Unfit for an English Stage? Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows and Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe

Abstract

This article discusses the major differences between Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows and August von Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe in order to assess in a comparative way what exactly it was that made Kotzebue’s original play, to Inchbald’s mind, so “unfit for an English stage.” The essay focuses on the dramatic differences and tries to assess in how far they can be read as signs of other differences, differences of a cultural, political, or ideological kind.

Notes

[1] It reads: “THE NATURAL SON: A PLAY, IN FIVE ACTS, by Augustus von Kotzebue …, Being the Original of LOVERS’ VOWS, Now Performing, with Universal Applause, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Translated from the German By Anne Plumptre … Who has prefixed A PREFACE, Explaining the Alterations in the Representation; and has also annexed A LIFE OF KOTZEBUE”.

[2] The dramatic text was submitted to the Examiner, John Larpent, on September 28, 1798, rehearsals began in the first week of October. Given Inchbald’s clear statement, one is somewhat puzzled by Jane Moody’s speculations (281, n20): “Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows is based on a play [not once does Moody give the original title of the play, Das Kind der Liebe] given to her by Henry Harris [it was Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden]. This play [obviously, what is meant is: this translation] may have been the work of an unknown French translator [Inchbald says he was a German] (see Anne Plumptre’s preface to The Natural Son) [there is none of this in Plumptre’s preface] or even the literal translation made by S[tephen] P[orter], Lovers’s Vows; or, The Child of Love, published in 1798” [again, this does not agree with Inchbald’s own account and is also at great variance with the publication history of Inchbald’s text – see Coda to this essay].

[3] The letter in the Monthly Magazine is very clear on this point:

[Your readers] will see that nothing can be more forward an unequivocal than Amelia’s annunciation to Anhalt of her love for him. Amelia in the original is all artlessness, all innocence; in the simplicity of her soul she reveals her love, because she was ignorant of any necessity, and had never learnt the art, of concealing it. Her forwardness is that of a child; far from exciting disgust, it is appropriate, it is essential to her character, and forms a very interesting part of it: not so in Mrs. INCHBALD’s translation; the simplicity of Amelia’s character is totally lost; she is converted into a pert miss, triumphing at the confusion into which she throws a man who has more modesty than herself.

[4] Backscheider gives a plot summary of The Massacre: “The play is a reaction to the Reign of Terror in France and a rare instance of Inchbald’s writing explicitly about her deep political interests. Eusébe [sic] Tricastin has escaped the Paris mob only to be caught and tried near his home. He and his father are saved by the courageous Glandeve who affirms the meaning of justice and the right of free thought, but his wife and children are killed and brought on a bier” (xvi). When Anne Mellor writes, “Inchbald turns her attention to the most famous prison of the time, the French Bastille, in The Massacre (1792)” (62), she seems to be unaware of the fact that the Bastille was stormed and destroyed by the revolutionaries in 1789 and that, whatever they did to their prisoners, they certainly did not keep them in the Bastille.

[5] Agatha, tellingly, keeps her part of the vow, namely not to disclose the name of her lover.

[6] Curiously enough, Inchbald had herself undertaken a translation of Rousseau’s Confessions in 1790.

[7] “Quick was unsurpassed in the parts of rustics and simpletons and, by Mrs. Inchbald’s time, of old men. His small, active body, his squeaky voice, and his ability to portray whimsey distinguished his roles for forty‐six years” (Backscheider xxv).

[8] Anne Plumptre identified most, though not all, of the rhymed passages and had them set in couplets.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christoph Bode

Christoph Bode, President of the German Society for English Romanticism and European Convener of the Wordsworth Summer Conference, is Chair for Modern English Literature at Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität Munich, Germany.