Yours Faithfully; Werther for the English Language Stage.

By David Bruno Starrs. Bachelor of Science (Australian National University 1986), Postgraduate Diploma in Health Sciences (Curtin University of Technology 1990), Bachelor of Theatre with Honours (James Cook University 1999), Master of Film and TV (Bond University 2000).

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Arts (by dissertation – 70% and creative work – 30%) to the School of Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts, the University of Melbourne, Australia, in September 2003. Awarded First Class Honours Feb. 2005. Abstract.

Although numerous English literary translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ‘nobility in suicide’ - themed, epistolary, psychological and therefore “untheatrical” (Atkins 1949) novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) have been published – none of the resultant English stage translations have ever been described as faithful to the original. The various obstacles to the creation of a faithful translation for the English language stage were analysed. The first obstacle is caution by Christian playwrights regarding the proscribed theme of nobility in suicide. Related to this is the second obstacle; the fear of producing ‘imitative’ suicides, which have been labelled ‘The Werther Effect’ by sociologists (Phillips 1974). Other obstacles are form-related rather than theme-related and include the absence of an authoritative English literary translation and the difficulties in translating to the stage the psychological and epistolary novel. With reference to Goethe’s three–tiered model of translation (translated by Lefevere 1977) and cinema academic Geoffrey Wagner’s ‘Three modes of adaptation’ (Wagner 1975) this writer has attempted to write a ‘prosaic’, ‘transpositional’ and unaugmented stage translation by identifying and addressing each of the obstacles, the hypothesis being that if these obstacles were systematically addressed and overcome, then an English language stageplay closely equivalent in meaning to the prominent ideas, themes and form of the novel – that is, a work arguably faithful to the novel – could be created. The research lead to the resultant creation The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther; a Stageplay which is submitted as the creative work component (30%) of the writer’s Master of Creative Arts thesis at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in September 2003. Declaration.

I hereby certify that – (i) The thesis comprises only my original work except where indicated, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, and, (iii) the dissertation is no less than 25,000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes but exclusive of tables, maps, appendices and bibliography.

Signed ...... (David Bruno Starrs) Date ......

Grateful acknowledgement and thanks are extended to Dr. Angela O’Brien (Supervisor), Dr. Denise Varney (Postgraduate Co-ordinator), Dr. Hector Maclean (Consultant), Sari Smith (Consultant), and, Dr. Ken Wach (Consultant).

Table of Contents.

Introduction. 5.

Chapter One. Obstacle one; the Christian playwright’s caution due to the proscribed theme of noble suicide. 10. a) Ancient times; Greek and Roman Stoicism. 10. b) Pre 5th Century; the suicidal mania of early Christianity. 12. c) From Augustinus on; the Christian ban on suicide. 12. d) The late 18th to 19th Century; the era of the Romantics. 15. e) The 20th Century; Dadaism. 17. f) Other 20th Century artists and suicide. 18.

Chapter Two. Obstacle two; the sociological concerns about imitative suicide. 22. a) Australian research results. 24. b) Foreign research results. 25.

Chapter Three. This writer’s reading of Werther. 29.

Chapter Four. Obstacle three; the absence of an authoritative English literary translation of Werther. 37. a) Variations in translating Werther. 37. b) Goethe’s model of translation. 42.

Chapter Five. Obstacle four; the difficulties in translating an epistolary, psychological novel to the stage. 45. a) Wagner’s model of adaptation. 47. b) Previous stage translations of Werther. 48. c) Case studies of relevant stage and screenplays. 51. d) Symbolic signs for the secondary and tertiary themes of Werther. 57. e) A summary of this writer’s The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther; a Stageplay. 58.

Conclusion. 59.

Bibliography/Works cited. 61.

Appendix A; The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther. (see ). Introduction.

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers is a short epistolary novel first published in 1774 by the emerging writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1742 –1849) in his native language of German. As one of the world’s first psychological novels, dealing as it does with a single character’s innermost thoughts, confessions and motivations, it became an instant best–seller and launched the career of Germany’s most successful and famous writer. The plot of the novel (hereafter referred to as Werther) is simple; in ‘Book 1’, after enduring some unexplained emotional crisis, Werther arrives in a new town where he begins to feel happy in the beautiful nature around him and with the people he meets. He encounters Charlotte and falls in love with her. When her fiancé Albert arrives a classically unhappy love triangle forms. Reluctantly, Werther leaves town. In ‘Book 2’ Werther starts working for the Ambassador in another town but does not enjoy the experience. He is, he believes, unfairly rejected by his aristocratic superiors, and quits his job in disgust to return to the town of the newlyweds Charlotte and Albert. Unable to see a solution to the problem of his growing love for Charlotte and due to his respect for their marriage he shoots himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Albert. He dies at noon on Christmas Day.

Notably, the novel is believed to have caused a wave of suicides by its readers who died, dressed in the yellow britches and blue frock–coat of the novel’s ‘hero’, with the opened book at hand and a self– delivered bullet through their skulls. As a result many European states banned it. The Internet bookshop site Bibliopoly.com – which in 2002 was selling an original first edition copy for US $35000 – described it as; A diminutive novel, half–epistolary and half–narrative [. . .][which] caused a furor [sic] throughout Europe. The story of a hyper–sensitive young man, whose Weltschmerz and Ichschmerz combined with his unfulfilled love for the girl Charlotte, reduced him to despair and self–destruction. Werther inspired a vogue which went far beyond blue coats and yellow breeches and porcelain tea–sets decorated with scenes from the book. So profound was its effect on the reading public, in fact, that literally dozens of love–lorn swains took up the knife against themselves in emulation of the pathetic hero. Indeed, for the second edition of the book, Goethe indited a cautionary quatrain for the title page which urged strength upon his more susceptible readers [. . .][Goethe] introduced the modern conception of the self as the sole and fragile source of all meaning . . . (Bibliopoly.com 2002, un–numbered web page).

The ‘cult of Werther’ was born. Academic Stuart Atkins in 1949 described how; . . . the cult of Werther was exploited by the trade: eau de Werther was sold, and Charlotte and Werther figures [. . .][were] as familiar and ubiquitous as Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck today . . . (Atkins 2).

The 1989 translator of Werther, Michael Hulse, noted; At the Prater in Vienna there was a Werther fireworks display. In Fleet street in London, Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Historical Wax–Work showed ‘The much–admired Group of The Death of Werter [sic], attended by Charlotte and her Family’. Werther songs were sung. (Hulse 1989: 13–14).

In England the response also included calls for prohibition, particularly from one Reverend Solomon Piggott; I would most strongly reprobate the sickly notions, the sentimental nonsense, the false morality, the infidel opinions, the immoral precepts, contained in many of our popular novels, romances and plays, which the idle and dissipated waste their hours in persuing [sic]. There is not a book of a more dangerous tendency in many of these respects than the undeservedly admired “Sorrows of Werther”, a book which should be forbidden and proscribed, as having largely contributed to diffuse licentiousness, to encourage effeminacy, and to seduce the weak and the agitated to suicide. (Piggott 1824: 130–1).

Piggott was not the first to proscribe themes that encourage suicide in works of art. However, his suggestion that weak and agitated readers or viewers subjected to works that apparently nobilise or otherwise glamourise suicide will be seduced into copying the act has been studied by sociologists in recent years with David Phillips describing such ‘imitative suicides’ as resulting from ‘The Werther Effect’ (Phillips 1974: 340).

Despite the controversy about the suicidal theme of Werther, numerous English literary translations have been published with the first being the Daniel Malthus 1779 version The sorrows of young Werter; a German Story and one of the most recent being the 1989 Penguin paperback version The Sorrows of Young Werther by Michael Hulse. Frequently, the criterion of ‘faithfulness’ has been mentioned in evaluations of these works, despite confusion as to the precise meaning of this term. Indeed, academic Patrice Pavis recently called the notion “ . . . a cliché of critical discourse . . .” (Pavis 1992: 26), but because a phrase is overused does not necessarily mean it is invalid, although the individual’s particular meaning may require elucidation. Matthew Arnold stated; “Probably [all] would agree that the ‘translator’s’ first duty is to be faithful, but the question at issue is, in what faithfulness consists.” (Arnold 1862: 3) Some have attempted to answer Arnold’s question; translator Kevin Halliwell had a simple explanation; “ . . . The tone [is] recognisably that of the original author . . .” (Halliwell cited in Logan un–numbered webpage). Academic Peter Brooks gave an equally simple answer when he said “ . . .we can still recognise the ‘story’ even when its medium has been considerably changed.” (Brooks 1984: 4). However, this writer’s explanation is that he uses the term ‘faithful’ when referring to the level of equivalence of the ideas, themes and their meanings expressed in and essential to the original work to those of the literary or stage translation. Whilst this may not result in an archivally authoritative translation suitable for students of the foreign language to use as a study crib, as long as it is arguably attempted then a high degree of faithfulness will have been achieved. Whilst replicating the ‘tone’ and ‘story’ of the original is vital, more must be done if the translator aims for maximum faithfulness. Apart from the themes, tone and story there are form related factors that must be equivalently reflected somehow in the translator’s work. A prime example is the epistolary form of Goethe’s novel; a collection of letters from Werther to his far-off friend Wilhelm. The faithful translation must somehow also retain this unique formic element of the original when it is produced on stage.

There have been inventive stage translations (or adaptations) of Goethe’s novel which neglect the themes and form of the novel, including a blank verse stageplay in English, a French stageplay, an Italian Commedia dell’arte and opera as well as several burlesques, parodies and ‘re–imaginings’. However, due to caution over the proscribed or, indeed, ‘taboo’ theme of nobility in suicide and the concern for audience members who might commit imitative suicide, the novel’s epistolary form and the psychological or confessional nature of the writing, Werther has never been faithfully translated for the stage. The obstacles have been too great or the temptation to augment the original work with additional ideas and themes too irresistable. This writer suspects that if restraint is exercised by the inventive playwright and these obstacles are addressed then a faithful stage translation can be achieved.

In Chapter One the primary obstacle for the translator/adapter of Werther, particularly prior to the post-modern era, is explored. Due to the proscription of suicide by Christian Churches in Western societies one can conclude that Christian playwrights have been cautious about causing offence; the stage translations of Goethe’s novel, like many other plays before the mid 20th Century, in the main have the suicide performed off-stage or simply inferred. Werther’s graphically described noble suicide has not been eagerly permitted, let alone unapologetically depicted on stage. An historical overview of the artistic representation of suicide in Chapter One is helpful in understanding this development and the post-modern backlash against this proscription (i.e. the decline in influence of the Christian Church and the inurement of audiences against violence now permit the post-modern graphic stage depiction and even trivialisation of suicide) .

Related to this caution about being seen to be condoning the most heinous of Christian sins is the concern that some audience members may imitate the staged suicide. This second obstacle is explored in Chapter Two.

Werther’s motives, as explored in Chapter Three – this writer’s reading of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers – are not egoistic; he is not motivated primarily by a goal of political martyrdom, wasting away from a painful and incurable disease nor is he shamed into the act through dishonour. He is not escaping an overwhelming enemy nor is he insane. His suicide is primarily to save Lotte and Albert any more pain, as he respects their marriage (although he does fantasise about having Lotte in the next world). Being so fundamentally altruistic, Werther’s suicide is an unusually noble act.

Finally, the form related obstacles of the absence of an authoritative English translation, the epistolary nature of the novel and the long psychological soliloquies of the protagonist are explored in Chapters Four and Five.

Art is powerful; it affects people and is intended to do so. Thus this writer had a quest to maximise faithfulness in translating Werther for the stage while retaining the power of the original. Whether or not this can be achieved is the research question this thesis will address (despite the volatility of the entire concept of ‘faithfulness’). The hypothesis is that if the obstacles to faithful translation/adaptation are systematically addressed and overcome, then an English language stageplay closely corresponding in meaning to the prominent ideas and themes of the novel – that is, a work arguably faithful to the novel – can be created.

The research methodology used consisted of; i) Identification of and analysis of the two sets - theme and form related - of obstacles to faithful literary and stage translation of Werther, including;

Theme related; a) Obstacle one; the Christian playwright’s caution due to the proscribed theme of nobility in suicide. b) Obstacle two; the sociological concerns about imitative suicide. Form related; c) Obstacle three; the absence of an authoritative English translation of the novel. d) Obstacle four; the difficulties in adapting an epistolary, psychological novel to the stage. ii) Reference to previous stage translations of Werther and to relevant models of translation and adaptation, prior to this writer’s attempt at stage translation. iii) Case studies of several relevant epistolary stage and screenplays prior to this writer’s attempt at stage translation of Werther. iv) A selective combination of solutions to the obstacles identified in i) as suggested by ii) and iii) in this writer’s attempt at stage translation of Werther.

Within this methodological framework an arguably faithful stage translation of Werther was aimed for; something which, according to the literature, has never before been achieved. In doing so, this thesis explores the extent to which the Werther Effect may affect and has affected the expression and representation of the primary theme of noble suicide in past and potential stage translations of Goethe’s most notorious novel. Chapter One. Obstacle one; the Christian playwright’s caution due to the proscribed theme of noble suicide.

The main obstacle to the successful stage adaptation of Werther is Western society’s entrenched disapproval of the act of suicide and the widespread opinion that Goethe’s novel nobilises and therefore encourages suicide. Generally, suicide, whilst an enduring theatrical theme, has been roundly condemned if its depiction is too realistic or, even worse, made to appear attractive or glamorous. This animadversion is despite the fact that few intelligent adults have never, at least momentarily, contemplated suicide. One sociologist in 1962 estimated that; “Eighty per cent of people admit to having ‘played’ with suicidal ideas.” (Merloo 1962: 65). This fear and loathing of self–murder is not new; society’s despisal of the act is deeply ingrained in numerous Western religions and cultures, particularly Christian ones. Yet, prior to the 5th Century, suicide was frequently viewed as noble. From then until the late 19th Century suicide was overwhelmingly seen as the ultimate sin; a rejection of God’s gift of life. Ron Brown, when surveying the artistic representations of suicide, neglects Reverend Piggot’s comments in 1824 about Werther, and limits this period further; From the Early Christian era (c. 4 BC) to the beginning of the 15th Century, a Christian millenium, suicide was, among other designations, seen as a product of diabolical despair which, together with presumption, was proscribed by the Church as one of the two sins against the Holy Ghost. (Brown 2001: 23).

Now, in our post-modern and increasingly secular arts world, it is no longer shocking to break this taboo. An ongoing controversy about suicide can be traced back through the ages in Western society’s literature and arts and a knowledge of this history is vital to understanding a post–modern response to the requirements of an English stage portrayal of noble suicide for a 21st Century Western audience. a) Ancient times; Greek and Roman Stoicism. In ancient times, suicide was often seen as noble, rational, sin-free and justified. According to historian Edward Watling in his 1947 work, The Theban plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, the very first literary suicide was that of Jocasta, whose act in Sophocle’s King Oedipus was made to seem praiseworthy; an honourable way out of an insufferable situation. Her self–murder exemplified the attitudes of the Greek Stoics. The Greek legends bear witness; Homer described suicide as natural and frequently heroic. H. R. Fedden tells us that Aegus drowned himself when he thought his son Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur. Erigone hanged herself upon finding the murdered body of her father Ikarios. Leukakas plunged to her death to avoid the rape of Apollo. Fedden wrote that the ancient Greeks deemed suicide acceptable if it was done for the best possible reasons; grief, principles or self– honour, but unacceptable if committed as a wanton act of disrespect to the gods (Fedden 1938: 55–9).

John Spaulding and George Simpson, in their 1951 translation of Emile Durkheim’s Suicide: a Study in Sociology (1897) tell us the Pythagoreans rejected suicide – for them, as with the Christians to come, life was a gift from above. Aristotle continued this thesis, adding that the act was also a crime against the state, robbing it of a useful citizen. But Plato concurred that if life itself became immoderately unbearable then suicide was justified. Death became a calm, rational choice befitting a rational world and a rational nature. Magistrates kept supplies of hemlock for those wishing to die, once they had pleaded their case to the Senate and been given official permission. Libanius is quoted as saying; Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons to the Senate, and after receiving permission shall abandon life. If your existence is hateful to you, die; if you are overwhelmed by fate, drink the Hemlock. If you are bowed with grief, abandon life. Let the unhappy man recount his fortune, let the magistrate supply him with the remedy, and his wretchedness will come to an end. (Spaulding and Simpson 1951: 330).

