For his historical tragedy König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1823, but owing to difficulties with the censor, not performed until 1825), Grillparzer chose one of the most picturesque events in Austrian domestic history, the conflict of Ottokar of Bohemia with Rudolph von Habsburg. With an almost modern realism he reproduced the motley world of the old chronicler, at the same time not losing sight of the needs of the theatre; the fall of Ottokar is but another text from which the poet preached the futility of endeavour and the vanity of worldly greatness. A second historical tragedy, Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn (1826, performed 1828), attempts to embody a more heroic gospel; but the subject—the superhuman self-effacement of Bankbanus before Duke Otto of Meran—proved too uncompromising an illustration of Kant’s categorical imperative of duty to be palatable in the theatre. With these historical tragedies began the darkest ten years in the poet’s life. They brought him into conflict with the Austrian censor—a conflict which grated on Grillparzer’s sensitive soul, and was aggravated by his own position as a servant of the state; in 1826 he paid a visit to Goethe in Weimar, and was able to compare the enlightened conditions which prevailed in the little Saxon duchy with the intellectual thraldom of Vienna. To these troubles were added more serious personal worries. In the winter of 1820-1821 he had met for the first time Katharina Fröhlich (1801-1879), and the acquaintance rapidly ripened into love on both sides; but whether owing to a presentiment of mutual incompatibility, or merely owing to Grillparzer’s conviction that life had no happiness in store for him, he shrank from marriage. Whatever the cause may have been, the poet was plunged into an abyss of misery and despair to which his diary bears heart-rending witness; his sufferings found poetic expression in the fine cycle of poems bearing the significant title Tristia ex Ponto (1835).
Yet to these years we owe the completion of two of Grillparzer’s greatest dramas, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831) and Der Traum, ein Leben (1834). In the former tragedy, a dramatization of the story of Hero and Leander, he returned to the Hellenic world of Sappho, and produced what is perhaps the finest of all German love-tragedies. His mastery of dramatic technique is here combined with a ripeness of poetic expression and with an insight into motive which suggests the modern psychological drama of Hebbel and Ibsen; the old Greek love-story of Musaeus is, moreover, endowed with something of that ineffable poetic grace which the poet had borrowed from the great Spanish poets, Lope de Vega and Calderon. Der Traum, ein Leben, Grillparzer’s technical masterpiece, is in form perhaps even more Spanish; it is also more of what Goethe called a “confession.” The aspirations of Rustan, an ambitious young peasant, are shadowed forth in the hero’s dream, which takes up nearly three acts of the play; ultimately Rustan awakens from his nightmare to realize the truth of Grillparzer’s own pessimistic doctrine that all earthly ambitions and aspirations are vanity; the only true happiness is contentment with one’s lot, “des Innern stiller Frieden und die schuldbefreite Brust.” Der Traum, ein Leben was the first of Grillparzer’s dramas which did not end tragically, and in 1838 he produced his only comedy, Weh’ dem, der lügt. But Weh’ dem, der lügt, in spite of its humour of situation, its sparkling dialogue and the originality of its idea—namely, that the hero gains his end by invariably telling the truth, where his enemies as invariably expect him to be lying—was too strange to meet with approval in its day. Its failure was a blow to the poet, who turned his back for ever on the German theatre. In 1836 Grillparzer paid a visit to Paris and London, in 1843 to Athens and Constantinople. Then came the Revolution which struck off the intellectual fetters under which Grillparzer and his contemporaries had groaned in Austria, but the liberation came too late for him. Honours were heaped upon him; he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences; Heinrich Laube, as director of the Burgtheater, reinstated his plays on the repertory; he was in 1861 elected to the Austrian Herrenhaus; his eightieth birthday was a national festival, and when he died in Vienna, on the 21st of January 1872, the mourning of the Austrian people was universal. With the exception of a beautiful fragment, Esther (1861), Grillparzer published no more dramatic poetry after the fiasco of Weh’ dem, der lügt, but at his death three completed tragedies were found among his papers. Of these, Die Jüdin von Toledo, an admirable adaptation from the Spanish, has won a permanent place in the German classical repertory; Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg is a powerful historical tragedy and Libussa is perhaps the ripest, as it is certainly the deepest, of all Grillparzer’s dramas; the latter two plays prove how much was lost by the poet’s divorce from the theatre.
Although Grillparzer was essentially a dramatist, his lyric poetry is in the intensity of its personal note hardly inferior to Lenau’s; and the bitterness of his later years found vent in biting and stinging epigrams that spared few of his greater contemporaries. As a prose writer, he has left one powerful short story, Der arme Spielmann (1848), and a volume of critical studies on the Spanish drama, which shows how completely he had succeeded in identifying himself with the Spanish point of view.
