created only to be destroyed again and to give rise to new ones. No character in this play is safe from ridicule because of his office or function: The king, who has an insatiable craving for roast rabbit, the princess, who writes poetry but has not mastered grammar, the poet, who needs an official “Pacifier” to escape the wrath of the audience—all are mere puppets in the hands of their author, created to facilitate his display of wit and to foster an atmosphere of contrast and confusion intended to perplex and startle Tieck’s contemporaries. This is not a classical comedy but a Romantic negation of it, which scoffs at rules and proprieties and is an end in itself.

The second level of the play is that of a depicted reality that constantly encroaches on the action taking place on the level of the fairy tale. Tieck accomplishes this by making the stage itself the theater and the fairy tale a play-within-the-play. By creating a fictitious audience on stage that reacts with scorn, derision, and even violence to the production of the fairy tale, Tieck can imbue it with all the characteristics that he perceives as ridiculous or inane in contemporary individuals and society. At the same time, he maintains complete control over both sets of characters (those of the play and those of the play-within-the-play) and creates an objective distance between the reader and the depicted reality, subtly manipulating the reader toward a critical view of the real world.

The real world, seen through the playwright’s eyes, is grotesque and ridiculous. The audience on stage is composed of enlightened commoners—enlightened (not unlike Tieck himself) in the sense of eighteenth century citizens, educated in the virtues of reason and the classical arts, and armed with a set of philosophical and literary rules governing all aspects thereof. If Tieck exposes the nobility’s inadequacies in the play-within-the-play (critics have perceived parallels between the kind and Frederick William II of Prussia, between the princess and Wilhelmine Ritz, countess of Lichtenau, and between Nathanael von Malsinki and Czar Paul I), he derides the pervading rationalism of members of his own class in the characters who compose the fictitious audience. Their names are drawn from the sphere of workers and craftsmen: They include a “Schlosser” (locksmith), “Fischer” (fisherman), “Müller” (miller), “Bötticher” (cooper), and others.

These emancipated citizens criticize the play in a manner that shows their acquired “culture” and purportedly discriminating taste to be merely a confused repetition of professional critics’ opinions. Having no real understanding of artistic creativity, they cling to platitudes and mindless imitation in the discussion before the play’s beginning. Fischer expects an “imitation in the New Arcadian” (idyllic) manner, and Müller concurs: “That wouldn’t be bad, for I have long desired to see such a magic opera without music for once.” This is an obvious reference to the popularity which musical offerings such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflote (1791; The Magic Flute) enjoyed. Later, when pandemonium erupts among the disappointed audience, the Pacifier sings Mozart’s “In diesen heil’gen Hallen kennt man die Rache nieht” (“we know no thoughts of vengeance within these temple walls”) and brings decorations from the The Magic Flute on stage. Fischer disagrees with Müller’s judgment, arguing that only if accompanied by the “heavenly art” (music) is it possible “to swallow all these stupidities. Egad, strictly speaking we are beyond such distortions and superstitions; the Enlightenment has borne its fruits, as indeed it should.” This comment, which belies the later reactions of the audience, ridicules not only the rationalists but also Tieck’s own concoction. Schlosser expects a “revolutionary drama,” and indeed, Tieck occasionally uses political overtones such as the cat’s proclamation of a “tiers êtat.” Fischer and Müller agree that the age of phantoms, witches, and ghosts is past, as also is that of a Puss-in-Boots. Bötticher, named by Tieck with a sly reference to Karl August Böttiger and his book of praise for the then popular August Wilhelm Iffland, wishes to see a play in the classical sense: “We shall have a feast fit for gods. How this genius, who so intimately experiences and finely tints all characters, will carve out the individuality of this tomcat! As an ideal, undoubtedly, in the sense of the ancients, not unlike Pygmalion.” In this depicted reality of the theater, Tieck ridicules that contemporary, aloof rationalism and “vapidity which, devoid of understanding for depth and mystery, dragged everything it could not and would not understand before the bar of so-called human reason.” In 1828, more than thirty years after its publication, Tieck reminisced about the play: “All my recollections—what I had heard at different times in the pit, in the loges or the salons—awoke, and so this arose and was written in a few happy hours.”