In his 1971 study of suicide and the arts, The Savage God, commentator A. Alvarez, citing the advanced Stoicism of the later Roman Empire, noted; “ . . . the more sophisticated and rational a society becomes, the further it travels from superstitious fears and the more easily suicide is tolerated . . .” (Alvarez 1971: 54). As with Plato, the question for the relatively sophisticated Romans was not whether to commit the act, but how to do it with dignity and style. Suicide was not a mortal sin but rather a test of honour and nobility and they turned the Stoic toleration of the Ancient Greeks into high fashion. In the 1st century AD, one of Rome’s most intellectual figures was statesman and tragedian Lucius Annaeus Seneca. H. Silving notes that under the law of his day a private citizen could commit suicide for reasons ranging from;“. . . impatience of pain or sickness [to] weariness of life, lunacy or fear of dishonour.” (Silving 1963: 108). Slaves, however, were excluded from this honour as they were considered commodities of their owners, as were soldiers who were property of the State. These apparently icy heroics may seem strangely unreal, when considered from a 21st Century Western perspective, but one must consider the environment of the times. When the Roman Stoics looked around them they saw a blatant disregard for human life so normalised that the mass media of the day, the Coliseum, could involve the deaths of up to thirty thousand gladiators a month. Even free men would offer themselves up for public execution for a fee to be paid to their heirs. Competition for this ‘suicide performance fee’ was at times fierce enough for candidates to elect the more entertaining death by being beaten to death rather than by beheading. Imperial Roman times were so unspeakably cruel, vulgar, corrupt, pedicular and wanton that Roman Stoicism was perhaps a philosophy of despair as much as style. Seneca eventually practised what he preached when he stabbed himself to avoid the wrath of his former pupil, Nero. One of the most vicious of all Roman emperors, it was Nero who intensified the bloodlust of the Roman Empire when he initiated the persecution of the Christians. b) Pre 5th Century; the suicidal mania of early Christianity. Alvarez explained the suicidal hysteria of the early Christians as follows; Christianity, which began as a religion for the poor and rejected, took that [Roman] bloodlust, combined it with the habit of suicide, and transferred both into a lust for martyrdom. The Romans may have fed Christians to the lions for sport but they were not prepared for the fact that the Christians welcomed the animals as instruments of glory and salvation. (Alvarez 1971: 58).

Even the most devoted of the Stoics waited for life to become somehow intolerable before resorting to a dignified suicide. But the Church’s promise that death would release them into everlasting glory and redemption opened the way for a flood of Christian suicides and martyrdom. Martyrdom allegedly offered not only heavenly bliss, but posthumous glory as well (the martyrs’ names were celebrated annually in the Christian calendar) and that perhaps sweetest of rewards – revenge – for the martyrs would be able to peer down from Heaven at their former tormentors roasting in Hell. Responding to this theological rationale required a zealotry bordering on madness, of which the Donatists were renown; They frequently stopped travellers on the public highways and obliged them to inflict the stroke of martyrdom by promise of a reward, if they consented – and by the threat of instant death, if they refused to grant so very insular a favour. (More 1790: 290).

This hysteria for Christian suicide would not subside until a powerful Christian figure arose in the 5th century. c) From Augustinus on; the Christian ban on suicide. Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa, began in 413 AD a project that would take the next 13 years to complete. Consisting of 22 books, The City of God Against the Pagans was a comprehensive overview of Christian theology. But the subject of suicide was so important to the man who would eventually become Saint Augustine that he dedicated one third of the very first book to the topic. Although the Old Testament mentions four suicides without negative comment (Samson, Saul, Abimelech and Achitophel), and some earlier Church fathers such as St. Jerome and the Venerable Bede had considered Jesus’ death on the cross an act of suicide (Fedden 1938), Augustinus took the 6th Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ literally. Ultimately, Augustinus supported the argument from Plato’s Phaedo that life is a gift from God and that to bear one’s suffering, instead of shortening it by suicide, was a mark of respect for that gift (Gallop 1975: 56). By 562 AD funeral rites were refused to all suicides; and by the end of the 7th century even attempted suicide was grounds for excommunication from most Christian Churches. Suicide took on a pejorative meaning; self-murderers were the most abominable of sinners. Part of this rationale, as Ron Brown noted, was because;“ . . . suicide may have been condemned under Christianity because Judas, the arch–villain of the Christian story, died that way.” (Brown 2001: 80). Indeed, the whole period of early Christianity is dominated by artwork related to this singularly didactic image. Jesus’ death, while avoidable and voluntary, was not self-inflicted; he nobly goes to Heaven. Judas’ death is cowardly, effeminate and just-deserts for the criminal; he remains suspended between Heaven and Earth and is denied peace.

Despite the Christian ban, suicide still had its champions. In 1580 Michel de Montaigne wrote a legal defence of suicide for those whose life had lost all meaning; Death is a remedy against all evils: it is a most assured haven, never to be feared, and often to be sought: All comes to one period, whether man makes an end of himself, or whether he endures it; whether he run before his day, or whether he expect it: whence so–ever it come, it is ever his own, where ever the thread be broken, it is all there, it’s the end of the web. The voluntariest death is the fairest. Life dependeth on the will of others, death on our own. (Florio 1929: 84).

Throughout the Renaissance the Church remained omnipotent, however there were cracks starting to develop. Suicide began again to be seen by some as a noble and courageous act in the growing Renaissance tradition of secular, gentlemanly honour. Montaigne and other philosophers began to look back to the classics, particularly Seneca, with the resolve to return power over death to the hands of the individual. This ‘neo-classical’ reversion exemplified the Roman non-humanist ideals; emotions and passion were undervalued due to their de-humanising effect. Humans, unlike animals, were seen as ideally calm and rational not affected and passionate.

Around this time came the master of suicide in theatrical art, William Shakespeare. In his plays, non-Christian men and women often committed suicide in apparently grand, heroic style. Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Antony and Cleopatra includes no less than five pagan suicides – the most theatrical when Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile, presses a deadly asp to her breast. Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ foreshadows the suicide of Othello in another of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. But in the reality of Christian Elizabethan England, Othello would have been dragged through the streets by a horse and buried at a crossroads outside of town – with a stake driven through his heart to prevent his ghost from rising to haunt the living, or alternatively; “ . . . drawn by a horse to the place of punishment and shame, where he is hanged on a gibbet, and none may take the body down but by the authority of a magistrate.” (Williams 1958: 68). While realising the value of suicide as a theatrical theme, Shakespeare nevertheless respected the prevalent attitude of the day and his suicides were cautiously framed as tragic not noble and glorious if they were Christian. Pagans could be shown rejecting God’s greatest gift but not Christians. As Ron Brown commented; Shakespeare lends his protagonist a religious sensibility: for Hamlet, suicide is a moral issue, validating the position arrived at by the Christian Church by the end of the 16th Century. (Brown 2001: 7).

The suicides of Ophelia, Romeo and Juliet’s suicides were more sadder still because they, like Shakespeare and his audiences, were Christians.

Brown also identifies in Shakespeare’s work the “ . . . binary poles of suicide as heroic and suicide as sinful . . .” (7). Ophelia’s wilful, self-inflicted suicide is a sin; she does not deserve a Christian burial and the Priest complains; “She should in ground unsanctified have lodged, Till last trumpet.” (Smithmark 2000: 213). Hamlet in confronting his oppressors heroically, seeks an end – which while voluntary is not self-inflicted – and thus flights of angels duly take him to Heaven. Elsewhere in Shakespeare, his caution regarding the nobility in wilful, self-murder is noticed when his Christian Macbeth asks: “Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On my own sword?” (182).

Elsewhere in Europe, the corpse of a suicide was burnt and thrown onto the public garbage heap (France), floated in a barrel down the river away from places it might want to haunt (Germany), disallowed departure from a house via the door – it had to leave through the window with the window frame burnt afterwards (Austria) and buried away from other graves with the self–murdering hand cut off and buried apart (Greece). Meanwhile, the suicide’s name was defamed, the family stripped of any nobility and their assets seized by the state. Indeed, the fear and loathing of suicides saw the degradation of their corpses well after the end of witch–hunting hysteria in Europe. It was not until 1823 that it became illegal to bury a suicide at a public highway crossroads in England and the repeal of legislation regarding confiscation of property did not occur until 1870.

Due to the influence of the Christian Church, this horror of suicides, of blood evilly spilt and unappeased, meant that for many centuries suicide was legally equated with murder. However, Robert Burton’s massive study The Anatomy of Melancholy, which became an instant best–seller when it was published in 1621, made the point that suicide is neither rational nor dignified and pleaded for sympathy; “These unhappy men are born to misery, past all hope of recovery, incurably sick; the longer they live, the worse they are; and death alone must ease them.” (Evans 1934: 135). After all, he also wrote, judgement is for God, not mortals. Yet Robert Burton ended his own life by hanging himself (though some suggest it was to fulfil his own astrological prophecy of the date of his death). Nevertheless, Burton raised questions about suicide which would reverberate beyond the subsequent Puritan’s Christian clampdown (which included the banning of theatre in England) and would fuel debate into the second half of the 19th century: the era of the Romantics. d) The late 18th to 19th Century; the era of the Romantics. In the latter half of the 18th Century signs of a romantic rebellion against the proscription of suicide began to become visible. The increasing availabilty of print media contributed to this trend, as Brown noted; As the Century progressed, the representation of suicide underwent changes wherein the seeds were sown of the idea of suicide as romantic rebellion . . . an accusation against society . . . The French press supressed suicidal death, in England suicide was hot press, and the rash act of voluntary death became popular news in the course of the eighteenth century. This also meant suicide was losing its supernatural aspect. (Brown 2001: 128, 133).

In Germany a whole new era was about to be ushered in which would further erode the supernatural aspects of suicide and influence the arts all over Europe and Britain. The Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and stress’) period, roughly 1765 to 1785, was characterised by a violent emotional reaction against the cool intellectualism of the previous Aufklärung (‘Enlightenment’) period. The notion of the individual being the source of all meaning was gradually growing – in direct opposition to the Catholic Churches belief that the Earth was the centre of the Christian universe – and the Church began to lose its grip on the criminality of the suicidal act. Earlier, in 1600 in Italy, playwright and priest Giordano Bruno was burnt alive at the stake for refusing to disagree with Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. Later the Church realised their error and made Bruno a saint but the Church was beginning to feel its influence on society and law wane.

Exemplifying the Romantic period was literary ‘boy wonder’ Thomas Chatterton, who has been described as the most famous of all spurned artist suicides, in part because his death is immortalised in a celebrated painting by Henry Wallis. Born in Bristol in 1752, he wrote a bulk of poems in convincing medieval style, script, spelling and vocabulary within a two year period before he was 17. He sent a few examples to Horace Walpole, a publisher in London, who was pleased to discover a new talent – that is, until he realised that Chatterton was a penniless teenage apprentice who was actually in search of a patron. Walpole rejected him outright. The snobbery of the literary set frustrated and infuriated Chatterton; It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19 – 20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such; – or DIE – perplexing alternative! (Chatterton cited in Alvarez 1971: 163).

On August 24 1770, four months after writing that letter, Chatterton tore his papers apart in the tiny room he could no longer afford and took arsenic. He was just three months shy of his 18th birthday and within one generation he became the supreme symbol of ‘Romanticism’ – a passionate, tortured, unappreciated and ultimately doomed artist. Coleridge and Shelley wrote poetry about him; Keats and Byron aspired to die young like him. Later, even seemingly ordinary theatre–going people were inspired to die artistically by the example of Chatterton, as evidenced by the following comment by Francis Steegmuller; In 1835, Vigny’s tragedy ‘Chatterton’, the final scene of which shows the suicide of the young English poet, brought on a wave of suicides throughout the country [France]; one young man killed himself in the theatre where the play was being given, dying happily with Chatterton; another ended his life before an open window, at sunset, his hand resting on a copy of the play open at the last fatal page. (Steegmuller 1947: 25–6).

Not long after Chatterton’s suicide came the previously mentioned wave of suicides in Europe of young men dressed in blue frock–coats, yellow vests and yellow breeches with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers often found alongside the corpse. Goethe said of the response to Werther; My [. . .] friends thought that they must transform poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life and, in any case, shoot themselves: and what occurred at first among a few took place among the general public . . . (Goethe cited in Phillips 1974: 340).

Indeed, Goethe went to considerable effort not to offend with Werther; various names are replaced with blanks, it is not specified which Christian Church Werther belongs to and the name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned. In the second edition Goethe exercised further caution and added the following warning; Every young man sighs for love, Every young girl sighs to win man’s love; Why, alas! Should bitter pain arise From the noblest of all passions? You, kind soul, mourn and love him well, From disgrace his memory’s saved by you; yet his spirit sighs from its cell: BE A MAN, DON’T FOLLOW ME! (Goethe, prefix to the 2nd edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, translated by this writer)

Despite Goethe’s warning, Alvarez noted that at the height of the Romantic period; “. . . life itself was lived as though it were fiction and suicide became a literary act.” (Alvarez 1971: 177). The suicide is performed so as to communicate a message or make a statement to a particular audience. It is also germane to note that with the proliferation of newspapers in the 18th Century there was an eagerness to print the ‘last words’ for the macabre pleasure of the growing reading public, and as a result the suicide note became an important accompaniment to every idealistic suicide, comparable to the programme for a stageplay; I am undertaking a long journey. If I should not succeed, let people gather to celebrate my resurrection with a bottle of Cliquot. If I should succeed, I ask that I be interred only after I am altogether dead, since it is very disagreeable to awaken in a coffin in the earth. It is not chic! (Brasol 1949: 469).

This was a not atypical note left by a 17 year old Russian girl which disturbed, yet fascinated, another of the great writers of the 19th century, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoeivski. What disturbed Dostoeivski most about this note was its frivolous and entertaining tone. One of the forerunners of 20th Century art, he had also struggled with the notion of suicide in his novel The Possessed. The character of Kirilov says he wants to commit suicide because ‘it is his idea’. Kirilov then shoots himself, performing what Dostoeivski called ‘a logical suicide’. Both Kirilov and the Russian girl quoted previously had abandoned their belief in God, and hence, any hope for an afterlife. This prospect was unbearable to Dostoeivski, and brought his whole purpose as an artist into question. While Dostoeivski did not follow through on his threats to kill himself, his attempts to untangle the psychological motives behind suicide were as complex as the multitude of characters in his epic novels. Death without an afterlife placed more importance than ever on how one died. He wrote in his diary; It is clear, then, that suicide – when the idea of immortality has been lost – becomes an utter and inevitable necessity for any man who, by his mental development, has even slightly lifted himself above the level of cattle. (Dostoeivski cited in Alvarez 1971: 185).

As the 19th Century was drawing to a close, the prevailing tenets of Romanticism had sown the seeds for a secular backlash against the Christian Church’s proscription against the theme of noble suicide in art and pockets of artistic revolt were forming, as typified by ‘Dada’. e) The 20th Century; Dadaism. Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and other artists founded the ‘Dada Movement’ around the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. The Dadaists were against everything – politics and religion, the establishment in general, their audience in particular, and even art and Dada itself. Taking nihilism to its logical conclusion, for the Dada purist, suicide was inevitable. Historian Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes said: “They were haunted by the uselessness of life itself. To revolt against life! But there is only one wonderful remedy: suicide.” (Ribemont-Dessaignes 1981: 105). Alvarez summarised the Dada attitude thus; “For the young Romantics at the height of the epidemic, to kill oneself was the next best thing to being a great artist. But for the pure Dadaist, his life and his death were his art.” (Alvarez 1971: 191). In 1925, the Parisian arts magazine La Revolution Surrealiste published a symposium posing the question: ‘Is suicide a solution?’ Apparently, the resounding answer was ‘Yes!’, not unlike the Romantics of nearly a century earlier. Jacques Rigaut, who destroyed most of his writing as soon as he finished it, called suicide ‘a vocation’; The only way left to us of showing our contempt of life is to accept it. Life is not worth the trouble it takes to leave it [. . .] A man who is spared worries and boredom, achieves perhaps in suicide the most disinterested of all gestures, provided he is not curious about death! (Rigaut cited in Alvarez 1971: 192).

