Times Literary Supplement, May 14, 1982, by Stephen Spender
"A gun-metal garden"
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Heinrich von Kleist, of ancient military Prussian stock, 
joined the First Foot Guards at Potsdam when young, left 
after six years, and lived a life of restless studying, 
intermittent earning, editing and writing stories, essays, 
plays and poems. Everything failed and in 1811 he shot 
himself, together with a girl who was dying of cancer. Like 
so many other German Romantic poets, his career seems to 
belong to the dark side of Goethe's sunlit harvest. His 
writings continue to haunt and trouble us. They have some 
mysterious affinity with the works of Frank Kafka in our 
century.

The young Prince of Homburg, hero of this play, is perhaps 
not so much the portrait of a Romantic dreamer as the 
persona of the poet imprisoned in his world of the Prussian 
aristocratic military hierarchy, rather like--though quite 
opposite to--Prufrock, with his vision of the mermaids, 
trapped in the world of Bostonian drawing-rooms.

In the opening scene the Prince is in a Paradise of the 
imagination. Half-awake, reclining on a bench under a tree, 
he holds a garland of laurel leaves which he places on his 
brow. Victory and love are the intertwined elements of his 
age of innocence.

He is interrupted by a torch-bearing search-party consisting 
of his commander, the Elector of Brandenburg and the 
Electress, Princess Hohenzollern, the Prince's cousin. Here 
he is--dreaming--when he ought to be at the head of his 
cavalry, with which for the three previous days he has been 
in pursuit of the fleeing Swedish army. But, instead of 
reproaching him, the Elector acts in a way symbolic of his 
dream. He takes the garland from the Prince's brow, winds a 
gold chain from his own neck round it and hands the garland 
to the Princess Natalie. The Prince looks up, murmurs 
"Natalie, my maiden and my bride," then, turning to the 
Elector, "Frederick, my lord and father," and then, to the 
Electress, "My gracious mother."

This opening scene stands apart, a microcosm of all the 
elements of the action, and also a prophetic vision which 
comes true in the final scene which also takes place in the 
graden but with what is perhaps a terrible irony, when the 
Prince of Homburg is indeed hailed as victor and crowned 
with the laurel garland by the Elector who blesses his union 
with Natalie.

But between these two scenes is the sequence of events which 
forms the narrative of the play. In the second scene, the 
Prince, still in a trance, scarcely pays heed to the orders 
given for the next day's battle. And when the battle does 
take place, still a sleep-walker, he orders and leads the 
cavalry charge which makes him victor of the Fehrbellin. But 
in doing so he has acted counter to the orders given by the 
Elector on the eve of the battle, that he should on no 
account attack unless he receives specific instructions to 
do so. He is court-martialled and sentenced to death. He 
sees his grave being dug and, in abject terror and a state 
of complete demoralization--like Claudio pleading with 
Isabella--begs the Electress to intercede with her husband 
to save his skin. In answer, the Elector writes him a note 
stating that if the Prince has cause to think the sentence 
unjust he has only to write back and say so, and he will be 
once be reprieved. Reading this, the Prince realizes the 
force of the justice of the state and he becomes--opposing a 
threatened revolt of the Army on his behalf--the advocate of 
his own execution. There follows the final scene in which he 
is forgiven, and his dream of the first scene comes true.

It seems to me essential that in a production the absolute 
contrast between the beginning and ending scenes in the 
garden and the intervening action be established as strongly 
as possible. Unfortunately in John Burgess's production this 
does not happen. Everything, from first to last, takes place 
against a gun-metal skycloth. There is not a tree or a green 
patch in the garden. Prussian officers in uniforms and 
aristocratic Prussian ladies dressed in monochrome Grecian 
costumes move across the stage among bits of furniture, 
declaiming rather than speaking their lines, like a 
procession of figures on a neo-classical *unter den Linden* 
frieze. This two-dimensional production, by reducing it to a 
progression of military events, submerges the real theme of 
the play, the contrast between the truth which is vision and 
the dream that comes true as terrible reality.

In the central scene when the Prince looks into his grave, 
he sees death as utter annihilation, not as heroic dream-
fulfillment. It is the negation of the dream. The awakening 
from the dream to the reality brings the bitter taste of 
gun-powder and conformism with the Prussian military 
hierarchy. At the end, when the Elector removes the bandage 
from the condemned Prince's eyes and says "Let the cannon's 
roar waken him," he awakens indeed--to comrades shouting 
"Long live the Prince of Homburg," and who go on to yell "to 
the field" and "into battle" and "stamp in the dust the 
enemies of Brandenburg!" The difference between the innocent 
beginning and the jubilant bloodthirsting end of the play is 
like that between the theme of one of Blake's joyous *Songs 
of Innocence* and the same theme echoed in the dust and 
ashes of the *Songs of Experience.*

Patrick Drury as the Prince of Homburg holds up his profile 
like a gold Napoleon and speaks his lines clearly, but the 
style of production gives him little opportunity for 
exhibiting any symptoms of having an inner life. Robert 
Urquhart as the Elector gives what is probably the best 
performance here of an authoritarian who is capable of 
feeling and imagination. Nicholas Selby is good as Kottwitz 
the general who has a kind of Wordworthian natural piety. 
Lindsay Duncan looks well in the part of Natalie and shows 
embarrassed pity for the Prince in his abject scene of 
terror and self-pity.

The version of Kleist by John James has the merit that, like 
the production, it puts across clearly and strongly the 
essentials of the action. However, it fails to convey either 
the powerful rhythmic unity of Kleist or his hard, severe, 
clean-cut imagery.

*The Prince of Homburg* is written in iambic pentamenters, 
which are certainly difficult to translate from German 
poetry into English without their sounding like bad English 
blank verse. All the same an English style has somehow to be 
invented which has, or which suggests, a rhythm strong and 
assured as a movement *alla marcia* in a Beethoven or 
Schubert symphony. Consider the opening lines, spoken by 
Hohenzollern:

     Der Prinz von Homburg, unser tapfrer Vetter.
     Der an der Reuter Spitze, seit drei Tagen
     Den fluchtigen Schweden munter nachgesetzt,
     Und sich erst heute wieder atemlos,
     Im Hauptquartier zu Fehrbelling gezeigt.

In the prompt version with which the theatre provided me, 
John James makes of this:

     after the last three days
     in pursuit of the retreating Swedish forces
     at the head of your cavalry the
     Prince of Homburg our audacious cousin
     reappeared at headquarters
     here at Fehrbelling
     only today
     quite out of breath

This is accurate, but it has neither rhythm nor style, it is 
neither prose nor verse.

As well as a clanging, almost iron, rhythm, there is 
literalness of imagery and metaphor in Kleist, admittedly 
very difficult to put into English but this kind of thing, 
by Mr. James, seems fluffed and blurred at the edges:

     now goddess of th' illustrious sphere
     with aura drifting
     off your crest
     a lifting sail
     in a tenuous breath
     that touches my hair
     as down to me here
     you do revolve.

where the German runs:

     Nun denn, auf deiner Kugel, Ungeheures
     [illegible copy]
     Gleich einem Segel luftet, roll heran!
     Du hast mir, Gluck die Locken schon gestreift.

Perhaps impossible to translate, but surely what should be 
conveyed is the feeling that behind Kleist's verbal imagery 
there is an almost machine-like articulated poetry. An 
English version of Kleist requires a consistent and unified 
style, authoritative imagery and magnificent rhythm. Perhaps 
that is too much to ask, but the weakness of the Cottesloe 
production is probably to be traced mostly to the English 
text.



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