Romanticism focused upon the feeling sub ject. That subject opened itself first of all to nature, which served as a laboratory of sensa tion. Society was all but absent. Romanticism was famously solipsistic. Frequently, the next object for the Romantic was the feeling artist himself, the structure of whose sensing ap paratus often proved homomorphic to that of the natural universe.

These general observations are occasioned by some recent productions of plays that stand toward the beginning and toward the end of Romanticism in the theater. The Jean Cocteau Repertory at the Bouwerie Lane Theater in New York staged a double bill of Leonce and Lena and Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (both c. 1836) and put on Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899). Also, the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb in Cambridge mounted a version of When We Dead Awaken.

It has often been observed that Roman ticism produced no great English-speaking theater, in contrast to the rich Romantic drama of France, Germany, and Scandinavia. In the German theater, Büchner (1813-1837) is a haunting case. Dead at twenty-three, he saw none of his plays (Danton’s Death, Le once and Lena, Woyzeck) produced. Leonce and Lena premiered in 1895; Woyzeck in 1913. Like the equally maudit Kleist, Büchner was a second-generation German Romantic and incorporated in his work parodistic critiques of the High Romanticism of forebears like Goethe and Schiller. Leonce and Lena is, in form, a short commedia