Notably, Rigaut’s own suicide in 1929 marked the end of Dada. f) Other 20th Century artists and suicide. Virginia Woolf, British author of the 1947 novel Mrs. Dalloway and pioneer of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, explored the complexities of her characters’ inner lives – ‘the ordinary moment in an ordinary day’. Her own life was tormented by manic depression and punctuated with threats of suicide, beginning at age 13 when her mother died. Before her success as a writer, she periodically succumbed to mental illness and once took an overdose of Veronal which nearly killed her. But then she began to write, and it’s possible to theorise that her severe bouts of ‘madness’– as the condition was called at the time – contributed to the writing style which would make her famous. In late March 1941, she wrote a note to her husband, took her walking stick and made her way to the river Ouse. Taking no chances this time, she pushed a large stone into her coat pocket, walked into the water and drowned leaving her friend, Rose Macauley, to remember her as follows; Dissolution into smoke, into clouds, into insubstantial pageants, into thin air; we are such stuff as dreams are made on; at times this seems the burden of her thought and of her words . . . (Macauley in Stape 1995: 181).

In his study of suicide and its artistic representations, Ron Brown said the 20th Century was a time when; “. . . suicide became art, and art suicide.” (Brown 2001: 195). The stigma imposed by the Christian Church was slowly being eroded away. In his 1942 essay on suicide The myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote; “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide [. . .] an act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as in a great work of art.” (Camus cited in Alvarez 1971: 87). In 1940 after the fall of France and a depressive crisis of his own, Camus contemplated the fundamental question of philosophy: ‘Is life worth living?’ – and concluded with a positive response, especially in regard to the life of an artist; . . . the death of the creator closes his experience and the book of his genius [. . .] Perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity with which it provides of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality. (O’ Brien 1955: 34).

But could Camus have anticipated the horrific ordeal of the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two which had already begun and would ‘close the book of genius’ for so many artists? Jerzy Kosinski, who committed suicide in 1991, was one of several writers who survived the Holocaust only to end their own lives later. The Russian–born French poet Paul Celan killed himself in 1970, and Italian–Jewish writer Primo Levi did so in 1987. The young Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski was spared the gas chambers in Auschwitz, but six years afterwards gassed himself at home. Their attempts to ‘describe the indescribable’ are moving testaments to their own and others’ courage – perhaps at the cost to the world of their ‘book of genius’.

One of Italy’s great post–war writers, Cesare Pavese postulated that; “No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.” (Pavese cited in Alvarez 1971: 69). Pavese was plagued by depression due to sexual problems and explored it extensively in his diary. In 1950, at the peak of his creative talents and public acclaim, the innermost thoughts Pavese recorded in his diary revealed the path to his final destination. A week later, Cesare Pavese went to an Italian newspaper office and lodged an obituary picture. He then checked into a hotel and swallowed sixteen packets of sleeping pills.

The English poet Sylvia Plath, in 1963, wrote; Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call. (Plath cited in Alvarez 1971: 3).

Sylvia Plath’s name is almost synonymous with the term ‘suicidal artist’, her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar recounts her near fatal attempt at the age of 19. A child prodigy, Plath began writing poetry when she was eight and a Fulbright Scholarship brought her to London where she later met and married the successful young poet Ted Hughes. They had two children, and while Hughes enjoyed the fame of the literary circuit, Plath continued to write her poems at home while taking care of the children. As her skill as a poet increased, the themes of depression, death and suicide were realised in her most powerful poems. Her marriage with Hughes broke up and Plath moved into a house once occupied by the poet W. B. Yeats. On a gloomy February morning in 1963, she blocked the door to her children’s room with towels and tape, then sealed herself in the kitchen, where she turned on the gas and waited to die. Only a few days earlier she had written in the poem Edge; The woman is perfected, Her Dead Body wears the smile of Accomplishment . . . (Plath cited in Alvarez 1971: 29–30).

Alvarez called it “ . . . a poem of great peace and resignation . . .” (Alvarez 1971: 30). He knew Plath personally and noted that “She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self–pity.” (Alvarez 1971: 16). If the above was true of Sylvia Plath, it could also apply to her friend Anne Sexton, another poet plagued by depression. It was Sexton’s therapist who suggested she write about her problems and soon the melancholic housewife became a poetry star. Her Pulitzer Prize winning collection was called Live or Die, and included the poem “Wanting to Die”; But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken his craft, his magic . . . Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say. And yet she waits for me, year after year . . . (Sexton 1966: 19).

“Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as in a great work of art.” Albert Camus’ words bear repeating. But questions remain: are artists more prone to suicide than the average person? As Marc Etkind explained in his 1977 book . . . Or Not to Be: a Collection of Suicide Notes, we expect artists to probe deeply, to cope with theirs and our darknesses. Their introspection and depression may simply be an occupational health risk, no different than the risk a building labourer faces on a high–rise construction site.

Since the proclamations of Augustinus of Hippo, the many variations of the act of suicide have been effectively forbidden, taboo, or as Reverend Piggott said ‘proscribed’ until possibly as late as the mid 20th Century. Playwrights such as Shakespeare were cautious about inflaming the Christian Church, and usually had the suicide framed as tragic, except in cases where the characters were pagan and not Christian. The notion of suicide being an evil act was shared by different Christian Churches, as Brown notes; “In most respects Catholic casuists and English and Scots Protestants were unanimous on one issue; suicide must be condemned.” (Brown 2001: 101).

The Romantics and then the Dadaists started to push this taboo aside. By the middle of the 20th Century suicide was seen as much less dangerous territory for the playwright. At this point, audiences had become progressively inured to the depiction of violence. As Brown has pointed out, suicide was no longer a supernatural act. News footage of war and death was being graphically depicted on a daily basis via the technologically advancing media of photography, film and television. Certainly in the post-modern era of today, the influence the Christian Church once had in depicting wilful self-murder as the gravest of all sins has weakened. As philosopher Michel Foucalt said in 1976; It is not surprising that suicide – once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise – became in the course of the 19th Century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die . . . (Hurley trans. of Foucalt 1980: 138-9).

Despite being banned for 40 years because Stalin said it was “empty and even harmful” (Freedman 1995: ix), Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide enjoyed an “ . . . English Erdmann boom in the early 1980’s.” (xiii). Unacceptable in previous eras, this play comically trivialises suicide and even thumbs its nose at the Christian Church when its suicidal protagonist cries “Lord Almighty! Oh, thou who dost give life! Give me the strength to kill myself. Can’t you see that I can’t do it myself.” (146).

Now in the increasingly secular West of the 21st Century, relatively few people (e.g. those in the religious and/or welfare professions, sociological realms of academia or the political and legal circles), still view suicide as an evil activity to be discouraged, an act of madness or solvable desperation/depression. The Christian Church is less powerful in interfering in the individual’s private right to die at his or her own hands and as this influence disappears so does the caution of playwrights to depict the act of suicide on stage. Our contemporary audiences are far more difficult to shock and fundamentalist Christian opposition to the graphic depiction and suggestion of nobility of suicide is in the minority, however it continues to exert some influence and may still be producing caution among some playwrights; it is far easier to have the suicide occur offstage than right in the audience’s face. Perhaps the only solution to this obstacle in graphically depicting Werther’s noble suicide on stage is the inclusion of a warning in the stageplay’s advertising and the programme to potential audience members that the play contains material some - particularly those with high levels of suicidal ideation, or for that matter, strong religious beliefs - may consider to be offensively suggestive, if not, indeed, fatal. For today’s writer wishing to remain faithful to this most prominent theme of Goethe’s novel, the act of suicide can and must be nobly and graphically depicted on the stage – as graphically as Goethe described. To bend to the history of the proscription of suicide, now waning, is to waver unfaithfully from the major leitmotif of Werther. Chapter Two. Obstacle two; the sociological concerns about imitative suicide.

As seen with the readers of Goethe’s novel Werther and De Vigney’s play Chatterton, even the fictitious representation of suicide appears to be contagious in real life; one person portrays an example and others respond in kind. This has led many professionals and academics to consider the mechanism whereby a suicide is imitated. Suicides are not always the result of unbearable pain, that is, acts of self–euthanasia, but are sometimes enacted to make a statement about themselves, their community or their beliefs. In the past people have seen suicides performed for the sake of honour and dignity as with the Stoics, religious martyrdom as with the early Christians, as a continuation of their life as artwork as with the Romantics and Dadaists or political statements or acts of terrorism as with modern–day suicide bombers. While an historical understanding of the influence the arts have had on suicide makes for fascinating study in itself, there is a relatively new artistic media that has probably changed every culture in the world forever, and that is the electronic mass media. Television, in particular, is virtually all pervasive and all influencing, and has been the subject of numerous sociological studies as to its effect on the behaviour of viewers.

Before consulting the relevant sociological studies on the mass media’s influence on imitative suicide, however, one must consider two divergent theories – one modern, the other ancient – with regard to the effect another’s violent behaviour may have on the observer or viewer, noting that suicide is a form of violence against oneself. The psychologist Albert Bandura claimed in 1977 that an individual’s acquisition of new patterns of behaviour occurs through the observation of one or more models. This ‘modelled’, (or imitative) behaviour can be learnt through observation of real and even fictional models (Bandura 1977: 191). Thus viewers of violent or self–harming behaviour would be more likely to engage in similar behaviour themselves, especially if they identify as being similar to the model or if they aspire to similarity to the model. On the other hand, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the experience of watching tragedy purges the spectator’s soul of strong emotions of a similar kind; what has come to be known as ‘The Catharsis Effect’. When the audience views passion and violence; “Such pictures of the imagination [. . .] arouse passions and by arousing them also lead them to the point of exhaustion.” (Edelstein 1966: 57). If this is true, watching suicidal behaviour would not make viewers more aggressive to themselves; on the contrary, since the vicarious experience of self–violence would remove or nullify the viewer’s similar tendencies, and the end result would be less aggressive behaviour by the viewer. These two theories on how an audience deals with the performance of violence are quite divergent. In reality, perhaps, as with most human behaviours, they actually represent two extremes on a continuum. In other words, a small number of viewers will imitate suicidal performances they witness, a small number of viewers will be purged of any suicidal tendencies and the majority of viewers will experience no change at all; they will remain detached and unaffected.

Sociology is a relatively new scientific discipline but the understanding and explanation of human behaviour is and always has been difficult and fraught with exceptions to any hypothesised rule. Indeed, the notions of ‘scientific method’, statistical analysis and replicability are relatively modern approaches to the quest for knowledge. However, the publication of seemingly scientific articles in academic journals can have far reaching ramifications. Laws can be enacted or repealed, censorship relaxed or strengthened and artistry encouraged or quashed, solely on the basis of a study that purports to reveal a ‘truth’ of human behaviour. While Aristotle may have been on to something constituting a human truth, Bandura at least had the currently more respectable approach of modern scientific research to back his theorising. In addition, Aristotle lived in a predominantly illiterate, superstitious and insulated world. The media of ancient times was the theatre and was not necessarily available to all who wanted to utilise it; it was not a mass media. The world of today is super–connected through various media. Vast numbers of people read print media, watch television and movies, listen to radio and ‘surf’ the Internet. A relatively few still even go to the theatre. Not only can we communicate more easily with other people anywhere in the world, we can meet them face to face more easily. Aristotle and his Peripatetics would have been quite visionary had they ever imagined the 21st Century ‘Global Village’.

Indeed, the electronic media of the 21st Century is the most powerful ever; it can sell us anything from religion to politics to washing powder, and maybe even . . . suicide. Marshall McLuhan said; All [mass] media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. (McLuhan 1967: 26).

But McLuhan’s sweeping generalisations fail to consider that most ancient and enduring of all media; theatre. This is perhaps because of the all–pervasive nature of print and electronic media compared to the relatively small audiences stageplays struggle to attract these days. McLuhan drives home his point; “Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.” (125). Television has become the ultimate media, and while the Globe theatre may have squeezed several hundred patrons in to witness the suicides of Antony, Cleopatra, Juliet, Ophelia, Othello, Romeo and others, today billions of people can be simultaneously ‘entertained’ – or perhaps fatally influenced – by a single act of human tragedy. Television news vacuums up the shocking, titillating and bizarre aspects of the frailties and foibles of men and women from all over the planet to sustain itself as an advertisement–securing attraction. And such constant activity makes for easy research pickings for the aspiring sociologist wanting to get published. Subsequently, there has been extensive and sometimes convincing research completed on news portrayals of actual suicides (both newsprint and television) and there is compelling evidence of a causal relationship between the reporting of imitative, ‘copycat’ or modelled suicide by the viewer (although some specialists put the figure down to as little as 5% of suicides being imitations of real–life suicide news reports (The Suicidology Web, un–numbered web page)). There has also been some research on the relationship between fictional television and film portrayals of suicide and the imitative behaviour of the viewer, and this may be worth considering as a relevant starting point. a) Australian research results. J. Pirkis and R. W. Blood completed Australian research in 1999 which backs up American findings that media reporting (that is, newspapers and TV news) of actual suicides has an imitative effect on the public (although they also criticise the American studies as; “. . . small in scale and/or suffer[ing] from various methodological problems.” (Pirkis and Blood 1999: 3)), they also conclude that there is little significant correlation between fictional suicides on film and TV on the viewer and they call for more Australian research on this particular issue. As they fail to address or even mention the effect theatre portrayals of suicide have on the viewer, the question remains as to what findings would be had if such research were to be carried out on viewers of theatrical portrayals of suicide.

A recent Australian newspaper article by M. Griffin in The Age suggests the portrayal of violence is actually helpful for children to determine the difference between real and fictional violence (and presumably real and fictional suicides). Griffin writes; “Kids need fantasies that are the opposite of reality to compensate for reality [. . .] to take control of their anxieties . . .” (Griffin 2002: 3). Griffins would probably agree that viewing violence and portrayals of suicide would be cathartic, while Pirkis and Blood may lean more toward supporting the notion of an imitative effect; there are certainly divided opinions being expressed in Australia. As with many areas of research, however, Australians need to look overseas for relevant studies. b) Foreign research results. Considerably more research has been completed overseas on the effect of the portrayal of suicide in television and films on viewers than in Australia, but many were, as Pirkis and Blood pointed out; “. . . small in scale and/or suffer[ing] from various methodological problems.” Likely to concur with Pirkis and Blood on the need for further research on the topic is A. L. Berman who in 1988 summarised overseas studies thus; Studies of imitative suicide by viewers of fictional depiction of suicide in television films have produced contradictory findings [. . .] To the extent that fictional presentations of suicide may serve as stimuli for imitative behaviour, the effect appears to depend on a complex interaction among characteristics of the stimulus, the observer of that stimulus and conditions of time and geography. (Berman 1988: 982). Nevertheless these findings should be mentioned and given due consideration. Some of the articles conclude that there is compelling evidence for the Werther Effect occurring amongst those exposed to fictional television depictions of suicide. One of the first was R. B. Ostroff et al, who wrote in ‘Adolescent suicides modelled after a television movie.’ (Letter) in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 142, 1985, 8; On Feb. 10, 1985, ABC television presented ‘Surviving’, a made–for–television movie concerning the successful suicides of an adolescent couple [and the effect] on their surviving parents. Before airing the movie, ABC broadcast a warning that children should not be allowed to view the show except in the company of their parents [and an educational programme was also broadcast according to Gould and Shaffer, 1986][. . .] Two days after the broadcast we [a hospital psychiatric emergency room] admitted an adolescent boy and girl who had taken drug overdoses in a suicide pact modelled after that depicted in the television show. (Ostroff et al 1985: 8).

While the letter–writers to this journal were writing not as researchers, it is disappointing they did not quote responses by the two attempted suicides as to whether they had actually seen the television show or how the letter–writers otherwise came to the conclusion that the attempted suicide pact was, indeed, modelled on the show.

Better researched articles followed, including M. S. Gould and D. Shaffer’s ‘The impact of suicide in television movies: Evidence of imitation.’ in The New England Journal of Medicine. 315,1986, 690–94. An extract from the abstract is sufficiently explanatory; We studied the variation in the numbers of suicides and attempted suicides by teenagers in the greater New York area two weeks before and two weeks after four fictional films were broadcast on television in the fall and winter of 1984 – 85 [. . .] we conclude that the results are consistent with the hypothesis that some teenage suicides are imitative. (Gould and Shaffer 1986: 690).

