The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

The Play within the Play The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

112

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

The Play within the Play The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection

Edited by

Gerhard Fischer Bernhard Greiner

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover image: Les Farceurs de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, by Abraham Bosse (c.1633, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris). By placing Gaultier-Garguille’s eye-glasses in the very centre of his image, Bosse indicates that eyes and looking are the key to this play within a play: observed by an internal on-stage audience (a Frenchman and a Spaniard), Turlupin robs Gaultier-Garguille, who is watching Gros-Guillaume make love to a woman, while we, their audience, watch them all. (John Golder) Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2257-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements

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Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives

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I. The Play within the Play and the Performance of Self-Reflection Bernhard Greiner The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm Yifen Beus Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation Klaus R. Scherpe ‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and Colonial Literature David Roberts The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation Caroline Sheaffer-Jones Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and The Blacks

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27 37

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II. The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre 1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference Christian Sinn The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob Bidermann’s Cenodoxus (1602) John Golder Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-1635/36 Manfred Jurgensen Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play Barnard Turner Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982): New Frames and Old Ulrike Landfester The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss’s Postmodern Metadrama and the History of Theatrical Reality

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77 101

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vi 2. The Theatre and its Audience Shimon Levy Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and Ethical Metatheatricality 145 Gad Kaynar The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious Play in Israeli Stage-Drama 167 Zahava Caspi A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflective Theatre: The Case of Israeli Drama 189

III. Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy, theatrum mundi Frank Zipfel ‘Very Tragical Mirth’: The Play within the Play as a Strategy for Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy Herbert Herzmann Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister Ludi Helmut J. Schneider Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical Drama from Lessing to Büchner Gerhard Fischer Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller) Birgit Haas Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie

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IV. The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation Lada Cale Feldman The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique Maurice Blackman Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête Kyriaki Frantzi Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth: Another Night: Medea

285 297

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V. The Play within the Play as Agency of Intermedial Transformation 1. The Play within the Play and Opera Yvonne Noble John Gay and the Frame Play Donald Bewley Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude Theresia Birkenhauer  Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera Ariadne auf Naxos

321 335

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2. The Play within the Play and Film Erika Greber Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene Onegin Alessandro Abbate The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: Multi-Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet Ken Woodgate ‘Gotta Dance’ (in the Dark): Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre

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3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction Tim Mehigan The Game of the Narrative: Kleist’s Fiction from a GameTheoretical Perspective 405 Alexander Honold French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting in Gottfried Keller’s Prose Fiction 421 Ulrike Garde Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and Barrie Kosky’s Interpretation for the Melbourne International Arts Festival 431

Notes on Contributors

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Index of Names

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Acknowledgements The essays in the present collection constitute a selection of papers delivered at the 2004 Sydney German Studies Symposium, which was devoted to the topic of The Play within the Play. The chapters have been thoroughly revised and edited for publication. The Symposium, convened by the editors, was designed to explore the wide range of aesthetic, literary-theoretical and philosophical issues associated with the rhetorical device of the play within the play, not only in terms of its original theatrical setting ranging from the baroque idea of the theatrum mundi onward to contemporary examples of a postmodern self-referential dramaturgy, but also with regard to a number of different generic and theoretical applications, in narrative fiction and anthropological writing, in musical theatre and film. As editors, our thanks go, first and foremost, to the individual authors who have made this volume possible; we appreciate their contributions as much as their co-operation and patience during the preparation of this work. We also wish to thank Marieke Schilling of Rodopi and Ernst Grabovszki and the members of the editorial board of IFAVL for their enthusiastic adoption of the project. A vote of thanks is due to the Sydney Goethe Institute, notably Roland Goll and Rainer Manke, for providing once again their beautiful venue with its cheerful ambiance that had so much to do with making the Sydney German Studies Symposia a successful series of events over nearly three decades, as well as to the German Consulate-General in Sydney and the German Research Council (DFG) for their essential support. We also like to acknowledge the contribution of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of UNSW (Prof. Annette Hamilton, Dean) who made the visit of Prof. Bernhard Greiner possible. We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Dr. Nita Schechet (Jerusalem) and, in particular, to Dr. John Golder (Sydney) who helped with the arduous task of proof-reading and copy-editing a complex and diverse manuscript. A final ‘thank you’ goes to Maria Oujo (Sydney) who completed the electronic layout of the book. Lastly, it is our sad duty to report the death of our colleague Theresia Birkenhauer who passed away on 6 November 2006. Gerhard Fischer (Sydney) and Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen)

Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner

The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives

The curtain opens. The stage represents a theatre. Ludwig Tieck, Die verkehrte Welt

The Play within the Play, Spiel im Spiel in German dramatic theory, or le théâtre dans le théâtre in French, is a theatrical device or convention, or a kind of sub-genre within dramatic literature and theatrical practice. Dramaturgically speaking it describes a strategy for constructing play texts that contain, within the perimeter of their fictional reality, a second or internal theatrical performance, in which actors appear as actors who play an additional role. This duplication of the theatrical reality is often reinforced by the presence onstage of an ‘internal audience’ which acts as a double to the actual audience. Like similar terms employed in theories of narrativity, e.g. mise en abyme, Rahmenerzählung (‘frame story’), Binnenerzählung (‘inner story’, or story within a story), dramaturgical terms such as ‘frame play’ or ‘outer play’ (Rahmenstück, pièce-cadre) and ‘interior’ or ‘internal play’ (Binnenstück, pièce intérieure) are commonly used in order to identify the two characteristic components of the play within the play. Its most salient feature is that it doubles an aesthetic experience which already presents a dual reality: the actor, who appears on stage both in his/her own physical presence and in the part he/she portrays, assumes and plays yet another role, thus adding a third identity which itself is constructed in the context of a third level of time, space, characterisation and action. The play within a play boasts a long and notable tradition in European theatre and dramatic literature: it is a dramaturgical strategy that playwrights from Aristophanes to Heiner Müller have put to a wide range of purposes. However, scholarly perspectives on the play within the play do not need to be limited to European theatre. Indeed, the anthropological ubiquitousness of both play and performance as social action as well as aesthetic experience testify to the international and multicultural dimensions of the play within the play and its function as a motif in dramatic literatures around the world. Furthermore, the play within the play also presents an ideal agency for shifting

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between different media, as well as for expressing notions and experiences involving cultural exchange or cultural conflict. The play within the play was the focus and the exclusive topic of investigation of an International Symposium held from 22 – 25 July 2004 at the Goethe Institut in Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales. The main aim of the conference, convened by the editors of the present volume, was to present a comprehensive account of the peculiar structural and thematic features of the play within the play, to analyse its theoretical dimensions, and to provide a comparative basis for discussion of this literary/theatrical phenomenon on an international scale. The participants, some fifty academics from Europe, Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, represented a number of disciplines and research areas; they included scholars in literature and cultural studies, anthropologists, theatre historians and practitioners, musicologists, and specialists in performance studies. The present volume presents a selection of the papers that were read and discussed at the Sydney Symposium, edited and brought up to date for the express purpose of providing a critical study at once wide-ranging and comparative. The play within the play is manifest in a multitude of forms and constellations, and it fulfils an equally diverse variety of tasks and functions within the performing arts. Systematically, these can be grouped in four distinct categories. One can consider the play within the play primarily (1) as an artistic agency of self-reference and self-reflection, i.e. as imaginative play that refers back to itself. It thus appears as a meta-theatrical mode of aesthetic expression, in terms of its own specific nature as play and representation as well as with regard to the function of the stage-audience relationship and in view of the self-reflection of its acting protagonists. It may also be thought of (2) as a special mode of perception that allows for different ways of presenting perspectives of appropriating and placing itself in relation to the world at large. Likewise, it is (3) a particularly suitable aesthetic agency for the exploration of fields of social and historical interaction or exchange, with a special dimension in the area of intercultural and/or intracultural contact or conflict. Lastly, the play within the play can be seen (4) as an artistic agency of mediation between conventional genres, or of generic transformation, permitting shifts from one genre to another. The play within the play is thus by no means limited to theatre, whether it be dramatic text or performance; it enjoys a wide popularity also in film, opera and musical theatre, and it frequently appears as a device in narrative fiction as well.

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As a specific form of organizing a process of theatrical reflexivity, the play within the play needs to be distinguished according to the different constituents of its respective realisations on stage. It features most prominently as a meta-theatrical strategy of self-reflection, especially in the modern context of the establishment and foundation of a concept of the self, that is to say in the affirmation of a self-conscious subject (‘the actor’) that transcends the masks of social roles. Hamlet, as play and as character, thus presents the succinct model of a social-historical and aesthetic-philosophical paradigm of modernity. Similarly, the play within the play constitutes a special agency for the self-legitimation of an evolving bourgeois subject within the parameters of a philosophy of idealism; here, the constellations of the play within the play favoured by the Romantics of the Kunstperiode offer the relevant paradigm. On another level, as part of a system of thinking set within a specific order of ‘representation’ (in the sense of Foucault’s meaning of the term), the play within the play also appears as a preferred field of self-reflexivity, which is why the meta-theatrical dialectic of play and representation achieved such particular prominence in the period of the Baroque. Of course, it could also be said that a postmodern art in which a reflection upon itself appears to be an essential element (not only in the theatre, of course) is very much a feature of our own era. Indeed, the play within the play would seem to be a particularly apt device for the expression of the playful self-referentiality of the post-modern condition. Other forms of the play within the play offer themselves, and have been employed, to provide a structure for self-reflection concerning the theatre audience, or the recipient reader of a literary work, respectively. Here, the play within the play functions as a ‘romantic’ site which encompasses all constituent elements of art (in the sense of borders being suspended or transcended), or equally as the site of a didactic theatre, e.g. during the early Enlightenment period or, with similar but not identical intentions, in the Lehrstückconcept of Brecht towards the end of the Weimar Republic. One could add that, generally, the play within the play tends to be a prominent feature of the practice of political and anti-illusionistic theatre. Apart from these forms of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity, the play within the play also offers an important organisational structure that highlights certain ways of approaching or dealing with the world. Perhaps the most significant example of this is comedy. Indeed, it could be said that the play within the play is a constituent and intrinsic component of the comedic genre. Typical features of comedy, e.g. the use of parabasis (as in the plays of Aristophanes), falling out of character, improvisations, or comic intrigues generally, are all structured on the play-within-the-play principle. Other ways

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of approaching the world, in which the play-within-the-play constellations can be seen, are melancholy and humour. In the former the world that confronts us, our own world of social practice and process, is merely regarded as play, however, when seen from the perspective of a protagonist who refuses to join in. The humorist, on the other hand, accepts his or her role as a performer in the ‘play of the world’; even though he recognizes the play as idle and transitory, he nevertheless accepts that he is an actor and that he has a role to play. Thus, the time-honoured topos of ‘world theatre’ proclaims that the world itself and all of its inherent processes and interactions is merely theatrical play, performed in front of and judged by a higher authority. The Baroque period in particular featured very powerfully staged presentations of the topos of theatrum mundi at the core of many of its extravagant spectacles. In another way, social or socio-historical interactions are often consciously imbued with the aura of the theatrical, as shown in the example of the protagonists of the French Revolution who loved to see themselves and reflect upon their historical roles by taking on the personae of the protagonists of the Roman Republic of classical antiquity. The play within the play has also found a very useful and productive usage as a form of action and reflection within a wide variety of cultural and intercultural exchanges. An example of this might be the appropriation of classical culture, e.g. Greek or Roman, by later European cultures. It can thus serve as an organisational agency to assist structuring encounters of different European cultures of distinct epochs, as in the role model of Shakespeare within German-language theatre, or the return to different forms of commedia dell’arte at various stages within the development of European comedy. Similarly, the play within the play has been an important factor as a structure of mediation between European and non-European theatrical traditions; it has enabled and facilitated the meeting of European and non-European cultures, just as much as it has been used to question the validity of such forms of cultural appropriations in the context of colonial encounters as well as in a critical postcolonialist discourse. As examples one could cite the case of Israeli theatre which connects the European culture with a genuine Jewish theatrical tradition, or the appropriation and transformation of certain aspects of European theatre to theatrical forms of the Islamic World. The staging of plays belonging to a specific culture by directors or theatre practitioners whose cultural background might be very different has opened up a special field in an area which might simply be called ‘cultural contact’ in an affirmative sense. But cultural encounters could also provide unforeseen and undesirable outcomes. Attempts at intercultural mixing or interaction could result in misunderstandings and misappropriations; they could result in opposition and

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distanciation, cultural exchanges could fail. This leads to yet another prominent usage of the play within the play, namely as an agency of action and reflection in the context of cultural conflict. One could distinguish here between intracultural and intercultural conflicts. An example of the former would be the conflict between high and popular culture, e.g. the proliferation of the play within the play in the Volkstheater movement (a specific tradition within German-language theatre), where it was used to ironically or comically subvert the idea of theatre as the property and domain of the ruling classes. Here, the Viennese Volkstheater of Nestroy offers the most obvious paradigm. Intercultural conflicts on the other hand might involve differences and opposition between cultures or groups of more or less equal prestige and standing, or between a majority culture (i.e. the ruling or leisured class) and a minority culture; the latter variant occurs for example in the play-within-theplay constellations that are being used in the context of postcolonialist encounters. Alternatively, some of the paradigms current in postmodern and postcolonial studies (hybridity, syncretism) are well suited to explore the topic in question, e.g. in relation to the notion of ‘intercultural framing’ as part of the process of reception and appropriation of European theatrical works by non-European playwrights and theatre practitioners. Finally, the play within the play has played a significant role as a structural principle to facilitate a process of mediation between media, or a movement of ‘shifting’ between different media. Thus, a kind of intermedial strategy can be observed in the change of medium or genre from theatre and other forms of artistic and imaginative expression. The play within the play appears here as the essential link, or as a kind of go-between. In recent film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, new forms of the play within the play were widely discussed as prominent features. In musical theatre, similar shiftings also make use of the device. The transformation of plays into opera in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries attests to the versatility of a structural principle that allows librettists like Hofmannsthal and composers like Strauss to appropriate and to transform suitable dramatic models as well as pieces from the classical theatrical repertoire into their own modernist operas. More recently, practitioners of modern dance theatres have also found it useful and productive to explore the potential of the play within the play in order to contribute to the development of original works that originated in other genres or media. Alternatively, the play within the play facilitates and enables the dramatisation of certain prose narratives – as, for example, in some of Heiner Müller’s later works – or, in a more conventional mode, it can be found as a fairly standard literary motif in a number of novels or other works of narrative

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fiction. One prominent example concerns the integration of theatre and of theatrical practice in narrative texts, by way of specific constellations of the forms of the play within the play that can be found in narratives by Goethe, Keller or Pushkin, among many others.

