̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - playwright

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library stages first public play in its 600-year history

sjr81 — Wed, 01 May 2019 14:45:53 +0000

Performance marked the launch of digital edition of Arthur Schnitzler's works and archive.

Arthur Schnitzler Digital Edition

sjr81 — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:15:45 +0000

Arthur Schnitzler digital: Digital Critical Edition (Works from 1905 to 1931

Saved from the Nazis in 1938: Schnitzler archive to remain in Cambridge

sjr81 — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 09:00:27 +0000

Now, more than 75 years after it was spirited out of Austria under the noses of Nazis intent on burning and destroying Jewish cultural works, the papers of the man who inspired Freud, Kubrick and many others have been officially signed over into the care of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Following several months of discussions with the writer’s grandsons and surviving heirs to his estate, Michael and Peter Schnitzler, the agreement concludes a handover process that began in the 1930s before being interrupted by the onset of the Second World War.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has always been proud of the role it played in saving the Schnitzler archive from certain destruction – and we are delighted to have reached agreement with the family to ensure that this unique collection remains in Cambridge and continues to benefit from the expert care and conservation it has received over the last eight decades.

“Arthur Schnitzler’s unique legacy continues to resonate and inspire, just as it has over the last 75 years. As one of the world’s great research libraries we are committed to making this fascinating archive available to as many people as possible.”

̽��ֱ��archive is currently being opened up to scholars and other interested readers by major edition projects in Austria, Germany and the UK. ̽��ֱ��German and UK projects will result in cutting-edge digital editions of works from 1905–1931, to be hosted, with open access, by the ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Andrew Webber, Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture at the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of German and Dutch, leads the UK editorial team, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He said: “We are delighted that this agreement has been reached. In the Schnitzler papers, Cambridge has custody of a treasure of Modernist literary culture. ̽��ֱ��edition projects are already making remarkable discoveries as the teams of scholars decipher and analyse drafts and notes recorded in Schnitzler’s idiosyncratic handwriting. They promise an exciting new view of the works and the creative processes of this key figure.”

̽��ֱ��story of how Schnitzler’s archive came to Cambridge is a remarkable and complex one. Upon Arthur Schnitzler’s death in 1931, his estate remained in his Vienna house with his ex-wife Olga, who was considered his widow even though the couple had divorced in 1921.

By 1933, the works of Schnitzler and other Jewish artists were regularly being consigned to the flames of the Nazis’ book burning rallies across Germany. In March 1938, Germany invaded Austria and many prominent Jews were arrested and dispossessed.

Worried that they would come for Schnitzler’s papers, Olga Schnitzler asked an acquaintance in Vienna, a student from Cambridge called Eric Blackall, if he might be able to help save them.

On March 19, 1938, at her request, Blackall sent an urgent message to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library to ask whether they would accept the more than 40,000 pages of Schnitzler’s literary archive. They agreed immediately, and a diplomatic seal was placed on the material before Blackall organised its shipment from Nazi-occupied Austria. More than a dozen cases and cupboards of manuscripts, sketches, notes, correspondence and even Schnitzler’s death mask made their way across Europe to Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��communications between Blackall and Cambridge, preserved in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, have the character of a spy novel, with Blackall referring to the urgent need to see that ‘mother’ (Olga) and ‘child’ (the archive) are safely dispatched to England.

Once both were safe in Cambridge, a legal document was drawn up and agreed between Olga and the Library in 1939, giving the archive to the ̽��ֱ��. However, Olga had neglected to notify the Library that she was not Arthur’s legal heir according to his last will. When her son, Heinrich, who was the sole heir and had emigrated to the United States, asked for the archive to be returned to him, the ̽��ֱ�� Librarian let him know that the papers had been given to the library by Olga and must remain there.

Olga herself left for the United States, taking some of the most personal artefacts (such as diaries and family letters) with her, with the blessing of the ̽��ֱ�� Librarian at the time.

Due to the outbreak of World War II, no further negotiations took place and Heinrich Schnitzler agreed to leave the archive in the custody of the Library, provided that he be given access to the archive and that microfilm copies of the papers were made.

