Two first prizes were awarded in 2010. They went to the theses of Kareen Klein (Geneva) and Lukas Lammers (FU Berlin).

Kareen Klein is undertaking an edition project. Entitled “‘Die Liebe hats gethan’: Edited passages of the seventeenth-century German Shakespeare adaptation Romio und Julieta”, she is interested in the text of a German version of Romeo and Juliet from the early 17th century – in which the title characters are called Romio and Julieta – a play text that comes from the repertoire of one of the travelling groups that translated, edited, partially paraphrased, i.e. rewrote, Shakespeare’s successful tragedies for their audiences.In other words, they adapted it to the needs or interests of a different theatre culture, but in any case contributed a great deal to the early dissemination and popularisation of Shakespeare’s work in the European context. A German version of Hamlet from precisely this context, entitled Der bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide), is internationally well known and often quoted. However, the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet adaptation is less well known and hardly accessible internationally, even in specialist circles, which is probably due, among other things, to the fact that there is not yet a single English-language translation of this play text (and few British or American Shakespeare scholars even read German). Kareen Klein’s project is to produce such a translation, to combine it with a thorough edition of the German play text and to gain insights into the viewing and playing habits, stage conventions and audience interests of German theatre culture in the 17th century. For the Master’s thesis that we are honouring today, she has selected and elaborated central passages of this project; for the dissertation that she is currently writing, a complete edition, translation and commentary of the entire play is being prepared.

Under the title “World and Stage: King Richard II and the Performance of History on the Elizabethan Public Stage”, Lukas Lammers undertakes a very subtle, knowledgeable and complex textual reading of a single play, namely the historical drama Richard II. This great history play is patiently explored scene by scene and act by act in a way that is as thorough as it is penetrating and, as the reader realises with both amazement and genuine profit, exciting in a completely new way. Lammers’ attention is consistently focused on the special situation of theatre acting, which is always located between role fiction and performance reality and is played out with tremendous finesse in this drama. The aim of the work is to productively measure this duality and to make it a consistent guide for interpretation, especially for historical drama, which always – and particularly in Richard II – also shapes a highly political field. It examines the multiple changes in the theatre text between the direct involvement of the audience in the action and its distancing, as well as between the construction of a fictional world on stage and the metadramatic reflection of this fiction. In this way, a special examination of history and historiography takes place, which at the same time makes clear how historical drama differs from narrative works of history such as the Chronicles, which were its sources. This work thus offers a new answer to the old fundamental question: What can theatre do?