I The Play within the Play and the Performance of Self-Reflection

Bernhard Greiner

The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm

When the play within the play starts its career in early modernity, it revolves about the modern subject as director, examiner, and judge of the play. Moreover, and vice versa, it produces this position: the ego as the centre of the world. Referring to Hamlet and its multiplied plays within the play, the chapter shows that this emergence of the modern subject takes place in a circle. The play within the play requires a position beyond the play from which the play can be initiated, directed, performed, examined, and judged. But, to achieve such a position (of a ‘true interior’, an ego beyond all masks and all show), it is necessary to gain knowledge and certainty about the interior, which can only be achieved by exteriorization of the interior, in other words, by playing (by acting in masks, in the world of show). Thus the effect of the play within the play is its precondition and vice versa. This chapter considers this circle in Hamlet as paradigm with reference, not only to an historical argument (the specific conditions on which the concept of the play within the play is constituted in early modernity), but also a systematic argument (the position of the ego, constituted as endless reflection, as the reference point and precondition of the play within the play). The other meaning of the circle, in which the emergence of the modern subject and the concept of the play within the play are connected, is the unification of producer (the ego bringing forth plays within plays as acts of self-reassurance) and product (the ego brought forth by plays within plays), and thus a purely immanent self-creation of the modern subject: it proceeds from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play and no longer needs reassurance from a position of transcendence.

‘It is a peculiarity of Shakespearean triumphalism,’ Harold Bloom remarks, ‘that the most original literary work in Western literature, perhaps in the world’s literature, has now become so familiar that we seem to have read it before, even when we encounter it for the first time. Hamlet [...] remains both as familiar, and as original, as his play. [...] We hardly can think about ourselves without thinking about Hamlet, whether or not we are aware that we are recalling him.’ 1 If, in our awakenings to self-awareness, we have always been Hamlet, it is because we equate the subject in its ideal boundlessness and respective uniqueness with unending reflection, introversion, and an element of play1

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), pp. 404-05.

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acting that is hard to pin down, in the sense that one can only be a person by playing one. The play-within-a-play patterns developed with virtuosity in the Hamlet drama bring these three constituents of the subject (self-reflection, introversion and play-acting) together. Hamlet becomes, as a paradigm for the play within the play, a paradigm of the subject. The figure of Hamlet introduces itself with an ontological claim to an essence independent of both role models and behavioural models. This claim is conspicuously linked with the theme of grief that is raised at critical junctures in the plot; that is to say, at critical junctures in the play’s redrawing of the self. The theme is presented without delay in the exposition of the conflict between Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet over proper and false ways of mourning Hamlet’s father. Likewise, the evocation of grief or signs of grief becomes the subject of a debate that follows the Player’s monologue on the grief of Hecuba, occasioning the play within the play in the narrower sense, which triggers certain crucial incidents in the plot: Gertrude urgently demands an interview with Hamlet, at which he kills Polonius; Claudius removes Hamlet from court with the intention of having him killed in England). Lastly, the final catastrophe, when all the protagonists except Fortinbras and Horatio meet their deaths, begins with the conflict between Laertes and Hamlet as to whose grief over Ophelia is the more authentic. In grief the subject is manifested as having experienced a fundamental loss that at the same time implies a loss of self.2 The subject in mourning does not, in a sense, maintain possession of itself. It is therefore all the more astonishing that it is Hamlet’s grief that moves him to lay claim to a self beyond and beneath the forms of appearance. The outward signs of mourning, Hamlet explains to his mother in their first scene – clothing, gestures, modes of behaviour – are mannerisms that could just as well be faked (‘actions that a man might play’; I.ii.84)3, whereas he himself is unacquainted with appearances: ‘I know not “seems”’ (I.ii.76). He has rather ‘that within which passeth show’ (I.ii.85). Hamlet negatively introduces the ontological claim to a subjectivity beyond appearance. Obviously, such a subject cannot otherwise be delineated. Insofar as it is missing something, it experiences itself: this indeed constitutes the grief of the ego through the concrete content of the deficiency, in this case the death of the father. The courtly ideal of ‘civility’, of cultivated behaviour, as proposed by Baldassarre Castiglione in The Courtier (published 1508-16) and given a 2

3

Sigmund Freud, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’, in Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, ed. by Alexander Mitscherlich and others (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1974), III, pp. 193-212. Quotations are taken from G.R. Hibbard’s edition of the play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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political concretisation by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (1513), includes significant doses of ‘play’, ‘show’, and ‘seeming’; that is, the art of concealing oneself, permitting no-one to see behind the mask, suppressing the emotions, controlling the body and its expressions, moulding oneself like a sculpture, all made to appear effortless, unforced, as ‘natural grace’ under competitive pressure. No-one is expected to say what his ‘own’ thoughts and feelings are, and each person expects similar treatment from his peers. 4 The reference point for this ubiquitous seeming is not, however, the construction of a personal identity, but rather that of a persona, that is of a mask.5 The goal is social advancement, making the right moves in the game played consciously by all, without any claim being made to a self beyond or beneath the mask. Hamlet is the figure that refuses to play the game, lays claim to an ego behind the mask, and makes reference to truth rather than to functionality in social intercourse. The refusal of the subject to play along in a world of seeming stands thus in a reciprocal relationship to grief, through which the subject has established itself as incorporating a fundamental lack. With all this, Hamlet is in the position of the melancholic as developed in the figure of Jacques in As You Like It, written immediately before Hamlet. The melancholic recognizes that life is a play – ‘All the world’s a stage’, he says – but has no desire to act in it himself. In As You Like It, the conditions of possibility of this position are not discussed. We find ourselves in the Forest of Arden, that is, outside the social world, and Jacques, after the Duke’s restoration to power, will not return to court with the other exiled lords. In Hamlet, the question of the conditions of possibility for the position of the melancholic is asked explicitly as a question of the possibility of maintaining the existence of a subject, a being beyond the social masks and roles assigned to each of us. This ego-essence is connected significantly with the notion of the particular, that is, of the entirely unique, that which is connected with the notion of the authentic, and never allows itself to become an instance of a general rule. Gertrude questions the occasion of Hamlet’s grief and the grief itself as being ‘particular’ (‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’; I.ii.75). It is in response to this that Hamlet lays claim to an essence beyond all seeming (‘I know not “seems”’). But what is the basis of such an ego, and how can it be sure of itself? The scenes with the ghost of Hamlet’s father give the subject’s claim to transcend ‘show’ a justification, although in a doubtful manner – a justifica4

5

Cf. Klaus Reichert, ‘Hamlets Falle. Das Paradox der Kultiviertheit’, in his Der fremde Shakespeare (München, Wien: Hanser, 1998), pp. 57-86. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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tion by what is, after all, a ghost. The subject is called upon to restore the disturbed natural order (‘Revenge his [i.e. the father’s] foul and most unnatural murder’; I.v.25). On the other hand, he is not allowed to link his actions to a pre-existing natural order which, ideally, would have a secure metaphysical foundation. The subject is made rather to justify its actions through itself and its own moral responsibility. This occurs with the second command that has to be fulfilled in the restoration of order: ‘Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/ Against thy mother aught’ (I.v.85-86). The subject is offered an elucidation of the occurrences at court that permits it to see beyond appearances, that is, beyond the show put on by the others. This fuels the subject’s claim, based on a deficiency (that is, on grief), to an essence beyond all seeming. Since, however, the subject does not wish to dirty its hands in performing the actions the insight prescribes, it must initiate an investigation before carrying out its revenge. But this means that Hamlet must achieve certainty about the nature of the Ghost – first, as to whether it is a ‘goblin damn’d’ that hopes to destroy him;6 then, whether it is telling him the truth when it claims that Claudius is his father’s murderer and has had an adulterous relationship with Gertrude; and thirdly, whether he himself is capable of correctly understanding the behaviour and speech, the signs, that the others produce. On this last point he provides questionable proof. As his own words he cites, ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’, which the Ghost had said to him (I.v.112). Is he here metonymically replacing the speaker with its audience? Or, if the words Hamlet writes are truly his own, must we accept the Ghost’s speech and perhaps even the Ghost itself as mere delusion? Hamlet maintains that he swore ‘Remember me’, but until this point in the plot he has sworn nothing. Instead it is his companions who must take an oath, not to ‘remember me’, but rather not to betray Hamlet or his investigative techniques. Hamlet, who has claimed to know no seeming, to have that within, a subjecttive essence, which is beyond all show, announces to his comrades that he will ‘put an antic disposition on’ (I.v.179). This, however, means operating behind a mask, play-acting. Self-contradiction is inevitable. From this contradiction arises, with and through the tragedy of Hamlet, the configuration of the play within the play. The subject, with its claim to transcend seeming, can only experience and be aware of its subjectivity when it becomes apparent, that is, manifests itself in the world of seeming. The ego must simultaneously play-act and judge its own performance from the sidelines. This is precisely what Polonius suggests

6

Cf. Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet im Fegefeuer’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur frühen Neuzeit, 2 (1998), pp. 5-36.

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to Reynaldo in Act II, scene 1, following the Ghost scene, as a method of acquiring relevant information about Laertes’ conduct in Paris. The method employs the negation of negation. Reynaldo should express negative opinions of Laertes, and from the ways in which these are contradicted it will be possible to deduce the truth. Nor does Hamlet have any other method, but his goals are more far-reaching. He has to prove the ego-essence that is beyond all seeming, beyond all produced signs and masks, while simultaneously proving his interpretation of the events surrounding his father’s death, an interpretation which along with his grief has occasioned his departure from operating behind masks in accordance with the rules of courtly role-playing. Hamlet’s method similarly employs the figure of the negation of negation. He stages, on the foundation of an ‘antic disposition’, performances of negation that the others must then negate. Correspondingly, the ego whose foundations and apperception are thus based proves itself negated; that is, it proves that it in itself is fragmented. The subject can gain itself as ‘particular’, that is, unique and indivisible, only by dividing into two subjects, one that acts in self-staged productions and another offstage that judges the performances. It refracts others’ masquerades through its own, then reflecting the consequent figures of refraction as its legal instance. Thus, the putative ego-essence, beyond all show, manifests itself as a process of reflection within the medium of the theatrical. Harold Bloom may have felt as much when he cited Richard Lanham’s assessment that Hamlet’s self-consciousness ‘cannot be distinguished from the prince’s theatricality’.7 The subject, as manifested in the tragedy of Hamlet, is embedded in masquerades. It is so deeply nested in them that, Hamlet, for example, who has proclaimed that he will play at ‘madness’, is able in the fifth act to call upon his ‘madness’ as a defense when asking for Laertes’ pardon. At the same time, the subject takes up a position beyond the play-acted representations, observing its own and others’ acting in reality. But such duplication is the essence of theatre. It is therefore hardly surprising that Goethe, in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, developed the conception of representative acting that gave shape to his dramaturgic and theatrical activities in Weimar with direct reference to Hamlet.8 The actor, Goethe writes, must be always absorbed in his role, yet at the same time he must know and observe himself in the reality of acting.9 7 8

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Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 411. Cf. my ‘Puppenspiel und Hamlet-Nachfolge: Wilhelm Meisters “Aufgabe” der theathralischen Sendung’, in Bernhard Greiner, Eine Art Wahnsinn: Dichtung im Horizont Kants. Studien zu Goethe und Kleist (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994), pp. 29-41. See, for instance, Goethe’s rules for actors in his Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Vierzig Bände, ed. by Hendrik Birus and others (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher

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A subject based on such a foundation is not ‘particular’, e.g. not unique, a whole that behaves in response to the various masquerades in which it is embedded. It is split, ‘dismembered’ and also in need of remembering, one might say, with apologies to the ghost of Hamlet’s father. With this kind of fragmentary self-justification and apperception, the subject is in a circuitous movement that cannot end. In the collisions of its masquerades with those of others, it becomes fragmented. To convey the semantic content of these refractions, it must undertake new proofs that it simultaneously observes and through which new fractures arise, again demanding new acts of judgment, and so on. Embedded in an unending chain of references, the ego flees ever deeper, itself becoming ghostly. Thus, the Ghost scene substantiates the subject, which had laid claim to a being beyond appearances, as an internally refracted processual unit of reflexivity without any possible end, a reflection taking place within the medium of theatre. The combination of its fragmented nature and its inconclusive reflexivity give the subject the ontological status of a ‘dismembered ghost’ that would have equally solid grounds for demanding – the question is only of whom – ‘Remember me.’ After Hamlet, as a reaction to the Ghost’s revelations, has announced his intention of assuming an ‘antic disposition’ and sworn his companions not to reveal that his actions may be concealing something beyond what they seem, it is impossible to decide whether or when Hamlet is play-acting both in the represented world in the events and speeches that follow and in the reality of the discourse (that is, for viewers and readers). From now on Hamlet defies definition. To gain insight into such a subject, one needs to apply Hamlet’s own method of apperception: The viewer, or reader, must confront Hamlet’s semantic masquerades with his own – his reading strategies; at the same time, he must step outside the semantic masquerades in which he nonetheless remains involved, and pass judgment on the resulting figures of refraction from a position offstage, in the wings. Thus he creates himself as a Hamlet-like subject. It is this persistence in establishing subjectivity on the other side of appearances, in the reality of discourse, that makes the ego-conception of Hamlet so utterly compelling. The method of establishing and qualifying a subject that transcends all appearances through the staging of masquerades (generated by the subject on the basis of an ‘antic disposition’ and simultaneously performed and judged) is already in place and visible with initial effects before the professional actors appear in the Hamlet drama. Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude attempt in

Klassiker Verlag, 1987-), XVIII: Ästhetische Schriften 1771-1805, ed. by Friedmar Apel (1998), pp. 857-83.

