DRAMATURG'S NOTE
By the time Georg Büchner completed Leonce and Lena (1836) as his submission to a publisher’s (J.G. Cotta) competition for one- and two-act plays, he had created a biographer’s timeline unique enough to make any head turn. He was 23 years old when he finished Leonce and Lena. And though this might seem a common age for a writer to be entering a phase of maturation and productivity, Büchner was a more unusual case. He had already attempted to incite a revolution in Giessen with the covertly distributed pamphlet, The Hessian Messenger (1834); he had mastered and brilliantly exhibited his skill for citationality in his drama, Danton’s Death (1835); he had anticipated literary modernism in his narrative fragment Lenz (1835); he had translated Victor Hugo’s Lucretia Borgia and Maria Tudor (1835); and he had completed his doctoral thesis on cranial nerves in fish, On the Nervous System of the Barbel (1836). Büchner would die before his 24th birthday in 1837, but not before he left the world with one of the most extraordinary and curious fragments in the dramatic literary canon, Woyzeck.
Leonce and Lena seems to fit nicely in this unpredictable timeline; it borrows and references just enough to keep the scholars busy, but it is also just bizarre enough to keep the same scholars scratching their heads. It is creepy enough to ward off bleeding heart lovers, but poetically sophisticated enough to entice the romantics. Like so much of Büchner’s work, it is seemingly out of place in time, both within the traditions of its creation and amidst the traditions in which it is produced. And if one were to attempt to establish that rigid social contract that we so casually term “genre”, surely a trial would be in order to determine the contract’s validity. The play ends in a marriage, giving us the familiar feel of a comedy, but the bride and groom are a melancholic pair referred to as “puppets” and “automata” until we wonder, as Büchner often did, how much autonomy they really have over their fate. Does fate play a role in how their lives unfold, or is everything merely left to chance? Or neither? Is their destiny pre-programmed?
Büchner’s delightful tale incorporates elements from Commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare, Late Enlightenment philosophy, German Romanticism, and Sturm und Drang, while also pre-dating Epic Theater, Theater of the Absurd, and Postmodernism. Our students have also keenly pointed out in their research and aesthetic choices how Seattle grunge is a fitting, contemporary interpretation.
Content by Matthew D. Straus