Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand. Zwote Auflage. Frankfurt, Eichenbergische Erben, 1774. Bound with Stella. Ein Schauspiel für Liebende. Berlin, Mylius, 1776.
Contemporary red boards with faded spine gilt (good antiquarian condition, occasional light spotting; both works preserved together as assembled).
The volume was bound together by an early owner, Johann Adam Heinrich von Clement, a Rhenish cloth manufacturer, whose ownership inscription it carries.
Götz, the first printing of the second edition (a rare edition), with the pagination errors, 192 pp. Stella, the first edition, the deluxe issue on strong paper, 2 leaves and 115 pp. The two works bound together by an early owner, a contemporary act of reading rather than a modern collector's construction. Small octavo (160 × 98 mm).
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Both plays belong to Goethe's Sturm und Drang years. Götz von Berlichingen came first. Its rapid movement between scenes, its historical detail, and its mixture of violence, humour, politics and sentiment broke with the neoclassical conventions that had governed German theatre for generations. Shakespeare stood behind the experiment. In his 1771 speech Zum Schäkespears Tag, Goethe had praised Shakespeare as the dramatist who restored art to nature and freed it from inherited rules, and Götz became the practical demonstration. The play also gave German its most notorious line, Götz's defiant retort in Act III, proverbial ever since as the "Swabian salute" (the famous "Götz-Zitat").
Goethe had sent the manuscript to Herder early in 1772; Herder—who had turned him toward Shakespeare to begin with—told him, as Goethe recorded years later, that "Shakespeare hat euch ganz verdorben," Shakespeare has quite spoiled you (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 13).
Goethe rewrote it and published it anonymously in 1773; in 1799 the young Walter Scott translated it as Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, one of his earliest publications and fifteen years before the Waverley novels that established the historical novel [Walter Scott, Goetz of Berlichingen (London, 1799)]. Stella tested a different boundary. If Götz challenged the rules of dramatic form, Stella challenged the rules of emotional convention.
Its mild subtitle, Ein Schauspiel für Liebende, is disarming for a play whose first ending of 1776, in which Stella, Fernando and his wife Cäcilie resolve to live together, unsettled contemporaries; Goethe recast the close as a tragedy in 1806.
PROVENANCE
Johann Adam Heinrich von Clement, Rhenish cloth manufacturer, with manuscript ownership inscription.
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Götz von Berlichingen, Zwote Auflage, Frankfurt 1774: Hagen 49; Goedeke IV/3, 143; Kippenberg I, 649–650; Hirzel A 37–40; Speck 715.
Stella, Berlin, August Mylius, 1776, first edition: Hagen 121; Goedeke IV/3, 131 (113); Kippenberg I, 353; Hirzel A 76/77; Speck 1446; Brieger 716; Wilpert/Gühring 17.
Goethe, Zum Schäkespears Tag, 1771; Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953); N. Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, I; Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (early Stella reception); Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 13; Walter Scott (trans.), Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand (London, J. Bell, 1799).
