Shaw Conference in Spain... at last!

Back in 2020, I was supposed to attend a conference on Bernard Shaw in the town of Cáceres in Spain. Well, the conference got delayed two years, but I finally made it!

I arrived in Madrid on Tuesday and took the train out to Cáceres, a beautiful city with lots of medieval architecture. The conference began on Wednesday, with a plenary lecture by Audrey McNamara. She spoke about how Shaw represented "Woman as Nation" but not in the idealized manner of W.B. Yeats in such plays as Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

Edurne Goñi-Alsúa kicked off the first session, discussing "geolect" in Spanish translations of Pygmalion.  Guadalupe Nieto Caballero talked about the reception of Shaw in Spain, and I was fascinated to learn that a production of Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple was performed in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín--who organized the conference--also spoke about his Online Shaw Concordance.

In the second session, I was glad to hear Peter Gahan discuss Shaw and the Germans. Shaw claimed that he mostly just knew Goethe and Schiller among German authors, though he was clearly familiar with a few others, as well. In Germany, Shaw's reputation during his lifetime was as a radical socialist, which informed the talk given by Virginia Costello on Shaw, Maxim Gorky and Emma Goldman. While Goldman became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after being transported there by the U.S. Army aboard the Buford, Shaw remained consistent in his support for the Russian Revolution.

Unfortunately, Jean Reynolds did not make it over for the conference, but she joined us over Zoom to officially launch her new book on Major Barbara and Pygmalion. She discussed how in Major Barbara Andrew Undershaft admires his predecessor in the arms trade, whom he refers to as his master. He quotes maxims of the business, but Reynolds said these maxims fall apart once you start to really think about them. She also brought up that when Andrew comes to his own home after being away for years, the butler Morrison doesn't know how to classify him. Should he announce him as a visitor or treat him as one of the family?

Wednesday night, we had a guided tour of Cáceres. We wondered at the old Moorish tower, the plaque on the ground marking the old Jewish quarter, and other amazing sights. The conference started up again on Thursday morning, with a plenary lecture by Brad Kent on Shaw and world literature. I learned that when Shaw accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, he used the prize money to set up an organization to encourage translation of Swedish literature into English. The organization gives out a prize each year for the best translation. Kent also spoke on Shaw's relationship to Max Reinhardt, who directed some of Shaw's plays, including a production of Saint Joan that included Bertolt Brecht.

The third session of the conference contained some Zoom talks, as well as Vishnu Patil (live and in person) discussing Shaw in India. He noted that India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, attended talks given by Shaw, and the two later met formally in 1949, the year before Shaw's death. After a brief coffee break, we had a fourth session, which featured Justine Zapin discussing The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, which she referred to as Shaw's last Irish play. She noted that in the play Shaw creates an Irish landscape in the minds of the audience without engaging in a mimetic representation of place in the physical theatre space.

After a book launch for Bernard Shaw and the Spanish-Speaking World, we had a fifth session in which Miguel Cisneros Perales discussed Spanish adaptations of Pygmalion and Óscar Giner spoke on links between Saint Joan and Calderón de la Barca’s Golden Age play The Constant Prince. Both plays present exceptional incarnations of the life force, he said. Giner also mentioned that Shaw's hero, P.B. Shelley, had partially translated Calderón's The Prodigious Magician, which remains perhaps the best English translation of that play. We also had some entertainment, with Brian Freeland performing his one-man show Bernard Shaw: Playing the Clown.

Today, I gave my own talk on Shaw and Sarah Bernhardt. There were also presentations by Luis Tosina Fernández, R.A.F. Ajith, and Soudabeh Ananisarab. It's been an exhausting conference, but one I was very glad to be able to attend!

Manfred at 200

Lord Byron published his drama Manfred in 1817. Now, 200 years later, a number of people are taking advantage of the piece's bicentennial to take a closer look at the work.

Thursday night, Red Bull Theater performed a staged reading of the play with Jason Butler Harner in the title role. And yesterday, New York University held a symposium organized by Omar Miranda to take a more academic look at Manfred.

After I saw the reading, I spoke with Miranda, and he invited me to the symposium. I have to teach on Fridays, so I missed much of it, but I managed to make it over in time to hear Emily Bernhard Jackson from the University of Exeter talk about Manfred, Byron, and incest.