Over the course of the following decades, the Library maintained a correspondence with Heinrich, who worked on his father’s papers, but the Schnitzler family remained owner of the archive. ̽��ֱ��agreement between CUL and Arthur Schnitzler’s grandsons puts to an end a legally awkward situation.

Schnitzler’s works provided the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, David Hare’s ̽��ֱ��Blue Room as well as plays penned by Tom Stoppard. Taking love, death and human sexuality as frequent themes for exploration, Schnitzler’s works were controversial and were even denounced by Hitler as examples of ‘Jewish filth’.

̽��ֱ��archive in Cambridge also contains Schnitzler’s only surviving letter to friend and admirer Sigmund Freud as well as his correspondence with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism and other leading artists and writers of the era – such as Henrik Ibsen, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

Saved from destruction by the Nazis and smuggled in secret to Cambridge, the rescue of author Arthur Schnitzler’s archive is as dramatic as any fiction he committed to paper.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has always been proud of the role it played in saving the Schnitzler archive from certain destruction.

Anne Jarvis

Ferdinand Schmutzer

Arthur Schnitzler, 1912

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Shakespeare's medieval world

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of universities have chairs in early modern literature, a few in Middle English; Cambridge is unusual in combining the two, in the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English originally set up for C.S. Lewis. His example of working across the periods has been followed by many of its later occupants, even though most scholars are cautious about crossing the invisible boundary between them. As the current holder of the Chair, I was delighted to be commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare and the Medieval World. Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Subtle glimpses of a changing time

Research is most often a process of discovering what’s there. That may be achieved by new technology, from Galileo’s telescope to the electron microscope, or simply by looking at things from a new angle or seeing them differently. Shakespeare’s medieval world is of the second kind.

We have, for instance, a number of early 17th-century engravings of London that are regularly reproduced in histories of the early modern city or books on Elizabethan drama. Apart from the newly-built theatres on the south bank, however, almost everything in the pictures is medieval: the great hulk of old St Paul’s towering over the city, the serrated skyline of the towers and spires of the parish churches, the bridge (completed in 1209) with its display of traitors’ heads, William the Conqueror’s Tower. They show, in fact, not so much ‘Shakespeare’s London’ as ‘Medieval London in the age of Shakespeare’.

Staging the world

̽��ֱ��same principles apply to drama. Many of the great cycles of Biblical mystery plays, which we think of as medieval, continued to be performed until half-way through Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a couple of them (both now lost) into the reign of King James I. Coventry, not far from Stratford, had one of the best known; it was last performed in 1579, when Shakespeare was 14 years old. His plays contain a number of allusions to the cycle plays – ‘out-Heroding Herod’ is the most famous of them – and most of them bear a particularly close relationship to what is known of the Coventry cycle. It can’t be proved that he saw it, but of the many unknowns in his life, that he did so is one of the safer conjectures.

̽��ֱ��cycle plays, furthermore, offered a model of theatre that was at the opposite extreme from the Classical Latin drama that was taught in the schools and imitated by humanist playwrights. It was insistently inclusive. ̽��ֱ��motto traditionally ascribed to the Globe, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (something between ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘everyone acts a part’), declared that the theatre was as large as the world: the maxim first appears in the 12th-century writer John of Salisbury, whose works were regularly reprinted in the Renaissance and were known, among others, to Ben Jonson.

̽��ֱ��theorists might insist that kings and clowns should never share a stage, but it was the very point of the Biblical plays that both kings and shepherds came to the newborn Christ. They did not separate out comedy and tragedy, both newly-imported terms: they offered an all-embracing play, in which black humour and deep grief could mix in the Passion sequences. They had no qualms about presenting a vast range of time and space on stage, from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgement, in ways that can make Shakespeare’s embrace of Rome and Egypt within a single play, or a time span that allows for babies to grow to adulthood, seem quite modest. And above all, they acted their action. Classical and humanist drama relied on messengers to report what was happening outside the single location it allowed itself, and especially any kind of violence. Medieval and Shakespearean drama performed it, blood and all.

