Navigating and Owning Obedience: Reassessing Friedrich Halm's Griseldis

This article reappraises the drama Griseldis (1835), the successful first play of the now largely forgotten Viennese playwright Friedrich Halm. I argue that a comparison between this play and its possible source, Petrarch's A Fable of Wifely Obedience and Devotion, offers insights into the reconceptualization of obedience in the nineteenth century. Concretely, I suggest that the changes in Halm's version serve to make obedience visible as an expression of individual agency and thus justify the role of obedience within a liberal ideology. This analysis revises older readings of the play, which saw in it a critique rather than a reinterpretation of obedience.