However, while statistically a significant increase, the actual number of suicide attempts in the two weeks prior to the shows airing was 14. It was 22 in the two weeks post airing; this in a city with “ . . . a population of approximately 3 million 10 – 19 year olds.” (693). And; “. . . with one exception, there is no way of knowing from the present review of hospital records whether the suicidal adolescents actually saw the movies.” (693). That one exception, presumably, was the 17 year old boy who said of the show Surviving in his diary; “I loved that film.” (Berman 1988: 986). What is important to note from that example, as Berman points out, is that the diary also included a long history of suicide ideation and the boy had attempted the same act of suicide at least twice before the airing of the film; in other words, the boy was probably going to continue to try to kill himself whether he saw the film or not. As Berman states; “ . . . there does not appear to be significant evidence that new suicides are created by these stimuli.” (986). Nevertheless, Gould and Shaffer conclude their article with the words; “ . . . the presumptive evidence suggests that fictional presentations of suicide may have a lethal effect.” (Gould and Shaffer 1986: 693). Their closing remarks not withstanding, one might be suspicious that this article is one of those Pirkis and Blood were referring to as; “ . . . small in scale and/or suffer[ing] from various methodological problems.” (Pirkis and Blood 1999: 3).

The debate was not confined to America. In England S. Platt further fuelled the controversy when he published ‘The aftermath of Angie’s overdose: is soap (opera) damaging to your health?’ in the British Medical Journal. 294, 1987, 954–57. Again the abstract provides sufficient information; In a study designed to evaluate the behavioural impact of a fictional parasuicide – namely, Angie’s overdose on the popular television soap opera ‘East Enders’ – information about cases of deliberate overdose treated in accident and emergency departments in 63 hospitals throughout Britain was obtained for the week after the televised overdose (the experimental period) and the week before the overdose (control period) [. . .] the increase in the cases of parasuicide treated by hospitals during the experimental period was not found to be significant [. . .] These findings do not lend support to the claim that there was a strong imitation effect after this televised parasuicide. (Platt 1987: 954).

David Phillips, the sociologist who first coined the term ‘The Werther Effect’ in 1974, then entered the argument when he and D. J. Paight published ‘The impact of televised movies about suicide: a replicative study’ in the New England Journal of Medicine. 317, 13, 1987, 809–11, which supported the notion of the Werther Effect occurring among viewers of fictional suicide. Although Phillips had published numerous convincing articles on imitative suicides after media reporting of actual suicides (see Phillips 1974), R. Kessler and H. Stipp (1989) successfully invalidated Phillips’ findings in this article, when they published ‘The impact of fictional television suicide stories on U.S. fatalities: a replication.’ in the American Journal of Sociology. 90, 1989, 151–167, and replicated the previous study by Phillips and Paight, questioning its validity. The following extract from the Kessler and Stipp abstract summarises; This paper calls attention to a serious mistake in Phillips’ data which invalidates his results [. . .] that fictional suicide stories on daytime television serials, ‘soap operas’, trigger subsequent real–life suicides and single–vehicle motor vehicle fatalities [. . .] in addition, [this] paper describes a more precise approach which produces no evidence linking soap opera suicide stories to subsequent real–life fatalities. (Kessler and Stipp 1989: 151).

The sociologists continued to disagree, however, with A. Schmidtke and H. Hafner publishing ‘The Werther effect after television films: new evidence for an old hypothesis.’ in the Psychological Medicine. 18, 1988, 665–76. This article is possibly the most reasoned and methodologically sound evidence of the Werther Effect resulting from watching fictional television portrayals of suicide. They stated; J.W. von Goethe’s novel ‘The sorrows of young Werther’ had, in its own authors words, ‘a great, even an immense impact’: men of society used to dress like Werther, and many seem to have felt, acted and died like him. For this reason Goethe’s novel was banned in many European states [. . .] In this study, a twice broadcast (1981, 1982) six episode weekly serial showing the railway suicide of a 19 year old male student [had] imitation effects [which] were most clearly observable in the groups whose age and sex were closest to those of the model. (Schmidtke and Hafner 1988: 665).

Despite the detractors, support for the Werther Effect occurring among viewers of media portrayals of suicide is considerable. As of 2001 there had been 71 published studies in English examining media influences (both fictional and non–fictional) on imitative suicide, according to Madelyn Gould, and of these 17 showed no support for imitation, 44 showed significant support for imitation and 10 were mixed or inconclusive (Gould 2001: 206). Not all the studies used the term Werther Effect and there was only one that searched for evidence of imitative suicide in theatre audiences (Jackson and Potkay 1974: 16–7). However, it must be noted that this particular study referred to audiences of E. Blake’s 1969 play Quiet Cries, which was commissioned by the Center for Studies of Suicide Prevention and sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health in America. It certainly was not a play that encouraged a view of suicide as noble. As to the existence or otherwise of the ‘Werther Effect’ in theatre and other non–mass media, Phillips is to be commended for calling for more research; We need more studies to learn which media effects are peculiar to a cultural group and which are relatively universal. In addition, the studies we have reviewed have almost always focused on stories in traditional newspapers and in national television programs; we need to learn about the effects of stories appearing in other media. (Phillips cited in Maris et al 1992: 513).

While sociological studies of the possibility of the Werther Effect occurring in contemporary theatre audiences are to be encouraged, this writer suspects that the effect is unlikely to be seen. Various factors have changed the contemporary audience’s reception of theatre. With the rise in naturalism since playwight Henrik Ibsen, director Konstantin Stanislavsky and arguably the pioneer of verisimilitude in the theatre, Victor Boss, audiences have become steadily more aware that, no matter how realistic the stage portrayal is, the event presented is not real. Bertolt Brecht’s pioneering work with the Alienation Effect, (Verfremdungseffekt) sometimes called Distanciation (Grimm in Mews 1997: 41), has led to audiences even further distancing themselves from empathising with characters on the stage. Television, on the other hand, achieves a ‘realness’, intimacy and immediacy that theatre is incapable of. With regard to Goethe’s novel, other distancing factors include the period setting, which must be retained if the work is considered to be of maximum faithfulness. 21st Century audiences, although they may look for the universal and timeless aspects of the human condition, nevertheless are distanced by 228 years from the actions of Werther. Hence this writer suspects that audience members in his stage translation of Werther will not succumb to the Werther Effect as they are effectively vaccinated against it by these distancing factors.

However, in Australia, the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing 1999 report on suicide and the media recommends that producers of all material that depict suicide include the telephone numbers for suicide prevention counselling services such as ‘Lifeline’ (Pirkis and Blood 1999). Such an addition to the programme for a theatrical production of Werther, like the warning referred to in addressing obstacle one, need have no bearing on the faithfulness of the stage adaptation to the original novel, whilst possibly nullifying concerns about the Werther Effect occurring amongst the audience of the production.

Finally, Goethe’s addition of his already mentioned cautionary quatrain to the second edition of Werther – advising audiences not to imitate Werther – can be projected onto the rear cyclorama as the audience enters and seats in the theatre before the stageplay commences. Despite being an act of unfaithfulness to the original – the first edition – by Goethe himself, and probably a token act of submission to the authorities who were banning his novel, the potential success this cautionary quatrain promises in overcoming concerns about imitative suicide presents a useful solution – if not the only solution – to the second obstacle to faithfully translating Werther to the stage. Chapter Three. This writer’s reading of Werther.

Before an attempt at translating Werther to the contemporary English–speaking Western stage, that is, an undertaking of the role of translator as dramaturge, this writer must clarify how he, personally, reads the ideas and themes of the novel. Only then can he hope to explain the equivalent hermeneutics of the ideas and their meanings as expressed in Goethe’s novel with those expressed in his planned stage translation. This writer has consulted not only the original German text of Goethe but also, as his German is not fluent, the 1917 translation by Thomas Carlyle and R. Dillon Boylan which, being in the public domain, is no longer protected by copyright and is freely available as an E–text on the Project Gutenberg website, thus also constituting an example of the novel being part of the much–maligned mass media and incorporating the novel’s relevance to obstacle two. In other words, the 1917 translation by Thomas Carlyle and R. Dillon Boylan has the potential to reach the most readers, and, indeed, as McLuhan would say, ‘massage’ the most readers. Additionally, as there is no definitive translation, this text is to be used as the English reference point for the reader and excerpts from this un–numbered website are referred to by the date of the letter they appear in.

At this stage, this writer feels obliged to defend his position as a non–fluent translator. That a playwright might adequately adapt a work for the stage from a language he/she is not fluent in was argued this year by Brian Logan who believes there is a “ . . . recent controversial eclipse of the academic– translator by the translator . . .” and quotes Philippe Le Moine, manager of England’s National Theatre Studio’s translation arm, Channels, which encourages up and coming British playwrights to try their hand at translating; Its popularity, he says, reflects the fact that “more and more people are interested in what’s happening outside Britain.” But its success – its alumni include Gregory Burke, David Greig and Mark Ravenhill – is predicated on the now established fact that translators don’t have to speak the original language. (Logan 2003: un–numbered webpage).

Logan goes onto describe this recent development with a specific example; [Christopher] Hampton, whose new translation of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ opens at the Playhouse in London this month, was first invited to “translate” a play (Uncle Vanya) when resident dramatist at the Royal Court in the early 1970s. “At that time,” he says, “it was rare for playwrights to do that. Instead, there were standard academic versions of classic plays, which people would perform. But now people think it’s better to get someone who can write dialogue, rather than someone who can speak the language.” (Ibid).

Logan went on to quote Ranjit Bolt; “The road,” he says, “is open to taking a certain amount of liberty.” His specialism is the work of Molière, whom he admires, but whose work wasn’t designed to entertain 21st–century British audiences. “My process is to familiarise myself with the original, then to depart from it,” he says. “You have to cut lines – and you can also add. If I think, ‘There’s a good laugh here and Molière hasn’t got it, ‘then I’ll put an extra couplet in.” In his 2002 National Theatre translation of Molière’s Tartuffe, for instance, Elmire said to the rapacious Tartuffe, “And now you’re rushing to the sweet/ before you’ve had the soup and meat”, a line that earned much laughter and praise in almost every review. “I’m true to Molière, but I don’t think that means I have to produce a text that an A–level French student could use as a crib,” Bolt concludes. “If you’re true to the letter, you straitjacket yourself. You wouldn’t get a good show.” (Ibid).

Pam Gemswhom who had just adapted Lorca’s “Yerma” for the Manchester Royal Exchange echoed these sentiments in the same webpage; “In the old days,” she says, “translators translated because they spoke Norwegian or Russian or whatever. And they burrowed away and tried to translate correctly. But of course what they produced was not drama. It was faithful and boring and C–R–A–P. It completely denied the notion that dramatic skills have any value. There was a terrible row back in the 80s when translators realised that dramatists were being asked to do versions of famous plays, and this meant they were losing their livelihoods.” (Ibid).

As long as the non-fluent translator retains the the ideas, themes and their meanings expressed in and essential to the original work and resists the urge to augment the original with new authorship (unlike Bolt’s treatment of Molière), faithfulness can still result.

The dramatic ideas, themes and meanings in the novel can firstly be understood by acknowledging the period the novel came from; Germany’s Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and stress’) period, roughly 1765 to 1785 – a period which was characterised by a violent emotional reaction against the intellectualism of the previous Aufklärung (‘Enlightenment’) period. Cool reason, self–control and good taste were overthrown in favour of emotion, individuality and freedom. This was the beginning of the age of Romanticism in Germany which spread across Eorope and Britain (Alvarez 1971: 171). There was great enthusiasm for nature and rebellion against political, religious and social authority and a cult of individual extremism reigned. The natural world was championed against artificial social conventions. Ganzheit (‘Totality of experience’) was the goal. With this regard, Werther should not be viewed as a pathetic creature but rather as a noble rebel who commits suicide due to his social isolation and his disdain for an authoritative society he cannot bear, as well as his obsessive respect for a woman, Lotte, whom he ultimately cannot possess.

In this writer’s reading the primary idea of the novel is that Werther’s suicide is noble. Werther represents, on one hand, the individual whose intelligence and artistic sensibilities isolate him from the rest of society. His appreciation of the beauty of nature generally precludes involvement with the townspeople or any other potential comrades in the story. For example, his disrespect for the Prince’s superficial artistic knowledge demonstrates his intolerance for anyone who does not share his own insight into art. Werther is unable to find a superior or even an equal to himself (apart from his geographically distant friend Wilhelm to whom he confides in his letters). Even Lotte, the woman he loves, is not capable of helping him with his obsessions and desires.

The class system, against which he rebels, plays the other role in Werther’s isolation. He finds himself placed indefinably somewhere between the lower and higher classes, making it impossible to feel comfortable in any social status. The lower classes suspect he is trying to patronise them, while his bitter sense of isolation is increased by his forced exit from a gathering of social elites during his residence with the ambassador. Confronted with the allegation that he has been shamed by the expulsion he quickly takes the moral high ground, claiming he was glad to leave them. He is, thus, opposed to every social class, from the aristocracy to the simple farmer. A clear example is illustrated in Werther’s description of Count C’s social gathering; God knows, I was thinking of nothing, when who should enter but the honourable Lady accompanied by her noble husband and their silly, scheming daughter, with her small waist and flat neck; and, with disdainful looks and a haughty air they passed me by. As I heartily detest the whole race, I determined upon going away; and only waited till the count had disengaged himself from their impertinent prattle, to take leave . . . (Carlyle and Boylan 2001: Letter dated March 15).

Apparently Werther resents anyone who participates in what he believes is the cycle of arrogance and superiority perpetuated by the aristocracy. Subsequently, he is not only removed from the Count’s social gathering, he is removed from his job, and returned to what will be, ultimately, a destructive relationship with Lotte and Albert. But Werther also disapproves, or rather, pities, the monotonous hard work of the lower and middle working classes. Their constant labour, not unlike the toil of the Ambassador, distracts them from the true splendour of nature and limits their intellectual growth; The human race is but a monotonous affair .Most of them labour the greater part of their time for mere subsistence; and the scanty portion of freedom which remains to them so troubles them that they use every exertion to get rid of it. Oh, the destiny of man! (Ibid: Letter dated May 17).

Werther considers his own life to be uniquely dedicated to the pursuit of romantic ideals such as love and beauty, and for him they provide the true meaning of life. As a result, Werther cannot possibly have a fulfilling relationship with the people around him, since he believes they are slaves to society and not passion. Doing nothing other than contemplating upon nature, sketching and reading Homer or Ossian would be a far greater career than farming or working in an office. Of course, Werther notes that mortal men cannot eat beauty or drink love, but he believes that the aristocracy exploit these natural limitations to maintain their disproportionate share of wealth. Their exploitation prevents mankind from ever pursuing meaningful abstractions and inhibits the work of geniuses as a result. As a believer in the importance of passions, Werther resents anyone who participates in this cycle. He argues with Albert because reason is Albert’s means of evading the true expression of his feelings, even from his wife Lotte. According to Albert, people who are open with their feelings or passionate are “. . . intoxicated . . .” (Ibid: Letter dated August 12). Aristocratic arrogance is an institutionalised form of pretence based on arbitrary titles and money, and is clearly the most vile and pathetic form of emotional protection to Werther. Aristocrats engage in pompous ceremony in an attempt to deny their feelings, but they also do so to display and preserve their power. The pretence, thus, has an added dimension of vanity and social injustice.

In addition, it may be that psychological difficulties along Freudian lines hinder Werther’s ability to interact with others. German academic B. Dumiche believes the novel constantly associates Werther’s love with motherly love (Dumiche 1995: 278-88) and Goethe possibly anticipated Freud’s theories. For example, Werther falls in love, enraptured, presumably at first sight, with Lotte when he sees her carrying out the maternal task of serving bread to her much younger brothers and sisters as she takes on the role of her own deceased mother. Werther’s own parental relationships are barely touched upon in the novel, leaving no answers to this Oedipal question. His written promise to Lotte that he will visit her mother in heaven after he commits suicide and his references to the innocence of children in his letters to Wilhelm are all possible indicators of a socially disruptive Oedipal dilemma, albeit a pure and religious sentiment. This is another important theme of Goethe’s novel which must be preserved in any faithful stage translation.

