Faith and Drama

Last night, I saw Ciara Ni Chuirc's new play Made By God at Irish Rep. The production features Briana Reeves Gibson as the Virgin Mary. Gibson previously worked on the national tour of Amazing Grace, a musical with a book by Arthur Giron, who passed away earlier this month.

Like Ni Chuirc's play, Arthur frequently delved into issues of faith with his writing. He is perhaps best known for his play Edith Stein, a drama about a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity, became a nun, and was ultimately murdered at Auschwitz. Faith is not an easy thing in Giron's work, but it is always worth wrestling with in the end.

I first met Arthur more years ago than I'd like to count, at a reading of his play Flight. He was the reason I applied to the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon, but he was just stepping away from it as I was accepted. Though I never studied with him formally, we stayed in touch, and he came to readings of my work when I invited him. He was always generous with his time and his feedback.

A few years ago, I bumped into Arthur at a reading directed by Kim Weild, who also worked on Amazing Grace. He was giddy because he had recently reconnected with a woman he described as his first love. They had both gone on to marry other people, but he couldn't wait to see her again and hear stories about how her life had gone. That was Arthur. He was always looking for the best in people and in life.

He grew up as Arturo Giron, but this was in the days when Latino playwrights weren't taken seriously, so he was advised to submit his work under the name "Arthur" instead. It worked, and his play Becoming Memories was a hit. Arturo became Arthur, and that was the name he then went by professionally. He didn't forget his Latin American heritage, though, which comes out clearly in his play The Coffee Trees.

Arthur had a special knack for introducing magical realism into plays about historical people. His play Emilie's Voltaire, for instance, tells the story of the Enlightenment philosopher's affair with the mathematician Emilie du Chatelet, using a stunning array of theatrical devices. It's probably my favorite work of his. Again, characters wrestle with ideas of faith, not in a simplistic way, but in a manner that reminds us what it means to be fully human.

I wish that Arthur could have seen Made By God, and that I could have heard his thoughts on the piece. The play deals with debates over abortion. In the present day, a Christian podcaster investigates the story of a pregnant teenager who gave birth and died in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary in the year that abortion was outlawed in Ireland. The set, designed by Lindsay Fuori, portrays the outdoor grotto that served as a shrine, and now looms over the lives of characters struggling with their own faith.

Though I can't know for sure, I think Arthur would have enjoyed the play, whether he agreed with Ni Chuirc's religious views and politics or not. To him, what was important was not that we arrived at a destination, but that we always remained on a journey. Faith, for Arthur, was not a prize to be won, but a life to be led.

There will be a memorial service for Arthur on Saturday at Trinity Church on the Upper West Side. If you want another way to honor his memory, though, you might want to check out Made By God.

Mademoiselle Clairon

The 18th-century French actress Hippolite Clairon was famous for her portrayal of classic heroines, but she also inspired contemporary dramatists to write parts specifically for her.

According to the biographer Frederick Hawkins, "Many tragedies were written in the hope that she might appear in them, and nearly all of those in which she did appear received at least a temporary vitality from her disciplined art and intensity of passion."

Voltaire was a particular admirer of hers, and he penned the role of Idamé in L'Orphelin de la Chine expressly for Clairon. That play was based on a Yuan-era zaju play from China, but ended up being re-adapted by dramatists all over Europe, including Arthur Murphy.

The admiration between Voltaire and Clairon was mutual. Hawkins claims that in Clairon's eyes Voltaire "had always been a sort of demi-god. On his side, the aged philosopher was quite prepared to view her as a demi-goddess, especially after witnessing in his little theatre the superb combination of art and truth which her acting had presented."

Clairon began her career at the Comédie Italienne, debuting in a small role in a play by Marivaux. She became famous, however, at the Comédie-Française, playing many of the parts exalted by the neoclassical French stage, including Racine's Phèdre.

She survived the French Revolution, but like many artists who were associated with the old regime, she fell on hard times after the change in government. Her economic need became a boon to historians, and she published her memoirs in 1799, quickly selling out the first edition.

The Orphan of China

When I was visiting the Tate Britain a couple years ago, I came across Tilly Kettle's portrait "Mrs. Yates as Mandane in The Orphan of China." The piece captures a nearly forgotten moment of transcultural drama in the 18th century.