The third level of the play is the level of literary criticism. Unless the reader consults an annotated edition, many of the witticisms that give the play its satiric edge will be lost. Indeed, even Tieck’s contemporaries were unaware of many of his allusions. On December 19, 1797, Nicolai wrote to Tieck: “When you allude to anecdotes of the local stage in Puss-in-Boots, it is perhaps not even interesting for local readers, who regard unimportant anecdotes of the theater and the pit as despicable. But what, then, are readers in other places to think, if they do not know what they are reading about?” Nicolai’s comment is well-meaning but based on the instinctive dislike of what began to emerge as a distinctive genre of the Romantic play. This type of literary satire is no more opaque than the scenes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Walpurgis Night in Faust (1808-1833) nor is it less legitimate than political or social satire; it is also one of Tieck’s favorite outlets for his brilliant humor.

The difficulty that the poet within the play encounters with his audience, the negative reception that he and his work are accorded, the misunderstanding of the plot and the literary intent—all of these were factors in the public reception of Tieck’s work and in the public reception of Romantic plays in general. The theatergoing public was educated to accept the literary standards of the post-Enlightenment era: A spiritually edifying tragedy was expected to be classical in style; an entertaining comedy was to comply with the standard rules as implemented, for example, by Iffland and August von Kotzebue. The plays of Tieck and other Romantics mixed the genres, destroyed the illusions, and confused the audience. The creative new element was viewed as theatrical incompetence. Fischer’s comments in the play particularly mirror this very real public reaction: “It is impossible for me to enter into a sensible illusion,” he asserts, when confronted with the talking cat. He fails to realize that a rational illusion is in itself an incongruity. When he is later told by another character that the audience in the play is well depicted, he reacts with consternation: “The audience? But there isn’t an audience in the play.” The entire comedy is an attempt to reeducate the public, and it fails. At the beginning, the Poet confronts his audience, which tells him that they want “a tasteful play.” He asks, “of what kind? Of what color?” and is told: “Family histories,” “Life savings,” “Morality and German sentiment.” When it becomes apparent that the play which is about to commence is not of this variety, Fischer scolds: “How can you write such pieces? Why didn’t you educate yourself?” The Poet’s noncompliance with the public’s wishes and expectations is perceived as a lack of education in the literary arts, and his “new kind of poetic invention” is utterly rejected. When he pleads, “Show me first that you understand me at least to some extent,” he is pelted with rotten apples. All of his explanations fail and he leaves the theater with the words: “O thankless century!”

Die verkehrte Welt

Like his fictitious poet, Tieck himself met considerable misunderstanding among his contemporaries with this fairy drama and with Die verkehrte Welt. The latter was so incomprehensible to Nicolai, who was to publish it in his journal Straussfedern, that he mistakenly believed he was receiving a second play when Tieck sent him the fourth and fifth acts after having previously delivered the first three. This time Nicolai admonished Tieck not to continue on his eccentric path but to cultivate the noble, the natural, and the interesting. Tieck considered a world in which the public determined literary taste, a world awry. (Die verkehrte Welt may be translated as “perverted world,” or “topsy-turvy world”). In Die verkehrte Welt, to a much greater extent than in Puss-in-Boots, Tieck criticizes contemporary literary production. The idea expressed by Nicolai that public taste should coincide with literary production is vehemently exposed to satiric treatment. This play, too, draws on a Poet and on diverse members of a fictitious audience for its characters. The confusion begins when members of the cast decide that they would prefer to be the audience, and when the audience expresses the wish to act. The distraught Poet, worrying about his play, expresses great concern but is overruled by Grünhelm (one of the spectators) and by the theater’s director. Grünhelm admonishes the Poet not to worry about his art, for “almost everything depends on the good-will of the audience. I know that as well as you do; therefore, true art is what uplifts this good humor.” When the Poet turns to the director for help, the latter merely asserts: “Look, I think of it this way: The public has already paid, and that takes care of the most important thing.” Commercialism, the whims of the public, and the demands of individual actors determine what passes for artistic production on the stage, and that is what is wrong with the literary world. Tieck expresses in these plays the basic tenets of the Romantic revolution: the need to reevaluate and revise literary production and its principles and the need to reeducate the public, its tastes, and its standards.

