d.h. als immanenter Vorgang, der von den Zuschauern als Handlungsanweisung rezipiert werden kann; sonst wäre das untätige Warten auf den Eingriff der Vorsehung, ohne den sich kein Mensch ändern könnte, die fatalistische Lehre des Dramas” (Steinhagen: Wirklichkeit und Handeln im barocken Drama. Historisch-ästhetische Studien zum Trauerspiel des Andreas Gryphius. Tübingen 1977 [=Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 51], p. 160).

  12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York 1985, p. 1 and passim.

  13. Blake Lee Sphar: “Cardenio und Celinde.” In his Problems and Perspectives. A Collection of Essays on German Baroque Literature. Frankfurt a. M. 1981 (=Arbeiten zur mittleren deutschen Literatur und Sprache, 9. =European University Studies. Ser. 1: German Languages and Literature, 423), p. 134.

  14. Spahr says: “Certainly Olympia's love for Cardenio does not stand the test of adversity or time. She imputes false motives to her lover all too easily, vacillates between him and Lysander, and, finally, when her choice is made, she gives the impression of trying to convince herself that she has made the right decision” (Spahr: “Cardenio und Celinde,” p. 136). Steinhagen characterizes Olympia's interpretation of her engagement to Lysander as divinely willed as “Verschleierung ihrer Schuld gegenüber Cardenio, dem sie wie sich selbst untreu geworden ist. Ihr Mißtrauen, ihr schwächlicher Glaube an Cardenio, ihre Verleumdung und schließlich ihre Ungeduld, die sie zur Wortbruch treibt, d.h. die mangelnde Beständigkeit ihrer Liebe zu Cardenio bedarf der Rechtfertigung” (Steinhagen: Wirklichkeit und Handeln, p. 178). Peter Michelsen, who finds the story presented in Cardenio's exposition in general “für modernes Empfinden sittlich höchst fragwürdig,” remarks that “Olympias Sinnesänderung selbst kann sicherlich auch nicht als hervorragendes Beispiel für Treue und Beständigkeit angeführt werden” (Michelsen: “‘Wahn’. Gryphius' Deutung der Affekte in ‘Cardenio und Celinde’.” In: Wissen aus Erfahrungen: Werkbegriff und Interpretation heute. Festschrift für Herman Meyer zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by Alexander von Bormann. Tübingen 1976, p. 67).

  15. As far as the social consequences are concerned, it does not matter whether Olympia has been physically raped: the presence of a man at night in her bedchamber destroys her reputation for virginity. We have only Cardenio's secondhand account of what occurred that night. Jean F.-A. Ricci notes both the disastrous social consequences of the nocturnal intruder and the way in which the original story leaves open the possibility of rape: “Or—nouveau coup de théâtre—la famille de la jeune fille se met à supplier, à sommer son amoureux de l'épouser: cette volte-face s'explique par la volonté de sauvegarder la réputation de la demoiselle; peu leur importe qui a été dans sa chambre et si l'acte a été consommé (le pudique Montalván esquive la question), l'essentiel est que Narcisa se marie pour qu'on puisse attribuer cette visite nocturne à son futur époux” (Ricci: Cardenio et Célinde. Étude de littérature comparée. Paris 1947, p. 14). In Pérez de Montalbán's tale, the marriage between Valerio (Gryphius's Lysander) and Narcisa (Olympia) is prompted by her pregnancy. Spahr, who finds Olympia's switch from Cardenio to Lysander unconvincing, argues that the “contradictions and the psychological inconsistencies in Gryphius's drama” result from his desire to present Olympia as moral and thus not pregnant and unmarried (Spahr: “Cardenio und Celinde,” p. 138). This is to ignore that it is immaterial whether Olympia is pregnant or not: she has already been appropriated by Lysander by his penetration of her chamber.

  16. Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women. Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.” In: Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. by Rayna R. Reiter. New York and London 1975, pp. 157-210, esp. pp. 169-179.

  17. In Pérez de Montalbán's tale, the Lysander figure is introduced as follows: “Servía también a Narcisa otro caballero de la misma villa, cuyo nombre era Valerio, que aunque en la sangre pudiera tener más ventajas, con su mucha riqueza disimulaba esta falta” (Pérez de Montalbán: “La fuerza del desengaño,” p. 58). Ricci takes particular note of the question of Valerio's social and economic background: “Teodoro a toutefois un rival, Valerio, … de moins noble extraction, mais plus riche que lui; malgré la discrétion de Montalván, qui ne veut pas froisser une partie de son public, nous croyons deviner que Valerio est d'origine roturière et que ses aïeux se sont enrichis dans quelque commerce lucratif” (Ricci: Cardenio et Célinde, pp. 12f.). Steinhagen notes that in Gryphius's play, there are passages indicating that all the principle characters belong to the nobility, with the exception of Lysander: “Allein über Lysanders Standeszugehörigkeit wird nichts Bestimmtes gesagt; nach seiner Tätigkeit und seiner Lebenseinstellung (IV, V. 137ff …) zu schließen, gehört er der angesehenen, Handel treibenden bürgerlichen Oberschicht an” (Steinhagen: Wirklichkeit und Handeln, p. 146, n. 7).