Those ideas are so familiar now – so much part of what plays do – that it is easy to forget how much they needed to be asserted. Some, such as the mixing of tragedy and comedy, incited bitter hostility among Elizabethan theorists and have continued to cause unease for much longer (hence the notion of ‘comic relief’: it’s more complicated, and more profound, than that). ̽��ֱ��dramatists for the public theatres, like their medieval forebears, assumed that the stage had the same freedom of representation that we now accord to the cinema screen. No one expects the screen to obey the Aristotelean principles for the stage rediscovered around 1500 – that it should show only one place, or that the action shown on it should approximate to real time; both are possible, but exceptional. Medieval principles of theatre gave Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights the freedom that the neo-Classicists wanted to forbid.

What Shakespeare read

‘Medieval Shakespeare’ extends not just to his theatre, but to his reading, and to what he wrote about. Not only his plays on English history, but Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear draw on history or legendary history as it was carried forward from the Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��story of Hamlet was first written down around 1200, and was in oral tradition before that. Lear was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain(c. 1136), and Holinshed’s great Chronicles, the Elizabethans’ encylopaedic history of their real and supposed past, took the story from there. Lear’s Tom o’ Bedlam quotes from a folktale, and from one of the medieval verse romances that in cheap print provided the 16th century with much of its pulp fiction. ̽��ֱ��Trojan Troilus and Cressida draws on Chaucer and Caxton much more than on Homer; Chaucer is the sole source for ̽��ֱ��Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher, and is the major inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose tomb faces the grave of Shakespeare’s brother in what was once the parish church for the Globe and is now Southwark Cathedral, is both the source for the story of Pericles and appears on stage as its presenter. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and they are a minor presence in many more.

None of this means that Shakespeare was a medieval writer: he changed everything he touched, whether inherited or new. But it is only possible to measure what he achieved, or even to see it clearly, when we recognise how much the Middle Ages gave the world’s greatest playwright to work on.

For more information, contact Professor Helen Cooper (ehc31@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or Magdalene College.

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work. Professor Helen Cooper examines its influence on the work of the world's greatest playwright.

Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Professor Helen Cooper

ell brown from Flickr

Statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London

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Schnitzler’s hidden manuscripts explored

bjb42 — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��work of Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) has inspired playwrights and filmmakers, among them Stanley Kubrick, David Hare and Tom Stoppard, and was admired by contemporaries such as Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann. Now, more than 75 years after his death, thousands of letters by the Austrian playwright are being analysed by a researcher in the Department of German.

PhD student Lorenzo Bellettini has embarked on a project to study part of a vast, as yet largely unpublished, archive of Schnitzler’s work. More than 30,000 pages, left behind by the Jewish writer after his death in 1931, were rescued from the Nazi book-burnings and brought to England by a Cambridge graduate, Eric Blackall, when Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

̽��ֱ��archive – which includes Schnitzler’s only surviving letter to Sigmund Freud and his correspondence with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and offers invaluable information on his relationship with some of the leading writers and artists of his time, from Thomas Mann and Henrik Ibsen to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler – has been available to researchers ever since, but most of it has remained unread. In the meantime, Schnitzler himself has attained almost cult status thanks partly to the way he was revered by later generations of writers for both stage and screen. His works have inspired Tom Stoppard’s Dalliance and Undiscovered Country, David Hare’s ̽��ֱ��Blue Room and Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut.

Sigmund Freud wrote in an admiring letter to the author: ‘I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.’ However, our understanding of Schnitzler himself remains distorted, due both to numerous clichés surrounding him and to our lack of knowledge on the role that some of his closest friends had in his creative process. Through researching Schnitzler’s legacy, Lorenzo Bellettini aims to lift the ‘translucent screen’ that masks the man.

One important revelation emerging from this work sheds light on Schnitzler’s debt towards his close friend and fellow-writer Gustav Schwarzkopf. Letters between the two show that Schwarzkopf suggested significant changes to several of Schnitzler’s plays, some of which seem to have been incorporated verbatim, especially in the final scene of Intermezzo (which contains the play’s entire moral message).