Beginning in 1731, zaju drama from China began being translated into European languages, causing a burst of excitement in the West. The first translation of a Chinese drama to be published in Europe was a French version of Ji Junxiang's The Orphan of Zhao.

Though The Orphan of Zhao was written in the 13th century, like most zaju plays, it takes place in the distant past, telling the story of how the Zhao clan was almost wiped out, but one child was saved and hidden away from the family's enemies. After many sacrifices are made to preserve the child, the orphan returns to avenge the Zhao clan and restore their authority.

In 1741, William Hatchett published the first English adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, but it was seen as an attack on the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, so it was never performed. The most famous version of the story was the one the French dramatist Voltaire penned in 1753. Known as L'Orphelin de la Chine, this version reset the play during the Mongol period. The adaptation quickly spread across Europe.

Voltaire's play adheres to unities of time, place, and action, something zaju drama rarely if ever did. In his version, the orphan is already grown, and everything takes place in the same imperial palace. All of this was done to comply with the rules of neoclassicism. The rules were supposed to make drama more realistic, though to us neoclassical plays often feel ridiculously improbable. In any case, it was Voltaire's version of the story that inspired the British dramatist Arthur Murphy to write his own adaptation in 1756.

"Enough of Greece and Rome," Britain's poet laureate William Whitehead wrote in the play's prologue, remarking:

     On eagle wings the poet of to-night

     Soars for fresh virtues to the source of light;

     To China's eastern realms: and boldly bears

     Confucius' morals to Britannia's ears.

Thus, the play's Chinese-ness was one of its main selling points. That's probably apparent, too, in the costume Mary Ann Yates is wearing as Mandane in Kettle's portrait. Is the costume authentically Chinese? Of course not. However, it attempts to evoke an idealized East that is "the source of light" and that upholds morals the decadent West had forgotten. That moralizing can sometimes make the play's dialogue feel stilted, as when Mandane's husband Zamti praises "sacred laws by hoary elders taught."

Zamti has raised the heir to the throne as his own son, while sending his biological son Hamet to Korea. This serves to distract Timurkan, the Emperor of the Tartars, from the real heir. David Garrick played Zamti in the original production of Murphy's play. Echoing the values of the Age of Reason, he declares in Act II: "Priestcraft and sacerdotal perfidy / To me are yet unknown: religion's garb / Here never serves to consecrate a crime..."

In the play's third act, Zamti reveals to his adopted son Etan that the boy is actually Zaphimri, heir to the throne of China. Being naturally good, however, the boy refuses to allow Zamti's biological son Hamet to die in his place. This is a big change from the original zaju drama, where tons of people are sacrificed in order to protect the young orphan. Though Murphy's play is staunchly monarchal, it looks for a justification beyond the mere Divine Right of Kings. As Zamti puts it:

                                   Tho' rufian pow'r

     May for a while suppress all sacred order,

     And trample on the rights of man, the soul

     Which gave our legislation life and vigour

     Shall still subsist, above the tyrant's reach.

All deaths are kept for the play's final fifth act, where they decorously take place offstage, out of the direct view of the audience. This might not be as exciting for us as the original, but it allowed London audiences in the 18th century to feel more comfortable with the play, since it conformed to conventions of the time. 

Perhaps it was necessary for audiences of the period to have some elements of the play rendered familiar so they could better enjoy the elements of the Chinese-inspired play that were unfamiliar and exotic to them.

Theatre in the Age of Reason

During the eighteenth century, Europeans were riding high on a wave of scientific progress. Over the course of the previous hundred years, Galileo Galilei had revolutionized astronomy using a telescope for observations, William Harvey had forever changed anatomy by postulating how the heart circulates blood, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek had opened a whole new world for biology by using a microscope to observe life forms previously invisible. Then, in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical physics with his Latin treatise Principia Mathematica. Newton's work in particular led to a new spirit of optimism. The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope paid tribute to Newton's achievement when he wrote: "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."