Due then to his high artistic sensibilities, indeterminate social status, psychological difficulties, and condemning social critique, Werther is effectively isolated from society. He has no one to love because, in his estimation, he has no equal in the entire world and knows no one who shares the same feelings. Without a loving relationship with a person who cares about him and suffers with him, Werther feels lost. He tries constantly to find means of resolving the solitude he cannot escape, including reading Homer, sketching, admiring nature and writing to Wilhelm. However, none of these activities can ever make him truly happy. So, when Werther can no longer find a companion in nature, he invents one in Lotte. But she shares to some extent Albert’s appreciation of reason and moderation since she chooses, in moderate rationale, to continue with their engagement to marry. In addition, she says that she appreciates Werther as a kind of confidante for her emotions. Ironically, Lotte finds consolation in Werther rather than the other way around. She needs someone to comfort her due to the loss of her mother, as he needs comforting for his loneliness.

Nevertheless, Werther does, in fact, fall in love with Lotte, despite their incompatibility. For a short while Werther feels very happy and assumes that his misplaced love is the answer for his loneliness and passion. Her steady character is the salve to his turbulent one. But when he finds out about Lotte’s conviction to marry Albert he decides he cannot accept living without her. Obsessed, Werther starts to fantasise about marrying Lotte in the life after death;“Charlotte," I said, as I took her hand in mine, and my eyes filled with tears, “we shall see each other again – here and hereafter we shall meet again.” (Carlyle and Boylan 2001: Letter dated September 10). His dream will realise itself only if he dies, therefore, he must kill himself. In the end, Werther comes to the conclusion that he must commit suicide in order to escape his pain and avoid hurting Lotte and Albert. Werther, thus, does not commit suicide in order to hurt anyone but because he cannot bear to continue living in his complete and friable solitude. This is an important facet of Werther’s motivation to suicide; there is none of the juvenile and petulant ‘They’ll be sorry when I’m gone’ psychology that would distance many readers. Although he is isolated from society, his is not exclusively an egoistic suicide. His self–murder is in fact a noble act of altruism in favour of Albert and Lotte’s marriage as much as a rebellion against society.

In preparation for the creation of the creative work for a contemporary audience, some hypothetical assumptions needed to be made about a post-modern reception of an English language version of Werther. To most people in contemporary Australia, analysing Werther is probably a simple task. Relying on the commonplace worldview of a pragmatic, technology–driven, and self–assured society, they might mistakenly look at Werther and see a young, deluded idealist who, because of personal weakness and immaturity, developed an obsession with a woman probably because he knew he could not have her. Gradually, as he realised the folly of his attraction, his fanciful emotions turned into a dangerous psychosis and a desire to hurt those who had rejected him through his suicide. The contemporary reader may incorrectly see a perverse mental disease underlying his wild yearnings. Even Brown’s reading of Werther as a flower-gatherer and his statement; “There is little doubt that the indexical tinder which sparked the idea of suicide as a result of feminine affectability was Goethe’s poem ‘Werther’” (Brown 2001: 140), are valid readings of the novel, but this description of Werther’s obsession as ‘feminine affectability’ is as un- sympathetic as Albert’s when he calls Werther’s passion ‘intoxication’. Unlike the Romantic contemporary readers of Goethe’s novel, this writer suspects dismissing Werther comes easily for most modern people. They may call him a tragic figure or a spurned lover but their disinterested sympathy denies the motivations at the heart of his obsession. Many probably read the story and immediately put it away because they feel Werther’s passion has no bearing on their lives (indeed, one of the aims of this stage adaptation is to overcome this absence of identification, if possible while still remaining faithful to the original. Certainly, at least some of the doomed contemporary readers of Goethe’s novel identified with the character of Werther as was witnessed by their imitative suicides).

The possible modern dismissal of Werther is noteworthy. They suppress him and his allegiance to passion yet have no idea that Goethe, ironically, has forced them to acknowledge the suppression of their own motivations. Werther is a rebel who becomes isolated from society because of his beliefs, and, as a result, must directly confront the loneliness from which most people hide. His failure to overcome his loneliness results in his obsession with Lotte and reveals the universal need for empathic love and mankind’s frequent denial of that need. Generally, people are terrified of revealing their most passionate feelings because they feel others will take advantage of them, so they nullify those feelings in acts of self– defence. In addition, they jealously chastise others who have the courage to open their souls to the world, causing a vicious cycle of bitterness and denial. This short novel, even though written almost 230 years ago, demonstrates that Werther’s critique of society is still relevant in today’s world. It does not matter whether one is an aristocrat, a lower class worker or a member of egalitarian contemporary Australia, perhaps everybody needs ‘empathic love’.

At the risk of exercising amateur ‘pop psychology’, this writer feels that to some extent, belonging to a group draws people away from their own emotions and towards the interests of the group. An over– examination of oneself can lead to loyalty towards the self rather than the group and the self may ultimately grow independent enough to leave the group entirely, or at least for relatively unfatal periods of short–lived social isolation. Werther, as a permanently isolated individual, has no real group identity and, consequently, cannot use it to withdraw from his emotions. No group exists to entice him away from his pain and he is left alone to confront his own emotions and passion. These inescapable passions begin to define his character. He is not a society lawyer like Albert, nor an Ambassador, or a Prince but only a man alone. With no means of defending himself or alleviating the passion he feels, Werther finds himself in the irreconcilable dilemma of resolving his terrible loneliness. Everyone must have some means of releasing the tensions caused by their passions. Directly experiencing rather than running away from passion is only the first step. Next, the person must share his passions with others such as his family or friends who are willing and capable of absorbing the tension his passion has created. Love could even be defined as a relationship between two persons in which one person has the sensitivity and the desire to help carry the burden of the other’s suffering. Yet, Werther has no one to love because, in his initial estimation, he has no equal in the entire world and knows no one who shares the same feelings; his existence is a perfect example of a self/other dichotomy. Empathic love, the kind Werther desperately needs, is rare because most people participate in either a vain defence or drudgery to avoid confronting their own feelings, much less the feelings of others. No matter how incompatible they are, Werther does fall in love with Lotte, and as long as he can continue to bask in this delusion, his melancholy no longer afflicts him. She is to me a sacred being. All passion is still in her presence: I cannot express my sensations when I am near her. I feel as if my soul beat in every nerve of my body. There is a melody which she plays on the piano with angelic skill, –– so simple is it, and yet so spiritual! It is her favourite air; and, when she plays the first note, all pain, care, and sorrow disappear from me in a moment. (Ibid: Letter dated July 16).

His temporary happiness suggests that love, even when contrived, is the cure for excessive passion and loneliness. Perhaps, one of the chief lessons of Werther is that solace for pain and passion only exists in the bond of love with another person and not nature, literature or art. Again, at the risk of sounding simplistic, if only Werther had joined a hiking club or some other coterie he could have been saved!

Another theme of Werther, while less prominent than the above, relates to the notion of Werther as a metaphorical Jesus Christ figure, which is implied by several incidents in the novel. The most vivid of these implications occurs when Werther first sees Charlotte. He sees her as a Mary–like mother figure breaking bread for her innocent flock of children and Werther later writes of wanting to kneel in front of her as if to a prophet (Letter dated July 6). Then towards the end he writes; “My God! my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ibid: Letter dated November 15), further illustrating this leitmotif. And of course he plans to commit suicide on Christ’s birthday; he shoots himself at midnight Christmas morning and dies at 12 noon.

Yet another analogy with Jesus Christ can be drawn. Werther’s absence of malignant anger towards Albert or Lotte is another redeeming feature of his personality that sets up his ultimate suicidal solution as one to be viewed as noble rather than pathetic or petulant. Werther only momentarily considers killing Albert and/or Lotte – but he has no lasting anger. Apart from the unabashed expression of his real emotions, Werther exercised true retenué. This is in contrast to Carol Tavris’ belief that; People everywhere get angry [. . .] It announces that someone is not behaving as (you think) she or he ought. This “assertion of an ought” is, according to psychologist Joseph de Rivera, the one common and essential feature of anger in all its incarnations. “Whenever we are angry,” he writes, “we somehow believe that we can influence the object of our anger.” [. . .][One can use] the enormous sympathy usually extended to scorned lovers[. . .] While anger serves our private uses, it also makes our social excuses. (Tavris in Brent and Lutz 1994: 91, 99).

Albert knows his wife and Werther love each other and he ‘ought’ to permit their love, yet pacifistic, un– angry Werther does not seek to destroy them, rather, like Jesus Christ forgiving his tormenters, he gives himself to God instead, and is perceived by this reader as all the more noble for it. This perhaps, was Werther’s intention; to make his suicide a theatrical literary statement. This possibility becomes more likely when one recalls Alvarez’s statement that at the height of Romanticism; “. . . life itself was lived as though it were fiction and suicide became a literary act.” (Alvarez 1971: 177). Werther regards himself as an innocent victim of human malevolence; he is suffering a martyrdom akin to the son of God, who when abandoned by his God, sacrifices himself (if not for mankind then for the future of Charlotte and Albert) that he may return to God. His suicide is for the sake of Charlotte and Albert as indicated by his words; One of us three must die: it shall be Werther. O beloved Charlotte! this heart, excited by rage and fury, has often conceived the horrid idea of murdering your husband -- you -- myself! (Carlyle and Boylan 2001: Letter dated 20th December).

Thus Werther is a goodly, ideal man possessing of a noble altruistic passion that brings about his inevitable destruction due to the essential imperfection of the world he, and we, live in.

In summary, the themes or ideas of the novel, as this writer receives them, are as follows;

1. Werther’s suicide is noble and stems from his; i) altruistic respect for the marriage of Albert and Lotte, ii) ‘Sturm and Drang’ attitude involving enthusiasm for nature and rebellion against authority, and, iii) disdain for the upper classes and those who lead lives not motivated by passion.

2. Werther respects the purity of motherly love and longs to rejoin Lotte, and indeed, Lotte’s mother, in the after–life.

3. Werther perceives himself as a Jesus Christ–like figure.

In this writer’s opinion, these are the ideas which must be preserved in the stage translation of Werther if the new work is to be arguably faithful to the original.

Chapter Four. Obstacle three; the absence of an authoritative English literary translation of Werther. a) Variations in translating Werther. Translation, which can be seen as the locus of modifications of an original with the potential for substantial repercussions, is above all a considered mediation between a uniniquely receptive creative author and an imagined reader in the target language. When the writer thinks he/she discerns the style of an author, with all its qualities and idiosyncrasies, it is rather the thoughts of the translator that the reader reads. This translator travelling between two linguistic realities occupies a dual task, both of which are invested with considerable authority; intermediary and first interpreter. Yet, as with the many versions of Werther, there can never be consensus as to the authoritative, archival translation. Any such claim to authority is contestable; it is illusion only. No translation, unless it is the only one in existence, can be considered to be the authoritative English translation.

Also arguing for the need for further translations in the preface to his 1970 translation of Werther Harry Steinhauer noted; . . . Homer or the authors of Genesis are relevant to us in the twentieth Century in the interpretation of life which they present, even though their way of presenting truth is no longer our way. Nor is it Goethe’s. That is why it is necessary to retranslate Homer, the Bible and Goethe repeatedly. And the translator is faced with the task of providing a version for the reader of today in our idiom and yet remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. (Steinhauer 1970: vii).

Modern German is a language closer to modern English than, for example, the ancient Greek of Homer, but it nevertheless presents challenges to the translator of literature aiming to be “ . . . faithful to the spirit of the original”. As a result, there are at least thirteen translations of Werther in Australian libraries, with considerable variations, each resulting, perhaps, from attempts to conform to the ‘idioms’ of their day. There is a continual tension and discordance between faithfulness to the 1774 original’s idioms, subsequent translations and those one might expect in a 2003 version. This even when no attempt is made to make the new translation sound contemporary or to culturally relocate it. Indeed, Werther has always been a young German male in the late 18th Century. Yet all translators have come up with quite differently worded translations. Even the titles differ; The Sorrows of Werter: a German Story (Malthus 1779), Werter and Charlotte; a German Story (Parsons 1786), The Sorrows of Werther (Carlyle circa 1850; Carlyle and Boylan 1917), The Sorrows of Werter / from the German of Goethe (Unknown 1892), The Sorrows of Young Werther (Lange 1949; Hutter 1962; Bogan 1971; Hulse 1989; Carlyle and Boylan 2001), The Sufferings of Young Werther (Morgan 1957; Steinhauer 1970) and The Sorrows of Young Werter (Ticknor 1966). One website authored by the anonymous ‘The Lone Wolf [or] The One Wolf’ sub–titles his/her The Sorrows of Young Werther as; “ . . . also translated as ‘The Inequities of Young Werther.’ ” (The Lone Wolf [or] The One Wolf, un–numbered webpage).

The earliest English translation in Australian libraries is a reprint of a 1779 text, usually attributed to Daniel Malthus, which itself was translated not from German but from French and is, therefore from the start, not necessarily expected to be a perfectly faithful interpretation of Goethe’s meaning, being a translation of another translation. In the preface to Malthus’ translation Jonathan Wordsworth seemed to disagree with Steinhauer’s argument for further translations; Malthus and his French model have felt free to make small changes (usually in matters concerned with religion), but essentially ‘The sorrows of Werter’ is the novel as completed when Goethe was twenty four [. . .] It has the flexibility to cope with shifts of mood and extremes of feeling. At the same time it has a gravitas that is appropriate, and a sense of period that no modern version (however it might score in point of accuracy) can ever achieve. (Wordsworth in Malthus, 1991: ii, vi).

Indeed, Malthus has deviated no more radically than other translators of Werther, and the argument can be made that his work, reflecting as it does the heightened language of the day, written in the day, is more accurate than the language of any 20th or 21st Century translator. However, analysis reveals it’s authority to be questionable.

In assessing the accuracy or faithfulness of any translation of any work surely the first stumbling block is the title. Without an epithet that indicates immediately the work of the original author the translator’s faithfulness is likely to be disputed by the reader at first glance. Malthus’ translation of the title therefore immediately raises doubts. Apart from implying parochially that it is a uniquely German story (the novel is not about we Christian British but rather, ‘(an)other’; the Germans), the other concern is that Malthus has changed the protagonist’s name. Central to the phrase ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ is the name of the person whose ‘Leiden’ are being referred to. Now, although Werther a not uncommon German name it would not be at all familiar to an English speaking audience. Nor would the variants other translators have used such as ‘Verter’ or ‘Werter’, which were probably chosen to either impress upon the English reader the correct pronunciation (however, ‘Vair-tair’ would possibly have achieved this particular objective more effectively) or as an act of euphonic subservience to the English tongue. The problem of this Teutonic moniker is further exacerbated by the lack of any contemporary English name that is phonetically even similar. The name ‘Werther’ means ‘the worthy one’ in German (coming from ‘Werte’ meaning “worth” (Dahl 1998: 263)) but there exists no English Christian name with this aetiology. Therefore, to deviate from the name ‘Werther’ in translating the title of this novel as Malthus and others have done is unjustifiable while still maintaining that a faithful translation has been made. The person who experiences the ‘Leiden’ of Goethe’s title is called Werther, not Werter, Verter or even Vair-tair.

As to the other words in the title; “Die” means ‘the’ (plural), “des” means ‘of’ and “jungen” means ‘young’ almost without argument. “Leiden” is more difficult to translate and has meant ‘sorrows’ and ‘sufferings’ to various translators, although not all dictionaries use the word ‘sorrow’ in their definition. The Random House German – English, English – German Dictionary defines ‘Leiden’ as “suffering, disease” (Dahl 1998: 142) and this writer suspects the use of the word ‘sorrows’ has been considered traditional by translators ever since Malthus and has not been interrogated since.

Regardless of this writer’s polemic against the various palimpsestic translations of Goethe’s novel, ultimately no authoritative translation of the title Die Leiden des jungen Werthers exists and the thirteen or more published translators were justified in choosing according to personal predilection. Hence this writer decided to use the following sobriquet for no other reasons than because it combines the two most common divergences in translation of the word “Leiden”; ‘sorrows’ and ‘sufferings’ (and because the alliteration is attractive to this writer and is also an appropriate ‘idiom’ for the reader of today, as Wordsworth recommends), and the fact that it is to be a stageplay and not a novel. Thus, the proposed title of this writer’s conception is The Sorrows and Suffering of Young Werther; a Stageplay. (See Appendix A).

