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Abstract
Goethe’s ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’ occupies a key position in the reception history of Euripides’ play, and has itself been subjected, particularly in more recent years, to radical and even hostile reinterpretations. But it is surely still possible to take seriously the idealistic, but not wholly unrealistic, humane message which Goethe intended it to convey.
Notes
1 Edith Hall, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2 l. 1680ff. of the verse version. Quotations and references according to the Frankfurter Ausgabe (div. I, vol. 5), which includes both the prose and verse forms of the play.
3 The motif of Thoas’s wish to marry Iphigenie is anticipated in Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel’s Oreste et Pilade of 1699. On this and other predecessors of Goethe (Schlegel, Guimond de La Touche) see my article, ‘“Und Götter auf der Erden”: Humanity and Divinity in some Eighteenth-Century Versions of the Iphigenia Story,’ FMLS, 40 (2004), 41–55.
4 The reinterpretation of the oracle also has its precedents, in Schlegel and (probably more directly) in Racine’s Iphigénie [en Aulide] (the latter is also the source of the name ‘Arkas’), but in neither case does it emerge, as here, convincingly from the interaction of the main characters.
5 Their ‘emergence’ is convincingly traced by R. C. Ockenden, ‘On Bringing Statues to Life: Reading Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso’, PEGS, 55 (1986), 69–108.
6 T. J. Reed, ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’, in Goethe-Handbuch, ed. by Bernd Witte et al., 4 vols (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1996–99), ii: Dramen, ed. by Theo Buck, pp. 195–228 (p. 217); my italics.
7 Despite her claim at this point that this was what she had always hoped for, she had not known before Orest’s revelation just how ‘schwerbefleckt’ the house of Atreus had in her absence become. Ockenden suggests (p. 73, n. 8) that the thought may even have been put into her mind by Pylades’words in the preceding scene (ll. 1610–14).
8 Cf. the account in the Italienische Reise, 19 October 1786, also quoted in the Frankfurter Ausgabe, I/5, p. 1291–92. On Hauptmann, see Hall, p. 218f.: ‘In hindsight, there is something uncomfortably suitable to the mood of Berlin in the 1940s in Hauptmann’s melodramatic showdown …’; but Piscator (quoted by Hall, p. 219) fully realised this, despite what Hauptmann may have intended — and despite the Third Reich’s favouring of Hauptmann as the Grand Old Man of German literature. (One is reminded of Karl Kraus’s observation that ‘satire which the censor understands is quite rightly forbidden.’)
9 Ronald Gray, in his generally somewhat dyspeptic view of the play, suggests that lines such as these reveal ‘the ultimately egoistic basis of Iphigenia’s conduct [and] the deviousness with which the argument is conducted’ (Ronald Gray, Goethe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 81).
10 Lessing, ‘Ankündigung’ of Nathan der Weise, in Werke, ed. by H. G. Göpfert et al., 8 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1970–79), ii (1971), 749.
11 Nicholas Boyle, Goethe, the Poet and the Age, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991–92), i: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) (1992), p. 327. The ending of Nathan is of course similarly dependent on the ‘conversion’ of Saladin by Nathan in the parable scene; that of Miß Sara Sampson is surely a rather different case.
12 Nicholas Martin, ‘The Reluctant Recruit? Schiller in the Trenches, 1914–1918’, in Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance, ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin and Norbert Oellers (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 351–66 (p. 359).
13 Hall (p. 199) reminds us that Sanson, the executioner who, having presided over the dismemberment of the wretched would-be regicide Damiens in 1757, went on to serve the regicide Republic and execute the King himself, liked to relax by playing Gluck on his violin.
14 Her remarks about Faust II, etc., on p. 208 suggest that she is not in fact well-informed about the rest of Goethe’s dramatic work. She also manages to misquote the (as she says, ‘famous’) closing words of Iphigenie as ‘Leb’ wohl’ (p. 211).
15 Meredith Oakes, note to a production at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath, September–December 2011.
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Notes on contributors
Francis Lamport
Francis Lamport, now retired, was Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College, Oxford. His principal publications are Lessing and the Drama (1981), German Classical Drama (1990), translations, especially of Schiller (The Robbers, Wallenstein, etc.) and articles, mostly on the literature of the Goethezeit, in various periodicals including OGS.