Staging News: The Theater of Politics and Passions in Eberhard Happel’s Deß Engelländischen Eduards (1690/91)

This paper addresses several of the structural and interpretive challenges posed by the early modern “endless novels”, specifically the Engelländische Eduard. In the foreword to this 1690 novel, Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690) spells out his vision of the world and his mission as a writer. He presents his world as a theater (Theatrum), a stage where people and events come and go affirming life’s mutability and the transitory nature of all things. Happel examines the facts reported by contemporary media, along with histories and geographies; he embeds these facts in his novel for the entertainment of the fictional characters and the factual reader. He offers his audience news from and about the real world on the basis of information gleaned from Zeitungen, Avisen, and Relationen which he offers alongside engaging ephemeral fictions that are intertwined with the comings and goings of the novels’ characters. We will see how these news items affect the movements of his fictional characters as they meander along their lives’ convoluted paths toward the happy conclusions of their travels.