While Newton's work didn't illuminate everything, people in the eighteenth century began to feel that everything in the universe could be known if it were only studied rationally. A few monarchs still ruled with absolute power, claiming authority directly from God. However, in 1715 Louis XIV of France, the greatest of such monarchs, died. He left his five-year-old great-grandson to be king. People not just in France but all across Europe dreamt of how they could remake the world along more rational lines. Individuals who discarded tradition and superstition in favor of reason and science viewed themselves as enlightened, and the era in which they triumphed became known as the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment influenced the theatre as well. The free-thinking Scandinavian nobleman Ludvig Holberg wrote a series of comedies mocking old ways of doing things and championing reform. In his most famous play, Jeppe of the Hill, the play's protagonist has a long monologue explaining why he drinks so much, arguing that alcoholism is a rational response to the miseries of life. The following year, Holberg premiered a new play in Copenhagen, The Lying-In-Room, in which a pregnant woman going into labor finds her many visitors cause her greater pain than child birth. Another Holberg play, the gender-bending comedy The Beautiful Bridegroom, was recently made into an opera by the American composer Dan Shore.

In France, Enlightenment ideas frequently drew the ire of the government, in part due to the actions of the philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name, Voltaire. Most famous for his witty works of satire, Voltaire attacked foolishness and corruption wherever he saw it, but most especially in the Roman Catholic Church and the French establishment. The Comédie Française agreed to perform Voltaire's first play, an adaptation of Oedipus, in 1717. However, before they could stage it, the author was arrested and thrown into the most notorious prison in Paris, the Bastille. He was released the following year, after which the theatre finally performed the play, earning Voltaire much critical praise.

Voltaire's next two plays were failures, and after a dispute with a nobleman, he was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time. The government later released him, on the condition that he go into exile in Britain. It was there that Voltaire met John Gay and other English playwrights. Eventually allowed to return to France, Voltaire had to avoid Paris, where he was routinely attacked and his writings publicly burned. This was the price of criticizing people in power.

Over his long life, Voltaire continued to produce plays in addition to works of philosophy and history. His tragedy Zaire was largely a success, but his play Mahomet drew criticism, not because it attacked the founder of Islam (though it did), but because people rightly perceived that the true object of the play's scorn was the fanaticism of the Catholic Church. Voltaire frequently disguised his criticism of France by setting stories in far-off lands, as was the case with The Orphan of China, an adaptation of the Yuan-era Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao. Though these plays did not send Voltaire back to the Bastille, they didn't win him many friends in high places, either. Yet by the time he died, Voltaire's literary achievements were grudgingly recognized. In 1778, the 83-year-old author rose from his sickbed to attend his last play, Irene, receiving tremendous applause. A few months later, he died.

By the time of Voltaire's death, criticism of French society and the French government was becoming much more common. The playwright Pierre Beaumarchais scored a huge hit in 1775 with his comedy The Barber of Seville. While the play nominally takes place in Spain, it pokes fun at the French upper classes, showing an aristocrat who is unable to marry his love without the help of a lowly barber. In 1781, Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, which went even further, showing the barber outwit the very nobleman he helped in the previous play. After reading the piece, King Louis XVI ordered it banned, in spite of entreaties from his wife, Marie Antoinette, who found it hysterically funny. Three years later, the ban was lifted, and aristocrats flocked to the theatre to see themselves made fun of by a playwright with humble origins.

The Marriage of Figaro is sometimes credited with helping to bring about the French Revolution, but as it so happens, Beaumarchais was involved even more explicitly in revolutionary activity. He helped run guns and supplies to the British colonies during the American Revolution and was intricately involved in a number of spy rings. His sympathies were clearly with the Enlightenment ideals embodied by Voltaire, and he published many of Voltaire's works posthumously, having them printed in Germany to avoid French censors. Beginning in 1787, Beaumarchais became involved in a series of legal battles as his enemies sought to discredit him. Though many in the aristocracy embraced Beaumarchais and his work, others feared the violent disruptions that might be caused by critiques of those in power.

Those fears proved to be well founded. On July 14, 1789, a mob in Paris stormed the Bastille, the prison that had not only once held Voltaire, but had in fact become a symbol of all the oppressive forces opposed by the Enlightenment. The mob's actions sparked a revolution that led to the execution of the king and queen and a Reign of Terror that would take many other lives as well. The social divisions criticized by Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and others had finally brought European civilization to a point where violence seemed the only way to right the wrongs at the heart of society. The age of reason dissolved into an age of violent emotions.

The Rival Sisters

Arthur Murphy was a successful playwright of the 18th century. He adapted Voltaire's The Orphan of China (itself an adaptation of the Chinese zaju play The Orphan of Zhao) in 1759, and later penned the hit tragedy The Grecian Daughter.

Yet after Murphy wrote The Rival Sisters in 1783, he chose to publish it without having it performed. Murphy knew full well that a good production was often crucial to a play being favorably received. He wrote in the preface to the play that the piece had not received "The pomp of splendid scenery, and the illusions of the skilful performer" without which a play "in the leisure of the closet is not always supported."

In fact, a play being perceived as a closet drama can "excite a prejudice not easy to be surmounted," Murphy wrote. Audiences might well ask: "If it be of any value, why was it not produced in the usual form of a Public Exhibition?" However, he was equally clear that "the Play was written with a view to the Stage." The play is not a closet drama, and Murphy was acutely aware of the stigma that came with such a label.

The Rival Sisters is based on a 1672 play by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre Corneille, author of The Cid and The Liar. The legendary actress Marie Champmeslé (who later became the muse and mistress of Jean Racine) played the lead in the first production of that play. Murphy seemed highly aware of the fact that if his own play were to succeed on stage, it would require a performer of similar ability. He wrote in his preface: "When this country could, with pride, boast of an Actress equally followed, and perhaps with better reason, it occurred that a Tragedy, with the beauties of the original, but freed from its defects, might, at such a season, be acceptable to the Public."

For whatever reason (and Murphy remains quite coy in his preface), the author decided not to press The Rival Sisters to be performed by some grand British actress. Still, we can guess for whom it might have been intended. Murphy completed the play the year after the stunning appearance of Sarah Siddons at Drury Lane in the role of Isabella in Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage. Siddons, who later that year also starred in Murphy's The Grecian Daughter at Drury Lane, took the theatre world by storm. She likely was the actress Murphy had in mind who might equal the grandeur of Champmeslé.

In fact, Siddons did perform in The Rival Sisters, though not until 1793. A decade after the play's composition, it finally made its premiere. The piece tells the story of Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos in favor of her sister, Phaedra. Interestingly, Ariadne does not even appear until the second act, when she confidently proclaims:

                    No, from this day, from this auspicious day,
                    Theseus is mine; the godlike hero's mine.
                    With ev'ry grace, with ev'ry laurel crown'd,
                    The lover's softness, and the warrior's fire.

Ariadne trusts her lover and her sister, though both are false. Pathetically, she goes to Phaedra, entreating her help to win back her man from the temptress leading him astray:

                    You can detect the traitress; guide me to her.
                    If on this isle—ha!—why that sudden pause?
                    That downcast eye? why does your colour change?
                    Oh! now I see you know her: in your looks
                    I read it all.

Yet Ariadne still does not understand. She thinks Phaedra is concealing her rival, not that her sister actually IS her rival! When the truth becomes known and Theseus sails away with Phaedra, Ariadne starts to go mad, then stabs herself.

In many versions of the myth, Ariadne marries the god Dionysus after her abandonment. Murphy gives us no such consolation, but he does show his heroine rising to a higher plain as she exclaims:

                    Elysium is before me; let not Theseus
                    Pursue me thither; in those realms of bliss
                    Let my departed spirit know some rest.
                    Oh! let me feel ingratitude no more.
                    Keep Theseus here in this abode of guilt;
                    This world is his; let him remain with Phaedra;
                    Let him be happy; no, the fates forbid it:
                    They will deceive each other.

And as those who know other plays about Phaedra can tell you, she's right. Theseus and Phaedra will deceive each other, but that's a matter for a different play.

The French Othello

In 1829, the French poet Alfred de Vigny asked the following question:

Will the French stage be receptive or not to a modern tragedy which offers the following: --in its conception, a large-scale portrait of life, rather than a narrow picture focused on a catastrophe and a plot; --in its composition, characters rather than roles, quiet scenes without drama intermingled with tragic and comic scenes; --in its execution, style which is familiar, comic, tragic, and sometimes epic?

