96 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
tude to Eoban and the latter’s supposed assistance in clothing him 
with his new dignity, but is quickly disillusioned, and as the Augs¬ 
burg councillor steals away, Kunigunde crowns Sachs with a laurel 
wreath, and the whole assembly burst out in cheers for the emperor. 
From Deinhardstein’s own prolog to his play, we are led to con¬ 
clude that Hans Sachs is not the real hero of the drama, or that at 
least he shares this distinction with Emperor Max: 
“Und so empfehlen deutsche Verse wir; 
die schildern, wie ein grosser deutscher Fiirst 
mit Macht und Weisheit GiLte auch vereint, 
und eines deutschen Dichters Eigenheit 
dem heissgelieMen deutschen Vaterlande .” 
The characterization of Hans Sachs is the weakest part of the play. 
The reader finds it difficult to conceive how the interest of the spec¬ 
tator in the hyper sentimental young man can possibly be sus¬ 
tained. 13 About half a dozen times the stage directions prescribe 
that his words and ways should be gutmutig • There is nothing 
about Master Steffen to commend him to our sympathy, and Eoban 
has no redeeming features whatever, not even as a comic figure. 
The synopsis will have sufficed to show how much the play leaves 
to be desired structurally. 
When Philipp Reger (1804-1857) in 1839 wrote the book for 
Lortzing’s opera Hans Sachs, jointly with his friends Philipp Jakob 
Diiringer (1809-1870) and Gustav Albert Lortzing (1801-1851), 
basing his text on Deinhardstein’s drama, almost all of the numer¬ 
ous changes he made were improvements on the original. 14 Rene 
Doumic says, “On ne ref ait pas une piece, on en fait une autre,” 
and, naturally, either a better or a poorer one. To preface what 
we have to say with what will be our final verdict, Lortzing-Reger’s 
opera (Diiringer’s share does not amount to very much) would to 
this day enjoy well merited popularity had not Wagner ’s Meister- 
singeir crowded it off the stage by its superior qualities. After see¬ 
ing Shakespeare’s masterpieces, only an antiquarian would desire 
13 And yet the audiences at the time of the first appearance of the play seem 
to have taken a great fancy to this character. In Hamburg the actor imper¬ 
sonating him received from the shoemakers’ guild a diploma promising to him, 
his children, and his children’s children, free shoes for their lifetimes. 
14 The text with a very illuminative introduction by G. R. Kruse, can be 
had as No. 4488 of Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. 