In this sense, Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt is programmatic and didactic. The figuration reveals this intent in its apposition of Scaramuz and Apollo. In the absence of Apollo (the leader of the muses), Scaramuz insists on playing the role of Apollo and taking charge of artistic developments. Over the objections of the Poet but with the aid of the theater’s director and the public, he is granted that right. Scaramuz (Scaramouch) is a stock character from the commedia dell’arte, a buffoon and ne’er-do-well who is never cast in the role of a tragic hero such as he wishes to portray here. In Tieck’s play, Scaramuz represents the contemporary materialistic, enlightened, and self-satisfied citizen to whom art and the theater is surrendered. Under his rule, egotism, materialism, and triteness govern: Actors (as well as members of the audience) play only the roles that suit them; on Mount Parnassus (the seat of the gods, or, figuratively speaking, that of the arts), a bakery and a brewery are erected by means of a mortgage; and when one of the writers complains to His Majesty, Scaramuz, that his readers have no taste and wish him to write trashy books, Scaramuz replies: “And why not, since in the end it is their lot to read your scribblings? Therefore you shall have the taste which is demanded of you.” In the figure of Scaramuz and his followers, Tieck portrays the representatives of a false, materialistic kind of art, derived from the age of rationalism and nurtured by the political, social, and economic changes that have permitted the rise of the masses to positions of power and have given rein to money and credit.

Democracy (reference is again made to the French Revolution) and capitalism have created havoc and terror for the arts, Tieck claims, but this is so only because the true artists have failed to act and to take charge. The personification of this true artist is Apollo, the second major figure in the play. Tieck’s placement of this figure, with the inclusion of the myth in which Apollo had to perform the duties of a shepherd for King Admetus, gives the play a strange and anachronistic twist and is the more surprising because Tieck normally excludes classic forms and figures from his plays. Its function is precisely to draw attention to this character and his actions, however, inasmuch as he mirrors that most venerated of poets, Goethe, to whom the Romantics looked for approval and guidance. As Tieck’s letters and essays show, he perceived Goethe at the time this play was written as somewhat of a messianic figure who could and would rescue the literary arts from that state of deterioration in which Tieck saw them. The younger Goethe had indeed embarked on a new, intrinsically German form of literature with his Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773; Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 1799) and his Faust, which appealed to the Romantics as works akin to those of their own school of thought. To their great disappointment, Goethe increasingly devoted his efforts to a revival of classicism in Germany, both in his function as director of the Weimar theater and in his own later production; he even went so far as to condemn Romanticism, calling its influence corruptive and destructive of literature. In his later letter, Tieck bitterly accuses Goethe of having betrayed Germany and German literature by embracing classicism: “No poet without a country [Vaterland]; to separate oneself from it is to deny the muses.” Tieck’s retrospective critical discussion of Goethe’s tenure as director of the Weimar theater is also unflattering: “His influence was more negative rather than that the theater might have progressed through him,” and no school of art was founded or furthered by him. “Here, as . . . in history and politics, he has failed to recognize the spirit of his time.”