  18. Jonathan P. Clark notes apropos of Cardenio's father's letters that “Gryphius makes an association between the written word and authority, be it in the form of the sword or the person of the father” (Clark: “The Words of the Letter, the Letter of the Word. Monological and Dialogical Discourse in Gryphius' Cardenio und Celinde.” In: Daphnis 17 (1988), p. 229).

  19. In an all too brief discussion of Brünhild Nancy Huston remarks that “The contact with the male body is … a source of permanent defeat, by virtue of the metaphor which likens the penis to a deadly weapon. Virginity is seen as an invisible armor, and the hymen as a shield designed to protect both the body and the soul of the young girl. Once it has been pierced, once she has succumbed to this first paradigmatic wound, all other wounds become possible. The deflowered female body is irremediably permeable, irreversibly vulnerable” (Nancy Huston: “The Matrix of War. Mothers and Heroes.” In: The Female Body in Western Culture. Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge, Mass. & London 1985, p. 129).

  20. The page Olympia sends is empty of writing, but as Rachel Blau DuPlessis remarks: “The page is never blank. It is (even if apparently white) already written with conventions, discourses, prior texts, cultural ideas, reading practices” (Rachel Blau DuPlessis: The Pink Guitar. Writing as Feminist Practice. New York and London 1990, p. 151). DuPlessis, as a feminist poet, struggles against these conventions, etc.; Olympia tacitly accepts the patriarchal dicta inscribed on her blank page.

  21. The figure of Olympia and her relationship to Lysander have been seen as possibly reflecting Gryphius' own marriage, which took place around the time that it is assumed he wrote the play. Willi Flemming regards their marriage as reflecting Gryphius's “tiefe Fassung der Ehe” (“Das schlesische Kunstdrama.” Leipzig 1930 [= Deutsche Literatur in Entwicklungsreihen, Reihe 13 B, Bd. 1], p. 41). Ernst Feise (“Cardenio und Celinde und Papinianus von Andreas Gryphius.” In: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44 [1945], p. 192) and Gilbert (“Gryphius's ‘Cardenio und Celinde’,” p. 495) cite Flemming and regard the play as offering a positive depiction of marriage. Ricci offers a French, and less glowing, view of this interpretation: “En effet, [Olympia] s'est laissé conduire par le Tout-Puissant avec une passivité fréquente chez la femme germanique. Gryphius, qui écrivit la pièce à l'époque de son mariage, a mis en elle les traits de l'épouse idéale, telle qu'il la concevait” (Ricci: Cardenio et Célinde, p. 48).

  22. To Gryphius's credit, he changes the name of the clearly negative female figure from the “Lucrezia” of his source to “Celinde.”

  23. Ricci: “Gryphius lui [Celinde] cherche des excuses que l'état de l'Allemagne à cette époque lui suggère sans peine: mort prématurée de ses parents, …” (Cardenio et Célinde, p. 43). Gilbert: “Celinde has fought in vain against adverse circumstances and it is in part owing to the war that she has become what she is, the kept woman and notorious beauty of the town. It is interesting that Gryphius has freely invented this pitiful story of her youth which is not given in the source” (“Gryphius's ‘Cardenio und Celinde’,” p. 493 and 493n.) Eberhard Mannack remarks: “Die ‘verzweifelt’ Liebenden wiederum werden durch zahlreiche Umstände entlastet, die sie wenigstens teilweise als Opfer erscheinen lassen. (Celindens Herkunft; zeitgen. Krankheitsdiagnose usf.)” (Mannack: Andreas Gryphius. Stuttgart 19862 [Sammlung Metzler, 76], p. 66, my emphasis).

  24. Juan Luis Vives: “A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instructio[n] of a Christen Woma[n].” Trans. by Richard Hyrde. In: Distaff and Dames. Treatises For and About Women. Ed. by Diane Bornstein. Delmar 1978, sig. L2r

  25. Gail K. Hart notes, in discussing Goethe's Stella, “the patriarchal fantasy of women's natural instinctual need for male dominance and guidance (regardless of the credentials of the guide)” (“Voyeuristic Star-Gazing. Authority, Instinct and the Women's World of Goethe's Stella.” In: Monatshefte 82 [1990], p. 417).