Jackson noted that the character of Manfred expresses guilt, and that incest was a central concern both for Manfred and for his creator, Lord Byron. (Byron likely had a sexual relationship with his half sister, and Manfred loved a woman named Astarte, who also seems to have been related to him.) However, she observed that Manfred's guilt does not necessarily come from incest.

Even if Manfred did commit incest, did that cause his guilt? No, Jackson argued. The source of his guilt was Astarte's death. Manfred does not regret that he loved Astarte. Rather, his real regret lies in her response to that love. Jackson pointed out that Byron's poem Don Juan jokes about sibling incest, and his play Cain portrays incest as natural. Manfred's guilt doesn't come from the incest, she argued, but from the result of that incest, Astarte's mysterious death.

Jackson was followed by Richard Lansdown talking about Manfred and suicide, and Alice Levine comparing the play to the Don Juan legend. Lansdown mentioned that the arrival of modernity can be judged by when the suicide rate surpasses the homicide rate. That occurred around 1680 in London, but only recently in a part of Italy where organized crime has dominated for years. Levine's talk was equally interesting, as she observed that Mozart's Don Giovanni has more in common with Manfred than it does with Byron's Don Juan.

After a break, Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gamer kicked off a new panel on Manfred, performance, and theater. They compared Manfred with melodrama, a genre which Cox called a machine built for speed, and that speedily consumes everything in its way. He noted that in the wake of the French Revolution, there were 30,000 performances of the melodramas by Rene-Charles Guilbert de Pixerecourt. In Germany, the melodramas of August von Kotzebue received more performances than all of the plays by Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe combined!

Gamer filled in some more information on melodrama. Thomas Holcroft, who adapted Pixerecourt to the English staged, was praised by his contemporaries for his ability to capture real life. What made melodrama a genre, however, was not its style but its form, in that it utilized music. Popular melodramas of the early nineteenth century borrowed music from ballet and pantomime to create mood. Similarly, he said, Byron used singing in Manfred, working in music as he tried to revive tragedy.

Jonathan Gross then spoke about the Freemason imagery in Manfred, and Miranda compared Manfred  to Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The keynote address, however, was given by Jerome McGann. He noted the similarity between Astarte's name and the name of Byron's half sister, Augusta. For all the parallels to Byron's life, through, Manfred remains deeply obscure, deeply ambiguous, and deeply suggestive, he said.

Most exciting for me, however, was at the reception afterward getting to meet Frederick Burwick. I've very much enjoyed reading some of Burwick's books, but I did not know how many Romantic-era plays he had directed! He and Paul Douglass have also made a great number of the songs used in Romantic plays available online.

Do yourself a favor and check out their site, Romantic-Era Songs. It's wonderful!

German Romanticism

The year 1789--when Parisian mobs stormed the Bastille, breaking into the prison than symbolized the old feudal order and setting its prisoners (and by extension, themselves) free--is an important marker in the history of Western civilization, as well as for Western drama. However, even before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the stirrings of a new outlook toward art began in Germany in the form of the so-called "Storm and Stress" movement. Friedrich Klinger gave the movement its name with his play Sturm und Drang (German for "Storm and Stress"), which premiered in Leipzig in 1777. The previous year, Klinger had submitted his play The Twins to a contest at a theatre in Hamburg, winning first prize and gaining an appointment at the Seyler Theatre Company. The Twins depicts a man who kills his weaker twin, claiming his brother will not allow him to fully develop his own nature. Whether or not Klinger actually embraced such a viewpoint, this type of thinking seemed something entirely new and different to audiences of the day.

In a Storm and Stress play like The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller, the action produces a series of spectacular events that seem beyond the realm of moral judgment. Schiller's villain, Franz Moor, tricks his father into disinheriting Franz's elder brother, Karl. Egged on by his libertine friend Spiegelberg (whose name indicates he is a mirror--"Spiegel"), Karl leads a band of robbers who wage war on civilization. In the forests of Bohemia, he urges his followers on to victory over a surrounding army, convincing them to fight rather than turn him over to the authorities in exchange for pardon. Karl then returns home to claim his promised bride, only to discover that Franz has imprisoned their father, who was long thought to be dead. During the final act of the play, recognitions and reversals happen with dizzying speed. Though the final moments of The Robbers suggest a return to the rule of law, the play's original audiences were more struck by its compelling action than any putative moral.

