Contextualization, analysis and critical edition of the Krumau Hanswurst burlesques

Eight plays, at least some of which were performed by a courtly amateur ensemble at Krumlov Castle in the years leading up to the early death of Princess Maria Theresa in 1753, have survived as stage manuscripts in the local theater collections. Six of these are in the Krumlov branch of the Třebon District Archives, while two further plays have been preserved in a manuscript volume that can still be found in the castle library today. Two of these works are also preserved in two stage manuscripts in the Vienna Library.

The initial thesis for the research work was that the Krumau Hanswurst burlesques were an untapped treasure for improvisational theater research. Accordingly, the Krumau theater manuscripts would be particularly noteworthy because the character speech of all the protagonists is fully formulated in them, whereas usually only scenarios or canvas have survived from impromptu burlesques as an improvisational theater form from this period, which only present us with the outline of the stage action. A further assumption was that the manuscripts created for an aristocratic amateur theater would now allow us to draw conclusions about the most important play conventions: the specific use of language varieties, the theatrical-practical combination of plot outlines, the differentiation of traditional comedy characters. In the course of the research, it emerged that the origin of the plays can be traced back to the old Viennese folk theater; the plays are copies of now lost originals that were copied and revised by five distinct scribes. The texts suggest that we are dealing with adaptations that are basically true to the original, but modified accordingly, or formulated original creations; improvisations are limited to individual scene moments or plot sequences, so further research will have to clarify what part improvisation actually played in Carinthian theater in the 1740s.

It was therefore not so much the outstanding quality of the Krumau plays that made their edition an urgent desideratum for research into improvisational theater, but rather the insight into the peculiarities of a genre resulting from the performance context and the situation of transmission, of which one could usually only get a picture through rudimentary text descriptions or collections of arias. The critical first edition and scholarly localization of this corpus was carried out via a printed version, and the data records are also fed into the FWF-funded Dialect Cultures database(http://gams.uni-graz.at/context:dic). What could previously have been dismissed as a local feudal aristocratic theatrical phenomenon became, under different premises, a genre-historically significant testimony to a form of play that set standards in German entertainment theater for decades. The Krumau texts from the 1740s reveal continuities of the play, which was in principle text-bound, language-sensitive and adapted to an ensemble, as it was to gain world literary significance almost a century later with Raimund and Nestroy.

Lisa Erlenbusch, Marko Ikonić and Christian Neuhuber (eds.): From the Vienna Carinthian Gate Theater to Krumlov Castle. The Hanswurst burlesques from Český Krumlov. Vienna: Lehner 2019. (= Texts and studies on Austrian literary and theater history. 6.)