As indicated by the above discourse on the title, the challenge of translating perfectly and indisputably a foreign work of poetry or even poetic psychological prose such as Werther into English is truly insurmountable. A ‘word for word’ translation will inevitably lose the subtle yet important elements of rhythm, metre and form not to mention other literary devices such as rhyme, alliteration, pun, onomatopoeia or colloquialism. Michael Hulse, the 1989 translator of Werther for Penguin books said in a 2000 Melbourne interview on Radio National interview; Goethe builds his fiction on the flaws in Werther’s character as solidly as Shakespeare built Hamlet on the flaws in his hero’s, but there’s nothing in the book that could point the way forward to a poet writing today. (Hulse in Australian Broadcasting Corporation un–numbered webpage).

As there is “ . . . nothing in the book that could point the way forward to a poet writing today”, this writer, whilst not claiming to be a poet, felt somewhat free to have a go. To do so with confidence, however, was onerous, due to the distracting variety in translations by others. For example, the very first colloquy in the novel is between Werther and a young servant girl fetching water at the fountain. The German is; “ ‘Soll ich Ihr helfen, Jungfer?’ sagte ich. – sie ward rot über und über – ‘O nein, Herr!’ sagte sie – ‘Ohne Umstäende’ “ (Goethe 2000: Letter dated 15 May). This has been variously translated as; 1) “ ‘Shall I help you, my dear?’ I said. ‘Oh! No! Sir!’, she answered, colouring. ‘Make no ceremony,’ said I . . .” (Malthus 1991: 9) 2) “ ‘Shall I help you, pretty lass’ said I. She blushed deeply. ‘Oh, Sir!’ she exclaimed. ‘No ceremony!’ I replied.” (Carlyle and Boylan 2002: Letter dated May 15) 3) “ ‘May I assist the young maid?’ said I. – She blushed from top to toe. – ‘Oh no, Sir!’ said she. – ‘No standing on ceremony,’ said I.” (Hulse 1989: 28– 9) 4) “ ‘Shall I help you, Miss?’ I said – Her face turned a deep red. – ‘Oh no, Sir,’ she said. – ‘It’s a trifle.’ ” (Steinhauer 1970: 4), and, 5) “ ‘Shall I help you?’ I said. She blushed deeply. ‘Oh, no, Sir.’ She exclaimed. ‘Come now! No ceremony!’ I replied.” (Lange 1949: 8). Apparently, even the least poetic of Goethe’s words can be interpreted differently. Goethe’s word “Jungfer” has been translated as “my dear” by Malthus, “pretty lass” by Carlyle and Boylan, “young maid” by Hulse and “Miss” by Steinhauer, yet the term is avoided entirely by Lange! Indeed, Lange’s caution is understandable when one reads the Random House definition of ‘jungfer’; “Maid, spinster, virgin.” (Dahl 1998: 121). Malthus interpreted the word “Jungfer” as a greeting of affection, Carlyle and Boylan saw its meaning of ‘prettiness’, Hulse stressed his reading of ‘youth’ and Steinhauser understood it to be ‘marital status’ while neither of them, Lange not withstanding, share this writer’s reading of ‘sexual purity or virginity’, as influenced by the Random House elucidation. It is not unlikely that Werther values chastity and in the idyllic, unspoiled surroundings of the fountain would recoil from a sight incongruous with that environment. Rather, he rushes to help this ‘Jungfer’, who blushes like a virgin at his efforts. However, it would also be unlikely that Werther would be so gauche as to cry ‘Shall I help you, virgin?’ Thus this writer’s translated reading of ‘pure lady’ is arrived at by consideration of the previous attempts at translation, the Random House dictionary’s definition, and his own preference, and the above passage was translated as follows; 6) “ ‘May I assist you, pure lady?’ I said. – She blushed deeply all over. ‘Oh, no, Sir!’ She exclaimed. ‘Come, come! Let’s not make a ceremony of it!’ I replied.” Whilst there are many variations in translation of even this short passage, it must be readily conceded neither Malthus, Carlyle and Boylan, Hulse, Dahl, Lange, Steinhauer nor this translator have the authoritative translation. As Sharon Sloan, in her translation of Wilhelm von Humboldt, adduced; No word in one language is completely equivalent to a word in another, if one disregards those expressions that designate purely physical objects [. . .] It can even be argued that the more a translation strives toward fidelity, the more it ultimately deviates from the original, for in attempting to imitate refined nuances and avoid simple generalities it can, in fact, only provide new and different nuances. (Sloan 1992: 55–6). This writer recognises the risk of creating ‘new nuances’ in his desire to write an accurate and faithful translation. Having said this, however, it must still be queried why some translators have chosen to excise parts of Goethe’s title. When Malthus called his translation The Sorrows of Werter he was effectively declaring the adjective “jungen” either irrelevant, unnecessary or inadvisable. Such an excision arguably takes the new work into a realm other than faithful translation as the new author has made a judgement on the original title’s value and created augmented authorship, whereby new meaning is added to the intention of the original author. While the motivation behind the translation of the name ‘Werther’ to ‘Werter’ can be understood in terms of it possibly improving the target English–speaking audience’s understanding of the correct pronunciation of a foreign name, the removal of the concept of Werther being young changes the entire meaning of the title. In other words, the translator has augmented the work of the author with meaning of his or her own. This alteration cannot be justified if the translator purports to being faithful to the original. Perhaps recognising this, the editor of the Project Gutenberg E–text, Nathan H. Doyle, changed the title of the 1917 translation by Carlyle and Boylan, The Sorrows of Werther, by restoration of the adjective ‘young’ in 2001.

The potential for augmented authorship perhaps explains why copyright is granted to the translator of a new work and why some bibliographies list references by alphabetical order of the name of the translator and not that of the translated author. Fortunately, the more versions of a translation there are, the more likely a diligent reader is to come to an accurate and thorough understanding of the original. Indeed, a prospective translator could be commended for studying other interpretations of a work before or concurrent to his/her own attempt. An intriguing result of this approach would be a translation from someone with poor ability in the source language. In the case of Werther, with its variety of interpretations, an original and arguably valid translation could be cobbled together from randomly selected extracts of the numerous translations already published, as perhaps playwrights Logan has referred to have done, although one would always be running the risk of plagiarism with this approach. Not all commentators welcome additional translations of an original classic. Jean–Luc Nancy, in his vehement if not abrasive post– modernistic critique of translations in general wrote; A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo perfect delicate works of signification. (Raffaoul and Recco, trans. of Nancy 1997: 67).

That Werther is a perfectly delicate work of significance is indisputable, and that there have been so many mimetic re–writings is almost laughable, but the alternative; a world where literary works exist in their original native tongue alone, is a multi–lingual world unimaginably deprived of foreign culture. Nancy’s sophism has not deterred this writer. Without the hopefully invisible workings of translators, not only would only the Germans know Goethe, but only the French would know Nancy. Others complained of the modern audience becoming distanced from the original; For Kevin Halliwell, the cult of “from a literal translation” seems as skewed against faithful translation as the academics’ monopoly was against drama. Halliwell, a professional translator in the European parliament, won the Gate Theatre’s translation award for his version of Witness, a Swedish play about the art of translation. “When people work from a literal translation,” he says, “what they tend to do is take a straightforward translation, then work on that until it’s been turned into something else.” Audiences, he argues, are being insulated from the original. (Logan un–numbered webpage).

Unfortunately, like Nancy, Halliwell offers no alternatives to the problem of audiences being distanced, or “ . . . insulated from the original . . .”, due to playwrights augmenting the original with new authorship, or turning it “ . . . into something else.”

In this ongoing controversy about the dramatisation of translated foreign texts, it is germane to recall Pam Gemswhom’s warning of the translator’s risk of producing “C–R–A–P”, and also, to acknowledge the multitude of translation theories. Unfortunately, to explore this “ . . . Translation Muddle . . .”, as G. M. Hyde called it in 1993, would exhaust the purposes of this thesis, whereas to acknowledge and utilise Goethe’s very own translation theory might be preferable. b) Goethe’s model of translation. Goethe himself wrote translations and described a three–tiered model where the first tier or ‘epoch’ is desirable because; . . . prose totally cancels all peculiarities of any kind of poetic art, and since prose itself pulls poetic enthusiasm down to a common water–level, it does the greatest service in the beginning . . . (Lefevere 1977: 35).

This first level Goethe called ‘prosaic’. It acquaints the reader with the culture of the foreign country within the sensibilities of his/her own land. This approach to translation is best when the translator desires the reader to identify most easily with the world of the original author. Then comes the ‘parodisic’; In most cases men of wit feel called to this kind of trade [. . .] Just as the French adapt foreign words to their pronunciation, just so do they treat feelings, thoughts, even objects: for every foreign fruit they demand a counterfeit grown in their own soil. (36).

The parodisic translation appropriates the foreign and forces it to fit with the familiar, frequently resulting in a humorous parody. The third kind is called ‘interlineal’ in which; . . . the aim is to make the original identical with the translation, so that one would not be valued instead of the other, but in the other’s stead [. . .] the translator who attaches himself closely to his original more or less abandons the originality of his nation, and so a third comes into existence, and the taste of the multitude must first be shaped towards it. (36). The uniqueness of his/her own tongue is abandoned in the translator’s ‘interlineal’ attempt to completely identify with the original and considerable effort must be expended by the masses in comprehending the work. Goethe went on to suggest that a cycle be completed by the foreign reader; first the prosaic translation, then the parodisic, then the almost identical to the original interlineal, and then finally, if possible, back to the original. Of course, if the English reader’s language skills permit returning to the original one must question the need for a translation at all – such a linguistically perfect world that would no doubt make Jean–Luc Nancy happy. But of course, to deny the works of Goethe and other foreign texts until the reader has acquired fluency in the source tongue is impractical, and even the interlineal attempt to identify completely with the style of the original author is doomed to mere approximation. For, as academic Roland Barthes points out in his explanation for the ethereal mystery of an author’s style; In speech, everything is held forth, meant for immediate consumption, and words, silences and their common mobility are launched towards a meaning superseded: it is a transfer leaving no trace and brooking no delay. Style, on the other hand, has only a vertical dimension, it plunges into the closed recollection of the person and experiences its opacity from a certain experience of matter, style is never anything but metaphor, that is, equivalence of the author’s intention and carnal structure [. . .] so that style is always a secret . . . (Lavers and Smith, trans. of Barthes 1984: 13).

The ‘secret’ of the original author’s style can ultimately only be guessed at by the prospective translator. With translation being such an inexact procedure one must also query the locus of the dividing line between translation and adaptation. Frequently, translation of a phrase, a sentence and even a single word is simply impossible and the newly created English version is at best an approximation of the original. The exact equal does not exist and instead an adaptation must be settled for. In translating Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung, (‘Offending the Audience’), Michael Roloff admits that in his quest for aural authenticity – the sound of the German text – he had occasionally crossed what he considered to be the dividing line between translation and adaptation; In translating the invective at the end of ‘Offending the Audience’, I translated the principle according to which they [the invectives] are arranged – that is, I sought to create new acoustic patterns in English – rather than translate each epithet literally, which would only have resulted in completely discordant patterns. In nearly every other respect these are translations and not adaptations. (Roloff 1971: 6).

After literary translation and stage translation (or adaptation) the secondary work is only a representation of the first – it masquerades, sometimes convincingly sometimes decidedly fake. It is in constant peril of being labelled fraudulent. Indeed, the challenge of producing a convincingly non–fake stage translation is central to this translator’s entire thesis. In the course of his Master of Creative Arts the writing of Goethe is to be translated/adapted more than once; from 1774 period German to a prosaic contemporary English and from novel to a play–script. Eventually it may be translated further; from playscript to performance, from performance to mise en scène, from mise en scène to audience reception and perhaps, even, from audience’s reception to audience’s level of suicide ideation, from audience’s level of suicide ideation to questionnaire responses and finally from questionnaire responses to analysis of responses to consideration of an hypothesis regarding The Werther Effect in theatre audiences. All of these stages must survive imputations of fraud, especially the translation from mise en scène to audience, despite it being usually beyond the influence of the author. If the director of the production, for example, deviates from the graphic portrayal of Werther’s suicide for fear of imitative suicides among the audience, he/she is not only betraying Goethe but the faithful adapter as well. As controversial as it may be, the faithful production of Werther on stage should ideally agitate the audience to consider suicide. Halliwell aimed “ . . . to produce the same effect on the English–speaking audience as the play would have had on its native audience.” (Logan un–numbered webpage), words that were reflecting those of academic David Ball when he earlier said; A translation should strive to produce, for the audience or reader in the target language, the equivalent of the effect produced by the text upon the audience or reader in the source language. (Ball un–numbered webpage).

The effect upon the native audience in the source language was, in some cases, imitative suicide and as undisireable as this may be it would certainly indicate that a faithful translation has occurred., if, in deference to Goethe’s own model of translation, the contemporary translator writes a prosaic version.

Chapter Five; Obstacle four; the difficulties in adapting an epistolary, psychological novel to the stage.

Having translated the novel from German into English the next decisions to be made concerned the selection of the relevant prose conveying the ideas of the original novel, the structuring of the play and, most importantly, how to depict on stage what are often lengthy inner thoughts and psychological musings written down by Werther in his letters. This epistolary form of novel writing flourished chiefly between the 1740s and the end of the 18th Century. A prime example was Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les liaisons dangereuses, which was later translated and adapted to the English language stage in 1985 by Christopher Hampton (the same Christopher Hampton that Logan applauded for translating and adapting for the stage foreign works he was not fluent in) and then made into a major motion picture of the same name by Stephen Frears in 1988. Like Hampton, it must be repeated that this writer has no intention of placing Werther in a 21st Century setting; his intention is to accept Wordsworth’s challenge to maintain a ‘sense of period’. Whilst undoubtedly a successful and popular stageplay – it was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company – it can be argued that whilst Hampton remained faithful to the themes and ideas of the Laclos novel, he nevertheless failed to retain the fundamentally epistolary nature of the original nature of Laclos novel. According to academic Constance Amy Naulls, Laclos’ novel consisted of at least 178 written letters and as many replies (Naulls 1994: 217) but his play is adapted into a seamless work of narration; the letters and their replies constituting a starting point for theatrical dialogue between characters. As such, the stageplay varies from the form of the original quite unfaithfully

The development from literary translation to stage translation, whilst seemingly logical, is constantly challenging. Yet there is a possibility for organic development from one to the other. Theatre academic Egon Tornquist acknowledged the continuum that exists from translation to adaptation; . . . every production of a play is a transformation. There are faithful and less faithful transformations – just as there are literal and free translations. When a translation / transformation involves significant voluntary deviations from the source text, I shall, in conformance with common usage, resort to the term adaptation. (Tornquist 1991: 8).

Another academic, Patrice Pavis, described how an ‘hourglass’ of thirteen filters operates when the attempt is made to transfer a theatrical work from the source culture to the target culture, these being; 1. cultural modelling, 2. artistic modelling, 3. perspective of the adapters, 4. work of adaptation, 5. preparatory work by actors, 6. choice of a theatrical form, 7. theatrical representation of the culture, 8. reception–adapters, 9. readability, 10a. artistic modelling, 10b. sociological and anthropological modelling, 10c. cultural modelling, 11. given and anticipated consequences. (Pavis 1992: 4).

Of course, this study is only concerned with ‘filters’ 1. to 4., these constituting the playscript or what Pavis calls the “ . . . codified, readable artefact . . . ” (3). The perspective of the adapter refers to the adapter’s personal reception of the work’s meaning and the relative importance of that meaning/s, and in the case of this writer’s thesis Goethe’s themes and meanings have already been detailed in Chapter Three. The other filters operate independently of this playscript and are enacted by forces such as the actors, the director, the performance space, the audience and the social milieu in which the play is presented. The confrontation between text and performance – the mise en scène – of the stage translation of Werther is beyond the influence of this writer at this stage and, as Pavis goes on to point out; Mise en scène does not have to be faithful to a dramatic text [. . .] it is clearly impossible to foresee, for a given text, the complete range of potential mise en scène. (26, 38).

With regard to Pavis’ filters 3. and 4., Hampton apparently regarded the epistolary form of the Laclos novel as little more than a source of contemptuous humour in his adaptation. Of course, as Naulls points out, Les liaisons dangereuses - unlike Werther - lends itself readily to the stage; Whilst it can be argued that an epistolary novel reports action and that drama is action it can also be suggested that the format of such a novel is not unlike a work written for the theatre. (Naulls 1994: 10).

