Friedrich Hartwich's Globus Fortunae (1617): A Dramatization of the Amadis

Abstract

Friedrich Hartwich's Globus Fortunae (1617): A Dramatization of the Amadis Steven R. Huff Tracing the transmission of a literary tradition can be tricky business. Any set of criteria designed to assist in the evaluation of specific sources and their suspected influence on a given text will always run the risk of arbitrariness, and the line separating borrowed from original genius is often notoriously blurred. Nevertheless, scholars are inclined to pursue such a venture—despite the inherent risks—when there is more at stake than simply the confirmation of an alleged borrowing. German dramatizations of the courtly romance Amadis de Gaula constitute one such case. Not only are baroque dramatizations of novels of any kind rare and therefore prized specimens, but also the A madis dramatizations offer singular incentives because of the light they shed on the transition from sixteenth-century vernacular drama to the highly stylized courtly drama of the seventeenth century.1 If a connection between the Amadis plays and the "Englische Komödianten" could be established, the rewards would be all the greater, two notable authorities have observed.2 Indeed, such a convergence of literary traditions is bound to spark the interest of Romance, English, and German historians of drama. A text that may well provide this missing link is Friedrich Hartwich's Globus Fortunae. The play and its author rival each other in their obscurity. It exists, as far as I have been able to ascertain, only in a manuscript in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (Cod. Guelf. 38. 4 Aug. 20). The manuscript was procured for the duke's collection around 1634 or 1635. Further details concerning the source of the acquisition are unfortunately no longer available.3 The double-sided folio STEVEN R. HUFF, Assistant Professor of German at Oberlin College, has published articles on Kleist, Goethe, and the early German opera libretto. 306 Steven R. Huff307 manuscript numbers 127 leaves (thus a total of 254 pages). There are on the average 30 lines per page. The signatures and the consistently legible handwriting would indicate that a professional copyist was likely employed, perhaps to prepare the manuscript for an intended printer. Biographical information on Friedrich Hartwich is scant. His name is absent from such standard sources as Goedeke and the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, nor could the Zentralstelle für Genealogie in Leipzig provide any information. What little is known about him must be pieced together from clues found in the manuscript. He indicates on the dedicatory page that he is from the duchy of Mecklenburg and a student of jurisprudence. A glance at the matriculation lists of the University of Rostock reveals that Hartwich was from the city of Rostock and that his fees were paid in 1606 (undoubtedly by his father to insure him a place at the university when he reached the appropriate age), but he did not actually swear the oam until 1613.4 If it is assumed that Hartwich was eighteen (the average age for beginning university students during the period5 ) when he swore the oath, this would place his birthdate near the year 1595, making him about twenty-two years old when he wrote Globus Fortunae. It is also possible that he spent one or two terms at the University of Jena, since a Friedrich Hartwich from Mecklenburg turns up there on the matriculation lists for the first semester of the year 1616:6 In any case, we find him back in Rostock in 1617 for the drama's first performances there on June 13, 16, and 17. We can be reasonably certain about what occasioned the play's performance. By 1617, student drama productions had already become a tradition in Rostock. In 1552 Duke Ulrich III (1527-1603) had issued an ordinance calling for semiannual academic productions of dramas by Plautus and Terence.7 Bärensprung suspects that the earliest recorded dramatic performance in Rostock in 1558 was presented by university students.8 The nineteenth-century historian Rudloff reported of academic life in Rostock: "Zur Erholung erlaubte man den Studenten (1573, 1576) geistliche Komödien im academischen Auditorium oder in der Johanniskirche aufführen."9 The 1576 performance is significant in that it was given on...