Grillparzer’s brooding, unbalanced temperament, his lack of will-power, his pessimistic renunciation and the bitterness which his self-imposed martyrdom produced in him, made him peculiarly adapted to express the mood of Austria in the epoch of intellectual thraldom that lay between the Napoleonic wars and the Revolution of 1848; his poetry reflects exactly the spirit of his people under the Metternich régime, and there is a deep truth behind the description of Der Traum, ein Leben as the Austrian Faust. His fame was in accordance with the general tenor of his life; even in Austria a true understanding for his genius was late in coming, and not until the centenary of 1891 did the German-speaking world realize that it possessed in him a dramatic poet of the first rank; in other words, that Grillparzer was no mere “Epigone” of the classic period, but a poet who, by a rare assimilation of the strength of the Greeks, the imaginative depth of German classicism and the delicacy and grace of the Spaniards, had opened up new paths for the higher dramatic poetry of Europe.
Grillparzer’s Sämtliche Werke are edited by A. Sauer, in 20 vols., 5th edition (Stuttgart, 1892-1894); also, since the expiry of the copyright in 1901, innumerable cheap reprints. Briefe und Tagebücher, edited by C. Glossy and A. Sauer (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1903). Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft, edited by K. Glossy (the publication of the Grillparzer Society) (Vienna, 1891 ff.). See also H. Laube, Franz Grillparzers Lebensgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1884); J. Volkelt, Franz Grillparzer als Dichter des Tragischen (Nördlingen, 1888); E. Reich, Franz Grillparzers Dramen (Dresden, 1894); A. Ehrhard, Franz Grillparzer (Paris, 1900) (German translation by M. Necker, Munich, 1902); H. Sittenberger, Grillparzer, sein Leben und Wirken (Berlin, 1904); Gustav Pollak, F. Grillparzer and the Austrian Drama (New York, 1907). Of Grillparzer’s works, translations have appeared in English of Sappho (1820, by J. Bramsen; 1846, by E. B. Lee; 1855, by L. C. Cumming; 1876, by E. Frothingham); and of Medea (1879, by F. W. Thurstan and J. A. Wittmann). Byron’s warm admiration of Sappho (Letters and Journals, v. 171) is well known, while Carlyle’s criticism, in his essay on German Playwrights (1829), is interesting as expressing the generally accepted estimate of Grillparzer in the first half of the 19th century. See the bibliography in K. Goedeke’s Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 2nd ed., vol. viii. (1905).
(J. G. R.)
GRIMALD (or Grimoald), NICHOLAS (1519-1562), English poet, was born in Huntingdonshire, the son probably of Giovanni Baptista Grimaldi, who had been a clerk in the service of Empson and Dudley in the reign of Henry VII. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1540. He then removed to Oxford, becoming a probationer-fellow of Merton College in 1541. In 1547 he was lecturing on rhetoric at Christ Church, and shortly afterwards became chaplain to Bishop Ridley, who, when he was in prison, desired Grimald to translate Laurentius Valla’s book against the alleged Donation of Constantine, and the De gestis Basiliensis Concilii of Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II.). His connexion with Ridley brought him under suspicion, and he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. It is said that he escaped the penalties of heresy by recanting his errors, and was despised accordingly by his Protestant contemporaries. Grimald contributed to the original edition (June 1557) of Songes and Sonettes (commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany), forty poems, only ten of which are retained in the second edition published in the next month. He translated (1553) Cicero’s De officiis as Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties (2nd ed., 1556); a Latin paraphrase of Virgil’s Georgics (printed 1591) is attributed to him, but most of the works assigned to him by Bale are lost. Two Latin tragedies are extant; Archipropheta sive Johannes Baptista, printed at Cologne in 1548, probably performed at Oxford the year before, and Christus redivivus (Cologne, 1543), edited by Prof. J. M. Hart (for the Modern Language Association of America, 1886, separately issued 1899). It cannot be determined whether Grimald was familiar with Buchanan’s Baptistes (1543), or with J. Schoeppe’s Johannes decollatus vel Ectrachelistes (1546). Grimald provides a purely romantic motive for the catastrophe in the passionate attachment of Herodias to Herod, and constantly resorts to lyrical methods. As a poet Grimald is memorable as the earliest follower of Surrey in the production of blank verse. He writes sometimes simply enough, as in the lines on his own childhood addressed to his mother, but in general his style is more artificial, and his metaphors more studied than is the case with the other contributors to the Miscellany. His classical reading shows itself in the comparative terseness and smartness of his verses. His epitaph was written by Barnabe Googe in May 1562.
See C. H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany (pp. 113-119, 1886). A Catalogue of printed books ... by writers bearing the name of Grimaldi (ed. A. B. Grimaldi), printed 1883; and Arber’s reprint oí Tottel’s Miscellany.