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PARTISAN REVIEW
tradition is Ludwig Tieck's
Pms In Boots,
first published in 1797, and
unavailable in an English translation between 1914 and 1974. In 1974, as
part of its Edinburgh Bilingual series, the University ofTexas Press released
l
a translation of Tieck's comedy, and there remains no excuse to keep this
"
playoff American stages. Particularly now, when audiences display the
same passivity at live theater performances that they exhibit in front of
celluloid projections and cathode ray tubes, it seems appropriate to revive
Puss In Boots.
With lines already written by Tieck for spectators, and with
stage directions for fruit-throwing and foots tamping , the play offers ordi-
narily speechless audience members hints about what they can say or do
•
during a performance, or at least what might have been said and done by
aud iences during Tieck's lifetime, before fourth wall realism and silence
prevailed in theaters .
The spectators for whom Tieck wrote lines in
Puss In Boots
were not the
smartest ones around; why else would they need lines written in advance?
They lacked spontaneity and imagination, which was part of Tieck's
argument against the prevailing aesthetic prejudices of his day and ours–
prejudices which favor imitation of " nature ," now called realism - and
keep the improbabilities of fantasy, surrealism, and abstract art out of
theater. Renouncing the age-old Aristotelian premise that drama should
imitate probable and in that sense natural actions, Tieck's comedy intro-
duces its protesting audience to such improbable characters as a talking ,
man-sized cat named Hinze, a King of Utopia who exchanges his daughter
for rabbits, a clown who speaks as the voice of the scenery, and an apologetic
playwright (surely few of them exist in actuality) who keeps coming on
stage to placate footstamping spectators.
The footstamping shills for whom Tieck wrote lines keep disrupting a
whimsical, parodic fairy tale derived from the writings of Charles Perrault .
While initially improbable, the tale, in which Hinze the Cat secures for his
young human master Gottlieb an invitation to marry the Princess of
Utopia, becomes more surreal and farcically anarchistic as it is interrupted
by protests. The spectacle of planted spectators, a man claiming to be the
author, and a huge cat discussing the play's merits with one another
combines the hallucinogenic fantasies of R. Crumb's
Fritz the Cat
comics
with the best theatrical high jinks of Pi randello. In fact, it is quite possible
that while studying in Germany, Pirandello read Tieck's play and later
imitated it in
Six Characters
and
Each In His Own Way.
Tieck not only anticipated Pirandello's illusion-breaking techniques
of self-conscious dialogue, but he also ridiculed audience aesthetic prefer–
ences that are still flourishing in twentieth-century America. The senti–
mental melodrama of Albee's
Seascape ,
Pinero's
Short Eyes,
Leslie Lee's
First