Like Schiller, the poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe began as a Storm and Stress writer, penning such plays as Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont. Heavily influenced by Shakespeare, Egmont marks a turn toward a new style, one that celebrated powerful emotions and political freedom. This new movement, born around the same time as the French Revolution, came to be known as Romanticism. Instead of looking back just to the classics for inspiration, Romanticism valued the vernacular literature of the middle ages and the Renaissance, especially the tales of chivalry and adventure that had come to be known as Romances. No longer valuing just popular sentiment or cold reason, Romanticism sought to remake the world through powerful, intense feeling.

Feeling is never lacking in Schiller's mature Romantic plays Don Carlos, the Wallenstein Trilogy (Wallenstein's Camp, The Piccolomini, and Wallenstein's Death), and Mary Stuart. The plays' skepticism about any type of absolute values can be seen in their ambivalent relationship with religion. In Don Carlos, Catholicism is the symbol of repression while Protestantism represents liberation, while in Mary Stuart the roles of those two religions are reversed. Wallenstein, though it takes place during the religious wars of the seventeenth century, remains aloof from religious questions. Schiller seems less concerned with what people actually believe than with how those beliefs shape them as human beings.

Schiller's later plays, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina, and William Tell, all reflect the influence of his friend Goethe. Goethe's play Torquato Tasso romanticizes the life of the sixteenth-century Italian poet who--following a difficult relationship with his patron the Duke of Ferrara--was imprisoned in a madhouse. Though Goethe began the piece during his Storm and Stress period, he was ultimately able to reach a higher level of poetic sophistication in the play, marking his entrance into the new style of Romanticism. While working on Torquato Tasso, he was also engaged in writing the drama that would become his masterpiece. In 1808, he finally published the first part of his massive poetic drama Faust.

Faust, Part I is the archetypal Romantic drama. Instead of being divided into acts, the play simply has a succession of scenes, with each scene written in a different verse style. Goethe carefully matches the meter and rhyme scheme of each scene to the emotions he is trying to convey. The poetry reaches a crescendo during Walpurgis Night, when Faust joins a group of witches and fantastic beasts celebrating a Bacchanalia in the Harz Mountains. In a dream, Faust witnesses the wedding of the Fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania. The following scene, written entirely in prose, shows the gloomy letdown from the event, as Faust realizes he has forgotten his precious Gretchen, the woman he loves. With the aid of his demonic companion Mephistopheles, Faust rushes to free Gretchen from prison, only to find she prefers to die there and be redeemed in the next life rather than to live with Faust and lose her soul.

Other German Romantic playwrights include Johann Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich von Kleist. Like many Romantic writers, Tieck was enthralled by fairy tales. His play Puss in Boots stages the popular children's story in a meta-theatrical manner, with characters constantly commenting upon the action. Kleist was far unhappier, both in his life and his art. His tragedy Penthesilea gruesomely depicts the fatal love of an Amazon queen. Though Goethe thought Penthesilea could never be staged, he himself put on a production of Kleist's comedy The Broken Jug. Kleist's most famous play, The Prince of Homburg, was not staged until after the author's suicide in 1811

After completing Faust, Part I, Goethe underwent a conversion of sorts and renounced Romanticism. Faust, Part II, not published until the time of Goethe's death in 1832, embraces the classical world. Faust convinces the bankrupt Holy Roman Emperor he can raise all the funds he needs by claiming an ancient treasure that has been buried since classical times, hinting at a revival of Germany through an embrace of the values of ancient Greece. The play uses a classic five-act structure, and includes a re-staging of the Walpurgis Night scene, but this time with motifs from Greek and Roman mythology. The third act of the play is a virtual hymn to classicism in which Faust wins Helen of Troy.

Romanticism continued in Germany, in spite of Goethe's later turn toward classicism. Writing after Goethe's death in the 1830s, Georg Büchner gave a Romantic exploration of the French Revolution in Danton's Death. What matters in Büchner's vision of Romanticism is not so much what one's values are, but that individuals dedicate themselves to those values with their entire beings. Büchner's last drama, Woyzeck, left unfinished at the time of his death, looks forward to modernism and later became a staple of twentieth-century theatre.

The Roots of Romanticism

In 1965, the great critic and theorist Isaiah Berlin gave a series of lectures on Romanticism. Posthumously published as the book The Roots of Romanticism, Berlin's lectures offer remarkable insight not just into Romanticism in general, but specifically into Romantic drama.

