Prelude on the Stage

Three figures confer before the performance begins. The Director is practical: this is a commercial theatre in German lands, the crowd wants to see a great deal happen, and a man who plans to work effectively must keep to the best tools. He does not disparage art; he subordinates it to the crowd that must be served. "Planks, boards, and a few dabs of paint" are the materials; it is results that matter.

The Poet objects. The motley mass gives him flight; he wants to write for the few who will still read in a hundred years. The present age with its crude appetite is not his audience. Poetry should rise above the clamor of the market. The Merry-Andrew cuts him off: posterity is fine, but who will entertain the present age? It wants its fun and it should have it; the man who can amuse it today is doing more good than the man writing for the ages.

They resolve it by deciding to do everything: youth and love, passion and earth, heaven and earth and hell — all of it onto the stage, worked through from beginning to end, "the whole ring of creation." The exchange is Goethe's meditation on what he is undertaking and what its competing obligations are. The clown's pragmatism, the director's calculation, and the poet's idealism are all visible in the play that follows — and none of them wins outright.