Tieck, Ludwig

(1773-1853)

   Director, playwright. Tieck was most innovative in discovering the connection between Shakespeare plays and Elizabethan staging, though he was also an important contributor to the German poetry of Romanticism. His playwriting efforts consisted mainly of dramatized fairy tales such as Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots), Ritter Blaubart (Captain Bluebeard), and Rotkäpchen (Little Red Riding Hood), though he also wrote tragedies—none of which were very successful. His contributions to and editing of the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare—along with those of his daughter Dorothea and Wolf Baudissin—are perhaps his greatest contribution to the recognition of Shakespeare as a "German playwright" in the 19th century. Prior to the Schlegel-Tieck translations, most theater directors (e.g., Friedrich Ludwig Schröder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe) feared that Shakespeare could not hold an audience's attention because Shakespeare was ill suited for the "realistic" stage; they feared "a breakdown of dramatic momentum" if Shakespeare were to be presented unabridged on a platform stage (Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 1:176). His work on the translations, however, allowed Tieck to discover that Shakespeare's plays functioned on a set of dynamics established primarily through character and speech, not pictorial illusion. Tieck conducted detailed research on the importance of theater architecture in the Elizabethan period, formulated the dimensions of the Fortune Theater in London, and found that successful staging in a mid-19th-century German theater was predicated on replicating the original Elizabethan environment.

   As a director at the Berlin Royal Theater, Tieck staged several innovative productions, the most notable of which was Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1843, for which Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) wrote incidental music. The production was one of the most popular ever presented in Berlin; it was given 169 times before 1885, when the intendant of the Royal Theater, Count Botho von Hülsen, removed it from the repertoire.