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vain to arrive at a cogent interpretation of Hamlet’s behaviour toward Ophelia. Hamlet is incomprehensible, precisely because as a subject beyond all show he can conceal himself, rather than revealing himself, in the masquerade. Why is a further exponentiation of play-acting (through the performance put on by the travelling players at Hamlet’s request) necessary? With regard to the grounding of the ego as a process of inconclusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical, and with respect to the attempt to bring out the truth about the death of Hamlet’s father within this structure, nothing new can be gained by the Players’ performance. The chain of staged action and reaction, already well under way, can only become more complex. So the question necessarily arises whether the play-within-the-play thematic forced by the Players’ performance is yet another way of grounding and making sure of the subject, while at the same time suggesting a different way of dealing with the unexplained events that surround the death of Hamlet’s father. What impresses Hamlet so much about the First Player’s presentation that he engages the troupe for a performance before the King and Queen? The answer seems clear. The actor, in his speech about Hecuba’s mourning for Priam, puts himself so entirely into character – spanning two internal refractions, as he represents a narrator reporting how Dido reported the scene to Aeneas – that he manages to evoke in himself that grief of which he is speaking, even manifesting his feelings with an abundance of physical symptoms. Apparently, the Players are engaged because they are effective in this manner. They invite the expectation that their acting will elicit signs of Claudius’ guilt or innocence. This way of reading the text is suggestive, but it ignores grave contradictions. The actor produced his emotional effect in himself, not in Hamlet, his audience, who had every reason to empathize with grief over a murdered king, and whose fixation on this very theme had led him to demand this text from the actor. If Hamlet has shown no affect, how can he expect Claudius, who has good reason to control his expressions of emotion, to be moved by the play to the uncontrolled production of signs that would betray him? The actor’s self-deluding performance has, however, produced a result in Hamlet; reflection on himself, and renewed resolve, stemming from his comparison of the actors’ text and performance with his own situation. Hamlet offers a commentary immediately after the player’s speech: ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ (II.ii.538). That seems to be the effect he hopes the play within the play will achieve: not the production of signs whose content can only be conveyed in further semantic performances in a ‘progressus ad infinitum’, but rather the evocation, if not the creation, of a subject that possesses an essence beyond the performances on display and behaves as Hamlet has previously depicted. If one reads carefully, Hamlet describes

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exactly this as the hoped-for effect of the Players’ performance: ‘guilty creatures’ will be compelled to ‘proclaim their malefactions’ (II.ii.578, 581), which presupposes a moral subject: ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ (II.ii.593-94). Hamlet is aiming for a subject that does more than function in masquerades, for a moral ego that reflects on itself when confronted with represented performances. Hamlet has postulated such an ego with reference to himself (‘I have that within which passeth show’). The attempt to make sure of this subjectivity has shunted him on to the track of inconclusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical on which he himself threatens to become a ‘dismembered ghost’, while at the same time threatening never to achieve any certainty with regard to the actions of others. Thus, one can name two functions and attainments of the plays within the play, as developed in Hamlet. On the one hand, they serve to reassure the originator, actor, and observer of the play of the existence of his ego – postulated as given – beyond and beneath all appearances. On the other, raised exponentially to plays within plays within plays, they should evoke, or even create, this ego in their audience. The Players’ play within the play seems, by virtue of its complex teleology, to be entirely dedicated to the former function, yet it fulfills only the latter. The scene presents so many levels of play-acting and corresponding interpretative contexts that the formation of meaningful signs ‘betraying’ Claudius can no more be mastered than can their possible readings. Suffice it to name a few of these levels. The play within the play duplicates and predicates itself with a pantomime, the dumb show. Claudius does not react to the dumb show, which reprises the entire plot, a king’s murder and his widow’s marriage to the murderer. However, he does react to the spoken play, in which it is not the King, but the Queen, that takes the leading role. In addition, Hamlet announces that he has inserted a speech of his own, though the particular passage cannot be readily identified. It is everywhere and nowhere. Hamlet proceeds to offer nonstop commentary, not only on the play itself, but also on the Players’ acting skills and the meaning of the performance (referring to it, for example, as The Mousetrap). The performance immediately following the dumb show is largely taken up by the complexity of ‘the Queen’s fidelity’, featuring, among other things, the Player Queen’s scandalous statement that, by giving herself to her second husband, she will kill the first.10 The regicide is mentioned only briefly, yet it is not the Queen’s reactions to

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‘A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed’ (III.ii.17273). The double meaning of these words is stressed by Anselm Haverkamp, Hamlet: Hypothek der Macht (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004), p. 49.

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the play, but those of Claudius that are supposed to be put to the test. Lastly, the piece does not reflect the murder as described by the Ghost. The murderer in the play within the play is not the brother, but the nephew of the King. Thus, the play appears to refer not only to the death of Hamlet’s father, but also to a possible future murder of Claudius by Hamlet. Hamlet has commissioned the performance. Through his addition to the text, it becomes his own. In the frame play’s presentation of a play for the King and Queen, he plays along, yet maintains at all times the perspective of an outsider observing the play and its audience. As end-effect of the piece and its performance, Hamlet seems to have achieved the desired certainty about Claudius. But such certainty should be followed by an act of revenge that becomes conspicuous by its absence. At first it fails because Hamlet misinterprets Claudius’s posture as a token of deep prayerfulness, but he later fails repeatedly to carry it out; as, for example, when Claudius questions him about Polonius’s whereabouts and sends him to England, acting clearly not as a repentant sinner, but as a conspirator with evil intentions. Meanwhile, the play within the play does not have the hoped-for effect of eliciting unambiguous signs. Claudius’s reaction on leaving the performance is ambiguous: it may be a confession of guilt, or possibly a reaction to a clear threat of murder. At the same time, it is the only appropriate reaction to a play generating meaning that has spiraled out of control. In addition to creating a diversity of signs that cannot be unambiguously determined, the play within the play also fulfills the second function. That is, it evokes in Claudius as its audience (and likewise in Gertrude, although I will not discuss her case further here) an ego beyond all masquerade. This subject announces its presence when Claudius leaves the performance instead of interacting with the Hamlet-generated piece viewed by Hamlet and Horatio that could be entitled Performing a Play about Regicide for a Regicide Audience. This subject is evidenced by Claudius’s monologue as he prepares himself for prayer. This evoked ego behind the mask can only be perceived by the signs it emits, as was true for the ego-being claimed by Hamlet from the beginning. These, however, can never be conclusively determined, as Hamlet’s misinterpretation of the seemingly praying Claudius shows. Reading such signs demands new semantic performances in which the interpreting ego, as presented, would experience itself as being further alienated from itself and embedded in an endless self-reflexive process. So both achievements of the play within the play (self-knowledge in its founder, actor, and observer, and the evocation of an ego in the audience) remain under the spell of this structure. Each launch of a play within the play necessitates further plays.

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But is it also possible to escape the influence of the infinitely parthenogenetic plays within plays? The fifth act of the play puts this question centre stage. The answer it gives is that it is possible to break the spell of the plays within plays, if both achievements can be combined in a single figure. That is demonstrated by Hamlet in Act V. The new quality that Hamlet gains resolves the great hermeneutic riddle of the piece, how the Hamlet of the fifth act can be linked with the Hamlet of Acts I-IV, where he appears as the modern subject in whom the world is centred, where he is expected to ‘set right’ [the time] that is ‘out of joint’ (I.v.197, 196).11 The juxtaposition of the two attainments of the play within the play continues to proceed from the theme of grief, now in the conflict between Laertes and Hamlet as to who can display the deeper grief over the dead Ophelia. Hamlet has pursued the semantic performances that serve to assure him of his subjectivity by assuming an ‘antic disposition’ on the very field where dissimulation is least expected, that of love. His play-acting has destroyed, among others, Ophelia. He was an actor in, as well as observer of, this play, and Laertes’ grief over Ophelia confronts him once more with the signs that his performance has evoked. When he rejects Laertes’ grief in favour of his own, his argument is weak, purely quantitative. His ‘quantity of love’ exceeds that of ‘forty thousand brothers’ (V.i.260, 259). Hamlet lends substance to his grief with an emphatic first-person declaration, and this immediately after Laertes has marked him as the guilty party: What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane (V.i.244-48)

Thus, the play within the play that Hamlet once played with his and Ophelia’s love has not only put him on track to apperception of his putative subjectivity, but has also evoked in him – when Laertes puts him in the position of the audience at his own play – a subject that confesses its guilt. This is what Hamlet once expected from the performance by the Players, but he could not be sure of its effect on others, that is, on Claudius as its intended 11

For two totally different interpretations of this, see Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, ‘Shakespeares Hamlet: Apologie der “Innerlichkeit”’, in her Skeptische Phantasie: Eine andere Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur (München: Fink, 1999), pp. 102-26, and Aleida Assmann, ‘“Let it be”: Kontingenz und Ordnung in Schicksalsvorstellungen bei Chaucer, Boethius und Shakespeare’, in Kontingenz, ed. by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 225-44.

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audience. The subjective essence claimed by Hamlet beyond and beneath all appearances is present both as a creative force (bringing forth plays within plays as acts of self-reassurance) and as a created product (brought forth by the plays within plays). Such a unification of producer and product is an act of self-creation of a subject whose character is purely immanent – it proceeds from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play – and no longer needs reassurance from a position of transcendence. An ego that has brought itself forth in this manner and has reassured itself of its self-generated semantic performances – as unending reflection in the medium of the theatrical – can allow all transcendence to rest on it alone. It has no need to involve itself in questions of providence; it does not need to play at destiny. Hamlet’s speech ‘Let be’ (V.ii.170) and his apparent recognition and transfer of loyalty to a world of providence is the utterance of an ego that has created itself and bears no trace of transcendence. So the subject purifies, through its speech, transcendence of all immanence,12 proving in the process that transcendence is the absolute Other of the purely immanent self-creation of the subject out of the spirit of the play within the play. This feeds the expectation that the self-negation of this ego – insofar as Hamlet anticipates his probable death – creates ex negativo an opening into the transcendent world as a metamorphosis that takes its evidence from the perfect immanence of this ego’s self-creation. The two attainments of the play within the play through which the subject creates itself are brought together in the realisation of the dramatic discourse – that is, not primarily in the represented world, but rather in the reality of the here and now of each performance or reading of the piece. For it is the order of the drama that links the producer and product aspects of the Hamletsubject: it confronts Hamlet, who is the subject of plays within plays, a subject that must first make sure of itself, thrusting itself into a course of inconclusive reflexivity. The drama confronts this Hamlet with the Hamlet as audience at his own performances that call forth in him a subjective essence beyond all appearances, an emphatic first-person declaration of the recognition of guilt. The drama Hamlet achieves, in its discursive reality here and now, the self-creation of the ego – the Hamlet-subject as a process of inconclusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical that we all are. It lends this act, as the absolute Other of transcendence, its aura ex negativo. This makes the ‘birth’ of the modern subject in Hamlet so compelling that we feel we

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This argument is stressed in Walter Benjamin’s remarks on baroque allegory; see his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), I, p. 246.

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have always known it: the self-creation of the subject out of the spirit and matter of the play within the play.

Yifen Beus

Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation

The play within the play is often used as a form of irony and can be disguised as a simple performance within the play itself, a character masquerading as another character, a character pretending to be out of his mind, or a complex fusion of theatrical realities. All these forms of the play within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and rely on a self-conscious writing process on the playwright’s part and the self-reflexive aspect of the performance itself. This paper concerns the theoretical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the play and focuses its examination on early discussions that greatly influenced the poetics of ‘modern’ drama, namely German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept and definition of Romantic irony. It will also discuss the cross-genre application of the play within the play that functions similarly in painting, drama and cinema by drawing examples from Diego Velázquez, Ludwig Tieck and Terry Gilliam.

