Woyzeck E-Book

Georg Büchner

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Woyzeck is one of the most performed and influential plays in German theatre. A modern classic that remains frighteningly relevant today. Franz Woyzeck, a lowly soldier stationed in a provincial German town, is bullied by his superiors and starved by the regiment's doctor in the name of scientific experiment. His only pleasures in life are his lover Marie and their innocent young son. But when Woyzeck learns that Marie has been unfaithful with the regiment's handsome Drum Major, he murders his lover in a fit of rage and hopelessness. Based on a real-life murder trial that took place in Germany in the 1820s, the play was written in 1837 but not staged until 1913. This edition, translated by Gregory Motton, includes an introduction by Kenneth McLeish, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

WOYZECK

by

Georg Büchner

translated byGregory Mottonwith an introduction byKenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Büchner: Key Dates

Acknowledgement

Characters and Notes

Woyzeck

Appendix: Fragments

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Georg Büchner (1813-1837)

Büchner came from a family of doctors and intended to follow in their footsteps. Several documents survive from his schooldays: essays on such subjects as ‘Friendship’ and ‘Suicide’, and the formal speeches that selected pupils were expected to give on public occasions. They show that as a teenager he already had an original turn of mind and, in the way he put over his arguments, the knack for rhetoric one might perhaps expect from a future playwright.

There is nothing in this schoolwork to suggest interest in any of the arts, much less drama, and although when Büchner went to university in Strasbourg at the age of eighteen he abandoned his vocation for medicine, his alternative ambitions were not literary but directed towards philosophy and academic research. Officially, research won. He specialised in natural science (zoology and anatomy), and made rapid progress up the academic ladder, winning a doctorate with a dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel at 22 and being appointed lecturer in anatomy at Zürich University a year after that.