When Tieck wrote Die verkehrte Welt, the direction Goethe was to take later was not yet apparent. Goethe had secluded himself in the small-town atmosphere of Weimar, directing plays and shepherding the tastes of the local audience. Tieck uses the myth of Apollo as shepherd for King Admetus in describing Goethe’s retreat: Apollo (Goethe) “has fled” and practices “simple shepherd’s songs in solitude” instead of taking charge of his role in the theater and preventing the takeover by Scaramuz. The programmatic aspect of Tieck’s play (which, incidentally, he calls a “historical” play) is evident in the happy ending that he provides: When Apollo recognizes the havoc created by Scaramuz’s reign, he returns from his isolation to take charge once again of his domain and to return true artistry to its rightful place: “Victory is ours, friends,” says Apollo at the end. “Take Scaramuz prisoner, and then we will reorganize the kingdom anew.” Considering the high hopes Tieck held for Goethe’s leadership, one can understand the depth of his disappointment at the realization that Goethe, who was fast approaching fifty years of age, preferred a sedentary life and had no intention of leading a revolution of the theater.

Prinz Zerbino

A quest for restoration of true artistry to art is also the main theme of Prinz Zerbino. (The German subtitle translates literally as “the journey in quest of good taste.”) Tieck prefaces the comedy with a dedication to his brother, the sculptor Friedrich Tieck of Berlin, whose work is not sufficiently appreciated, he believes. Friedrich’s works “may be compared to the best of the new and old era, yet many of them . . . have remained crated in Munich for years, awaiting an edifice which will bring them to light. This is a major misfortune for an artist.” The comedy, too, revolves around the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of genius. The setting is a courtly environment (unmistakably patterned after Berlin’s royal quarters), populated with some of the same characters already encountered in Puss-in-Boots. The cat Hinze, now a nobleman of great power, rules with other representatives of enlightened ambition and misdirected science. The truly philosophical, inquisitive, and fertile minds (Prince Zerbino, heir to the throne and son of the cat’s owner, Gottlieb; the court jester; and to some extent the old king) are believed to suffer from an insidious type of insanity that the physicians are unable to cure: “It is the illness which so frequently accompanies greatness.” The old king’s symptoms include his wish to read what he has to sign, and Zerbino even says to his jester: “Although you are a born fool you are still the most rational man in the entire country.” Because his interest in literature and philosophy has stimulated his imagination excessively, his physicians perceive him in a stage of crisis: His illness must necessarily pass “soon into lunacy or common sense it is impossible for it to remain in this impasse much longer. The noble patient asked me today what form of government I considered best.”

In his effort to discover good taste, Zerbino sets out on an allegorical journey that brings him into contact with the catastrophic influence that so-called “good taste” has had on artistic endeavors. Tieck uses this allegory as an opportunity for literary satire and for attacks on Nicolai, Kotzebue, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Iffland, Johann Daniel Falk, and others. Zerbino’s traveling companion Nestor, thought to be a caricature of Nicolai, offers the suggestion, “perhaps we have found good taste long ago and just don’t know it,” but Zerbino laments, “Taste! Where are you hiding to elude me on all paths?” In order to achieve the objective distance necessary for the destructive element of Romantic irony, Tieck employed techniques that ant+icipated Bertolt Brecht’s influential concept of Verfremdung, the so-called alienation effect: Personifications of the “blue of heaven” as well as of trees, bushes, flowers, and birds become articulate and thereby destroy the illusion of reality or authenticity into which the reader may have slipped, forcing him to confront the ultimate illusion with the facts—good taste cannot be defined. Not even Tieck’s own play is able to illustrate the term, and when Zerbino realizes this, he acts out of character and threatens: “I will enter into all scenes of this comedy, they shall break and burst, so that I either find good taste in this present play, or at least destroy the entire play and myself.” In turning the plot back scene by scene, Nestor remarks that it does not seem to matter whether it goes backward or forward, but the playwright, the critic, and the other actors object to Zerbino and Nestor’s undertaking. The play itself is a failure, and good taste remains an elusive commodity. The final irony is the restoration of the status quo at court in a scene depicting a “great Circus.” Fatalistic overtones are evident in Tieck’s conclusion that change is not likely to occur.