In the opening chapter, "In Search of a Definition," Berlin uses Romantic drama to try to get to the heart of what Romanticism really is. For a Sturm und Drang play like Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers, there is no answer to the question of who is right or wrong. Georg Büchner's later play The Death of Danton offers an even further challenge. Danton does not deserve to die, Berlin argues, "yet Robespierre was perfectly right in putting him to death." What matters in Romanticism is not so much what the values are, but "that people should dedicate themselves to these values with all that is in them."

Berlin considers Romanticism to be an attack on the Enlightenment, and identifies the true fathers of the movement as philosophers such as Johann Georg Hamann and Hamann's pupil, Johan Gottfried Herder, as well as the great Immanuel Kant. In discussing these philosophers, however, Berlin illustrates their principles by turning to dramatists. For instance, he singles out Friedrich Klinger, whose play Sturm und Drang gave a name to the entire German proto-Romantic movement. Klinger's play The Twins depicts a man who kills his weaker twin, claiming his brother will not allow him to fully develop his own nature. Such a viewpoint is entirely alien to that of the Enlightenment.

Kant leads a group that Berlin calls "the Restrained Romantics." Raised on Lutheran pietism, Kant was "virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedom," according to Berlin. Playwrights like Schiller picked up on this obsession with freedom. The hero of Schiller's Fiesco, for instance, acts abominably, but acts with freedom, unlike the rabble in the play who need a leader they can blindly follow. According to Schiller, men must go through the stage of Notstaat in which they are governed by necessity, to Vernunftstaat in which they are governed by rationality, to a finally liberated state in which man is driven by Spieltrieb.  This "play drive" creates its own rules, because it knows that all standards are invented, so the only way to live life authentically is by creating one's own rules.

This type of thinking, however, leads to what Berlin calls "Unbridled Romanticism." This movement included writers like Friedrich Schlegel, whose novel Lucinde advocated free love. It also broke out in the playful meta-theatricality of Ludwig Tieck, whose play Puss-in-Boots contains an on-stage audience openly questioning the conventions of the theatre.

Such unbridled Romantics produced lasting effects, which Berlin illustrates with the stage history of Mozart's Don Giovanni. After devils dragged off his title character to hell, Mozart had the more respectable characters sing a sextet. For a hundred years, however, the Romantics refused to stage the original ending, since they had elevated the villain of the piece to the status of "a vast myth."

This myth, of course, was manifest in the person of Lord Byron. According to Berlin, "Byron's chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of the view that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons, takes its rise from him." Berlin even quotes Byron's Manfred saying:

My Spirit walked not with the souls of men,

Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;

The thirst of their ambition was not mine,

The aim of their existence was not mine;

My joys — my griefs — my passions — and my powers,

Made me a stranger...

This unbridled Romanticism seems far from tolerant. But Berlin argues that it ultimately led to tolerance. If each extreme, individualistic genius can be right in his own way, what right have we to criticize anyone? Though Berlin notes the connections between Romanticism and authoritarianism (particularly Fascism), he finds it ultimately democratic. 

Mr. Cooke Is Goosed

At the beginning of 1789, while France was on the verge of a revolution, the actor George Frederick Cooke found himself being slighted by Elizabeth Whitlock.

Cooke was acting in Newcastle, where he had been almost single-handedly responsible for the success of the Theatre Royal there. When it came time for his benefit performance on March 23rd, it seemed likely that all of his fellow actors would graciously accept invitations to perform with him.

Taking advantage of an actor's prerogative to use his benefit to take on roles that he might not ordinarily play, Cooke decided to play the title role in Joseph Addison's Cato for the first time. He approached Whitlock, the leading actress in the company, and asked her to play Marcia. The role is not particularly large, but it is the leading female part in the play. Whitlock declined.

Undaunted, Cooke engaged another actress for the part. While Whitlock might have lacked a certain amount of tact, there was no reason for the matter to extend beyond the walls of the theatre. Unfortunately for her, it did. A number of ladies, appalled by Whitlock's ingratitude toward the man who had done so much for the theatre in Newcastle, withdrew their support for her benefit.

Faced with declining popularity, Whitlock resigned her own benefit for the season, supposedly to show she had no pecuniary motives, but more likely to avoid playing before a half-empty house. This made matters worse, and with public sentiment turning more and more against her, Whitlock eventually agreed to play the role. That night, she made a public apology from the stage, but then retreated after the audience expressed their hostility. After much ado, she performed the role, skipping a number of her own lines, and ending the whole affair in disgrace.