The "modern" drama to which he referred was de Vigny's own The Moor of Venice, itself not a new work at all, but rather an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello. Certainly, Othello has a large-scale portrait of life, full-blooded characters, and alternating scenes of comedy and tragedy. All of these things were anathema to French neoclassical tragedy.

Though neoclassicism was "harmonious," de Vigny argued that the old feudal and theocratic systems in France had been harmonious, as well, Just as the French Revolution had swept away the old political order, artists of the Romantic Revolution sought to sweep away the stultified art world of the early nineteenth century.

To do this, they needed Shakespeare. Not only were Shakespeare's plays antithetical to the ideas of neoclassicism, they were also universally acknowledged as works of genius. By bringing Shakespeare to the French stage, de Vigny was engaged in a revolutionary act.

Othello's road to the French stage was not an easy one. In his preface to The Moor of Venice, de Vigny recounts how difficult it was to get the French to tolerate even the use of a simple hand prop necessary for the story: the handkerchief. Voltaire's play Zaire, which bears some resemblances to Othello, replaces the handkerchief with a letter as the vital property. Ducis, who adapted a number of Shakespeare's plays into French, wrote a version of Othello in 1792, but he used a string of diamonds rather than a handkerchief, which must have seemed much more refined.

A handkerchief did appear onstage in Pierre Lebrun's adaptation of Schiller's Mary Stuart, but when the actors referred to it, the prop was called "gauze" and "gift"--anything but handkerchief! It was not until 1829 that de Vigny finally had to nerve to call a handkerchief a handkerchief.

It was the following year that Victor Hugo's play Hernani finally cast aside the neoclassical tradition for good. The success of Hernani, however, might not have been possible without Othello conquering the French stage first.

The Tragedies of Voltaire

Voltaire understood the limits of neoclassicism, yet still had difficulty surmounting them. Beginning with a French version of Oedipus in 1718, Voltaire wrote a number of tragedies, including Zaire, which dealt with Christian-Muslim relations. Voltaire acted in that play himself, and according to one account, forgot his lines and made up half a dozen new verses on the spot.

His play Mahomet, first performed in 1741, actually portrays the Muslim prophet onstage, a big no-no in Islam, so for that reason alone, I imagine the play is un-performable today. It’s not particularly kind to the prophet, but Voltaire seems to have intended the play as an attack on the Catholic Church, using Islam as a cover to shield himself from local authorities.

Voltaire’s play The Orphan of China reworks Ji Junxiang’s classic Yuan-era play The Orphan of Zhao. Though it wasn’t the first French adaptation of the Chinese play, the fact that this version was by Voltaire no doubt brought special attention to the piece, and the Comedie Francais premiered it in 1755. Unfortunately, many people attacked it for not maintaining unity of time, place, and action.

However, Voltaire himself campaigned against critics who felt rules were more important than drama. In his “Discourse on Tragedy” he wrote:

I know very well that the Greek tragedies, besides the superior ones in English, have erred in often taking up horror for terror, and the disgusting and the unbelievable for the tragic and the marvelous. The art was in its infancy in the time of Aeschylus, as in London in the time of Shakespeare; but despite the great faults of Greek poets, and even of ours, one finds a real pathos of singular beauty; and if some French who do not know the tragedies of different standards but in some translations and by hearsay, condemn them without any restriction, they are, it seems to me, like some blind men who affirmed that a rose could not have vibrant colors, because they in considering it had felt the thorns.

Voltaire went on to say that the Greeks, and especially the English, were inclined to surpass the boundaries of decorum, but that French writers often failed to achieve the truly tragic because they were too afraid of being indecorous.

While Voltaire’s dramas were progressive for the eighteenth century, he was still too stuck in the conventions of his own time to appeal to later generations of Frenchmen. Writing in the nineteenth century, Emile Deschamps concluded that while Voltaire was inventive in his plots and original in his thinking, he was still inferior to dramatists of the Golden Age such as Racine and Corneille. As Deschamps put it:

His Turks, Chinese, Arabs, and Americans are much more French than the Greeks and Romans of Racine and Corneille, and since they are Frenchmen of the age of Louis XV, rather than of Louis XIV, their language is less grand, less pure, and less idealized. They are addressing Madame de Pompadour rather than Madame de Valliere.