The novel’s subject of letterwriting was an effective cue for theatrical jokes, double entendre and sight gags. For example, Hampton wrote; AZOLAN: Anyway, apparently she keeps her letters in her pockets.

VALMONT: I wish I knew how to pick pockets. Why don’t our parents ever teach us anything useful.? (Hampton 19).

And yet again Hampton augments for the audience; VALMONT: Now, do you have pen, ink and writing paper? (EMILIE is puzzled. After a while she answers) EMILIE: Yes , over there in the bureau. Why? (Instead of answering, VALMONT gets out of bed, crosses the room, finds what he’s looking for in the bureau and brings it back to the bed. He puts down the pen and inkwell carefully, twitches back the bedclothes, spreads a sheet of paper across the small of EMILIE’S back, arranges himself comfortably and reaches for the pen.)

VALMONT: Now, don’t move. (EMILIE is still puzzled. But she submits graciously enough. VALMONT begins to write.) ‘My dear Madame de Tourvel . . . I have just come . . . to my desk . . .’ (EMILIE understands now. She turns her head to smile up at him.) Don’t move, I said. (He resumes.) [ . . .] The position in which I find myself as I write has made me more than ever aware of the power of love [ . . .] excuse me for a moment while I take steps to calm what I can only describe as a mounting excitement. (The lights fade to black . . .) (Hampton 1985: 28–9).

Hampton’s desire was not to render a faithful adaptation of Lorca’s uniquely epistolary novel, emphasising as it really should a succession of admittedly sexy and humorous letters, but rather he has apparently placed a higher priority on the narrative theatricality of the production than the epistolary reality of the original. Fundamental to the themes and essential ideas of this and Goethe’s novel is the concept of the novel being a collection of letters, thus to ignore this obstacle to faithful stage translation is to commit infidelity to its source. It is interesting to note that Hampton’s title to his stageplay is ‘Les liaisons dangereuses by Christopher Hampton’, not ‘Les liaisons dangereuses as adapted from Lorca’s novel Les liaisons dangereuses.’ The same liberties are impossible with Werther as it is far more concerned with the psychology of a sole letter writer, Werther, than the many letter writers of Les liaisons dangereuses. The two are very different epistolary novels.

It was useful at this point to refer to another descriptive, yet simpler model of adaptation than Pavis’s such as that proposed by cinema academic Geoffrey Wagner in 1975 called ‘The three modes of adaptation’ (Wagner 1975: 223); a model for analysis and description of screen adaptations of novels to cinema which can also be extrapolated to interpret and evaluate stageplay adaptations of novels. a) Wagner’s model of adaptation. Wagner described three modes of adaptation; i)Transposition. This type of adaptation is the most faithful rendition of the original in cinematic form (or theatrical form) possible. The adapters simply view the end result as an illustration of the book. Such an approach is exemplified by films that have an opening shot of the original book being opened by an unidentified reader, lingering effectively on the title–page, before turning the page to reveal an illustration which ‘comes to life’ as the action of the movie commences. ii) Commentary. “This is where an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect. It could also be called a re–emphasis or re–structure.” (226). Locations, chronological periods and even endings may be changed and the adapter manages to create something quite different, yet nevertheless similar to the original document. Hampton’s stageplay would fit most comfortably in this category. iii) Analogy. Wagner almost considers changes in chronological period, say from Elizabethan times to modern day, as an example of analogous adaptation, but concludes; For our purposes here analogy must represent a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art [. . .][it] cannot be indicted as a violation of a literary original since the director [or translator] has not attempted (or has only minimally attempted) to reproduce the original. (227).

In the analogous adaptation the new work of art is substantially different and may not even be initially understood by an audience as to have anything to do with its source. An analogous adaptation should certainly not beggar confusion with more faithful adaptations by retaining the original’s title, as Hampton did with his stage translation of Laclos’ novel.. b) Previous stage adaptations of Werther. As already mentioned, Werther is not a novel that lends itself easily to transpositional adaptation to either the stage or the screen, consisting as it does of a series of psychological letters from Werther to his only confidante, Wilhelm, who rarely responds, it seems, to Werther’s letters. Further complicating the unusual epistolary format of this work is the introduction towards the end of the voice of the ‘Editor to the Reader’ of the letters who writes briefly of the actions around and after Werther’s suicide. Most importantly, it must be acknowledged that a certain historical reticence by many theatre adapters and producers to depict on stage the allegedly sinful act of suicide has prevented fidelity in stage versions of Werther. The primary idea of Goethe’s novel is that Werther’s suicide is noble and this idea has not been preserved in the previous attempts to adapt it to the stage. These plays, in excising the essential idea of the novel, have not been faithful to the original work. The few serious attempts at stage adaptation of the novel in the late eighteenth century; . . . were melodramas in which the Werther elements are subordinated to theatrical devices guaranteed to maintain an audience’s attention. Failure to understand the full meaning of their inspiration, unwillingness to displease their audience, and their own mediocrity explain the failure of these writers. The untheatrical nature of the Werther theme only meant that they had failed before they started. (Atkins 1949: 202).

It is the obstacles provided by the “. . . untheatrical nature of the Werther theme . . .” this thesis seeks to overcome. In the late 18th Century there were three attempts at overcoming these obstacles which could at best be categorised as commentary according to Wagner’s model, since they shied away from depicting the suicide on stage; they re–emphasised the meaning of Goethe’s novel. By doing so they effectively negated any glorification of suicide Goethe’s novel was noted and almost certainly intended for and the playwrights acted as not only adapters but as censors. These unfaithful adaptations include;

i) A French version by either Johann Rudolf Sinner or Vinzenz Bernhard Tscharner in 1775 entitled Les Malheurs de l’amour, which was noteworthy in that it preceded any French translation of the novel. Unlike Goethe, the disputed author was; “ . . . sufficiently conservative not to introduce the suicide as a stage effect.” (171). Little has been written about this work, but apparently the playwright quite consciously avoided the charge of condoning suicide. ii) A ‘tragicomedy’ or Commedia dell’arte by the Italian playwright Simeone Sografi in 1794 entitled Verter, in which; Verter’s servant Ambrogio accordingly has some of the best lines: he can grumble that his master’s moans keep him from enjoying a good night’s sleep, or make an observation such as, ‘He couldn’t have delivered that speech better if he had known it by heart!’ (173).

In the tradition of comedy, Verter’s attempts at suicide are frustrated, and the play ends without the revelation, let alone depiction, of Verter’s suicide. Sografe’s play, while having a superior theatrical plot, did not have the plot of Goethe’s novel. Nevertheless, it was apparently very successful in its day. iii) An English tragedy in blank verse by Frederick Reynolds in 1796 entitled Werter; a Tragedy in Three Acts, which was performed at the Theatre–Royal, Coventry and even successfully toured to America, but was apparently received with mixed opinions as to its theatrical significance. Reynolds took considerable liberties in his adaptation of Goethe’s novel; inventing friends for Charlotte (Laura) and Werter (Sebastian) as well as naming the servant of Goethe’s novel as one Leuthrop who is given a substantially greater role than simply the carrier of Albert’s pistols to Werther. The action of the play takes place over one night and day when Albert returns to Charlotte after a three year absence during which Charlotte has become quite convinced of her love for Werther but agonises over her betrothal to Albert. Interestingly, while Werter kills himself on stage, Reynolds has him do it with poison not a pistol, and Werther dies in Charlotte’s arms. In addition, Reynolds warned the audience, conventionally – but not with the cautionary quatrain of Goethe’s second edition – of the sin of suicide; For if one crime is blacker than the rest, Below more punished, more abhorr’d above; ‘Tis self destruction; ‘tis by heaven decreed. So high an outrage! That at mercy’s throne, The suicide alone is shut from Grace. (Reynolds cited in Atkins 1949: 189).

Then in 1892 came another work – which could also be considered a commentary adaptation – when Jules Massenet premiered his hugely popular opera Werther in Vienna (translated by H. Grossman and W. Lyman in 1961). That it has not sparked the controversy the novel has is probably due to one major factor; Massenet too changed the ending. Werther’s suicide occurs off stage between Acts 111 and 1V and Lotte, upon finding him dying, cradles him in her arms and declares her love for him. This, as was Reynold’s version, provided a satisfyingly happy but inventive denouement compared to that of Goethe’s novel.

The above adaptations deviated from the original sufficiently to have little claim to being faithful transpositional adaptations. In addition Atkins mentions several minor parodies and burlesques – that is, analogous adaptations – based on Werther which were performed throughout Europe not long after its release; some portrayed Werther as a working–class commoner while others showed him failing at his suicide attempt because he was too drunk to properly hold a pistol to his head. There have also been several remarkable works inspired by the novel. Involving modernisation and cultural relocation of Werther, Charlotte and Albert, they are sometimes described as ‘re–imaginings’ but these works would also be categorised as analogous adaptations according to Wagner’s model. They include the 1774 film entitled Die neuen Leiden des jungen Werthers (‘The new sorrows of young Werther’) directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz, which is more an attempt to reflect the relationship between East and West Germans in the 1970s than to faithfully translate the 18th Century literary work to the screen. Likewise, the 1992 film entitled Le jeune Werther directed by Jacques Doillon involves a group of schoolchildren trying to come to terms with a classmate’s suicide, not a young man caught in a doomed love triangle. Then came the 1999 stageplay by Sarah Kane entitled 4.48 Psychosis which is set in a mental hospital and heavily peppered with confronting and provocative language, sex scenes, death and despair; it involves the suicide of a female inpatient. Other analogous rather than transpositional or commentary adaptations include Bo Bergstrom’s 2002 film Werther in which the unrequited love is between Werther and Albert, and Hebbel–Theater Berlin’s 2002 stageplay Total Masala Slammer Heartbreak no. 5 which Melbourne newspaper The Age chronicled as; . . . based on Goethe’s tale of unrequited love [. . .] it contains music, dance and images and is described as kitsch Bollywood soap opera meets German tragedy. Is it dance, theatre or opera? Who knows? (Gill 2002: 3).

Director Michael Laub said of this adaptation; “ . . . it’s going to be full of trash and Bollywood and as much sex and violence as I can squeeze in.” Surprisingly, he also said “I am working with it in a fragmentary way, but I wanted to be faithful to the poetry [of Goethe] too.” (Laub cited in Bunbury un– numbered webpage). If he was attempting to be faithful to Goethe Laub failed with his ad hoc stage translation. One viewer recollects; The suicide is enacted in a bored cliched way by a handsome young man with golden locks in a frilly white shirt with a pop gun. It's comic. He falls. The performance moves on. Total absence of drama and emotion. That's what annoyed many in the audience and amused others. (Varney, private correspondence 2003).

Despite augmenting his interpretation with as much trash as he could squeeze in, Laub has nevertheless recognised the primary theme of Goethe’s novel and the importance of depicting Werther’s suicide onstage rather than sheepishly hiding it away from the audience, although the trivialisation of the act, through the use of the pop gun, detracts from the gravity of the scene.

In summary, the above stage and screenplays have suffered considerably during the act of filtration through Pavis’ hourglass, as the adapter’s perspective was that the nobility of suicide was not an idea or theme central to the meaning of Werther. c) Case studies of relevant stage and screenplays. There has never been a faithful English stage translation of Werther, due primarily to obstacle one presented by caution over the proscription of the theme of nobility in suicide. The caution exercised by playwrights in portraying on stage this fundamental theme of the novel is surprising when one considers other plays with similar themes such as many of the works by Shakespeare. Commenting on the paucity of research on the Werther Effect and Shakespearean theatre, L. Kirkland asked in 1999; Much of that [newspaper] literature treats two aspects – assisted suicide and imitative suicide – as if they had only become problems in the late 20th Century. With the advent of television and other sensationalistic media these issues have become more apparent, but the extent to which they have become more real is uncertain [. . .] if it does occur now, however, why would it not have occurred in Elizabethan England? (Kirkland 1999: 665).

Opera is another artform that has avoided controversy over its glamorisation of suicide, and John Hofsess questioned this in 1992; When political moralists worry about the effects of culture upon the great unwashed, it is invariably pop culture which concerns them. [But] If anyone’s cultural output can ‘influence’ human behaviour it is likely to be the powerful and original works of art created by men and women of genius [. . .] Consider the world of opera [. . .] In the world of opera, suicide is the first choice of death on stage by every leading soprano and tenor. Glorious suicide, noble suicide [. . .] Is this a dagger I see before me or a pretext for a great aria [. . .] suicide is not only not condemned but is positively condoned [. . .] Parents are hereby warned not to let sensitive and impressionable teenagers anywhere near Tosca or Werther. (Hofsess 1992: 5).

The reason Goethe’s work has been so selectively criticised for its nobility in suicide theme while others have been tolerated is unclear but is probably due to the obviously Christian status of Werther compared to the pagan status of suiciders such as Shakespeare’s Romans and Egyptians. The heroic and grand suicides of opera and Shakespeare are frequently identified as being the ‘other’ because they were pagan. Indeed, this may be the answer to Kirkland’s question regarding the apparent absence of the Werther Effect in Elizabethan England. One thing most sociologists agree on is that the Werther Effect is stronger when the audience identifies with or aspires to be like the model. The Romans and Egyptians were, in the eyes of most Elizabethan Englishmen, exotic ‘Others’. Today, audiences may also distance themselves from a stage translation of Werther and therefore be unlikely victims of the Werther Effect because the characters of the faithful stageplay are from 18th Century Germany. Thus, this writer remains adamant that any softening of the ‘untheatrical’ theme of noble suicide in Werther would be an unnecessary act of unfaithfulness. To hide the suicide offstage, for example, might prevent controversy, but such an augmentation of Goethe’s meaning would make the stage adaptation a commentary adaptation, according to Wagner’s model, and must therefore be avoided if faithfulness is the adapter’s goal.

The nobility in suicide theme is not the only factor contributing to the novel’s ‘untheatricality’. The other obstacles to successful stage adaptation of Werther include the epistolary and psychological nature of the novel. With this in mind, it would be useful to examine a case study of a similarly foreign language epistolary novel that has been successfully and faithfully adapted into an English stageplay. If entries in a diary can be considered similar to a collection of letters then one such comparable work is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank in 1947 (which was translated into English by B. M. Mooyaart in 1995). First published posthumously and edited by her father, then translated from the Dutch in 1952, the novel is a collection of diary entries by a young Jewish girl during the holocaust of World War 2. It was later adapted into a Tony award winning stageplay titled The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956 by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Then in 1959 it was adapted into a screenplay and produced as a movie of the same name (produced and directed by George Stevens). This case of adaptation from firstly, a foreign language to English; secondly from epistolary form to stageplay and thirdly; from stageplay to screenplay, represents an appropriate point of comparison for a similar exercise in adaptation with Werther.

The productions show Anne actually doing the writing at times but both the stageplay and the screenplay solve the quandary of converting the entries in a diary into a diapason of flowing narrative by actually depicting most of the events the diarist writes of. The creators of both the stageplay and the screenplay chose not to depict these events, however, from the diarist’s first person point of view – through Anne Frank’s eyes, so to speak – but rather as if from the perspective of an omnipresent, invisible third party (note, the stageplay and the screenplay were written by the same people). The first person point of view is a device rarely used in cinema and is virtually impossible in theatre, but is an important device for the novel. In the novel, as Roland Barthes points out, it engenders an intimacy and authenticity which is impossible to achieve in the theatre; The third person in the Novel [. . .] there is no art which does not point to its own mask [. . .] like the narrative tense it signifies and carries through the action of the Novel [it] supplies its consumers with the security born of a credible fabrication which is yet constantly held up as false. Less ambiguous, the ‘I’ (first person) is thereby less typical of the Novel [. . .] it is the sign of an intelligible pact between society and the author [. . .] it is a human act which connects creation to History or to existence. (Lavers and Smith trans. of Barthes 1984: 30–1).

