Wilhelm Schlegel’s review of
Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s tragic drama
Regulus: Eine Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen (Berlin 1802)
Zeitung für die elegante Welt (1802) 49 (Saturday, 24 April 1802), 385–88;
50 (Tuesday, 27 April 1802), 393–95 [*]
Regulus
in the Berlin Theater
For some time now, versified dramatic works have been quite on the agenda here; such works have included Regulus and Nathan der Weise, and now Turandot is expected as well. [1]
Regulus had prompted grand expectations from Vienna, where its performance last autumn caused quite a sensation. The favorable reception of such a piece does honor in a way to the taste of the Viennese public, alluding as it does to the need one increasingly finds elsewhere as well to venture boldly out of previous dramatic performances and into the arena of history and the imagination.
It is refreshing to hear great names again, including that of magnificent Rome, uttered on our stages. One need not be overly concerned at the lack of precision in making the various requisite distinctions, which of late been so little practiced.
For Regulus itself, unlike the reputation that preceded it, is in no way the masterpiece of a previously unknown author, but rather more like a schoolboy’s exercise in which a young man tries to renew on stage as best he can what he has read and noted for himself in the ancient historiographers.
With respect to the dramatic arts, this author is still far removed from the proper path; or rather, he is on no path at all. The half-measures and faltering elements in his style are obvious from the very outset. He seems not to have come to any real clarity yet whether he wants to write something in the style of the ancient tragedy or French Trauerspiel; [2] moreover, various formal elements seem to have come to him from Shakespeare’s historical dramas, indeed, he has also drawn from quite proximate and yet extraordinarily murky sources by at least thinking of if not directly imitating Octavia by Herr von Kotzebue. [3] [Critique act by act] . . .
Some critics have blamed the material itself for the weaknesses in the piece; but for a true artist, there is neither favorable nor unfavorable material, since everything depends on the way one treats the subject matter. The author does not seem to have studied adequately at all Shakespeare’s manner of portrayal with respect to Roman stories, or at least certainly seems not to have understood it.
The elements of coarseness and immaturity attaching to the actions of the common rabble in Regulus have been modeled after Shakespeare. But for Shakespeare, such is intimately connected with the profound, often unfathomable irony within the overall portrayal, whereas in Regulus it is merely a disruptive, out-of-place admixture.
The author might also have learned some things from Ben Jonson’s Catiline, [4] or even from Voltaire’s Roman dramas, since there inheres in these French Trauerspiele an element of artistic organization and tight cohesion utterly missing here. The discourses in Regulus, considering that by nature the whole has a rhetorical inclination, might have been far more concise and magnificent; a few maxims from Seneca are wholly insufficient.
A proper rendering of the Roman spirit would have required a more stoic view of things (albeit at the cost of a considerable weakening of indulgence in the element of family torment) together with an emphasis on Laconicism throughout. The discourses are almost always excessively long, frequently too weak, the verses lacking in lilt, the language not sufficiently full and dignified, not to mention the insufferably modern turns of phrase that sooner recall the past decade than transport us to Rome. . . .
Regulus has been performed five times thus far; at the last performance, the seats were almost empty, and perhaps at the preceding performance some audience members paid for the acknowledgement of good taste, which they thought they were exercising, with boredom.
Such as it is, the piece’s success hardly corresponded to the expense and effort that went into the production, which can so easily discredit so-called poetic pieces at the box office.
In this case, however, the fault is all the author’s, since it is obviously inappropriate to use so many characters in a play in which so little really happens. In this respect, the whole should have been much more simply organized. In the meantime, however, the performance of Regulus has indeed served a higher purpose insofar as now a plethora of togas is available for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, with which, as we do indeed hope, the theater management will soon regale the public here.
Notes
[*] Repr. Sämmtliche Werke 9:180–87; Kritische Schriften 2:122–27 (incomplete). The text is here taken from the Zeitung für die elegante Welt, whose wording differs slightly from that in the Sämmtliche Werke.
Illustration: frontispiece to Heinrich J. v. Collin’s sämtliche Werke, vol. 1: Regulus, Coriolan, Polyrena (Vienna 1812). Back.
[1] Lessing, Nathan der Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Aufzügen (N. p. 1779); Schiller, Turandot. Prinzessin von China. Ein tragicomisches Mährchen nach Gozzi (Tübingen 1802). Back.
[2] Lit., “play of mourning, grief.” See Carlo Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago, London 2012), 73, speaking about the more recent understanding of Walter Benjamin:
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, indeed, [Walter] Benjamin distinguishes between the classic Tragödie [viz. of antiquity], in which the tragic element was provided by myth, and modern Trauerspiel (which is to say, translated literally, a “sad dramatic play” or “mournful representation”), whose tragicity is instead due to history seen in a Christian light, which illuminates it as a panorama of catastrophe and ruins. Back.
[3] August von Kotzebue, Octavia: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Akten (Leipzig 1801). Back.
[4] Ben Jonson, Catiline (London 1611) (frontispiece from the edition of 1739):
Translation © 2016 Doug Stott