Description

REUNION OF THE TWO FRENCH EDITIONS PUBLISHED IN 1820 IN A VERY FINE CONTEMPORARY BINDING.

Marie-Stuart, tragedy in five acts by Frédéric Schiller, translated from the German and published by M. de Latouche, ; preceded by some thoughts on Schiller, Marie-Stuart, and the two plays, German and French. 
Paris, Bataille Librairie, 1820.
ORIGINAL FRENCH EDITION.
"Marie-Stuart is Schiller's masterpiece. In the opinion of the judge we referred to earlier [Benjamin Constant], it is the most pathetic and best conceived of all the German tragedies."

Marie-Stuart, tragedy in five acts by M. Pierre Lebrun.
Paris, Ladvocat Librairie, 1820.
Second edition of Pierre Lebrun's unannounced adaptation of Schiller's tragedy. Performed for the first time by the King's ordinary actors on the First French Theatre on Monday 6 March, the play was a triumph. "Audiences cried their eyes out at this tragedy, given a deeply moving performance by Joséphine Duchesnois in the title role and Talma as Leicester. It was such a success that it gave rise to a fashionable dress code - in the spring of 1820, elegant women wore hats "à la Marie Stuart" - as well as a veritable publishing fever around the Queen of Scots".
The craze forced Lebrun to acknowledge the source of his inspiration, as some of his colleagues offered to "to subject the play M. Le Brun has just performed to a comparative examination with Schiller's tragedy: the care he himself took to admit that he owed all his success to our poet, dispenses us from repeating this truth."However, this adaptation is truncated by "the most touching scene", that of the confession.

A very fine copy in an elegant period binding in long-grained morocco from the library of the German canoness and translator Bernhardine von Wintgen. (1789-1855) with her name gold-stamped in French on the front cover. A translator from English into German of several religious texts, she held a famous literary salon in Munster with the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.

Bibliography of French translations7765 and 7766
Nicole Cadène. "Mary Stuart in Restoration theatre: Queen of France or of Scotland? "in, Figures from French history in theatre at the turn of the Enlightenment 1760-1830Voltaire Foundation, SVEC, pp.199-210, 2007.