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Charlotte von Stem, Dramen (Gesamtausgabe), ed. Susanne Kord. Frühe Frauenliteratur in Deutschland, vol. 15. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1998. 280 pp.
If Christiane von Goethe has been relatively invisible in the Goethe scholarship, precisely the opposite is true for Charlotte von Stem. Although her letters to Goethe are not extant, presumably because she destroyed them, nevertheless her voice survived in other parts of her correspondence. This volume now attempts to recover her individual identity independent of her relation to Goethe. It contains her four extant dramatic works and an introduction that identifies issues in the plays other than the well-studied ones of how they reflect on her feelings about Goethe. The plays are, in order, Rino (1776), Dido (1794), Neues Freiheitssystem oder Die Verschwörung gegen die Liebe (1798) and Die zwei Emilien (1800). Only the last was published during Stein's lifetime-through Schiller's mediation with Cotta in 1803. The first two were published in the late 19th century in Adolf Schöll's edition of Goethe's letters to Stem; Dido had already been published separately by the indefatigable Heinrich Düntzer. Neues Freiheitssystem, unfortunately, is known in print only through two apparently extensive adaptations by different (male) editors; the original is in the GoetheSchiller archive in Weimar but the text is represented here by the most recent adaptation. Because this is a photo-reprint each play has the separate pagination of the edition from which it was taken; the editor's notes in these originals are not included.
Rino is a four-page Knittelvers pasquale on Goethe's popularity at the Weimar court shortly after his arrival. The cast consists of Rino (to be played, the manuscript specifies, by Goethe) and four adoring ladies, to be played by Anna Amalia and Charlotte von Stein, among others. The women squabble over him for two scenes, then discover that he has been leading all of them on when each produces her own billet doux. Rino is one of the bards included in Goethe's translation from Ossian in Werther; the women associate him with Werther; the women's names are typical of the sentimental Ritterdramen of the period. Thus even without the specifications about the cast, it is difficult not to read this as a text primarily about Goethe and Stein's attitude toward him....