Egmont and the Vision of Freedom

Abstract

The critic of Goethe's Egmont is constrained to move cautiously. He may bear in mind Goethe's charming response to the sixteen-yearold Fritz von Stein, who told him in a letter he was reading the play for a second time: Es freut mich, daB Dir 'Egmont' zum zweiten Male gefillt. Das Stuck ist so oft durchgedacht, daB man es auch wohl ofters wird lesen konnen (November 16, 1788). It certainly appears that on the many occasions when Goethe turned to this material, from the original drafts in 1773 and 1775 to the final version in 1787, he was never satisfied with the revision of individual scenes or episodes but struggled to work out and think through again and again the implications of the drama as a whole. Nevertheless, readers and theatergoers alike have responded to the play with a considerable sense of unease. Schiller, in his review of September 20, 1788, in the Jenaer Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, put into words some of the objections which have echoed in the vast critical literature since. Does Egmont have the stature of a tragic hero? Do we see in his case that tragic dilemma, that moment of desperate choice, which normally sets in motion the sequence of tragic action? Aristotle, in Book VI of the Poetics, required of tragedy that it be an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality.l Schiller recognizes no such dramatic action around which the drama is constructed: