A dramatic satire based on the tale! Puss in Boots, or the Master Cat, is one of the great fairy tales in Western literature. First put to paper by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in the 1550s, Puss in Boots is the story of a talking cat who serves his poor owner by his wits, making his master wealthy, finding him love, and stealing him a kingdom. Ludwig Tieck’s 1797 stage version of the play, first performed in German, is a brilliant amalgam of the fairy tale, children’s theater, and social satire. Rarely performed, Tieck’s Puss in Boots is a joyous early example of absurdist theater. Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was one of the most formative influences of the romantic movement, inspiring such major figures as Novalis and Hoffmann. Not only did his tales and novels shape the course of German romantic fiction; as a translator he helped to naturalize Shakespeare and Cervantes; as an editor he was among the first to recognize Kleist. Tieck’s precocious invention of ironic-fantastic comedy quickly found resonance among fellow romantics, who worked under the parallel influence of the Goethean revolution in drama exhibited in Faust. Yet Tieck’s play Puss-in-Boots (1797) had to wait a full century before its impulses were transmitted, by Pirandello, to modern anti-theater and theater of the absurd. The Tieckian direction anticipates the metaphysical strains both of symbolist and of existentialist theater and the beneficent absurdism of Wilder and Ionesco. As the boundary between stage and audience completely dissolves in Puss-in-Boots, we experience the transcendent delight of pure theater and unsettling doubts about our own roles on the world’s stage.