SOURCE: Franklin, Wayne. “Tragedy and Comedy in Brown's Wieland.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 8, no. 2 (winter 1975): 147-63.

In the following essay, Franklin suggests that the primary sources for Wieland were Shakespeare's Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing.

Many critics and scholars have written extensively about the various sources of Charles Brockden Brown's novel, Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), yet what may be the most pervasive general influence—that of Shakespeare—has been overlooked entirely so far. The sources enumerated certainly are important for an understanding of Brown's immediate use of other writers, as well as for a grasp of his translation of historical events into fiction. Thus, one critic has stressed the role of the Godwinian “novel of ideas” in the make-up of Wieland, while others have focused on such diverse things as the presence of the Gothic formula, the influence of various German works, the historical background of...