I recount this little anecdote, because it gives an idea of how rough and tumble the world of theatre could be in Cooke's day. Audiences could be an actor's friend one day, but then turn on him the next. Cooke was a brilliant performer, but he also struggled with alcohol his entire life, and he could be his own worst enemy. Ultimately, the bottle brought him down, and all the talent in the world could not save him.

Cooke was known for playing villains, particularly Richard III, but also Shylock, Iago, and other Shakespearean bad guys, as well as Sir Giles Overreach in Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. He was drawn to classic plays and did not support the gifted playwrights of his own day. Cooke once wrote of the wonderful Matthew G. Lewis play The Castle Spectre:

I hope posterity, if they read it, will not believe it could repeatedly attract crowded houses, when the most sublime production of the immortal Shakespeare, even for one night, would be played to empty benches, at least to empty boxes:—But it certainly is the best treat for empty skulls.

On Halloween night, 1800, Cooke made his debut at Covent Garden in the role of Richard III. He could have made a home in London long before that, but quarrels with fellow actors kept him out in the provinces. Fortunately, his return to the capital was a success. A letter he received, and kept until the day he died, carried a warning, though:

The public are your friends:—look to them alone; for while you merit their patronage you will ever experience it.

An implied warning here was that if he ever ceased to merit the patronage of the public, Cooke would be lost, just as poor Elizabeth Whitlock was after the Newcastle Cato affair.

Over the next few years, Cooke engaged in an intense rivalry with John Philip Kemble, the leading tragic actor of the day. Cooke saw himself as Kemble's equal, but while he had an intensity Kemble lacked, Cooke did not have as great a range. He also allowed his temper to get the better of him—especially when he was drinking.

In 1802, Cooke saw the Newcastle episode repeat itself, only this time it was in London, and he himself was on the losing end of the audience's wrath. Cooke declined to perform in a benefit performance of another Lewis play, The Harper's Daughter, which is an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's drama The Robbers. Kemble's nephew Henry Siddons ended up reading the part in the performance while Cooke disappeared for more than two weeks, presumably getting drunk every night.

Cooke returned in time to play the title character in King John, which was being done as a benefit for the remarkably talented actress Harriett Litchfield, who was playing Constance. Cooke on occasion angered Litchfield, but the two remained on good terms throughout their lives. According to a report in the Morning Chronicle, the audience was not as ready to forgive. They hissed Cooke on his first appearance, and—like Whitlock in Newcastle—he had to apologize to them directly.

In that instance, Cooke claimed he had been ill, and the audience allowed him to continue, even giving him hearty applause by the end of the show. As time went on, though, Cooke's "illnesses" became understood as euphemisms for bouts of drunkenness.

Eventually, Cooke left Britain to tour in the United States. In 1810, he performed in America for the first time, making his debut at the Park Theatre in New York, once again in his most famous role of Richard III. The theatre was packed, but by the end of the winter, the novelty had worn off and houses thinned in bad weather. Cooke was living the life of an exile. He was not wanted at home, and did not feel welcome abroad, either.

In 1812, Covent Garden invited Cooke to return. Though his antics had become legendary, management missed the box-office draw he could provide. By that time, however, it was too late. Cooke died on September 26, 1812 at the age of 56. A post-mortem found his liver had almost ceased to function.

Cooke's body was buried in the so-called Stranger's Vault of St. Paul's Chapel in lower Manhattan. According to biographer Arnold Hare, the great actor Edmund Kean (who was an admirer of Cooke) while visiting New York in 1820 arranged for the remains to be moved to the center of the churchyard where a suitable monument could be erected.

Legend says that when they dug up the body, the skull was removed and used as a prop in Hamlet, eventually making its way to a medical museum. Kean also took a bone for himself. (In some versions of the story, it was a toe bone, but Hare asserts it was a finger bone.) Mrs. Kean subsequently threw it away.

The remains of the remains are still there outside St. Paul's Chapel, which narrowly missed being destroyed by the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I went down there this afternoon. Unfortunately, all of the grass is currently fenced off, so I couldn't get very close to the grave, but I did snap this picture:

The plaque on the monument says it was erected in 1821. Kean was in America from 1820 to 1821, so either year could be correct. I am inclined to doubt Hare's biography, but 19th-century gravestones can be notoriously inaccurate.