Nevertheless, Voltaire’s tragedies, more than fifty in all, continued to have an impact on the French theatre well into the nineteenth century. Once Deschamps’ friend Victor Hugo had his play Hernani performed in 1830, however, Voltaire’s neoclassical plays looked quite old-fashioned, and today they are largely forgotten.

Playwriting in Post-Revolutionary France

What was it like for playwrights during the French Revolution? Though he wasn't born until 1801, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve gave this account of Revolutionary writers:

When the Revolution came and disturbed these minor literary lives, instead of readings in the salons, one had "Sunday luncheons." For at least fifteen years, at these luncheons, the literary guests exchanged confidences... one told one's friends the subject and plan of one's work before a single line of it was written. No sooner had the first acts been scribbled down than a reading was given.

This rosy depiction of the Revolutionary era appears to be more or less accurate. The Chapelier Law of 1791 had struck down the censorship practices of the old regime, and over the next year the number of theatres in Paris more than doubled. Working-class people flocked to the theatre, and there was a tremendous demand for new work. Sainte-Beuve claimed that the old forms simply did not speak to a public that was living in a new world:

...if we were still living under a monarchy like that of Louis XIV or Louis XV, what more would we require, I ask you, than the admirable emotional analyses of Racine, or the philosophic dramas of Voltaire? Even after the Revolution, during the ten years of the Empire, wasn't the absence of freedom enough to revive, in the context of Austerlitz and Jena, the classical tragedy of the monarchy which, excepting Corneille, was so foreign and incongruous?

Writing in 1828, after France had embraced a constitutional monarchy, Sainte-Beuve saw the present as being closer politically and socially to those heady Revolutionary days. Still, he lamented the fact that the theatre was not as vibrant as it once had been. Politics, he said, had curbed art, since now audiences went to the theatre to escape rather than to debate important political questions. Still, he was optimistic about the future:

Free from the vortex, art, still youthful, yet ripe with experience, will pursue her peaceful work in solitude. This work will be animated with all life's colors and all mankind's passions. This product of leisure and meditation will doubtless encompass and intermingle in thousands of charming and sublime effects the true and the ideal, reason and fantasy, the observation of men and the poet's dreams.

Victor Hugo's breakthrough Romantic drama Hernani was still two years off, but Eugene Scribe had begun writing plays. Sainte-Beuve believed that Scribe's vogue was a good reason for optimism.

The Evolution of Madame de Staël

Anne Louise Germaine Necker was an odd fish. Her parents were Swiss Protestants who settled in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. The year after she was born, her father went into politics, eventually rising to become the Minister of Finance for King Louis XVI.

Did I mention that her dad was Jacques Necker? You know, the financial genius who did everything he could to save Louis's rear end, and whose dismissal by the king helped to precipitate the French Revolution? Yeah, that Jacques Necker.

And her mom? That would be Suzanne Curchod. She used to hang out with Diderot, and she exchanged letters with Rousseau and Voltaire. Edward Gibbon wanted to marry her, but she pretty much turned him down.

So with those two as your parents, it's probably hard to not be a genius. (Especially when you're an only child and your brilliant father dotes on you all the time.)

When she was 20, Germaine married the Swedish ambassador to Paris, Eric Magnus Staël-Holstein. They split after a couple of years, but she took his name, becoming known to history as Madame de Staël.

Madame de Staël published--under her own name--some rather radical little pieces right before the Revolution. She had to flee the Reign of Terror, but she returned to France after the fall of Robespierre and wrote a fascinating book called The Influence of Literature on Society. With this work of literary criticism, de Staël broke with traditional French Enlightenment thinking and began a journey along the road to Romanticism.

The Influence of Literature on Society holds that the rules of good taste are not arbitrary, but are based on "universal truths" that are "unanimously approved by all mankind." The book claims local customs often force authors of genius to depart from good taste, but that these minor errors in style should not obscure the greatness of works tainted by barbarous (read, non-French) customs.

The great example of this, of course, was Shakespeare. In her chapter on Shakespearean Tragedy, de Staël writes:

In Shakespeare there are beauties of the first order which appeal to all nations and all epochs. In Shakespeare there are also flaws which may be attributed to the Elizabethan period and peculiarities which are so popular with the English that they continue to have success on the English stage.