As this illustrates, a study of Schnitzler’s papers inevitably goes beyond Schnitzler himself and sheds light on the world of writers around him. It is likely that comparably important revelations will be yielded from a study of Schwarzkopf’s intense correspondence with another great writer and friend, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. These two correspondences de facto pave the way for a re-evaluation of Schwarzkopf as a key figure in the group of fin-de-siècle writers known as Young Vienna who met in the 1890s and produced some of the greatest masterpieces of Austrian and European literature.

Lorenzo Bellettini’s research also makes use of diaries and letters to offer a fairer interpretation of some aspects of Schnitzler’s life that have often become clichés. Schnitzler’s sexuality is a case in point. ̽��ֱ��sexual themes in his work, often mirrored by his active social life, caused controversy in his own lifetime and have often dominated his reputation. Their interpretation is dangerous because in many ways it risks becoming an extension of the anti-Semitic propaganda that the Nazis devised to portray him as a lascivious Jew.

Perhaps as a consequence of this risk some researchers have been inclined to sweep Schnitzler’s sexuality under the carpet to purge his image and adapt it to chaste ideals. This is, of course, also wrong, because Schnitzler’s sexual life is well documented in his diaries. Between 1887 and 1892 he kept a written record of his exploits, with the sum total for every year, ranging from 208 in 1887 to over 400 in 1892. A correct interpretation of this bizarre habit becomes possible only if we see it in a larger context: Schnitzler’s erotic activity being an expression of that same energy and thirst for life and culture that accounts for his extraordinary productivity. It is the same enthusiastic élan we find in his diary entries recording the mind-boggling number of his visits to the theatre, opera and concerts, as well as his extensive readings.

As a teenager in the 1870s, for example, Schnitzler was, often unbeknownst to his father (who later forced him to pursue a medical career), writing complete novels in secret – including one that exceeds 600 pages in length. At 18, Schnitzler looked back proudly at the thousands of pages of the 23 complete and 13 unfinished plays he had already written.

This same energy is evident in the cultural voracity that characterised all his life and is recorded faithfully in his diaries and letters. He profited from the cultural cornucopia that Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, had to offer, and this energy is also a constant of his travels. When he was in London in May–July 1888, the 26-year-old Schnitzler immersed himself in the capital’s culture with opera, theatre, balls, concerts and soireés in society. He filled his days with recitals at the once-magnificent St James Hall and Crystal Palace and with quintessentially English operettas, such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance at the Savoy Theatre.

Schnitzler experienced life and culture with admirable intensity – his is the motto ‘Intensivsein ist alles’ (intensity is everything) – but not, however, without criticising what he saw. When, during a two-month stint in Paris in April–May 1897, he wrote to his friend Gustav Schwarzkopf about the ‘Haupterfolge der Saison’ (the hits of the season) at the local theatres, he enjoyed tearing most of them apart, with a splendid mixture of lightness, irony and vitriolic sarcasm.

Research into his ‘hidden manuscripts’ at Cambridge aims to shed light on this Schnitzler, the critical, lively, voracious, productive Schnitzler, the great ‘sceptical enamoured of life’ as the Austrian writer Robert Musil once called him, in an attempt to bring him closer to us in his contradictions, complexity and humanity.

To accompany the research, a travelling public exhibition showing some of Schnitzler’s manuscripts from the Cambridge archive for the first time will be visiting several universities in the UK, USA and continental Europe during 2007 and 2008. ̽��ֱ��exhibition may be booked by institutions wishing to host it.
‘Schnitzler is the first great poet of the subconscious: the first writer to absorb new scientific theory about the complexity of human motive. There were others in Vienna, like Stefan Zweig, who wrote just as well, but Schnitzler still seems the most modern.’

Sir David Hare

Playwright and Director

For more information, please contact the author Lorenzo Bellettini (lb289@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of German, or write to him at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, CB2 1RH.

Research into more than 30,000 unpublished drafts and letters casts new light on the inspirational Austrian novelist and playwright.

Intensity is everything

Arthur Schnitzler

By permission of the syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Freud letter

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