Notes

1.

The important motif of patriarchal privilege and responsibility. It returns in the question of Ferdinand’s duty to his father and of Luisa’s to hers.

2.

George Brydges Rodney, English admiral who attacked the French at sea at the time of the American revolt against British rule.

3.

Billets doux (tender notes, that is, love letters). One of many instances of the Wife’s ignorance and pretentiousness, and of the presence of French and Frenchness at the small German courts of the time.

4.

Coffee and tobacco were heavily taxed under the sumptuary laws of the time. The Wife is instantly recognizable as a type in the German literary tradition: foolish, expensive, untidy, but also loyal to her husband and loving toward her child.

5.

The German is Frau Base, here a friendly form of address among the middle classes rather than a title of kinship.

6.

Plaisir (pleasure), with a German accent.

7.

Also a friendly form of address among burghers.

8.

Derived from mademoiselle. A polite title specific to a young unmarried woman of burgher’s rank.

9.

The Wife’s responses are all predicated on her conviction that Luisa is too good for Wurm and will marry Baron Ferdinand von Walter.

10.

The German is gnädige Frau, a title and a form of address for a woman of superior rank.

11.

The first sign of Miller’s generosity toward his daughter.

12.

The German is Fräulein, at the time an honorific reserved to unmarried women of rank.

13.

Both Luisa and Ferdinand experience love in cosmic terms.

14.

A visible sign of his high rank.

15.

Luisa, like Thekla in Schiller’s Wallenstein, has a sixth sense of the impending disaster.

16.

The German is Landeswucher, probably tax farming, an ancient practice of collecting rents on the land on behalf of the state, long associated with oppression and corruption.

17.

Ferdinand, like Luisa, experiences love in cosmic terms. Unlike Luisa, he is categorical.

18.

Ferdinand has awakened Luisa’s desire—a responsibility that he will remember.

19.

These are the insignia of high office.

20.

Wurm, unlike Miller, is quite stiff-necked about his standards for women’s conduct.

21.

Wurm has proposed a double intrigue: to separate Ferdinand from Luisa and to acquire Luisa for himself.

22.

An amusement practiced among boys at the time.

23.

Schiller, for his own amusement and for ours, has hung his bourgeois tragedy and send-up of the nobility on three binaries. The plot itself turns on an opposition of the world of the honest burgher and the courtly world of the nobility in a rather small, unspecified German town that is the seat and ducal residence of one of Germany’s many small principalities. Within this opposition lies another: that of the solid, unpretentious German world, usually but not exclusively of the burgher, and the French-infected world of the court, represented most pungently in the figure of the Chamberlain, who now enters. This opposition implies a third, that between masculine and feminine, most accessible again in the frenchified—and feminized—figure of the Chamberlain. The play privileges the first member of each of these oppositions.

24.

A recital of just how the Chamberlain spends his days. It reflects both the scope of the Chamberlain himself and the scope of the princely household he runs.

25.

The color of goose droppings—last year’s rage in Paris.

26.

The capital of a duchy, where the duke resides.

27.

The conversation that follows plots convivial eighteenth-century court life against ideals of solitude and inwardness that mark the first stirrings of a new, romantic era.

28.

That is, not yet dressed for the day. The Lady is presented in a natural state, her hair still open, playing by ear. She is a daring rider, impatient of convention, and full of feeling.

29.

Sophie, and then the Lady, describe a typical evening at a princely court: The company gathered, entertained themselves with conversation, at cards (games of hombre, faro, piquet), or with music. The ladies did fine needlework such as filet.

30.

Rare spices, formal gardens, leaping fountains, and costly fireworks are typical forms of princely display.

31.

Strings by which a wandering child was controlled.

32.

Effectively, the Lady has crossed the First Minister’s court intrigue with one of her own.

33.

Troops, such as the famous Hessians, purchased (strictly speaking, leased) to fight in the American revolt against British rule, 1775–1783

34.

The German is Bärenhatz, a particularly ostentatious form of “hunt” or, rather, a harrying of a dangerous wild animal confined within a closed compound. See Velázquez’s Tela real in the National Gallery, London.

35.

“Pearls and diamonds” is a metonymy for “tears.”

36.

The ermine of office. See the robe of the Duke of Friedland on the cover of Schiller’s Wallenstein in this series.

37.

Like the privilege of carrying a sword, the tassel on the grip is a mark of high birth.

38.

Ferdinand takes responsibility for awakening Luisa’s desire. See Luisa’s last speech, Act One, scene four, above.

39.

Town musicians, traditionally, were governed by the local musicians’ guild. The title is known to English speakers from the medieval tale of the “Town Musicians of Bremen.” The German is Stadtmusikant.

40.

A leather holder, sewn at the waist of a uniform, by which a sword was carried.

41.

Contredanse is from “country dance” and an illustration of how something new and modish among the upper classes travels from England to France and, as something French, finally turns up in Germany.

42.

This is the notion of patriarchal rule. It is subtended by a chain of order: As God rules the universe, just so the king rules the country and the father rules his household and, importantly, his son. It is a God-given order and holds the civil world together.

43.

Wurm’s entrance is staged as the entrance of the devil.

44.

The German is Jungfer, which is distinct from Fräulein for the well-born and, unlike Mamsell, a native German honorific.

45.

The original is Verflucht! Deeply alarmed, the Chamberlain reverts to German expletive.

46.

At point-blank range, and indoors: a particularly savage form of dueling.

47.

Ancient Parisian charity hospital.

48.

The German possessive pronoun is Ihr (or ihr). The Chamberlain intends “your father” (Ihr), exposing the First Minister’s plot. Ferdinand understands “her father” (ihr) and concludes the Chamberlain is denying responsibility.

49.

The Lady’s use of the definite article carries a note of haughty condescension.

50.

Luisa had suspected that the Lady was complicit in Wurm’s plot.

51.

The choice of entertainment for the evening is between an imitation of the famous English pleasure garden and a German play, with a sly reference to the German play before us.

52.

Heated, stirred up. The Wife, Act One, scene one, rendered the same thought in the language of her class: approximately, as “all het up.”

53.

A pilgrimage of penance.

54.

In ancient iconography, love was represented as a child with a torch held high, death as a child with torch inverted. The motif of Eros and Thanatos as two aspects of the same will return.

55.

Miller now cautions Luisa not to substitute her love of Ferdinand for her love of God.

56.

Here, and below, Ferdinand is speaking double: He speaks in terms of love and means the murder he intends.

57.

Luisa adopts the language of her station, restoring class distinction.

58.

Ferdinand understands at last what the Chamberlain tried to tell him. See above, Act Four, scene three, the Chamberlain’s second-last speech.