  26. Margaret R. Miles' study of the iconography of the virgin suggests that Celinde's inability to function as a savior or intermediary is not just circumstantial, but dictated by traditional views of women: “while men are encouraged to identify with the male Christ, women's identification with the female Virgin is blocked by verbal emphasis on the unbridgeable chasm between the ideal Virgin and actual women” (“The Virgin's One Bare Breast. Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture.” In: The Female Body in Western Culture. Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge, Mass. & London 1985, p. 206).

  27. On Tyche, see David E. R. George: Deutsche Tragödientheorien vom Mittelalter bis zu Lessing. Texte und Kommentare. Trans. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich 1972, esp. pp. 309-315.

  28. Kummer: “Liebeszauber.” In: Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Ed. by Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli et al. Berlin and Leipzig 1927-42 (=Handwörterbücher zur deutschen Volkskunde, Abt. 1. Aberglaube), col. 1280.

  29. The overwhelmingly negative depiction of Tyche also distracts us from the overtones of black magic in Cardenio's efforts to eradicate his love for Olympia, when, in a scene (III.145-176) generally regarded as signalling the beginning of his conversion, he, in accord with ancient superstition, burns memorabilia of their liaison, including locks of Olympia's hair.

  30. One explanation for the failure of Tyche's magic may lie in Celinde's (unacknowledged) inability to fulfill one crucial condition: she is to find “jemand der sie trew' vnd ohne Falsch geliebt ❙ Vor kurtzer Zeit entseelt” (II.135f.). Marcellus, having renounced her just before his death, was not a model of fidelity. Perhaps Celinde has an inkling of what went wrong when she rephrases the requirement even more explicitly in her recounting in act V: she could rekindle Cardenio's love “Wofern ich könt ein Hertz auß einer Leichen finden / ❙ Daß ich / weil sie der Zeit auff dieser Welt genaß / ❙ Durch vnverfälschte Gunst biß auff den Tod besaß / ❙ Was solt ich arme thun?” (V.302-305).

  31. The bow and arrow are Gryphius' innovation; in his source, the skeleton is armed with a scythe.

  32. See Sigmund Freud: “Medusa's Head.” In: Freud on Women. A Reader. Ed. by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New York 1990, pp. 272f.; and Judith Kegan Gardiner: “Mind Mother. Psychoanalysis and Feminism.” In: Making a Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. London and New York 1985, p. 116. There are other reminders of the Medusa and horror of women in the central scene of Gryphius's play: the specter tells Cardenio she will lead him to a garden which she loves for “die rauen Steine” (IV.102), which recall the stones, the men and beasts already petrified by the sight of Medusa, that littered Perseus's path as he made his way to the Gorgon's home (Ovid, bk. IV). In act V Cardenio likens his own journey into the garden to that of one “der dem heissen Rachen ❙ Der Löwen kaum entkömmt” (V.218f.), a narrow escape from the vagina dentata.

  33. Already in I.74, he says of Olympia “ob der mir jetzund grauet.”

  34. Lysander: “Nun spür ich daß Gott selbst den Vnfall wollen wenden” (V.206); Cardenio soon thereafter absolves Lysander of any guilt: “Wie werd ich vor jhm [Gott] stehn / ich der voll toller Lüste / ❙ Nach keuscher Ehre steh' / der mich erhitzt entrüste / ❙ Auff ein nicht schuldig Blut” (V.229ff.).

  35. Ricci: Cardenio et Célinde, p. 47. Of the specter in Pérez de Montalbán's tale, from which Gryphius's differs but little, Ricci remarks “Son invention est donc incohérente, peu chrétienne et de mauvais goût” (p. 20). Steinhagen: Wirklichkeit und Handeln, p. 176, n. 81, also raises the question of the specter's deception.

  36. In his retrospective narration of the events, Cardenio says “Ich glaubte was ich wähnt / vnd schloß mit steiffer Klingen ❙ Den Frev'lern auff der That / die Beuten abzudringen!” (V.245f.)

  37. Judith Fetterley: The Resisting Reader. A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington and London 1978, p. 71.

  38. Steinhagen: Wirklichkeit und Handeln, p. 170.

  39. Clark: “The Words of the Letter,” p. 227. Spahr, while not likening the ending to Utopia, also seems to regard the outcome of the play as a happy one. He remarks that in act V “the final result is justice for all with the additional optimistic feature of the four young people being saved from the errors of youth …” (Spahr: “Cardenio und Celinde,” p. 145).

  40. Thomas More: Utopia. Trans. and Ed. by H. V. S. Ogden. Arlington Heights, Illinois 1949, p. 38.

  41. More: Utopia, p. 59.

  42. More: Utopia, p. 59.

  43. More: Utopia, p. 60.

  44. Hart: “Voyeuristic Star-Gazing,” p. 415.

  45. Elias Major's “Schreibkalendar” is quoted in Spellerberg: “Szenare zu den Breslauer Aufführungen,” p. 258.

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The Tragedies

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‘Weder mit worten noch rutten’: The Force of Gryphius's Examples