Course Outline

There will be a final test on Tuesday 25th of January.

In the exam we will be given a text, which can be a play, scenes from play or a sonnet, and we will put them into practice.

During the course, we need to do a ten to fifteen minute presentation. We also need to write a paper consisting of 1000 words. It should not be a paper at all. Quality is more important than quantity.

We are supposed to prepare a portfolio including the things we have been discussing.

Wedding March comes from Midsummer Night`s Dream. Mendelssohn wrote it in 1842.

Midsummer Night`s Dream fascinated one of the German producers in the 20th century. Max Reinhardt, an Austrian, produced German version of Midsummer Night`s Dream in Berlin.

Schlegel and Tieck are two different people who lived around  18 hundred. The translations were not finished in 1797,however in 1830s most of the work was done by Ludwig Tieck. The translations were called Schlegel and Tieck translations althought they were translated by a team of four people. The other two were Dorothea Tieck and Wolfgang Baudissin.

At the end of the 18th century, adaptation was preferred. It means, translators took up the content in a suitable form of the contemporary audience. It was also the idea behind Schiller`s work. Schiller`s adaptation was to be played in Weimar.  The idea behind Schiller was to realize the content of the play for the audience in a suitable way.

In 1812 Romeo and Juliet was performed in Weimar and it was shortened.

Next week, we will cover the porter`s scene from the Romeo and Juliet. Porter`s Scene and its function will be covered. Also the linguistic features in Schelegel- Tieck, nameley form - content relationship will be covered.

There are no manuscripts which we can go back to. Texts we rely on are the secondhand versions. People making their own notes, they are pirot editions.

When it comes to talk about editions we can mention quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare`s works.

For Quarto cilck here

Folio is the collection of plays. It is oficially authoritised.

There are also reclam editions.

In 1616 William Shakespeare died.

In 1623 we have the first folio editior, and we know very little about his biography.

Around the beginning of the 18th century there was a need of finding a national poet. There was a conscious effort to promote Shakespeare as the national poet. People began to produce Shakespeare`s biography on the base of anecdotal evidence.  Nicholas Rowe wrote a largely invented biography in 1709, which was based on anecdotes.