'Aber eine Ohrfeige in einem Trauerspiele!' The Earl of Essex on the Nineteenth-Century Austrian Stage

Abstract

G. E. Lessing devotes a significant fraction of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie to the analysis of three plays based on the life and death of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex and last favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Lessing's praise for John Banks' The Unhappy Favourite, or The Earl of Essex (1682) inspired a series of German-language translations and adaptations, including plays written for the Hofburgtheater in Vienna by Matthäus von Collin (1823) and by Heinrich Laube (1856). This paper examines how German-language representations of Essex's fate evolved between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to the characterization of the two central figures and the relationship between gender, emotion, and politics.