Der Zerbrochene Krug

(The Broken Jug) by Heinrich von Kleist.

   Premiered 1808. Kleist's verse comedy has become perhaps the most well known and certainly the most frequently performed of nearly any in German, even though the premiere Johann Wolfgang Goethe staged of it in Weimar was a complete disaster. It is set in a Dutch magistrate's court, where a judge named Adam presides over a case against Eve's boyfriend, who is accused by Eve's mother of breaking her "most precious jug" upon his hasty egress from Eve's bedroom the evening previous. Adam is prepared to convict the boyfriend immediately, but the appearance of district court supervisor Walter complicates matters. Walter insists that Adam follow accepted procedure and the fine points of jurisprudence; in doing so, it becomes obvious that Adam himself was the culprit in Eve's bedroom, the one who destroyed the jug.

   The character of Adam has been what the Germans call a "parade role" since the mid-1820s, when the play found its audience and became a fixture in the repertoires of most theaters. Though Adam's dilemma teeters toward the farcical on numerous occasions, the play never descends to the level of the formulaic. Adam's desperate attempts to shift blame and assign responsibility elsewhere, and ultimately his dismal failure to exculpate himself, form a masterpiece of characterization, one equaled rarely in all of German drama. The list of outstanding actors who have played Adam is a long one, and the attention scholars have paid to the play as a serious work of German theatrical art is equally extensive. One reason for both is Kleist's unprecedented expertise in the use of verse. In his hands, it becomes a fluent idiom for performance, and Kleist employs it ingeniously in the service of a comedy that is both enormously entertaining and extraordinarily effective as both entertainment and finely wrought literature.