She claims that Shakespeare is superior to the Greeks in his portrayal of the passions, but inferior to them in terms of artful composition, citing "dull patches, useless repetitions, and incoherent images." The reason for these flaws, she claims, was that Will had to write for an ignorant audience. One gets the sense she thinks that if Shakespeare had only written for more civilized, French theatre goers, then his plays would have been perfect.

Later on in the book, de Staël links the style of Shakespeare and other English writers with the authors of Germany, theorizing about a type of imaginative literature emanating from the northern countries of Europe. While she does not prefer this literature to that of France, she recognizes its power, and she admits that highly structured French verse cannot always contain the deepest feelings of human passion. Ultimately, the book advocates "an intermediate genre between the decorum of the French poets and defects in taste of the Northern writers."

In 1800, de Staël still couldn't get beyond seeing Shakespeare--and other "Northern" writers--as being somehow defective. Perhaps writing her own imaginative works helped to change her mind. In 1802, de Staël published Delphine, an epistolary novel examining the roles of upper class women. She returned to France the next year, but she got in hot water with Napoleon and ended up touring Germany with her lover, a fellow Swiss-French writer names Benjamin Constant.

Now that she was spending some serious time in Germany, de Staël's feelings about that country and its literature began to change. She saw Goethe's theatre in Weimar and met Schlegel in Berlin. She then took a tour of Italy and wrote a new novel, Corinne. It was in 1810 that she wrote her second important piece of criticism: Germany.

Napoleon ordered all copies of the book destroyed. Three years later, she was able to have the book republished in London. What was it that made this book, more than Corinne, more than Delphine, more than The Influence of Literature on Society, so dangerous to the French Empire?

As de Staël points out in the book, many people in France had come to use the term "classical" as a synonym for perfection. French art was "classical" because it was based on Greek and Roman models. "Romantic" art by contrast had its origins in the songs of the troubadours of the chivalric age. In Germany, de Staël had the nerve to say that "classical" art wasn't necessarily the best way to go. In one passage she observed:

French poetry, being the most "classical" of all modern poetry, is the only modern poetry not familiar to the people. The stanzas of Tasso are sung by the gondoliers of Venice; Spaniards and Portugese of all classes know the verses of Calerdon and Camoëns by heart. Shakespeare is as much admired by the common folk of England as by the upper classes. Poems of Goethe and Bürger are set to music and can be heard from the banks of the Rhine to the Baltic. Our French poets are admired by the cultivated classes of France and the rest of Europe, but they are completely unknown to the common people, and to the middle class, even of the cities.

Thus, Germany linked all of French literature to the old aristocratic regime, and it associated foreign literatures with egalitarianism, which the Revolution had allegedly championed.

Madame de Staël was particularly biting when it came to drama. She attacked the French for holding fast to the unities of time and place when unity of action was the only one that really mattered. She did not advocate that French playwrights should adopt the methods and models of the Germans, but she welcomed foreign plays as a way to generate new ideas

Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy seems to have greatly moved her. She noted that German audiences watching the play did not mind lingering over lengthy scenes, appreciating the feelings of the characters rather than only being on the lookout for the plot. She expressed a desire to see Wallenstein on the French stage, but she added that the play demanded a "youthful spirit" that many in France lacked.

Acting in France was too bound by what de Staël described as "the art of declamation." She praised German actors, such as August Wilhelm Iffland, as well as the British actor David Garrick. The French actor she most admired was François-Joseph Talma, who found new ways of acting old scenes in order to breath fresh life into them. She concluded a long digression on Talma by saying:

The artist gives as much as is possible to French tragedy of what, justly or unjustly, the Germans accuse it of lacking: originality and naturalness. He knows how to characterize foreign manners in the diverse plays in which he acts, and no actor hazards greater effects by simple means. In his declamation Shakespeare and Racine are artistically joined. Why won't dramatists also attempt to unite in their compositions what the actor has so well combined in his acting?

Germany was more than mere literary criticism. It included a manifesto for a new type of dramaturgy. Napoleon, who had limited the number of theatres in Paris and sought to tightly regulate drama, would have none of that. But all the Napoleons in the world couldn't keep de Staël's successors, including romantic playwrights Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, from ultimately conquering the French stage.