Carol.

Shakespeare in Jena

Summer Theatre for the Opening of the Kulturarena Jena

Carol. That is how her name appears, written in pencil, in the manuscripts of her husband August Wilhelm Schlegel whenever the texts were in her hand. Carol.: Caroline Schlegel-Schelling. Together with her husband she translated Shakespeare; she was the salonnière where Goethe, Fichte, Novalis, and Tieck came together. “A nod from her was worth more than the chatter of all the other reviewers.”

Summer Theatre 2024 is the farewell production of the current ensemble and gives Carol. the stage she deserves. Romanticism meets modern pop: we sing about and interrogate the immensely progressive side in the DNA of the city of Jena—the city from which the Early Romantics shaped modern thinking in Europe. At the center of this stood Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, a woman who, like so many other influential women, was later swept under the carpet of history because her ideas either disappeared under men’s names or because she was occupied with care work and did not produce works of her own.

Welcome to Leutragasse 5, Jena! Caroline lived here with her husband; here she hosted her salon, where around 1799 a circle of free spirits, poets, and thinkers gathered. This circle shaped our present-day understanding of friendship, nature, and what it means to be human. What was Caroline’s contribution to the ideas of the Early Romantics? How can the radicalism and innovativeness of her approaches—today sometimes appearing almost self-evident—be made tangible?

Summer Theatre 2024 invites you into the salon of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and brings the brief period of the Early Romantics in Jena to life. Together with Caroline and August Wilhelm Schlegel, we rediscover Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on our stage, we shout love poems as punk songs, and we meet Goethe quite privately for tea.

Theaterhaus Jena takes you on a journey into the night, between poetic nightmare and wild celebration. For this, we have once again brought the fantastic band around Moritz Bossmann to Jena. Where do the spirits lie dormant? Were the Early Romantics a kind of punks? And what was Caroline’s personal drama? “Carol.” does not seek a chronological or strictly historically accurate portrayal of the time in Jena, but rather a theatre evening that makes the Early Romantics tangible as thinkers and as human beings who love, hate, and argue. A special focus is also placed on the translation work on Shakespeare by Caroline and August Wilhelm Schlegel, who rediscovered Shakespeare’s texts for the German-speaking world.

Hovering over everything again and again is the theme of farewell and grief: Caroline must process the death of her daughter Auguste. The Jena ensemble must say goodbye to the theatre, the city, and the audience.

Celebrate with us our farewell to you, our audience, and to the city of Jena!

Premiere: July 3, 2024
Running time: 1 h 40 min, no intermission