Goethe and the Uncontrollable Business of Appropriative Stage Sequels

In the final decades Of the eighteenth century, writers regularly borrowed fictional characters invented by other authors for use in their own texts. Most commonly, these works took the form of sequels—what German contemporaries dubbed "Fortsetzungen einer fremden Hand" (continuations by another hand),¹ and what this article names "appropriative sequels."² In the absence of formal legal regulation, many authors felt free to write such texts, including Goethe. But little work has been done to understand this surprisingly widespread writing practice, particularly in light of the commercial realities of the German theater.³ As William Hinrichs recently put it: "We do not know what to call these sequels; we do not know how to talk about them; we do not know how they function; and we do not know why people read and write them."⁴ Turning to Goethe begins to provide answers.

It is well known that Goethe was preoccupied with sequels; after all, he devoted much of his literary life to Faust II, as well as sequels to Wilhelm Meister, Des Künstlers Erdewallen (1773) and Des Künstlers Vergötterung (1774). Fewer scholars have noted, however, that Goethe also made something of a habit of writing sequels to other authors' works. Between 1793 and 1806, Goethe began Die Aufgeregten (1793), conceived with Schiller a sequel to Die Hagestolzen (sometime between 1793 and 1805),⁵ and published two sequels: Der Bürgergeneral (1793) and Der Zauberflöte, Zweyter Theil (begun in 1795, and first published in 1806). Goethe wrote his appropriative sequels when he was faced with new pressures as director of the Weimar Court Theater and increasingly conscious of the market value of literature.

Taken together, Der Bürgergeneral and Der Zauberflöte, Zweyter Theil offer new insights into the business of appropriative stage sequels. To date, scholarship has overlooked the self-reflexivity of Goethe's Zauberflöte and its own observation of sequels on the German stage. Analyzing Der Zauberflöte, Zweyter Theil as an aesthetic comment on appropriative sequels offers a new reading of Goethe's perplexing libretto and helps explain why these texts proliferated around 1800. Furthermore, studying the reception of Der Bürgergeneral, a sequel to Heyne's Die beiden Billets (1782), illuminates how the issues raised in Goethe's Zauberflöte sequel played out in the literary field, highlighting the uncontainable nature of these works. Analyzing the creation, marketing, and content of Goethe's two published appropriative stage sequels thus reveals overlooked eighteenth-century attitudes toward this writing practice.

While appropriative sequels were written in a variety of genres, this article is concerned only with stage sequels, including both musical and nonmusical works. By "sequel," this article more precisely means any work that chronologically continues an existing story using characters from that text and not merely similar characters in a similar plot (as was often the case with the Robinsonade).

The article first investigates the legal context and commercial motivations that contributed to the popularity of appropriative stage sequels, looking to texts inspired by Iffland and Schiller, two of the most popular dramatists around 1800. After examining Goethe's repeated practice of writing sequels to others' works, the article next examines Goethe's justifications for penning appropriative stage sequels. The next section then closely reads Goethe's Zauberflöte as a statement on the uncontrollable business of appropriative sequels before turning to the reception of Der Bürgergeneral as an example of such. Ultimately, analyzing Goethe's sequels provides more than a new look at Goethe's opera.⁶ It begins to fill a blind spot in our understanding of the eighteenth-century theater and questions the role of the author in telling stories for the stage.

The Business of Stage Sequels

The late eighteenth-century stage was flooded with sequels. The librettist of Die Zauberflöte Emanuel Schikaneder (1751–1812), for instance, composed six sequels to his opera Der dumme Gärtner aus dem Gebirge oder die zween Anton (1789), prompting one critic in the Theaterjournal to complain, "der Himmel weiß, wie viel Fortsetzungen erschienen sind" (heaven knows how many continuations have appeared...