Der Busant
Known from a single fifteenth-century manuscript and three fragments, Der Busant emerged from a thematic tradition of wild men, thieving birds, and adventures of separated lovers.
Cultural impact of the poem is visible in several surviving tapestries, as well as a possible influence in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In the meantime, the princess has taken refuge in a mill and makes a living sewing, waiting all the time for her lover's return.
She is taken in, unrecognized, by the prince's uncle (a duke) and aunt, who had become interested in the origin of the fine needlework and, after taking one look at the princess, recognizes her nobility.
[2] One day the duke is out hunting and captures the wild prince, whom he takes back to the castle and attempts for six weeks to cure.
The manuscript is preserved in the State and University Library of Bremen, MS B.42b, which, according to Hans-Friedrich Rosenfeld, is "poorly and randomly corrected" (schlecht und willkürlich korrigiert).
[11][12] Modern scholars of the poem cite it from Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's Hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen (1850; republished 1961); a new edition was announced as part of a project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Edition und Kommentierung der deutschen Versnovellistik des 13. und 14.
[17] Paul Meyer compared Der Busant and L'Escoufle and suggests that the two were derived from a single source, yet to be found;[18] the comparison was first made by Köhler, and according to Rosenfeld, later cited by Linden, that original is a French text.
Typical for this kind of narrative poem, according to Linden, is the opposition between culture and nature, and the prince's madness follows a conventional plot: he moves away from culture and into the moral and physical wilderness (Gewilde) of the forest, where chaos reigns; as he does so, he loses, one by one, the qualities which characterize him as a human of high birth—by scratching and hitting himself he destroys his beauty, he tears his clothes off, and finally he begins walking on all fours.
[6] According to John Twyning, this descent into madness in Der Busant inspired the plot in which four lovers are lost in the woods in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; he describes the latter as an intended "riff" on the German poem.
Der Busant partakes of the French tradition of Die schöne Magelone (in German), but also shows affinity with the work of Konrad von Würzburg and the Iwein.