The play within the play is often used by playwrights to reveal the workings of dramatic irony and the very nature of drama. It may come in a variety of guises: (i) a simple performance within the play itself, as in Ludwig Tieck’ Der gestiefelte Kater or Puss in Boots; 1 (ii) a character masquerading him/herself as another character, as in Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio;2 (iii) a character pretending to be ‘beside’ his/her usual self, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; or (iv) a complex fusion of theatrical realities, as in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.3 All these forms of the play within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and rely on a self-conscious writing process on the playwright’s part and the selfreflexive aspect of the performance itself. Thus, it is meta-drama, so to speak. This is by no means a new concept. In fact, self-reflexivity can be regarded as a marking of modernity in art and literature. This chapter examines the theoretical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the play, focusing on early debates that greatly influenced the poetics of ‘modern’ drama, namely

1 2 3

In Schriften, 12 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985). In Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). In Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New York: Meridian Books, 1952).

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German writer/philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony.4 By drawing examples from the work of Diego Velázquez, Ludwig Tieck and Terry Gilliam, as well as that of Schlegel, it will also discuss the cross-genre application of the play within the play as it functions in drama, cinema and painting, in order to illustrate the working or reflexivity in various forms of the play within the play. First elaborated by Schlegel as part of his definition of the modern, Romantic irony later becomes a defining characteristic of all Romantic art. Schlegel is the first to use the term ‘Romantic’ to describe modern literature. In his Critical Fragments (Kritische Fragmente or Lyceum Fragmente),5 published in 1797, in the periodical Lyceum der schöne Künste, Schlegel redefines the concept of irony, in literature as well as in philosophy. He uses the term Poesie (roughly translated as ‘poetry’) in its broadest sense, to mean literature in general, and thus his theory of irony and poetry actually concerns all literary genres. The two major aspects of Romantic irony are: (i) the harmonious mixture of the comic and the serious, and (ii) self-reflexivity, i.e. literature that reflects back on itself, that reflects on its own existence. In his Athenäum Fragment 116, Schlegel defines Romantic poetry as ‘eine progressive Universalpoesie’ (a progressive universal poetry): Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will und soll auch die Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegenem Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. (Its mission is not merely to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It will and should also mingle poetry and prose, genius and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, render poetry living and social, and life and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with solid cultural material of every kind, and inspire them with vibrations of humour.)6

4

5

6

For a more detailed analysis of Schlegelian irony, and of its working in Tieck’s drama, see my Towards a Paradoxical Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), chaps 2 & 3. The present essay derives the analysis of the play within the play from the re-definition of Romantic irony advocated by Schlegel. Schlegel’s key writings on irony and the Romantic poetics appear in two sets of fragments, the Critical, or Lyceum Fragments and the Athenäum Fragments (1800), both published in Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Hans Eichner, 35 vols (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967). Athenäum Fragments quotations are taken from volume 2 of Schlegel’s Kritische Ausgabe and, unless otherwise noted, translations are by Ernst Behler and Norman Struc in German Romantic Criticism, ed. by A. Leslie Willson, German Library, 21 (New York: Continuum International, 1982).

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This is a very ambitious – and obviously serious – definition of literature. Few people have taken literature and the attempt to define it more seriously than Friedrich Schlegel, yet he concludes his central definition by arguing that literature should inspire laughter in the reader. For Schlegel, the comic is a key ingredient in serious literature. He derives this comic, ironic paradox from a number of literary sources, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Tristram Shandy. In Hamlet, the comic play within the play reveals the central, hidden truth that Claudius has murdered Hamlet’s father. Fiction, here, becomes the perfect vehicle for truth. In King Lear, the Fool’s jests show Lear the true nature of his daughters. The Fool’s jokes both conceal and, at the same time, reveal the truth – and thus might arguably be seen as another form of play within a play. In Tristram Shandy, Tristram, the narrator, assumes the role of jester, informing his readers that he will ‘sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it’. At the same time, he requests that his readers ‘courteously give [him] credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon [his] outside’.7 In these examples, the line between folly and wisdom, the comic and the serious, appearance and truth, becomes blurred. This instability – this comic irony – forces the spectator (or reader) to view realities on different levels – realities both within and outside the work. This ironic sentiment reflects a quizzical attitude towards the traditional, classical views of reality or truth. By mixing the serious and the comic in this way, the new Romantic poetics challenges the old Classical definitions, and the very strict boundaries of a play (in its broadest sense). Thus, this fusion of tones is essential to the play within the play as a device of deception, intrigue and masquerade and an ultimate truth-telling power about the nature of play/drama. Structurally, the play within the play also takes on the (con)fusion of various levels of reality, blending the theatrical reality as well as illusion while maintaining a reflexive posture through this very design, for within the larger play’s illusion, there are both reality of the spectator and illusion. It calls for the breakdown of the spectator’s suspension of disbelief and draws his attention to the purpose of this mise-en-abîme structure. Schlegel does not simply advocate the fusion of comic and serious elements in a literary work. He argues for a universal poetry, a kind of literature that embraces everything, an all-inclusive literature. The new freedom advocated in Schlegel’s definition of Romantic poetry emancipates the poet’s imagination with regard not only to form, admitting every possible genre, but

7

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), I, vi.

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also to content, admitting all imaginable subject matter. In order to exemplify his new ideals, Schlegel writes Lucinde, which he subtitles ‘a novel’. Far from what we think of as a typical novel, Lucinde is a combination of short narratives, essays, and dialogues. Besides containing a mixture of traditionally separate ‘genres’, in line with the principle of universal poetry Lucinde also attempts to challenge the concept of the novel as a single, complete work consisting of a lengthy narrative with logical sequence or discernible chronology and providing a sense of closure after a climatic incident. Not only does aforementioned irregularity and variety exist in individual sections of the book, but the entire second part of Lucinde is never written! This ‘novel’ is thus complete (in its structural intention) and yet incomplete. However, in the midst of seemingly formless imperfection and a mixture of different genres, Schlegel carefully arranges the novel’s content in a fashion that displays wit and craft while Classical drama insists on a strict separation of the different genres – tragedy, epic, and comedy – Romantic drama insists on mixing these genres. Of all the genres of literature in the Romantic period, drama pushes Schlegel’s ideals the farthest in practice, although to Schlegel the novel (der Roman) is the ideal genre. In the absence of Classical restraint, Romantic playwrights are given so much freedom that their plays often exceed the physical capabilities of the nineteenth-century stage. For instance, a sudden change of location or the staging of multiple simultaneous scenes were not easily achieved in the first part of the nineteenth century, until the advent of devices such as the elevator stage and the revolving stage. The former is first installed in 1884 in the new Budapest Opera House, and the latter in 1896 by Karl Lautenschläger in Munich’s Residentztheater. Faced with the limitations of the stage, Romantic dramatists such as Byron, Shelley and Musset write closet dramas. Not intended for physical performance, these permit the poet’s imagination to soar beyond theatrical boundaries. A play within the play also allows the playwright freedom to incorporate elements, situations, characters, and even dialogue that are inconsistent in tone and structure with the main drama and would otherwise have not been included. This device literally breaks the conventions that are contained within a drama and clears the space for itself to exist separately and yet, at the same time, as part of the main play. The physical stage is thus no longer an obstacle in terms of scene and location change or even identity disguise for characters; such changes could easily be performed and staged in the context of a play within a play that justifies any manipulation or inconsistency in technicality or illusion. These changes might even be highlighted in the play within the play in order to hint at truth and display the playful nature of the theatre.

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The second major feature of Romantic irony is its self-reflexivity. Poetry should always be meta-poetry, and drama meta-drama. The play within the play is the most common device for this self-reflexivity. In Athenäum Fragment 238, Schlegel says: [...] so sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die in modernen Dichtern nicht seltern transcendentalen Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtunsvermögens mit der künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung […] in jeder ihrer Darstellungen sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie sein. (That poetry not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcendental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring […] thus this poetry should portray itself with each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poetry of poetry.)

The paradoxical self-creative and self-critical powers combine raw material with theory and allow the work to present itself as meta-poetry (Poesie der Poesie) that describes itself as well as the author’s mind at work. Schlegel frequently refers to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is full of digressions and digressions from digressions, as the most quoted example of such a narrative device that makes the author’s act of writing the novel evident. Besides Sterne’s opening remarks warning the reader that he would occasionally act as a jester to provide comic effect as mentioned previously, his voice (through Tristram) is constantly heard, talking to his reader and asking how he might continue the story, telling the reader to re-read a passage which she has carelessly read, calling on the critic to render assistance in writing a difficult part of the narrative etc. Sterne’s narratology challenges Schlegel in his reading experience to constantly think about both his own process of reading and the novel’s own self-critical stance, while Schlegel commends Sterne’s witty craft of a novelist who skillfully captures his reader’s interest and attention, giving them immense pleasure of confusing the reading and writing experience. Humour is but a disguise for criticizing the form of a novel and the rules of reading a work the reader is accustomed to. Similarly, the play within the play device serves as a digression in the main play from the development of the plot, while at the same time it extends the implications of the inner play into the main play. Thus, this disguised digression continues to develop the story, supplies plot information and reveals the very process of writing (both plays). In addition, the framing of the inner play exposes the existence of the author from within and, in so doing, gestures towards the actual author (of the outer play) at work. In his own writing, Schlegel employs similar authorial intrusions, although not as daringly digressive as Sterne’s or Denis Diderot’s narrative

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patterns, by confounding the authorship and the narration of each section of Lucinde. Its very title-page sets up a frame for the reader to enter the world of fictionality: ‘Lucinde, a novel, by Friedrich Schlegel’; but the authorship of each section of the novel is deliberately ambiguous. After a prologue in which the author, employing the German first-person ‘mein’, confesses his inability to write verse like that of great poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, and states his overall view of poetry, love, and romance, another subtitle-like page insert appears: ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’ (Confessions of a Maladroit), suggesting an ambiguity regarding the author of the confessions: Is it Schlegel himself? Or Julius? Within the confessions, the main body of the novel, the point of view shifts back and forth between that of the main character Julius (using first-person narration) and that of an omniscient narrator. ‘Sehnsucht und Ruhe’ (Longing and Silence), one of the shortest sections of the novel, even contains pure dramatic dialogue. Although autobiographical parallels in Lucinde often confuse the narrative voice (of the author, the narrator, or the character Julius) addressing the reader, Schlegel, through such a deliberately ambiguous narration, is able to present his philosophy and opinions from an ‘objective’ position, critiquing his work through his characters and their self-expression within this novel. Hans Eichner sees this interposed narration as the novel’s main strength, illustrating the ‘fusion of enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring’ demanded by Schlegel’s theory: Most strikingly, the novel exploits the technique of the interposed narrator in such a way as to display the fusion of enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring demanded by Schlegel’s theory; Lucinde is an obvious illustration of the ‘witty’ or ‘arabesque’ form that Schlegel had singled out as a distinguishing feature of Romantic poetry.8

To Schlegel the self-reflexive (Selbstbespiegelung) and thus ‘objective’ presentation of an action in Romantic poetry also refers to portraying itself as a whole with each of its portrayals. This reflexivity, which occurs everywhere, will thus be at the same time ‘Poesie’ and ‘Poesie der Poesie’ (Athenäum Fragment 238). As the author depicts his object, he constantly stands above to look at his creative process and his creation and critiques it as he moves along, and the work he produces in turn reflects all these individual activities, forming a whole with a series of creative and critical components. This self-mirroring power merges poetry/drama with theory and allows the work to present itself as an organic self-revealing and self-critiquing entity that describes its very nature and the writer’s writing process. Just as a play 8

Friedrich Schlegel, Twayne World Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 89.

Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play

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within the play is a complete, self-contained work, it is also a part of the larger play that contains it. Thus, it is both a fragment and a whole in the post-modern sense. The very existence of the play within the play displays the ironic structure of such a literary device and exposes the nature of playwriting – it is a play (toying) with illusion and reality between the characters and the spectator/reader. As Schlegel points out in his Fragments, numerous pre-modern literary works, as well as art works, already display this reflexive sensibility and for him serve as forerunners of ‘modern’ literature.9 The seventeenth-century Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, demonstrates such modernity in his celebrated Las Meninas, a painting about painting that questions the nature and representation of perception and thus invokes the effects of the play within the play. 10 Acknowledged as the chief forerunner of nineteenth-century French Impressionism, Velázquez presents a striking ironic fusion of Classical order and objectivity, of naturalistic details and obscure reflections, and of the duality of creative and destructive powers in the very creation of the work. Las Meninas is a great example of self-reflexive art, in which the painter toys with various forms of disguise – through the motifs of reflections in the glass/mirror, door frame, the very canvas itself, and the contextual reality of the subject – much like that of a play within a play, while at the same time, displaying a playful reality of the act of painting and artistic expression. On the left-hand side of the canvas is a painter, ostensibly Velázquez himself, painting the scene that we see inside the painting. As with the various realities superimposed through Romantic irony, this painting reveals to us layers of existence and perspectives within and outside itself: ourselves (the spectators), the painter, the King and Queen (reflections in the mirror), the José Nieto (the figure standing in the doorway), and the infanta Margarita with her ladies-in-waiting and the dwarf. The painter here creates a painting within the painting. The figure of Velázquez looks out of the painting, at the spectator, forcing the spectator to contemplate the whole question of artistic representation. The playwright Ludwig Tieck, a contemporary of Schlegel’s, is the prime exemplar of Romantic irony in literature. In his plays, Tieck’s self-reflexivity systematically destroys the dramatic illusion of reality, just as does Velázquez’s painting by revealing all the different levels of its representations, and 9

10

Besides Shakespeare and Sterne, previously mentioned, Cervantes, Milton and Diderot all inspired Schlegel to rethink and define modern literature. See Foucault’s detailed analysis of the painting in Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Book Editions, 1994).

