BOOKS
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BreezeojSlImmer,
and other recent prize-winning American plays may not be
quite the same as the sentimenral melodrama demanded by Tieck's audi–
ence, but the resemblances are close enough that no American director will
have to update Tieck's satiric comments on audience taste. The shills who
protest Tieck's fairy tale dramatization do so out of a preference for tame,
sentimental, Kotzebue-style melodrama; for well-made, instantly com–
prehensible stories, the old "family stories-abductions-country
cousins-things like that," as one of them puts it. While audiences rarely
disrupt plays these days, if they did, they would probably uphold the
popular prejudices that Tieck recorded in
Puss In Boots.
Reasonable fac–
similies of these prejudices, complaints such as:
We've paid, we constitute the public, so we demand our own standard
of good taste, and no foolery!
*
Only nature should ever be presented on the stage.
·x·
I
can't preceive any rational illusion in that .
.*
And no love interest either!
*
What improbabilities!
can still be found in
New York Times
play reviews, let alone in theater
lobbies during intermission.
As Gerald Gillespie, editor and translator of this welcome
Puss In Boots
edition, notes in his introduction to the play, Tieck's drama "constituted an
attack mainly against the theater public itself." That similar attacks against
the German theater public were written by Grabbe in
Satire , Irony, jest, and
Deeper Significance
(1822) and by Buchner in
Danton 's Death (1835),
suggests at least one common denominator among these three important
playwrights, all of whose plays were unproduced or underproduced during
their lifetimes, and all of whom relatively neglected in America.
In a satirical attack upon prevalent if unwritten rules of drama circa
1820, Grabbe's Baron Mushcliff declared that in writing a play for the
audiences of his day
The plot, in particular, you must so fashion as
to
be charmingly flat
and trivial-otherwise not every near-sighted sheepshead would be
able
to
take it in. You must not expect the smallest understanding or
spirit of inquiry from the reader.
This complaint in
jest , Satire, Irony , and Deeper Significance
is not too
