Ludwig Tieck: English and French Sources of His William Lovell (1795/96)

English and French Sources of His William LovellzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTS (1795/96] Francois Jost We THINK OF LUDWIG TIECK mainly as one of the founders and exponents, with the brothers Schlegel, of German Romanticism, which he illustrated in many ways, especially in his long series of plays and stories. Today the cultured public often identifies him only as the author of Der blonde Eckbert and Der gestiefelte Kater. The literary scholar, however, remembers other aspects of his work. Although Tieck was born rather late in the eighteenth century and helped importantly during his lifetime to shape the spirit of the nineteenth—he died in 1853, at the age of eighty—quite a few of his publications present characteristics of the age of Enlightenment, often mingled, it is true, with elements of the new trends. The Enlightenment milieu is dominant in one of his very first novels, Die Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell, which appeared in three volumes in 1795 and 1796. To a certain extent it is the ’’story of Mr. Ludwig Tieck,” not so much in regard to the details of the plot as in regard to the ideas expressed and the Weltan­ schauung the author expounds. But other sources than the young novelist’s personal experience may be discovered. In point of fact, William Lovell clearly shows essential links between Tieck’s own philosophy and that of his masters or inspirers, and reveals strik­ ing analogies between his technical devices or patterns of structure and those of his models. When he first thought of writing the novel and started to work out its major parts, Tieck was a student of English literature, successively at Halle, Gottingen, and Erlan­ 181 Ir r a t io n a l is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y gen, specializing in Elizabethan drama.1 He also knew French, as did every educated man of the time, and as an authentic German —his birthplace was Berlin—he felt very strongly the spell of Italy: these are, in general terms, the foreign sources of jihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQP William Lovell. The initial spark for the work was provided, it seems, by Ben Jonson’s The New Inn or the Light Heart*? on the other hand the narrative technique as well as many episodes and ideas echo parts of Le Paysan perverti by Restif de la Bretonne,3 and most of the ac­ tion takes place in Italy.4 A similar combination of sources can be discovered in one of Tieck’s latest works, his novel Vittoria Accorombona , dealing with Italian post-Renaissance mores, which he planned at the age of twenty and wrote at the age of sixty-seven. The fate of the "Famous Venetian Curtizan,” as John Webster called her, a lady of the aristocracy who died in 1585, first became the theme of a literary work when, in 1608, The White Devil was performed.6 Webster’s drama is clearly Tieck’s main source. And at the time Tieck was writing his novel, Stendhal had just pub­ lished his Chroniques italiennes (1837), which also includes the story of Vittoria Accoromboni. But we are concerned here with Tieck’s early work, William Lovell. Herbert Lovel, one of the main characters of Jonson’s play, seems to have transmitted not only his name to Tieck’s hero, but also quite a few traits of his character. The "melancholy guest” of the English comedy becomes the melancholic Epicurean in the German novel. The New Inn, it is true, does not count among Jonson’s masterpieces, and Tieck never commented on it at any length. The two volumes of his Altenglisches Theater, published in 1811, contained plays of Shakespeare exclusively. But internal and cir­ cumstantial evidence may shed some light on the nature of the relations between The New Inn and William Lovell. Indeed we may limit ourselves to one aspect of such evidence: why did Tieck choose for his hero the name Lovell? Obviously he could have taken it from anywhere. In the eighteenth century, Lovel, or Lovell, or Lowell were common names in literature and in everyday life as well. In Shakespeare’s Richard Ill there...