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disrupts the ‘reality’ it appears at first to depict. In Tieck’s best-known play, Der gestiefelte Kater, the characters go to see the play Puss in Boots. The plot develops around the characters’ responses to and interaction with the playwright, the actors and audience of the play within the play. The structure of the play reflects itself as drama and meta-drama at the same time. Some techniques Tieck uses include: this framing of the play within the play, the double role of many characters in the play, and the constant interaction between the characters and the audience. All these elements are presented on at least two, if not more, levels – the play itself, and the play within the play, which both creates and critiques the ‘real’ play at the same time. The play itself is a process of writing and staging a play. Tieck manipulates the illusion of reality in his plays, alternately increasing and decreasing the distance between the play and the audience. By using the play-within-the-play structure, Tieck conveniently critiques the clichés of his contemporary sentimental drama by ridiculing the authoraudience relationship within the play. It displays in essence more of a retrospective attitude of the author than a direct attack on a specific form/subgenre or author and serves as a device to examine the nature of the genre. The poet/playwright in Kater, for instance, defends his profession and role by reminding his audience at the end of the epilogue that he has done well to transport them back to the remote feelings of their childhood years – a naïve and innocent state closer to nature than adulthood.11 Although the audience rewards the poet with ‘rotten pears and apple and wads of paper’, the latter walks off the stage commenting that the audience is in fact better than he is at creating a ‘eine neuerfundene Dichtungsart’ (a new kind of poetry), a farce indeed. This farce, created by the audience within the play, leaves the real spectator/reader to contemplate the nature of the dramatic genre, the mission of the poet, and the entire viewing experience – a quite serious intent – after the laughs and farcical caricature are produced during the play. This sort of self-conscious reflection, this playing with the boundaries between fiction and reality, remains quite common in more recent theatre and film. The Verfremdungseffekt (device for making the familiar strange) through laying bare the play’s structure in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre does this, for example, as does the ‘anti-play’ of the Theatre of the Absurd. These twentieth-century dramas continue what Schlegel advocates in the Fragments 11

Wordsworth expresses a similar sentiment in his poem, ‘The Rainbow’. This call to return to childlike innocence, in order to be closer and eventually united with nature, becomes one of the defining characteristics of most Romantic lyric poetry. Tieck’s desire to transport his audience back to childhood feelings is no doubt serious, and he does it by using fantastic elements rooted in the past and far removed from jest and imagination.

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and set the stage for the cinematic use of similar kinds of ‘play within play’. For instance, the subject of Federico Fellini’s film, 81/2 is the film itself. Woody Allen’s characters jump in and out of the screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Terry Gilliam’s films often blur the boundaries between fiction and reality; his Adventures of Baron Munchausen even uses the stage as its very backdrop and introduces the audience to a play within a play within a film. This cross-genre application of the self-reflexive device illustrates how Romantic irony functions in the film’s content and form at different levels of authorial control. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is based on a set of stories about the preposterous eighteenth-century Baron Karl Friedrich von Munchausen, who goes on all sorts of remarkable adventures, including sailing to the moon. Gilliam uses these obviously impossible adventures to call into question the nature of reality and explore the truth-telling power of fiction. The film opens in an unnamed European city that is under attack from the army of the Grand Turk. In a large theatre, a troupe of actors is trying to perform a dramatic version of Baron Munchausen’s tales. As the play within the film begins, a man claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen enters the theatre and disrupts the performance. The first exchange between the ‘real Baron’, the actors portraying the Baron’s story and a prominent member of the audience (Horatio Jackson) sets up the initial playful complexity of theatrical illusion and reality. The Baron often comments on both the play and events in the ‘real world’ outside the play. In an interview with Eric Idle (who played Berthold, a member of Munchausen’s gang), the actor marvels at the interplay of fantasy and reality this film presents in the form of the play within the play: They’ve cleverly interwoven them, so you don’t feel it’s several stories. It’s just drawn on the sources. So he [Munchausen] goes into the whale, and he goes to Vulcan, and you do feel it’s going somewhere because of the context in which Terry’s set the whole thing, which is the conflict with the Turks and this little troupe of actors playing this awful version of the Munchausen story. When you first see Munchausen, he’s played by this very awful actor with a silly nose, and you think, ‘Oh no, it’s not going to be this’ – and it isn’t! The Baron comes up out of the audience, and goes, ‘No, it’s not like this at all.’ And takes you off into fantasy. So it’s good the way the fantasy and the reality keep [overlapping], so you’re never quite sure whether the Baron – in one scene, for example, we’ve finally beaten the Turks, and we win, and then he’s shot dead. And we’re going to a funeral and everything for him, and we cut back to the stage and the Baron says, ‘That was just one of the many occasions on which I’ve met my death!’ It’s a nice joke. Very strange.12

12

David Morgan, ‘Interview with Eric Idle’, available at (accessed 25 January 2005).

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When the Baron, backstage at the beginning of the film, says to Horatio Jackson, ‘Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever’, we realize immediately that he is addressing both the theatre audience within the film and us, the cinema audience outside the film. A few moments later, the real Baron ushers the actors offstage and begins to narrate the apparently ‘real story’ of his adventures. As he tells his tale, the stage setting dissolves into the palace of the Grand Turk. The film then follows the Baron through his adventures until, finally, he defeats the armies of the Grand Turk. As the city celebrates its deliverance, Horatio Jackson reappears and shoots Munchausen. The audience then picks up the story at the Baron’s funeral – one of the many deaths Munchausen encounters during the course of the play within the play. Gilliam’s strategy is to set up and then dismantle a linear story-line. By the end, the spectator has no way of differentiating between real events and the story Munchausen tells. When the film cuts back to the Baron’s narrative, after his apparent death, the audience does not know whether he is dead or alive, whether he has simply been telling crazy tales, or whether all the characters have been part of a great adventure. Gilliam gives equal weight to each of these possibilities. His manipulation of artistic illusion through the play within the play can be traced back to Schlegel’s concept of irony; that is, the notion that a work of art should reveal the creator’s creative process, the mind at work, rather than simply present an imitation of reality in the classical sense. Since the Romantics coaxed irony out of its Classical shell as a rhetorical trope, it has been an intrinsic attribute of modern literature and art, redefining the relationship between the author, the work, and the reader through its mode of expression and representation. Jonathan Culler describes Romantic irony as ‘the posture of a work which contains within itself an awareness of the fact that, while pretending to give a true account of reality, it is, in fact, fiction and that one must view with an ironic smile the act of writing a novel in the first place.’13 In a word, Romantic irony is self-referentiality, constantly reminding the reader of the very act of writing and reading the text. The modern concept of irony has generally evolved around Schlegel’s definition. It remains a topic of constant interest and investigation in contemporary literary studies as well. From Shakespeare to the Romantics, and from the Romantics to the modernists and contemporary writers and theorists, Romantic irony continues to play an important role.

13

Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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In Les Mots et les choses Foucault comments on the crisis of representation initiated by Romantic irony and the transparency of language as a signsystem whereby representations represent nothing more than themselves: La littérature, c’est la constestation de la philologie […] De la révolte romantique contre un discours immobilisé dans sa cérémonie, jusqu’à la découverte mallarméenne du mot en son pouvoir impuissant, on voit bien quelle fut, au xixe siècle, la fonction de la littérature par rapport au mode d’être moderne du langage […] la littérature se distingue de plus en plus du discours d’idées, et s’enferme dans une intransitivité radicale; elle se détache de toutes les valeurs qui pouvaient à l’âge classique la faire circuler (le goût, le plaisir, le naturel, le vrai), et elle fait naître dans son propre espace tout ce qui peut en assurer la dénégation ludique […] elle rompt avec toute définition de «genres» comme formes ajustées à un ordre de représentations, et devient pure et simple manifestation d’un langage qui n’a pour loi que d’affirmer – contre tous les autres discours – son existence escarpée; elle n’a plus alors qu’à se recourber dans un perpétuel retour sur soi […].14 (Literature is the contestation of philology […] From the Romantic revolt against a discourse frozen in its ritual pomp, to the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in relation to the modern mode of being of language […] literature becomes progressively more differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity; it becomes detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space everything that will ensure a lucid denial of them..[…] it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming – in opposition to all other forms of discourse – its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve back in a perpetual return upon itself […].)

This description of language and literature of the nineteenth century as selfreflecting manifestation largely coincides with Schlegel’s central assertion about Romantic poetry – that poetry ‘should portray itself with each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poetry of poetry’. Lyceum Fragment 37 also describes this self-referentiality inherent in the paradox of irony – ‘Das Höchste: [...] Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung’ (The highest goal: [...] self-creation and self-destruction).15 In Foucault’s words, literature creates within itself a space that ensures a ‘lucid denial’, it curves back in a perpetual return upon itself. But to Schlegel, poetry is more than an independent form such as Foucault describes it, which exists wholly in reference to the pure art of writing; it is also a representation of the author’s creativity, and it should also undertake a critical approach that portrays its relationship not only to the creator but also to his 14 15

Foucault, p. 313. Kritische Ausgabe, II, 151.

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surroundings. It is a paradox that transcends its intrinsic being as a ‘pure art of writing’. Romantic irony creates multiple layers of existence and meaning in works of art. It also creates a resistance to fixed interpretations, permitting texts to remain in a state of perpetual becoming. It makes the work of art a self-consuming artifact that protects itself from attempts to finalize its meaning. Romantic irony also reveals criticism as creatively destructive in the way it dismantles the preconceptions and received opinions (of the author, the text itself, or the audience/reader). As we look at the myriads of the form of the play within the play in its broadest sense, it is indeed this self-reflexivity that underlines the working of dramatic irony generated by meta-drama. Play within the play is its best representation and, at the same time, the best criticism of itself.

Klaus R. Scherpe

‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and Colonial Literature

‘Backstage discourse’ is constituted by gestures, words and tales, which cannot be performed in the face of power. Exploring the ‘hidden transcripts’ in ethnographic and colonial literature we can follow a line of resistance from 18th century drama (Schiller’s The Robbers) to Jean Genet’s Les Nègres, which – as play within the play – mimicks the front stage of domination and violence. Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ demonstrates the ape’s mimetic faculty as a means of survival. Jean Rouch’s film Les Maîtres Fous gives evidence of resistance by incorporating the colonial regime into the tribal ritual. The replay of the ceremony shows its real character. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ exemplify the perversion of power indicating the failure of the colonial enterprise

The term ‘backstage discourse’ is taken from a fabulous book by James C. Scott, an expert in South East Asian Studies at Yale. Its title, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, refers to encounters of and confrontations between the powerless and the powerful, the colonizers and the colonized. The process of domination generates hegemonic public discourses (of morals, conduct, values and language) as well as a backstage discourse that consists of what cannot be said in the face of power. Backstage discourse is to be found in gossip, folktales, jokes, songs and all kinds of performances in which the vengeful tone of mocking and mimicry display resistance to official onstage practices and rituals of denigration, insults and assaults of the body. Making use of camouflage, disguised speech, and hence exploring the immanent possibilities of acting against domination, these ‘hidden transcripts’ – another term for the same issue – are part of a power play within the accepted framework of dialogue, participation and understanding. In its anonymity and ambiguity, backstage discourse harbors a permanent threat to those in power, who fear violence.1 Thus it is inherent in the colonial mode of production of reality. Mimesis occurs, as Michael Taussig argues, ‘by a colonial mirroring of other-

1

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), p. 2.

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ness that reflects back onto the colonist the barbarity of their own social action.2 Like social scientist James Scott, cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig, Clifford Geertz in his ‘thick description’3 of the Balinese cockfight, or new historicist Stephen Greenblatt in his Marvelous Possessions,4 I take the liberty to present some striking literary examples of theatrical quality within the context of ethnography: a re-reading of well-known texts by Franz Kafka, an ethnographer in heart and mind; a story by George Orwell, the colonial officer in 1920s’ Burma; Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness of course; some cinematographic material and, at the end of this essay, Jean Genet’s clownery, Les Nègres. Backstage discourse, I suggest, functions as a play within the play, taking into account the ‘mimetic faculty’ that Walter Benjamin has explored in his short essays on language,5 drawing attention to the sensuous and tactile qualities of communication lost in the script. I should like to begin by going back to the première of Friedrich Schiller’s drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) at the Mannheim National Theatre on January 13, 1782. Surrounded by his wild bunch of comrades, Karl Moor, the prodigal son and heir to the principality, receives the forged and fatal letter, written by his vicious brother Franz, which informs him of his father’s decision to dispossess him of home and country, and to set him free to go wherever his ‘despicable deeds’ may take him, without hope of forgiveness. While Karl is reading the letter on the front stage, Moritz Spiegelberg, who embodies the utmost of criminal energies among the robbers, performs a pantomime backstage that silently demonstrates Karl’s transgression from good to evil. The dialogue between the three robbers that accompanies and comments on Spiegelberg’s strange performance backstage runs as follows: What’s Spiegelberg up to? The man’s gone mad. He’s gone St. Vitus’s dance. His mind must have gone. Or he’s writing poetry. Spiegelberg! Hey, Spiegelberg! The brute can’t hear me!

2

3

4

5

Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 134. Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, ed. by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Walter Benjamin, Über das mimetische Vermögen, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.3, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1877), pp. 210-214.

