,,So sey dann feyerlich entbunden“: Neue Beobachtungen zu Clemens Brentanos Lustspiel nPonce de Leon

摘要

This paper explores Clemens Brentano’s illustration of love as a relationship between lord and servant through elaborate comic depictions in his romantic comedy Ponce de Leon (1801). The whole comedy revolves around this conception of love, which, however, has been missed in the scholarship of Brentano, especially academic discussions of Ponce in the past thirty years. This study demonstrates that the comedy is a densely encoded text within which poetic and theatrical dimensions are closely intertwined. Upon rebirth in the name of love, the pilgrimage of the hero Ponce de Leon might be semantically interpreted as a quest for love that had long been lost in this world and a quest for the lost ,,Urbild”.