as 1813
Grillparzer had thought of _The Ancestress_. Schreyvogel encouraged him
to complete the play, and his interest once again aroused and soon
mounting to enthusiasm, he wrote in less than a month the torrent of
Spanish short trochaic verses which sweeps through the four acts of this
romantic drama. Schreyvogel was delighted; but he criticized the
dramatic structure; and in a revised version in five acts Grillparzer so
far adopted his suggestions as to knit up the plot more closely and thus
to give greater prominence to the idea of fate and retribution. The play
was performed on the thirty-first of January, 1817, and scored a
tremendous success.

Critics, to be sure, were not slow to point out that the effectiveness
of _The Ancestress_ was due less to poetical qualities than to
theatrical--unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the
scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is
of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make
Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer
nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all
adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could
give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho
would furnish a text for an opera. Grillparzer replied that the subject
would perhaps yield a tragedy. The idea took hold of him; without delay
or pause for investigation he made his plan; and in three weeks his
second play was ready for the stage. Written in July, 1817, _Sappho_ was
produced at the _Hofburgtheater_ on April 21, 1818. Grillparzer said
that in creating _Sappho_ he had plowed pretty much with Goethe's steer.
In form his play resembles _Iphigenia_ and in substance it is not unlike
_Tasso;_ but upon closer examination _Sappho_ appears to be neither a
classical play of the serene, typical quality of _Iphigenia_ nor a
_Kuenstlerdrama_ in the sense in which _Tasso_ is one. Grillparzer was
not inspired by the meagre tradition of the Lesbian poetess, nor yet by
anything more than the example of Goethe; he took only the outline of
the story of Sappho and Phaon; his play is almost to be called a
romantic love story, and the influence strongest upon him in the writing
of it was that of Wieland. The situation out of which the tragedy of
Sappho develops is that of a young man who deceives himself into
believing that admiration for a superior woman is love, and who