Johann Ludwig Tieck

Born May 31, 1773, in Berlin; died there Apr. 28, 1853. German writer.

Tieck, the son of an artisan, studied at the universities of Halle, Erlangen, and Göttingen between 1792 and 1795. He was a friend of W. Wackenroder and of Novalis. Tieck’s first important work was the epistolary novel William Lovell (1795–96), which was followed by the three-volume collection Folktales of Peter Lebrecht (1797), a stylized reworking of medieval chap-books that idealized the patriarchal world. In 1799 and 1800, Tieck was a member of a circle of romantic poets in Jena. He stated his aesthetic views in the philosophical novel Franz Stern-bald’s Wanderings (1798). Tieck’s plays, including Puss in Boots (1797; Russian translation, 1916), are light, satirical works in the style of Gozzi’s comedies. Themes from his Romantic Poems (parts 1–2, 1799–1800) were later used by E. T. A. Hoffmann, H. Heine, and R. Wagner. Tieck was the author of the historical novellas Revolt in the Cevennes (1826) and The Young Joiner (1836), based on the life of L. Camōes.

Tieck also translated Cervantes’ Don Quixote and several of Shakespeare’s plays and wrote works about the theater and dramaturgy.