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(Shaking him) Are you dreaming, man? Or what? Spiegelberg (Who has meanwhile been miming a mountebank’s pitch in the corner of the room [die Pantomime eines Projektemachers] jumps up wildly) La bourse ou la vie!6

Evil Spiegelberg mimes good-natured Karl’s criminal imagination. Spiegelberg is obsessed with crime and insanity, dancing the epileptic Vitus’s dance backstage; he is the brute, the beast; and he is in Schiller’s play (often neglected by scholars of German literature, with the exception of Hans Mayer 7) the Jew. Moritz Spiegelberg is the Jew in the play, who desires to bring the kingdom of Judea back by force as he bursts into his dance. ‘I took you for your better,’ Hamlet says ironically to Polonius. ‘I take you for your worst’ is the sardonic message in Spiegelberg’s pantomime. The name Spiegelberg means ‘mirror mountain’, rocher de miroir. He re-plays, or rather pre-plays, the robber’s violent action in the Bohemian Forest. But in this backstage mirroring of a front-stage morality play – Karl’s soul will be saved at the end – there is, against expectation, no referential evidence in the doubling of the theatrical reality, nothing of the fascination with transgression, liminality, hybridity, no real drama between fact and fiction to entertain and educate the audience. The pantomime does not illustrate the dramatic action; it does not substitute and illuminate the dialogue as in Hamlet’s staging of the play within the play. Why? Because there is nothing to negotiate. And that means that the only evidence on the backstage is casual and not causal: violence. Spiegelberg demonstrates pure violence. The villain’s mimetic acting shows the audience how terrifying resemblance can be. Why? Because Spiegelberg’s spectacle, that is, the extremist other (as murderer, beast, maniac, and Jew) demonstrates that pure violence has no metaphor, no symbol, and no meaning. Real violence is nothing but the desire to kill, Jean Genet said in an interview with Hubert Fichte about the murder of Pasolini on the beach of Ostia: ‘People say it’s for a dollar or a coat. In reality it’s for the violence itself.’ 8 No picturing, nothing but this mute mimicry. Schiller’s ‘hidden transcript’ on the backstage operates metonymically: Spiegelberg insults and murders by numbers, making his victims into objects, thus making himself the outcast, the thief, the rapist, the 6

7

8

Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. by Robert David MacDonald (London: Oberon Books, 1995), p. 33. Hans Mayer, ‘Der Weise Nathan und der Räuber Spiegelberg. Antinomien der jüdischen Emanzipation in Deutschland’, in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 17 (1973), 253-272. ‘Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte’, trans. from the French by Patrick McCarthy, in The New Review Vol. 4 (1977), 9-21 (p. 17).

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murderer, the opposite of Karl Moor on the dark side of reason. In his Vitus’s dance Spiegelberg is outraged, beyond himself. Basically violence has no face, as Jean-Luc Nancy states: ‘Violence represents itself as Gestalt without Gestalt; it is monstration and performance of what remains without Gestalt.’9 In his pantomime of a criminal, Spiegelberg, the monster, is constructed as pure monstration. The backstage discourse of the fierce and ultimate ‘other’ is – to return to my main point – the realm of non-representation (one that is not/cannot be represented). Nonetheless, when we wish to see or visualize horror, the uncanny, catastrophe, our vision of the end of the world (the apocalypse) in writing and reading, we seek relief from violence. How? By engaging l’écriture, the distancing code of the alphabet against the original mimetic process of the backstage, which according to Benjamin was originally constituted as a magical correspondence. Friedrich Schille’s The Robbers, staged in Mannheim in 1782, is a morality play that expects the audience to take an interest not in violence, of course, but in the functioning, the instrumentality, the moral katharsis of violence. But whose violence? Whose morality is it, or will it be? When we take backstage discourse not only as an educating construction of good and evil, but as a scene of hidden violence within the construction of domination and resistance – the terrifying scene of difference and resemblance – we are then confronted, sans phrase, with the core of the problem: in ethnographic and colonial efforts of writing and re-writing ‘the other’. The staging of the other (the monster, beast, brute, the Hun, the Black, and the Jew) takes place in the presence of the other’s other: the white man, the white audience, which Jean Genet demanded for his black play.10 In Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ we find the inversion of this scene. Rotpeter, the ape imported from the dark continent (the brute, the monster, the slave, the Jew), has made his way to the front stage of the academy; convincingly he gives evidence of his learning to become a human being by imitating human beings, ‘almost but not quite’, as Homi Bhabha would say.11 Mimicry was Rotpeter’s only chance to survive (his Ausweg, the only way out, the last exit). One can read this as alluding to the forceful assimilation of the ‘Jew of Prague’, that is, of Kafka’s own play within the play. The ape’s progress is, by means of this mimetic production, meant to wipe out his exist9

10

11

“Die Gewalt stellt sich als Gestalt ohne Gestalt aus, sie ist Zur-Schau-Stellung (“monstration“) und Darbietung dessen, was ohne Gestalt bleibt.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Bild und Gewalt’, in Lettre International 49 (2000), 86-99 (p. 89). Gene A. Plunka, ‘Victor Turner and Jean Genet – Rites of Passages in Les Nègres’, in Theatre Annual 46 (1993), 65-88 (p. 69). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 91.

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ence as an ape, his difference, extinguishing his original barbarity (Caliban on the island before the arrival of Prospero). But not quite! What we see in Kafka’s text, again, is the experience of terrifying resemblance. The brutal act of subjection, well accomplished in the eyes of the observers, officers and officials, hides the wound, the red scar on the ape’s bottom, the reason why the name Rotpeter was inflicted on him. Not always! When excited and enthusiastic about his mimetic achievements toward becoming a human being, Rotpeter cannot always avoid dropping his pants in public and demonstrating (monstrare) where he was shot, exposing the spot, the signifier of violence and pain. And, back home, behind the stage, he has his beloved, his female ape, dull and blind, to relax and feel pleasure, as Kafka writes. Kafka’s art of resistance, as we know, only exists as a ‘hidden transcript’ in the self-destructive act of assimilation and submission. And this, of course, takes us directly to the colonial enterprise, on stage, to the West Coast of Africa, for instance, or to the San Blas Islands off the shore of Panama. How is the white man’s presence being performed? How can the powerless, the subaltern, speak behind or in the face of colonial power and violence? How is resistance performed in the white man’s presence, backstage? ‘In some way or another one can protect oneself from the spirits by portraying them.’ Michael Taussig makes this statement in his book Mimesis and Alterity, referring to the ritual practices of the Cuna Indians who inhabited the San Blas Islands.12 In 1927, the Swedish baron Erland Nordenskjold made his observations of the Cuna shamans who use carved wooden figurines in a curing ritual. These figurines are emblems of power. Everything visible (people, animals, plants, stones) has its invisible counterparts. The Cuna Indians believe in the magical power of replication. In the wooden figurines the evil spirits can be convinced and pacified by portraying them. And when copied, the power of the original is transferred to the copy. In other words: The representation takes its power from the represented. But the really stunning discovery of the white traveler was to observe that the Cuna in one particular village carved fifty larger than life-sized figurines, all of which represented (through their clothes and military outfits) European types of mainly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them a colossal, sevenfoot figure of General Douglas MacArthur. Obviously, the mimetic transfer, this curious affair of embodiment, the appearance of the colonial other in local shamanism, is a re-play in the strict sense, a strategic maneuver to resist

12

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), p. 10.

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power in the face of power. Consequently, thanks to the Cuna’s mimetic faculty of visualization, backstage discourse could be performed on stage. In this case, however, the mimetic process does not reveal any act of violence: it is not ‘emergent’, exploding in an act of disobedience and disorder. On the contrary, the Cuna’s technologies of mimesis make use of all tactile qualities (carving and painting) to establish a logical and strategic matrix of mimesis. By comparison, mimetic performances of violence as such, emergent violence, could be observed in another context of colonial affairs, in Western Africa, Niger, nowadays Ghana. Cultural anthropologists have researched the Hauka movement in the 1920s und 1930s, when the natives were resisting French colonial rule. Jean Rouch’s famous ethnographic film Les Maîtres Fous gives evidence of the Hauka’s spiritual practice. In their ritual dance it could happen that the Hauka became possessed by the spirits of their colonial administrators. This mimetic production signified to the Europeans, of course, the native’s downright savagery and awesome otherness. Mocking the white man was a daily practice among the Hauka, but making the colonial authorities the object of ritual violence called the French colonial regime to the scene. Much later, in 1954, Rouch’s film showed that such actions were banned in France. The insult to the French, as Rouch explains, ‘was because the film, e.g., shows an egg being broken over the head of an image representing the Governor-General, an imitation of the real Governor General’s plumes cascading over the ceremonial helmet.’ 13 The mimetic machinery, intensified through film’s ability to explore the optical unconscious, is greased with dirt, blood and excrement to soil the symbols of power and oppression. The Hauka’s re-play of colonial domination, first performed on the backstage of the possession rituals in local villages, went beyond earlier limits of representation. Tribal violence as mimesis of colonial domination developed a variety of mimetic techniques for dishonoring and delegitimizing the white man’s mental and physical power. Incidentally, one of the last targets of those militant Hauka spirits in Ghana was a French general who later became a commander in the Indochina war that preceded the U.S. war in Vietnam. How terrifying resemblance can be! Quite different from what Victor Turner aimed for in his well-known book From Ritual to Theatre, Western theatre that is, which takes mimesis as a universal potential for understanding and humanizing the other.14 The mimetic matrix of violence tells a different story of colonial power and resistance. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

13 14

Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 242. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).

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stages colonialism as a narration within narration: Marlow, the narrator, retired on the banks of the river Thames, tells the adventures of Major Kurtz, who crossed the borders of civilization to become the chieftain of native barbarians. Marlow’s mission as Kurtz’ potential double (the Doppelgänger) is to reverse Kurtz’ excess of violence in the dark hinterland of domination by bringing home (to the colonial office) Kurtz’ eccentric writings on colonial matters and his own re-writing of Kurtz’ experience of ‘horror’. Marlow’s retelling of the story is, one could say, a painful hermeneutic endeavour to represent to the Western reader what cannot be represented: the horror, the violence of Kurtz’ experience of the heart of darkness. In this reading, the ‘white lie’ is not only the softened version of Kurtz’ death which Marlow gives to his fiancé in the British countryside; Marlow finds himself confronted with the empire’s ‘white lies’ of colonizing “’he others’ in the name of Christian brotherhood, of human rights and other benefits of the Western world. ‘He [Major Kurtz] would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party,’ Marlow quotes one of the visitors. ‘What party?’ he is asked, and the fatal answer is: ‘Any party.’ 15 This is the moment when Marlowe’s narrative of Kurtz’ adventures comes to the point, the point of no return as far as the hermeneutic effort of re-writing of colonialism is concerned. On the backstage of the jungle outback there is nothing but a diffuse execution of violence; divine power, as Walter Benjamin says in his essay ‘Critique of Violence’,16 ‘ecstasy of heroism’, as Max Weber termed it,17 violence without Gestalt, shape and contour as Nancy formulates. Major Kurtz is Marlow’s Spiegelberg. And a Spiegelberg (the perversion of a human being, the brute, the beast, the founder of a barbarian kingdom of his own will) can by no means be brought back to the front stage of civilisation. Major Kurtz’ imperative (‘exterminate the brutes’), as Malinowski’s secret diary of his field studies also shows, cannot be reported back to the academy. If Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is ultimately a book about the ‘final solution’ and a narrative of rescue in terms of the ‘white lie’, then George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a short story to end the ‘white lies’ of colonialism. Orwell’s report about his colonial experience as a sub-inspector of police in 1920s colonial Burma gains insight into the permanent threat of backstage discourse, its hidden transcript of power that, on the front stage, 15 16

17

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 115. Walter Benjamin ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.1, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1877), pp. 179-202. Max Weber ‘Charismatische Herrschaft’, in: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1985), p. 140.

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deprives the dominant discourse of its meaning and legitimacy. Worse, backstage discourse even makes dominant discourse ridiculous in the eyes of the so-called natives. In this first person narrative Orwell has been summoned to deal with an elephant that has broken its tether and now ravages the bazaar and kills a man. Later, the elephant peacefully grazes in the paddy fields; his heat has passed. For the villagers and the officers the logical assumption would have been to return to work. But there is another logic Orwell has to perform on the front stage of colonial rule. The public scene demands the exercise of power to preserve power. Two thousand colonial subjects follow the scene and watch the police officer. Orwell writes: And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s domination in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy […]. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.18

Orwell’s use of theatrical metaphors is pervasive, as James Scott observes.19 He speaks of himself as ‘a leading actor of the piece’, of hollow dummies, puppets, masks, appearances, and an audience that would ridicule him if he did not follow the established script of colonial power. Obviously, there is a disparity between the public discourse of domination, the open exercise of power, and the backstage discourse safely expressed only offstage. If subordination requires a credible performance of obedience and humility, so domination requires an authoritarian performance of haughtiness and mastery. Any disorientation of this hierarchy as experienced and reflected by Orwell is threatening. As a result of the failure of this power play – the breakdown of the hegemonic discourse of the colonial power under the observing eyes of the powerless – Orwell feels the ‘hollow posing’ of his own performance: the sudden recognition that his acting is nothing but the shallow imitation of an action, which had to be carried out. The personal consequence for Orwell

18

19

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), pp. 3-12, (p. 8). James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 10-11.

