Wallenstein a Dramatic Poem

Open Book Classics Wallenstein A Dramatic Poem FRIEDRICH SCHILLER TRANSLATED BY FLORA KIMMICH, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROGER PAULIN To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/513 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. ONLINE SURVEY In collaboration with Unglue.it we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used. We really value your participation, please take part! CLICK HERE Wallenstein A Dramatic Poem By Friedrich Schiller Translation and Notes to the Text by Flora Kimmich Introduction by Roger Paulin https://www.openbookpublishers.com Translation and Notes to the Text © 2017 Flora Kimmich. Introduction © 2017 Roger Paulin. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Friedrich Schiller. Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem. Translation and Notes to the Text by Flora Kimmich. Introduction by Roger Paulin. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0101 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/513#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active on 30/1/2017 unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/513#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Open Book Classics Series, vol. 5 | ISSN: 2054-216X (Print); 2054-2178 (Online) ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-263-9 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-264-6 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-265-3 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-266-0 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-267-7 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0101 Cover image: Rolf Werner Nehrdich, Wallenstein standing between Max and Thekla (detail). Courtesy of Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich, CC BY 4.0. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Translator’s Note 1 Flora Kimmich Additional Resources 3 Introduction 5 Roger Paulin Wallenstein’s Camp 17 Prologue 19 Characters 23 Act One 25 The Piccolomini 59 In five acts Characters 61 Act One 63 Act Two 80 Act Three 101 Act Four 120 Act Five 134 The Death of Wallenstein 147 A tragedy in five acts Characters 149 Act One 151 Act Two 172 Act Three 193 Act Four 235 Act Five 261 Notable Names 287 Notes to Wallenstein’s Camp 293 Notes to The Piccolomini 297 Notes to The Death of Wallenstein 305 Translator’s Note This attempt at Schiller’s Wallenstein seeks to bring that extraordinary trilogy to young people in college-level instruction and to the general reader. It joins Fiesco1 in a growing series of translations, with commentary, of Schiller’s major plays, which Open Book Publishers makes freely available to a wide readership. Endnotes add brief information to clarify the many historical references in the text; they comment on the rare obscurities and repeatedly they call attention to a web of internal reference that draws a work of nearly eight thousand lines into a dense, capacious whole. These references are noted by act, scene, and line number to bring before the reader ever and again the economy that distinguishes drama from the other genres. A glossary of Notable Names intends to give quick aid when the reader cannot keep all the Friedrichs and Ferdinands here entirely straight or quite remember where it was that Tilly met his end. It also offers a small amount of information beyond the endnotes, particularly on the historical dimension of figures whom Schiller has reinvented for the purposes of his great drama. For both the endnotes and the glossary I am deeply indebted to Frithjof Stock, editor of the edition Deutsche Klassiker, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, the text on which the translation is based, and to the ever- concise and evergreen Columbia Encyclopedia, third edition, New York, 1 Friedrich Schiller, Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa, edited by John Guthrie, translated by Flora Kimmich (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/261 2 Translator’s Note 1963. Roger Paulin, generously, helped me rid the text of weighty Latin words and other blots. Alessandra Tosi presided over it all with patience and forbearance and a fund of good solutions. Christoph Kimmich’s conversation sustained me in this whole long labor, to say nothing of his resourcefulness in wrestling a typescript as thorny as was this one from an unyielding computer. Additional Resources Readers can freely access the original German text of Schiller’s Wallenstein (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1911) at Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6518 A reading of the drama (in German) is freely available at LibriVox, https://librivox.org/wallenstein-ein-dramatisches-gedicht-by-friedrich- von-schiller Gerhard von Kügelgen, Friedrich Schiller (1808–1809), oil on canvas, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gerhard_von_Kügelgen_001.jpg. Image in the public domain. Introduction1 Roger Paulin Schiller first encountered the figure of Wallenstein as a subject during his work on his History of the Thirty Years’ War, published in 1792. There, it was a question of pitting King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden against his main rival, Albrecht Wallenstein, duke of Friedland. According to Schiller’s scheme at the time, this involved contrasting the figures of the king, an “idealist” but not unmoved by political motives, with Wallenstein, the “realist,” power-hungry and following these aims pragmatically. Yet in the course of work on his History, Schiller developed a more nuanced view of Wallenstein, still unscrupulous and a victim of his own overweening ambition, but invested nevertheless with more admirable human qualities, such as generosity, always towering above his contemporaries as a figure in history. The idea of treating this subject in dramatic form dates from as early as 1791, with work beginning in 1793. By 1796, he could confess to Goethe that the sheer mass of material was forcing him to think beyond the confines of conventional tragedy. His philosophical studies, and his close contact with Goethe, enabled him to envisage a subject that was rooted in the here and now—“realistic”—but which gained formal dignity through the ideal constraints of art. In this way, Schiller was able to create a tragic character, in moral terms blameworthy, but from whom paradoxically we cannot withhold our admiration. 1 This Introduction is largely based on my ‘Schiller, Wallenstein,’ in Peter Hutchinson (ed.), Landmarks in German Drama (Bern, 2002), pp. 47–57 (by kind permission of the publisher, Peter Lang). © 2017 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0101.01 6 Introduction By 1797, following Goethe’s advice, Schiller concluded that a play—a “dramatic poem,” as he eventually called it—of this density and complexity could not be contained in five acts of verse, nor indeed in two full-length dramas. By 1798, the play had assumed its present form, a trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp in old-fashioned rhyming verse, then The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein in the blank verse of the German classical high tragedy. At its first performances in Berlin and Weimar in 1798, a shortened version of parts Two and Three was presented. In 1800 appeared the full three-part version that we have today. Critics and commentators are in general agreement that Wallenstein represents the pinnacle of Schiller’s achievement as a dramatist.2 Contemporaries like Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt sensed that this was a new high point in German tragedy. Goethe had followed the genesis of the play in his correspondence with Schiller and was even behind the idea of using a trilogy as the only aesthetically satisfactory means of presenting the vast panorama of history. Coleridge’s and Constant’s translations are an indication of its reception beyond Germany.3 Only those critics who identified one-sidedly with another tradition or with different notions of tragedy found fault with Wallenstein. Hegel around 1800 saw no religious sense behind the presence of fate in the drama, comparing it unfavorably with Greek tragedy.4 Tieck in 1826 found the love scenes superfluous and not organic to the action, making comparisons with Shakespeare’s very different technique in Romeo and 2 For an account of the reception of Wallenstein, with an extensive bibliography, see Schillers ‘Wallenstein,’ ed. by Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller, Wege der Forschung 420 (Darmstadt, 1977). See also Friedrich Schiller: ‘Wallenstein:’ Erläuterungen und Dokumente, ed. by Kurt Rothmann, Reclams Universal Bibliothek 8136 [3] (Stuttgart, 1982). Recent studies in English include T.J. Reed, The Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (Oxford, 1980), pp.

Load more