Another very important theatrical and cinematic device used in both the stageplay and the screenplay is the ‘flashback’ – a return in the story to an earlier time. Anne’s father returns to the factory after the war and discovers the diary. He picks it up and starts reading. In the theatre, the lights go down and a scene change to that of the wartime attic occurs. It is conventional in movies for a flashback to often be accompanied by an optical effect such as loss of focus, wave–like distortion or a swirling rotation of the picture. Audiences have been conditioned to understand that this cinematic device indicates the momentary changing psychological timeframe of the storyteller. The third device used to overcome the challenges of adapting an epistolary document to a visual medium is the voice–over, which both the stageplay and the screenplay use. Primarily a modern technique, relying as it does on electronic amplification, it is not seen in stageplays older than around one hundred years. It has, however, become a very popular device in cinema, and is often used to express the character’s unspoken thoughts whereas an onstage soliloquy would have been the only device fulfilling this purpose in older theatre productions. In the example of the movie of The Diary of Anne Frank, the voice–over is of the diarist reading aloud her written entries. In the stageplay, Anne’s father’s initial reading of the diary out loud is overlapped by the actress reading the same entry concurrent to the flashback/scene change. It is further introduced about nine times, particularly where the stageplay indicates a scene change. In the movie the voice–over of Anne also has a slight echo to it, further emphasising the flashback nature and also suggesting the ultimate fate of Anne. The final words of the movie are a repeat of an earlier voice–over; “In spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart.”, sounding more than a little like an echoing voice from the grave. These were apparently effective devices as the film garnered three Academy Awards. Considering the critical success, then, of the movie and the stageplay, and their use in the lesser known Egon Gunther film, this writer felt justified in applying these cinematic and theatrical devices to The Sorrows and Suffering of Young Werther; a Stageplay.

Before utilising the devices from the movie Werther and the stageplay and movie The Diary of Anne Frank, this writer had to decide which parts of Goethe’s novel were to be represented on stage and which were to be excluded. Whereas a literary translation cannot make excisions of the original without the allegation of augmented authorship, judicious edits must inevitably be made in stage adaptations of most written works for the sake of practicality; some scenes are impossible, or at least prohibitively costly to reproduce in a theatre. Likewise efforts must be made to not burden the audience with boring tracts of speech – a good play is more than recitations, it must involve action. For this reason the scene involving the lengthy discussion between Werther and Albert about intoxicated suicides had to be condensed as was the prolix declamation by Werther of his translation of Ossian. Unfortunately, as has been deliberated apropos the title in Chapter Four, when excising parts of the original the adapter automatically jeopardises his/her work with a possible betrayal of the author’s intent. A perfectly faithful stage translation would spare nothing, but the pragmatics of stagecraft and audience taste must also be deferred to if the new work is to ‘work’. However, Werther does describe many significant events and actions apart from his psychological musings and his letters include quotes of his and other’s dialogue vital to the plot. A good starting point for this writer was to make a compilation of all the actual dialogue in the novel and present it in playscript form. Thus, the previously discussed translation; “‘May I assist you, pure lady?’ I said. – She blushed deeply. ‘Oh, no, Sir!’ She exclaimed. ‘Come, come! Let’s not make a ceremony of it!’ I replied.” was written for performance as;

WERTHER: May I assist you, pure lady?

SERVANT GIRL: (Blushing deeply all over) Oh, no, Sir!

WERTHER: Come, come! Let’s not make a ceremony of it! (WERTHER helps her with filling and lifting the pitcher) (Appendix A: 72)

Some dialogue is not presented as actual quotes but rather referred to in the past tense, for example, the above passage concludes with “Sie dankte und stieg hinauf.” Such references were easily converted to present tense dialogue for the stageplay character. Thus, “Sie dankte und stieg hinauf.”, or ‘She thanked me.’, simply became;

SERVANT GIRL: Thank you, Sir. (She exits. The lights go down)

Other decisions were made regarding certain German references with limited contemporary English popularity. For example, at the ball after the storm has passed, Werther and Charlotte are watching the sky through the window and she exclaims “Klopstock!” Werther kisses her hand and looks into her eyes with admiration. That one word can summarise their shared appreciation for the poetry and beauty of nature indicates, to Werther at least, that they are similar souls. Gottleib Friedrich Klopstock was a pre– eminent poet of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period but is little known in contemporary English speaking Australia. The poignancy of this moment between Werther and Charlotte would surely be destroyed if the single word exchanged between them was followed by an explanation of who Klopstock was. Fortunately an opportunity was presented earlier when, on the way to the ball, Goethe omits the name of a book Charlotte had been reading but did not enjoy. Werther asks for its title and Goethe has her reply blanked out. A footnote in the novel explains Goethe’s desire to remove any cause for complaint from, presumably, the lawyers representing the publishers of the maligned book, as he also justifies his use of blanks or initials for certain character’s names. While lending an air of authenticity to the novel, these blanks also provide a chance to strengthen the narrative. Thus Charlotte can reply to Werther’s question about the book’s title as follows;

CHARLOTTE: Well, it was not the wonderfully epic poetry of Klopstock!

Werther is suitably impressed at her affinity for the poet and at this, their first meeting, the seeds for his excessive love are sown. This addition of explanatory dialogue does not constitute an augmentation of the original authorship, as the meaning has not been changed, rather it has been clarified.

Despite the ‘untheatricality’ of the Werther theme, there was, in 1976, an attempt at a relatively faithful transpositional adaptation of the novel into film with Egon Gunther’s Werther. This film did not remove or hide the idea of Werther’s suicide being noble and was also studied to yield solutions to the other obstacles to staging Werther. Yet to be released in English it remains possibly the closest to a transpositional adaptation on either stage or screen due to its use of the unadulterated and original, albeit condensed, German language of Goethe, the costumes and scenery of 18th Century Germany and most importantly; an unflinching depiction of Werther’s suicide, although it does make some changes to fit with the atheist, nationalist and communist East German regime of the 1970’s. The Jesus Christ theme was made to appear satirical; in an early scene Werther views craftsmen building a large crucifix with disdain. In the ballroom scene when Werther is evicted by the aristocrats, Gunther has him humiliated by a pompous old war hero who pulls his head to his chest and savagely brutalises Werther’s face on his war medals. Werther leaves the place with a bloodied face and the theme of rebellion against authority and the upper classes is reinforced in an almost surreal manner.

Most notable from an adapter’s point of view to solving the obstacle of the novel’s epistolary form was the decision to frame the story with an introductory scene showing Wilhelm bemoaning “Warum haben wir Deutschen eigentlich keine National literatur? Die Englander haben eine, Franzosen, die Italieener . . .” (‘Why have we German people no National literature? The English have one, the French, the Italian . . .’ – this writer’s translation). This is also a thinly veiled statement of admiration for Germany’s father of modern literature, Werther’s creator Goethe. Wilhelm then collects all the letters received from his dead acquaintance, suggesting to the audience that the movie is based on a yet to be published epistolary novel. Serving a similar function as the ‘Editor to the Reader’ in the novel, Wilhelm establishes the need to publish the letters as a novel and thus inaugurate what is now regarded as the pinnacle of German national literature.

Wilhelm continues; “Aber wehe, ihr lasst die Leute nicht auch weinen. Die haben Werther so schnell verscharrt ach seinem Tode . . . Warum hat er sich erschossen?” (‘The people have to cry over his death but he was far too quickly buried . . . Why did he kill himself?’). Thus the audience is told from the very beginning that Werther has killed himself, and that while difficult to understand his motivations it was not an act deserving of over hasty burial, shame and forgetting. The suggestion of nobility rather than shame in suicide is made from the start before there is a flashback from Wilhelm to the depiction of the events written about in the early letters of Werther. This is certainly not the case with the novel, rather the theme of glorious suicide is only gradually developed (unless one quite reasonably interprets the opening line; “Wie froh bin ich, dass ich weg bin!” (‘How happy am I, that I am gone!’) to be the voice of the now dead Werther). Then, at the end of the movie, like a second bookend, there is a flash–forward, after Werther’s suicide, to Wilhelm’s present and, inventively, the viewer is shown another overly emotional Werther–like figure – a “spinner” (‘crackpot’) – tending preciously to a pot–plant in his workplace and, like Werther, unbending to the exigencies of the pedantic offices of the ruling classes. Again this is an example of augmented authorship by the screenwriters, but one which nevertheless supports one of the themes of the novel.

The writers of the Gunther film also helped with a solution to the problem of the epistolary nature of the novel with the inclusion of several scenes showing Werther writing letters with a goose–feather quill. This is a transpositional device similar to the cinematic cliché of vision shot over the shoulder of an anonymous reader turning the pages of the book from which the movie has been adapted. On stage, this device can be replicated by the use of an amplified sound system reproducing the sound of a quill scratching words onto parchment accompanied by a video projection onto a rear cyclorama of a hand writing in a calligraphic manner. This image can be made to blend and merge into a montage of images of the subjects Werther starts talking about, that is; the German countryside and nature, which he so loves. The device of a video projection on the rear cyclorama can be used to illustrate other scenes of the novel which would be difficult to reproduce on the stage, for example, the group of young children playing or the elegant couples dancing at the ball. These devices can help the stage translation achieve a faithful transposition of the novel. d) Symbolic signs for the secondary and tertiary themes of Werther. Although the “ . . . codified, readable artefact . . .” that Pavis refers to may be subject to unfaithful treatment in the mise en scène, the playscript can exercise more control over the performance than merely providing the dialogue. A playscript can dictate sound, lighting, set and stage directions, effectively reinforcing the ideas of the original work. Thus the secondary theme of the purity of Charlotte’s motherly love and the tertiary theme of Werther’s perceived role as Jesus Christ, which are only subtly inferred by the prose of the novel, can be converted into readable signs in performance by the instructions. The playscript’s stage directions will ensure that gentle organ music and lighting is used to indicate a saintly glow – suggesting a sense of divine approval – about the characters. Stage directions can also ensuere the actor playing Werther stands slowly and adopts a pose like Jesus on the crucifix before he shoots himself. Bathing in light the characters of Charlotte when she is feeding the children and Werther when he suicides is an example of what Charles S. Peirce called a ‘symbol’. In 1931 Peirce devised a trichotomy of the ways we perceive and communicate by the use of sign systems; i) The Icon. This is a sign that represents its object through similitude with it. “We lose the consciousness that it is not the thing.” (Peirce cited in Elam 1988: 21) For example, a figurative painting or a photograph is a metonymic icon of its object. ii) The Index. This is a sign that represents its object by pointing to or being connected to it. The sign refers to the object it denotes “ . . . by virtue of being really affected by that object.” (21–22) For example, smoke is an index of fire. iii) The Symbol. This is a sign that represents its object through agreed convention, even though there is no similarity between object and sign. There is “ . . . a law, usually an association of ideas.” (22) For example, the dove is a symbol of peace. The gentle light and soft religious music is a symbol of divinity and Werther’s crucifix pose is a symbol of Jesus Christ. Of course, all speech is in fact a linguistic symbolic sign.

Indeed, everything on the stage is a synecdochic sign for something else. The mise en scène is a performance text consisting of a complex set of encoded signs which the audience must decode. It is itself created after the decoding by the directors, actors and technicians of the playscript; a kind of pre–text for the performance text. The codified, readable artefact of this writer’s adaptation of Werther is therefore a text of semiotic signs denoting Goethe’s novel. If the symbols used in it, such as sound and stage lighting representing some kind of divine approval of the actions of Charlotte and Werther, are agreed by those decoding them, i.e. the audience, to have this meaning, then theatrical signs faithful to the source novel will have been created. e) A summary of this writer’s The Sorrows and Suffering of Young Werther; a Stageplay. After all the suitable quoted dialogue in the novel had been collected and translated, those sections of the letters that lent themselves towards presentation as voice overs or monologues by Werther and which explain his situation and motivations were also included. The programme and publicity are to include a warning about the content of the stageplay and contact details for suicide prevention services.

Fundamental to this stageplay is the use of video projection onto a large cyclorama at the rear of the performance area. Rear projection is to be preferred to prevent lights appearing on the actors or their shadows appearing on the cyclorama. The cyclorama should show Goethe’s cautionary quatrain as the audience is seated. Taking cues from the Diary of Anne Frank film and stageplay, the opening line of The Sorrows and Suffering of Young Werther; a Stageplay; ‘How happy I am to be gone’, has directions for it to be delivered as an echoing voice–over in the dark. Scene changes should be quick and indicated by the dimming of lighting in one area and the brightening of the lighting in another area of the performance space. Stage scenery should be limited and supplemented by that of the video on the cyclorama with actors appearing to perform and interact with the actors in the video. A video projection on a rear cyclorama can show vision over the shoulder of Werther writing with a goose–quill as the voice over narrates from the letters. A flashback in time is indicated by a swirling distortion of the vision that gradually takes the shape of a long montage of the German countryside that Werther is describing. The video then fades to black as the characters on stage begin to speak the dialogue quoted in the novel. When Charlotte is feeding her brothers and sisters bread and butter, the stage directions can instruct sound and lighting to bathe her in a saintly religious glow, as it does to Werther when he rises to adopt a crucifix pose just before his suicide. The moment when Werther pulls the trigger the lights are extinguished and a blood red explosion of light erupt onto the cyclorama. The section presented by the ‘Editor to the Reader’ at the end of the novel is a voice–over monologue as The Sorrows and Suffering of Young Werther; a Stageplay finishes and the video projection again fades to black. Conclusion.

Analysis of the obstacles to faithful stage translation of Werther and exploration of potential solutions to these problems suggest the answer to this thesis’ research question ‘Can this writer create a faithful stage translation of Werther?’ is affirmative. The obstacles presented to earlier Christian writers attempting to stage this novel were fourfold; two theme related (society’s proscription of the theme of noble suicide and concern about imitative suicides) and two form related (the absence of an authoritative English literary translation and the epistolary, psychological nature of the novel). Obstacle one is almost extinct; in the post-modern era playwrights need not be cautious about depicting suicide because the Church no longer influences public opinion as it did for centuries. Sociologists’ concerns about imitative suicide are placated by warnings and contact details for suicide counselling sevices in the stageplay’s publicity, programme and on the screen of the theatre’s cyclorama thus overcoming obstacle two. Lack of fluency in the source language by the writer need not be an obstacle when one acknowledges there is no perfect English literary translation and that there is support for dramatically superior stage translations rather than study cribs for language students. Obstacle four – the difficulties in translating the epistolary, psychological novel to the stage – was overcome by case studies of relevant stage and screenplays.

If Werther is to be translated into English and then translated a second time for the stage and still survive potential criticisms of unfaithfulness, it must – according to this writer’s understanding of the meaning of ‘faithfulness’ – preserve the ideas and themes expressed in the original novel. The literature suggest that to be a faithful stage translation it should also, according to Goethe’s model, be a prosaic translation if it is to be easily understood by the masses, and, according to Wagner’s model it should endeavour to be a transpositional adaptation. Despite the ambiguity of the concept of faithfulness in literary and stage translation, and, indeed, post–modern negativity such as Halliwell’s and Nancy’s toward the quest for it, the term is ingrained in criticism of most forms of translated and/or adapted literature. Ultimately, the true test of faithfulness is performance, when the playscript undergoes its final and most important (at least in terms of the reception by the audience) translation, or as Pavis would say, filtration, that being the mise en scène; the translation generated by the directors, theatre technicians and actors.

Several factors now exist which contribute to this writer’s scepticism about the likelihood of the Werther Effect occurring among audience members of his stageplay; the distancing effect of theatre in the post-modern age, the inurement of contemporary audiences to depictions of violence, and the reduced influence of the Christian Church on attitudes to suicide. It must be noted by the reader that no attempt was made to overcome the first obstacle to faithfulness; the problem of anticipated audience’s historically ingrained fear and loathing of the depiction of the proscribed act of suicide on stage - as other stage translators have done - apart from warning audiences about the potentially disturbing content. To remove - or even lessen the impact of - the portrayal of the act of suicide would be an augmentation of Goethe’s original and primary theme of nobility in suicide.

This writer’s doubts aside, all care must be seriously taken lest The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther; a Stageplay be so faithful to the original Goethe novel that a wave of Werther Effect suicides by audience members actually does result. Alternatively, were there to be a re-awakening of the ‘cult of Werther’ due to this stageplay, it could well provide convincing proof of this prosaic, transpositional and unaugmented stage translation’s maximised faithfulness to the novel. Bibliography / Works cited.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Starrs, David Bruno

Title: Yours faithfully; Werther for the English language stage

Date: 2003

Citation: Starrs, D. B. (2003). Yours faithfully; Werther for the English language stage. Masters Research thesis, Faculty of Arts, School of Creative Arts, The University of Melbourne.

Publication Status: Unpublished

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/39211

File Description: Yours faithfully; Werther for the English language stage

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