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after this experience was quitting the colonial service. If Major Kurtz mirrors Spiegelberg, who mimics pure violence on the backstage, in the woods, in the jungle, then Orwell, the colonial officer, makes his last appearance as Karl Moor did on the front stage, staging shame and honesty, the very last hero of a morality play, Western style. However, as Jean Genet observed when commenting on the theatrical production of Les Nègres, colonization does not end when the colonizer has gone. In an all-black performance, Genet writes, one white man at least must be in the audience, the spotlight focused on this symbolic white; or white masks have to be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theatre; and if the blacks refuse the masks, ‘then let a dummy [of a white man] be used.’ 20 Even better: a dummy! The black audience does not share George Orwell’s sophistication of guilt and the shame of being ridiculed by ‘the other’. Les Nègres is a play without morals, absolutely indifferent to the ‘white man’s burden’ and also deeply mistrustful of the better morals of the subordinates. Genet’s support of the Black Panther movement did not alter this view. The play within the play in Les Nègres is a ‘clown show’, improvised not only to execute the inversion of white to black domination, but even more to demonstrate that the code of power and violence is circulating, endlessly shifting without a reliable notion of one’s own identity and that of the other. For this reason, the blacks imitate their own imitation of the whites. ‘Who can say what exactly is “black”?’ Genet asks. At this point the ontological order of the play within the play – what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fiction’? – becomes ineffective. There are no limits of representation in this play and, therefore, no substantial meanings of identity, hybridity, transgression, etc. The coffin with the body of the murdered white woman onstage and – backstage and offstage – the trial and execution of a renegade Negro, are happenings that are accumulated and associated data of violence, nothing more: killing by numbers in a never-ending play. ‘What party’, extreme and powerful? Major Kurtz’ ghost would have answered: ‘Any party’. Here it is again: The power play within the play, without Gestalt, no condition, no reference, the definition and vision of violence. And the theatre as an institution? If the play can no longer be a moral play in Friedrich Schiller’s sense, maybe the theatre can be a moral institution; differently, to be sure, in Genet’s practice. ‘There is only one place in the world,’ Genet claims in his interview with Hubert Fichte, ‘where theatricality does not hide power and that is the theatre.’ 21 In political and social affairs

20 21

Gene A. Plunka, p. 69. Jean Gene talks to Hubert Fichte, p. 14.

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power is hidden by theatricality, violence is justified, legalized, etc. Not so in Genet’s theatre. In staging violence the theatre does not hide violence; in its ritual action it has the ability to incorporate violence. Pure violence in absolute presence: this would be the sensation of Genet’s theatre of excess. And the audience? They, of course, are fictional in their need and desire for identity, with the illusion of gaining insight and learning from the play. ‘Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet?’ Jorge Luis Borges writes: ‘These inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers and spectators, can be fictions.’ 22 Western readers and spectators, one must add! The real horror, the utmost threat to one’s own fictional identity is, as we know, the loss of the opposite, the black, the brute, the Jew, ‘the other’ to define oneself against. Most terrifying: the absence of evil Moritz. The absence of Spiegelberg as a mirror of good-natured Karl Moor would signify the loss of certainty and security. But identity needs a mirror, at least a shadow. We cannot do without our Caliban. And here I come to the end of the chapter, with Kafka again. Franz Kafka in Prague with his friend Max Brod, after a visit to a cinema maybe where a Western movie was shown – Kafka, in this very short story about an Indian, reports the terrifying experience of the failure of mimetic production, in this case the mimetic desire to be an Indian: Oh to be a red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one’s galloping mount, leaning into the wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs, for there were no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there were no reins, and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that horse’s neck and horse’s head were gone.23

22

23

Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-52, trans. by Ruth Sims (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 46. See also Pyllis Gofrain, ‘Play and the Problem of Knowing in Hamlet: An Excursion into Interpretative Anthropology’, in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. by Victor Turner and Edward Bruner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 217. ‘Longing to be a Red Indian’, in Franz Kafka. The Transformation and other stories, ed. and trans. by Malcolm Pasley, (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 31.

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The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation

The limits of representation in the theatre can be made manifest only through the staging of the representation of representation. The two basic types of metadrama, the inset play, the selfimplicating play in the play, and framed play, the self-explicating World Theatre, are the products respectively of the Renaissance (Shakespeare) and of the Counter-Reformation (Calderón). The second part of the article analyses the critical intention of Dürrenmatt’s combination of these two forms of metadrama in The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame).

1. In Derrida’s essay on Artaud 1 the theatre of cruelty is characterized as the total antithesis to Western theatre. Artaud’s impossible idea of a theatre without representation serves to bring into focus the limits of representation, that is to say, the closure of representation which defines the invariant structure of Western theatre across its whole history and all its dramaturgic revolutions. This invariant structure, integral to Western culture, whether it be in the field of religion, philosophy or politics, is metaphysical or theological in kind. By theological Derrida means the dominance of the word, the primacy of a founding logos, which endows the scene with the following elements: an author-creator, absent, distant, armed with a text, who supervises and controls the meaning of the representation. The originating logos is represented by directors and actors, who represent characters, who represent directly or indirectly the ideas and intentions of the author-creator. In other words, actors enact the will of an invisible master before an audience of spectators, consumers, voyeurs. The theatre of cruelty, more exactly, the idea of a theatre without representation, signifies the impossible attempt to banish God from the scene by destroying this structure of reduplication and repetition. Artaud’s paradoxical dream of an originary representation of pure self-identical presence cannot escape the closed circle of representation. All Artaud can do is lay bare what this circle contains: ‘Closure is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference repeats itself indefinitely. That is to say, the space of play (jeu). 1

Jacques Derrida, ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation’, in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 341-368.

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This movement is the movement of the world as play.’ 2 Every play, we may say, opens a space of play and represents the world as play. From the perspective of the limit, the space of play refers to the form of the play and the world as play refers to the content (meaning) of the play. Since every form has a content and every content a form, neither the space of play nor the world as play is perceived as such. The limit of representation remains unrepresented, just as the scene’s secret relationship to its other – the originary force of a theatre without representation – remains occluded. The hidden ‘presence’ of this other can manifest itself only negatively as a consciousness of the limit of representation. For this to happen, however, representation must be represented: that is to say, presented, re-presented, represented. Inherent in this second order reduplication are two possibilities: on the one hand reduplication can produce a self-critique of representation; on the other hand, it can produce a self-affirmation of representation. These two possibilities are familiar as the two basic types of metadrama: the inset drama, the play within a play, and the framed drama, the theatrum mundi or World Theatre. The play within the play first appears in the Renaissance, its classic embodiment is Hamlet. World Theatre as generic form comes to full flowering in the Baroque. Calderón’s The Great Theatre of the World is its classic embodiment. The theological dimensions of both plays are evident. Calderón’s affirmation of the world as play requires a personal appearance by the author of authors, whereas Shakespeare’s exploration of the space of play is shot through with theological doubts. But in each case the meaning of representation, for both actors and audience, is at stake, the meaning, that is, of playing the game. The self-referential character of both types (e.g. the self-critique and selfaffirmation of representation) indicates that they both operate within the circular closure of representation. Each reconfirms through reduplication this closure at the same time as each uses reduplication to ‘master’ closure by raising representation to a higher power. In structural terms the two types constitute complementary (but asymmetrical) opposites: the play within the play is the introversion of the framing ‘play of the play’ in World Theatre, just as the latter operates through the extroversion of the inset play. To put it differently: the one uses reduplication to internalise the origin and causality of the scene, the other to externalise origin and causality. In each case reduplication has the purpose of making the invisible closure of representation visible in relation either to the form or the content (meaning) of representation. As indicated, the representation of representation raises the theological 2

Derrida, p. 367.

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stakes – in more obvious fashion in the case of World Theatre, where instead of chasing God from the stage he is made the visible source of all action, the God in the World Machine; in less obvious fashion in the case of the play within the play, where God has withdrawn to become the ghost in the machine. Theologically and historically the two types point in opposite directions: the play within the play anticipates through introversion the modern recession of origin, that is, the paradox of self-implication; World Theatre looks backwards to reaffirm through extroversion the medieval closure of meaning whose outcome is the allegory of self-explication. The distinguishing feature of the play within the play is that it makes the space of play visible by redoubling it in order to stage the form of representation. I am using the term ‘form’ here in the sense that Spencer Brown uses it in his Laws of Form.3 Spencer Brown defines form as the unity of difference, such that every form possesses two sides: the marked, visible and the unmarked, invisible. The form of representation involves a visible scene and an invisible audience but also the in/visible distinction between actor and role. To make this closure of representation visible, it is necessary to repeat the form – in Spencer Brown’s terminology, to re-enter the form in the form (the concisest definition of mise en abyme.4 This is of course what the play within the play, the representation of the form of representation, does. Its mise en abyme appears to bracket the theological question of the author-creator. In Hamlet an agnostic or atheistic standpoint is adopted, whose consequence is the paradoxicalization of representation. Although Hamlet expounds an Aristotelian aesthetic of imitation (e.g. holding a mirror up to nature), he is compelled to register that in a world of mirrors everyone is an actor, that one can smile and yet be a damned villain, and that madness is the safest refuge of sanity. In Hamlet we observe the stage becoming the world through staging itself. The play announces what we could call the vanishing perspective of modernity – the infinite recession of meaning, set in motion by re-entry, that is, by the self-implication of form, which folds the play in on itself. The representation of representation responds to the break in symmetry, which is the effect/consequence of the closure of representation. The play in the play is thus both less and more than the play. It is less, in that the part is less than the whole; it is more, in that the part is more than the whole. Hence the paradox, that the part contained in the whole contains and frames the whole at the same time. 3

4

G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, 2nd edn (New York: Julian, 1977). See also David Roberts, ‘Die Paradoxie der Form in der Literatur’, in Probleme der Form, ed. by Dirk Baecker (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 22-44. See Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Oxford: Polity, 1989), p. 37.

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World Theatre by contrast proposes the self-explication of its content by unfolding the allegory of representation. If the play within the play absorbs the world into the space of play, World Theatre absorbs the stage into the world as play. In the first case the macrocosm becomes visible through the microcosm (the inset play), in accordance with the paradoxical logic inherent in the figure of re-entry (that the part is greater than the whole, because in order to see itself the whole must divide itself into a seeing and a seen part). The opposite applies with World Theatre: here the macrocosm, the world as play, gives meaning to the microcosm, the stage play. This is only possible if the spectators can be raised to the awareness of their participation in the ‘great theatre of the world,’ that is, if the spectators can grasp the meaning of the rules of the game revealed through the authorization of representation. The visible presence of God on stage has the function of ‘representing’ the restoration of the symmetry broken by re-entry. The world of re-entry is a world without God (a world of infinite recession). It makes us all, like Hamlet, self-observing observers who have a problem with acting (in both senses of the word). This vanishing perspective is replaced in World Theatre by God as the vanishing point of all perspectives, through which the unity of all differences can be reaffirmed. We are transformed from self-observing observers into authorized participants, called to represent in a worthy fashion the role allotted to us in the world theatre. The authorization, the deparadoxicalization of representation cancels its negativities and culminates in the mystery of ‘real presence.’ Calderón’s autos sacramentales, written for performance on the feast of Corpus Christi, all conclude with the allegory of allegories, the miracle of the Eucharist. The play within the play and the World Theatre are thus the structurally complementary but asymmetrical representations of the closure of representation which emerge in the context of Renaissance/Reformation and Counterreformation. 2. In the second part of this chapter I want to examine an inversion of the model of World Theatre, which turns its defining idea of judgment against it: the form this takes involves the presentation of World Theatre as the inset play of a morality play that operates through the staged contrast between appearance and reality, in which both actors and stage audience are being judged. The play in question is Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1955), which I want to set in relation to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s reworking of Calderón’s Great Theatre of the World for the Salzburg Festival after the First World War.

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The Salzburg Festival, inaugurated in 1919, was Hofmannsthal’s response to the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The heartland of Central Europe, Austria and Vienna, had suddenly been relegated to the periphery of the German ‘nation,’ divided since the Reformation between the Protestant North and the Catholic South. The Festival aimed at more, however, than a continuation of the Baroque legacy of the Habsburgs. Hofmannsthal intended a cultural politics, whose stake was the divided soul of the German nation, a cultural politics in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, that is to say, directed against the Protestant definition of the German nation. Hofmannsthal’s Salzburg signifies in this sense the counterpart to Wagner’s Bayreuth. Each festival was dedicated to the cultural-political goal of the spiritual regeneration of the German nation through art. Each moreover identifies the split between Protestant drama and Catholic opera as the cultural symptom of the divided German soul, which Wagner’s music drama and Hofmannsthal’s ‘German national programme’ for the Festival were to heal. As his own long productive collaboration with Richard Strauss indicates, Hofmannsthal saw himself as the inheritor of a great theatrical tradition, which did not separate opera and drama.5 Just as great operas – Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven – are above all dramatic works, so great dramas – Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s fantasy plays, Schiller’s romantic dramas – presuppose music. At the centre of this great tradition stand Mozart’s operas and Goethe’s Faust; they form what Hofmannsthal calls ‘the German national programmme of 1800,’ which included as well as the ancients the modern – English, Spanish and French – drama. On what grounds, however, can Hofmannsthal reclaim Goethe and Schiller and Weimar classicism from the Protestant North and its concepts of Bildung and Kultur for his programme? On what grounds can Salzburg displace Weimar and Bayreuth as the site that truly corresponds to the nation, even more claims to be ‘the heart of the heart of Europe’?6 Hofmannsthal’s ‘national’ programme of 1800 looks back to a prerevolutionary Europe and to the universalism of the Catholic Church. It turns its back on the political and cultural nationalisms of the nineteenth century, which led Europe into the catastrophe of 1914 and tore the supranational Austro-Hungarian Empire apart. Just as the ‘people’ must reconcile class divisions, so the lost tradition of popular theatre must reconcile the modern splitting of the public into the elite and the masses. Thus against Bayreuth, 5

6

‘Deutsche Festspiele zu Salzburg (1919)’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Prosa III (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1952), pp. 441-443. ‘Die Salzburger Festspiele’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Prosa IV (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1955), pp. 88-94 (p. 92).