Unfortunately, the man at the church gift shop, though very eager to help, was not able to provide any information about the Stranger's Vault. He did give me a number to call to contact the church archives, though, so perhaps I'll be able to get more information next week.

Until then, rest well, Mr. Cooke. I hope you found some peace in death that you rarely had in your lifetime.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Playwright

I've been reading Rosemary Ashton's biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer hailed in his lifetime as a great playwright as well as a great poet.

Even from a young age, Coleridge had a dramatic imagination. In 1792, he was spending much time at the home of his friend, Tom Evans, enjoying a sort of adopted family. In a letter to Tom's mother, the 19-year-old Coleridge wrote of his fondness for the family in metaphors of the stage:

You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart's little theatre--and--God knows! you are not crowded. There, my dear Spectators! you shall see what you shall see--Farce, Comedy, & Tragedy--my Laughter, my Chearfulness, and my Melancholy. A thousand figures pass before you, shifting in perpetual succession--these are my Joys and my Sorrows, my Hopes and my Fears, my Good tempers, and my Peevishnesses: you will however observe two, that remain unalterably fixed--and these are Love and Gratitude.

One of the first serious literary attempts Coleridge made was a play about Maximilien de Robespierre he wrote in collaboration with Robert Southey. The two friends undertook the work as a sort of docu-drama, composing The Fall of Robespierre only weeks after the execution of the famed leader of the French Revolution. Robespierre had gone to the guillotine on July 28, 1794, and Coleridge and Southey wrote the play in August, using newspaper accounts of the events leading up to his precipitous fall from power. By the beginning of September they were shopping the play around to publishers, and it was released to the public in October. No grueling developmental workshops here!

Coleridge fell very much under the spell of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller. After having discovered Schiller's The Robbers, he wrote to Southey:

I had read chill and trembling until I came to the part where Moor fires a pistol over the Robbers who are asleep--I could read no more--My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling Fiends?

Later, in 1795, Coleridge wrote a political pamphlet called The Plot Discovered in which he attacked the government of Prime Minister William Pitt. One of the charges he leveled against the government was that it had suppressed productions of The Robbers.

For most people, Coleridge's name will forever be bound up with that of William Wordsworth. It was the two of them together who ushered in a wave of Romanticism with their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. However, for their first in-person meeting after a period of admiring correspondence, Coleridge had tucked under his arm not poems but the first two and a half acts of his play Osorio.

Two passages from Osorio actually made their way into Lyrical Ballads as independent poems under the titles "The Foster-Mother's Tale" and "The Dungeon." My favorite of the two is the latter:

And this place our forefathers made for man!

This is the process of our love and wisdom

To each poor brother who offends against us—

Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty?

Is this the only cure? Merciful God!

Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up

By ignorance and parching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague spot.

Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks—

And this is their best cure! uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

With other ministrations thou, O nature!

Healest thy wandering and distempered child:

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,

Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,

Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing,

Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;

But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,

His angry spirit healed and harmonized

By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

Sadly, the Theatre-Royal at Drury Lane turned down Osorio. Coleridge disliked some of the popular fare that did make it to the boards. He derided Matthew G. Lewis's runaway hit The Castle Spectre as "Schiller Lewisized" with "not one line that marks even a superficial knowledge of human feelings."

In 1798, as Lyrical Ballads was being published, Coleridge set out to Germany, where one of his goals was to gather enough materials to write a biography of the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The book on Lessing never materialized, but Coleridge did learn enough German to translate the two main parts of Schiller's dramatic trilogy Wallenstein. These two works, The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein, are now regarded as models of poetic translation.

After his return from Germany, Coleridge joined the circle of the English actress and poet Mary Robinson, nicknamed "Perdita" for the role she played in The Winter's Tale. (It was in this part that she attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales, soon becoming his mistress.) Coleridge read to her from his unfinished and unpublished poem "Kubla Khan." She recalled the scene in her own piece, "Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge" which she published in October of 1800, not long before her death.

During all this time, Coleridge was yet to have any of his own plays produced, He wouldn't have to wait forever, though. Though Drury Lane had turned down Osorio, Coleridge rewrote the piece as a new tragedy: Remorse. That play was the hit of the season in 1813, and is also the subject of tomorrow's blog post.

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.

Stendhal on Theatre

The novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, the author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, also wrote some dramatic criticism in the 1820s, before his career took off as a novelist. In Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal compared the playwright most praised by classicists with the dramatist most favored by the romantics.

