Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach is now famous for her novels, aphorisms, novellas, and diary writing. Ebner-Eschenbach, however, saw herself as a playwright, wrote exclusively dramas during the first 30 years of her literary career, and was extremely ambitious; in her own words, she was aiming to become 'the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century.' She authored twenty-six plays, which were reviewed contemptuously by her contemporaries and ignored by posterity. None of the eight 'complete' editions of Ebner-Eschenbach's works includes a single full-length play by the author. The reasons for this are rooted partly in the contemporary gendered vision of drama as a genre: in the wake of Goethe and Schiller, who also furnished Ebner's dramatic inspiration, drama (particularly tragedy) had come to be considered the 'highest' literary genre and therefore one that was inaccessible to women.
The plays selected for this volume are Ebner's two great historical dramas, Maria Stuart in Schottland (1860) and Marie Roland (1867). Both plays portray the lives of great women from history, one a queen, the other a revolutionary, focussing on the historical moment of the decision that led to their respective execution. Both plays are indebted to the dramatic work of Friedrich Schiller, whose play Maria Stuart (1800) Ebner read as positing femininity and the right to political action as opposites in terms. In struggling with Schiller's dictum of the 'Unweiblichkeit' of politically active women (Ebner's sarcastic diary entry: "Gehorsam ist des Weibes Pflicht auf Erden, sagte mein angebeteter Schiller"), Ebner created two plays in which the observance of "feminine duty" directly impacts the heroine's ability to act publicly and politically. Schiller's premise forms the central theme of both Maria Stuart in Schottland, an attempt to counter-act his verdict by relating the early history of the Queen of Scots and re-interpreting her character, her history, and her politics substantially, and the later Marie Roland. Thus Ebner's plays can be read as direct responses to Schiller's drama, both to its ideological premises (which she opposes) and to its form and style (which she imitates).
Ebner's tragedies distinguish themselves from the work of other early and mid-nineteenth-century Austrian 'epigonal' playwrights, such as Grillparzer and Hebbel: like them, Ebner attempts to revive the "Classical" form (blank verse, five acts, strict Aristotelian form, and a prevalence for historical themes); unlike them, she attempts to fill the Classical form with new ideological content, to re-write history as well as revise the tradition of historical drama.
Macht des Weibes: Zwei historische Tragödien von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach is a companion volume to Letzte Chancen: Vier Einakter von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach published as Vol. 3 in the MHRA Critical Texts series.
