Transnational Crisis Management: Glapthorne’s Albertvs Wallenstein and Gryphius’s Carolus Stuardus

Abstract

Just over 400 years ago, on 23 May 1618, the Defenestration of Prague triggered the conflict that later became known as the Thirty Years War. The ensuing armed conflict that lasted from 1618 to 1648 saw confessionalism and power politics collide, resulting in the largest bloodshed, and the longest, most protracted and messy conflict ever witnessed on European soil. Henry Glapthorne’s drama The Tragedy of Albertvs Wallenstein (1639) dramatizes a key event from this conflict, the murder of the Imperial commander-in-chief. Andreas Gryphius’ Ermordete Majestät oder Carolus Stuardus (1657) dramatizes a related event. The execution of Charles I can also be located in the context of confessionalism and its repercussions for the power dynamics between and within nations – civic, religious and constitutional crises, unrest and the collapse of inherited concepts and practices of order and political organization. Here, legacies pertaining to the Reformation in Britain, the union of the English and Scottish crowns, and to constitutional issues between Monarch and Parliament erupted in Civil War and the ruler’s accusation of high treason. While the first printed versions of the two pieces appeared some years after the respective events, the assassination of Wallenstein on 25 February 1634 and the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, we possess evidence that the authors started work on their scripts in the immediate aftermath. Glapthorne’s piece was most probably performed on the stage of London’s Globe Theatre some months after the event,1 and Gryphius’s manuscript was dedicated to a high benefactor in March 1650, i.e. the year after the