Much of Stendhal's argument relied on oversimplification. For instance, he wrote that the entire dispute between Racine and Shakespeare could be reduced to deciding whether playwrights should observe the unities of place and time. For Stendhal, the answer was clearly no, they shouldn't, and in a long mock-dialogue he made fun of academicians who still clung to the unities.

In the third chapter of Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal makes the bold claim that Sophocles and Euripides where romantic, and even that Racine was romantic. This is because these authors all tried to suit the age, rather than writing "literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." Stendhal's alleged romanticism, however, amounts to little more than embracing all that is new. He had harsh words for Byron, calling his tragedies "boring." Schiller had merely "aped Shakespeare" according to Stendhal. On the other hand, he praised Etienne de Jouy's now forgotten play Sylla.

Stendhal is most upfront in his preference for all things modern when discussing triumphal archesof all things:

When Louis XIV had the triumphal arch known as Porte-Saint-Martin erected, the bas-relief on the north side depicted French soldiers attacking the walls of a city. They were armed with helmets and shields and arrayed with coats of arms. Well, I ask you, were the soldiers of Turenne and the Grand Conde who won Louis XIV's battles armed with shields? What good is a shield against a cannonball? Was Turenne killed by a javelin?

According to Stendhal, the Romans were romantics, because "they depicted what was true for their time." Louis XIV's sculptors, by contrast, were classicists, and Stendhal makes clear how much he feels they deserve our contempt.

Yes, dear...

As I was reading Madame de Staël’s Germany, I was struck by the criticism she doled out against the author of the French adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein. She wrote that this author “was obliged to incorporate in his play the exposition which was handled so originally in the prologue.” While she admitted that the first scenes were “in perfect accord with the imposing tone of French tragedy,” she complained that there was “a kind of animation in the irregularity of the German original which can never be improved upon.”

Um... Madame de Staël? The author of that French adaptation… wasn’t that Benjamin Constant? You know... the guy you were mentoring... and uh... sleeping with at the time?

Why, yes, it was! But that didn’t stop her from laying into her “little friend” even more. Referring to the play by its French title, de Staël wrote: “I would be curious to see the play Wallstein performed in our theatre, even more so if the French author had not submitted so rigorously to the conventions of French regularity.”

Geesh! Cut the guy some slack, can’t you? Well, a number of years later, Benjamin Constant finally admitted… yes, she was right. In 1829, the French-Swiss author published a revision of his preface to Wallstein, recognizing that, on each of these points, he probably should have listened to his girlfriend.

That first part of Schiller’s Wallenstein, the prologue that just shows a day in the life of an army camp, it really was better in the original, Constant admitted. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight (and of a demanding lover who wasn’t afraid to say exactly what she thought), Constant wrote:

The scenes follow one another without being linked, but this incoherence is natural: it is a living portrait with neither past nor future.... We perceive all the symptoms of a burgeoning insurrection, awaiting Wallenstein’s signal to explode.... We see them defying authority, yet making it a point of honor to obey their leader.... It would be impossible to transfer to our stage this singular production....

Though Constant covers his rear by noting that he never could have gotten the French stage to accept something like Schiller’s prologue, he has to agree with de Staël that he at least should have tried. “In various ways I had destroyed the dramatic effect of the play by condemning myself to maintaining all our own theatre’s rules,” Constant wrote--two decades after he had first translated the play. Sadly, he had described Wallenstein’s superstitious nature rather than showing it, as Schiller had done. (Show, don’t tell, remember Benny? Didn’t a certain someone point that out to you…?)

Plus, he had eliminated a number of roles from the original, reducing 48 different characters to a mere 12. As Constant put it:

I had sacrificed, without any compensation, another advantage possessed by Schiller. Subordinate characters which are not directly linked to the plot allow the Germans a type of effect unknown in our theatre.... In German tragedies... there exists... a second sort of roles which are, in a way, spectators themselves.... Thus we can say that the audience’s opinion is anticipated and directed by an intermediary audience which is closer to the action, but no less impartial.

Constant compared Schiller’s use of secondary characters to the use of the chorus in the great tragedies of Sophocles. Looks like he missed out on that one. And then there’s the matter of his portrayal of the female character Thekla. Constant has to confess, he got her wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems there might have been a certain amount of eye-rolling from you-know-who on this one.
Toward the end of the essay, Constant writes:

Had I possessed more foresight or daring, [or perhaps just listened to my girlfriend] I would have avoided the majority of the flaws I have just indicated in my own work. I should have foreseen that a political revolution would carry over into a literary revolution. I should have foreseen that a nation which had only momentarily renounced liberty in order to hurl herself into the perils of conquest would no longer be satisfied by the weak and imperfect emotions which had sufficed for spectators softened by the pleasures of a peaceful existence and a refined civilization.

There’s a nice thought for this Bastille Day.

And next time, please pay attention when the lady criticizes your play. Especially when the lady happens to be Madame de Staël.

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.

German Theories of Vegetable Genius

Consciousness can be over-rated. At least that's what the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz believed. According to Leibniz, at any given moment, we each have an infinite number of perceptions within ourselves. That means there are constantly changes within our very souls of which we are unaware, because these changes are "too small and too numerous or too closely combined."

In the eighteenth century, the critic Johann Georg Sulzer picked up on how Leibniz's ideas could be applied to art. In his four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts, Sulzer developed Leibniz's theories of the unconscious, frequently employing the metaphor of a plant to show how art can "bloom" without its creator being fully aware of what he is doing. In one passage, Sulzer writes:

It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other mysteries of psychology, that at times certain thoughts will not develop or let themselves be clearly grasped when we devote our full attention to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord, when we are not in search of them, so that it seems as though in the interim they had grown unnoticed like a plant, and now suddenly stood before us in their full development and bloom.... Every artist must rely on such happy expressions of his genius, and if he cannot always find what he diligently seeks, must await with patience the ripening of his thoughts. 

Sulzer was not the only one to develop this biological view of art. The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder saw all human endeavors as possessing the qualities of organic growth. Each culture, he believed, grew out of the peculiar conditions of its own time and place. Herder in turn became a great influence on the greatest of all German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

"As I have looked upon nature, so do I now look upon art," Goethe wrote in one of his letters. For Goethe, a perfect work of art was a work of the human spirit, and thus also a work of nature. An artist must not just study an object. He must also penetrate into the depths of his own spirit, creating works in rivalry with nature, "at once natural and above nature," as Goethe put it.

Goethe's own work appeared that way to critics. Friedrich Schlegel wrote of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that it was a "thoroughly organized and organizing work" and that it formed "itself into one whole." For Schlegel, Goethe's work expressed itself, almost without the need for a creator.

In 1800, a young Friedrich Schelling published his System of Transcendental Idealism, calling for a combining of intelligence and nature, of the conscious and the unconscious, of reflective freedom and blind necessity. This, Schelling said, is what art does, making art "the general organon of philosophy." According to Schelling, all artists must be inspired, receiving their art as a gift of grace. As he put it:

The artist is driven to production involuntarily, and even against an inner resistance.... No matter how purposeful he is, the artist, with respect to that which is genuinely objective in his production, seems to be under the influence of a power that sunders him from all other men and forces him to express or represent things that he himself does not entirely fathom, and whose significance is infinite.

Friedrich Schiller had already explored the idea of the unconscious creation of art in his 1795 essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." After reading Schelling, however, Schiller had a strong reaction. Though an idealist himself, Schiller felt Schelling and his followers were going too far. In 1801 he wrote to Goethe:

I fear that in their ideas, these Idealist-gentlemen take too little notice of experience; in experience, the poet begins entirely with the unconscious... and poetry, it seems to me, consists precisely in being able to express and communicate that unconscious--i.e., to carry it over into an object.... The unconscious united with awareness constitutes the poetic artist.

Schlegel's older brother August agreed with Schiller in this more moderate view, that art is both conscious and unconscious. Still, he continued to use Sulzer's analogy of a plant to describe the process of artistic creation. In his published lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature, the elder Schlegel wrote that organic form:

is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches its determination simultaneously with the fullest development of the seed.... In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature--the supreme artist--all genuine forms are organic....

Genius. Sheer German vegetable genius.

And that explains the German section at the heart of M.H. Abrams' book The Mirror and the Lamp. I'll cover the rest of the book, and try to explain how all this relates to the theatre, in my blog post tomorrow.

By the way, a special thank you to Alex J. Jefferies and the other talented vegetable artists of the Internet for their portraits of famous dead German philosophers. (I'm sure that's precisely what they were going for.)