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dedicated to one great artist and a German nation in the image of Weimar, Hofmannsthal sets the whole classical heritage of the nation, which extends from the Middle Ages up to Mozart and Goethe in an unbroken theatrical tradition, whose organic development is rooted in the popular culture of the South, that is, the Austrian-Bavarian lands. Hofmannsthal is at pains to underline what he calls the southern German theatrical forms present in Goethe’s world theatre: Faust incorporates mystery and morality play, puppet theatre, courtly opera with chorus and stage machinery. The centre of Austria/Bavaria is Salzburg, not Vienna. The modern cosmopolitan metropolis cannot play this reintegrating national role. Salzburg thus stands for the romantic redefinition of society as community, as ‘aesthetic totality.’ 7 To create this totality through the moral and magic powers of a retotalized theatre, the collaboration of Max Reinhardt was essential. In 1917 Reinhardt submitted a memorandum to the Austrian Ministry of Culture proposing the building of a theatre in Hellbronn, dedicated to the original and final form of the theatre, the festival play, as it had been realized by the Greeks and in the medieval mysteries and Passion plays of the Church. Reinhardt had already achieved some of his greatest prewar successes through arena spectacles for a mass audience. Perhaps the best known was his 1911 production of the pantomime, The Miracle by Karl Vollmüller with music by Humperdinck, performed by 2000 actors before an audience of 30 000 at the Olympic Hall in London, transformed for the occasion into the interior of a Gothic cathedral. In the following years this production was performed in Vienna, various German cities, New York and the Salzburg Festival in 1924. In 1910 Reinhardt directed Oedipus Rex in Hofmannsthal’s adaptation at the Circus Schumann in Berlin, and in 1911 Hofmannsthal’s version of the medieval English morality Everyman at the same venue. If Oedipus figures as a production of major importance in the history of twentieth century theatre, Everyman failed to impress Berlin critics. Before a more congenial audience in Salzburg in 1920, however, staged in front of the cathedral, it made a profound impact and remained central to the Festival up to 1937, forming with Don Giovanni and Faust a trinity of Catholic morality plays. The success of Everyman fulfilled Hofmannsthal’s idea of the festival play and confirmed the ideological goal of the Salzburg Festival: the transformation of the theatre public into the ‘people.’ As Hofmannsthal put it, the public is capricious and moody whereas the people is old and wise and recognizes the food that it needs. To this end the modern playwright must have recourse to the great and simple dramatic forms that were truly the products 7

See ‘Die Salzburger Festspiele’, pp. 88-89.

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of the people.8 In 1920 the difference between public and people was identified with the difference between Berlin or Vienna and Salzburg. In 1911, in relation to the Berlin production of Everyman, Hofmannsthal had tried to persuade himself that concealed within the metropolitan masses the people still exists, ready to respond to the revival of ‘this eternally great fairytale.’ Built around the one great opposition between the profane and the sacred, earthly life and salvation, Everyman, he declared, is still illuminated by a divine light.9 The Salzburg reception of the medieval morality encouraged Hofmannsthal to rework Calderón’s most famous contribution to the genre of the auto sacramental, The Great Theatre of the World. The dramatic metaphor of the theatrum mundi, in which man plays the role allotted by God in the game of life, provided the perfect model of and for a re-totalized theatre. Hofmannsthal’s Salzburg Great World Theatre sought to refunction this sacred form for contemporary purposes by expanding the role of the beggar in revolt against God’s world order into an allegorical demonstration of the overcoming of the destructive forces of revolution by divine grace. Here the suggestive power of Reinhardt’s staging in the University Church in Salzburg (by the Baroque master Fischer von Erlach) came to the rescue of Hofmannsthal’s undramatic allegory. Here too, as in Everyman, the figure of Death the drummer, leading the players, King, Rich Man, Beauty, Wisdom, Peasant in a dance of death, had the desired effect on the audience. Hofmannsthal speaks of this dance of death as one of the strongest scenes of any of Reinhardt’s productions, holding the audience spellbound as death fetched each figure in turn in a pantomime in which the figures follow like puppets the beat of the drum. Dürrenmatt’s The Visit is also set in the heart of Europe in the other Alpine republic, the other South German-Swiss region with its own tradition of popular theatre going back to the Reformation and celebrated by Gottfried Keller in his novel Der grüne Heinrich. Dürrenmatt’s Güllen is the counterpart to Salzburg. On the one hand it presents itself as an old European Kulturstadt, proud of its medieval cathedral and its connections with Goethe and Brahms. On the other hand, like Salzburg after the First World War, it is a ruined provincial town, which European reconstruction after the Second World War has passed by (international trains no longer stop in Güllen). The Visit can be seen as a bitter satire on Hofmannsthal’s self-deluding ideology of a theatre for the ‘people’ and on the revival of the Salzburg Festival after

8

9

‘Das Spiel vor der Menge (1911)’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Prosa III, pp. 60-65 (p. 63). P. 64.

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1945 to promote the economic benefits of cultural tourism. On a second level, however, The Visit needs to be grasped as a searching re-vision of the idea of World Theatre, in which the theatre of the individual and internalized guilt is pitted against the theatre of the collective and the externalization of guilt. The Visit explicitly invites comparison with the model of World Theatre. In Act I we learn that the West Door of the Gothic cathedral (Münsterportal) portrays the Last Judgment, in Act II posters at the railway station advertise the Oberammergau Passion play. The author and director of the stage action, the old lady, the billionaire Claire Zachanassian, who is present throughout on stage, observing events from her hotel balcony, is repeatedly compared with one of the Greek fates. With the exception of Claire’s former lover Ill, the townspeople appear solely in their function as teacher, doctor, policeman, etc., to be judged according to the duties of their calling. We are thus invited to be spectators of a Last Judgment but also of a Passion play, in which the last words of the sacrificial victim, ‘My God’, leave us to ask whether like Jesus on the cross God has abandoned Ill in his agony. Ill is condemned to death by the townspeople to redeem the sins of the community, that is to say, to ransom the town from the guilt, which goes back to 1910 when Claire, dishonoured and betrayed by Ill, was forced to leave the town and to become a prostitute. Claire has now returned 45 years later, after two world wars, to demand justice from Güllen, which had sanctioned and approved Ill’s guilt. Dürrenmatt’s morality play thus encompasses World Theatre and Passion play: the judgment of Everyman and the judgment of Everyman’s proxy, the sacrificed redeemer. Dürrenmatt turns to the theatre of judgment after World War Two for the same reason as Hofmannsthal after World War One. His play ratifies Hofmannsthal’s diagnosis of the disintegration of values, the self-destruction of European civilization. He ratifies Hofmannsthal’s judgment at the same time as he judges Hofmannsthal’s ideological programme. Salzburg serves Güllen as the prototype of European reconstruction after a second world war, a reconstruction that represents for Dürrenmatt a final betrayal of European values, in that it substitutes cultural restoration – the celebration of the ‘festival as cultural event’ still in its infancy in the 1950s – for moral purification. Dürrenmatt turns Hofmannsthal’s remedy against him by re-presenting the old popular form of theatre as play in the play, performed for the assembled media (film, TV, radio, and press) that follow Claire’s celebrity trail. Unlike Hofmannsthal’s Everyman, the Güllen Passion play is not performed before the cathedral but in the assembly room of the Golden Apostle, the hotel in which Goethe once stayed. The men of the town have assembled here be-

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neath a Theaterportal, as opposed to the Münsterportal with its Last Judgment. The proscenium arch, designed to separate play and audience, is decorated with Schiller’s famous adage, ‘Life is serious, art is serene,’ in order to underline the evacuation of moral intention from the ‘representation’ of the old communal ritual before the cameras and microphones of a world publicity. However, as we know, the play in the play creates two audiences, the audience on stage (the media and the townswomen) and the audience in the auditorium. It is we, the real audience, who must observe and judge the difference between reality and appearance. And since the play within the play frames the whole of which it is part, The Visit can both present and re-present the idea of the festival play from Greek tragedy to Oberammergau – not forgetting the town’s bankrupt ‘Wagner-Werke’! – for the judgment of the audience. The Visit realizes the idea of world theatre at the same time as it demonstrates its reduction to advertisement for Güllen’s supposedly intact civic tradition. Moreover, it does so through the enactment before the media of the return to the archaic origins of the theatre in the ritual of communal purification from pollution. It was Artaud who compared the living theatre, the theatre of cruelty, to the plague. Güllen is infected by the plague. Its once flourishing economy lies in ruins. Deliverance suddenly arrives from outside in the person of Claire Zachanassian, Armenian Oil, who has secretly bought and closed the town’s businesses. In return for economic rescue she demands justice, that is, the death of Ill, the man who has brought the plague on the town. Claire thus sets in motion the archaic ritual of the scapegoat, the externalization of collective guilt. That the destruction of Europe’s economy in two world wars was the consequence of moral disintegration can thus be denied or rather converted into its opposite: Güllen’s economic recovery is depicted before the media as the consequence of the still intact moral integrity of the town, which renders unto Claire the justice that she demands. Ill is murdered on stage once the cameras have gone. The blindness of Oedipus is visited on the whole town. By assenting before the cameras to Claire’s gift to her native town, Ill (the one individual in the town) assents to his murder as a just retribution for his guilt, thereby demanding of the town that it recognize the guilt that it is incurring. The Visit can thus re-present with total dramatic irony the empty shell of the tradition of World Theatre, in which judgment by a higher external causality is exemplified by the visible presence of the godauthor of the play and negated in Ill’s internalization of guilt. This god is Mammon, comparable in the modern world to one of the ancient fates; Claire, like the tradition she represents, is herself an empty shell, a creature of artificial limbs and plastic surgery, alive but not living. The

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fateful archaic-modern reversal of Christian judgment takes the form of the original constituting act of the polis – the traditional meeting of the townspeople in solemn deliberation is enacted now for a world public in the appropriately mediated form of a repetition of repetition, the very figure of reentry. The decision whereby Ill is collectively sentenced to death (masked as the town’s decision to accept Claire’s gift) has to be repeated because of a technical fault with the TV cameras. This simulation of a simulation, which presents itself as moral self-approbation, is the public face of the collective reversion to archaic barbarism. The theatre of the individual and the internalization of guilt accuses the communal theatre and its myth of the authentic community. The transformation of the townspeople into the one collective body is aptly symbolized by the yellow shoes which they have all bought on credit, the credit drawn on Ill’s life.

Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and The Blacks

The play within the play is discussed in relation to Genet’s The Balcony and The Blacks. By staging the play within the play, Genet makes the central issue of his theatre not simply social or political concerns but the question of the spectacle. Through the embedded play, actors take on multiple roles, including that of spectator. Objectivity is brought into question and the spectator is neither simply outside theatre nor within it. Indeed the borders of the representation are difficult to define. The notion of the work is examined and reference is also made to some of Derrida’s texts. The metaphor of the ‘house of illusions’ in The Balcony, for example, does not simply relate to the bordello, but is clearly central to the idea of theatre, as is the title of the play. The play within the play in Genet’s texts renders problematic the difference between reality and illusion, outside and inside.

For theatre, as for culture, the question remains to name and to direct shadows: and the theatre, which is not fixed in language and forms, destroys false shadows by this fact, but prepares the way for another birth of shadows around which the true spectacle of life assembles. (Artaud, The Theatre and its Double) ‘But is he still acting or is he speaking in his name?’ (Genet, The Blacks)

The Play within the Play The play within the play is an integral part of Jean Genet’s theatre. Characters step into the roles of others, or represent themselves, in front of an audience played by other characters. What is paramount about the play within the play is that it brings into focus the question of theatre. It highlights above all the acts of watching and acting, which are not as straightforward as they may seem. The term suggests that one might designate an inner play which is part of an outer play, yet it is precisely the boundary between the two which Genet brings into question. When the frontier between the acting in the play within the play and the so-called reality beyond this inner play is unclear, then it is apparent that what belongs to the representation is not well-defined and the very notion of the work needs to be rethought. In his writing on the parergon in a different context, Derrida has problematized the conception of

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the work and its boundaries, for the parergon is neither internal nor external.1 Indeed, in analysing Genet’s use of the play within the play, I will discuss the limit of representation and the problem of distinguishing between playing and so-called reality. It can be shown that in The Balcony and The Blacks the interactions of an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ play disrupt the conventional notion of theatre as spectacle. Before examining these plays in detail, I will make some brief, general remarks about Genet and theatre. The play within the play has appeared in different forms in the works of many playwrights including Shakespeare, Corneille and Molière, for example, or Pirandello and Sartre.2 Drama has, of course, changed radically over the ages, especially when considered in relation to the function which Aristotle ascribed to tragedy in the Poetics, namely catharsis or the purgation of the emotions of pity and terror. However, it is the relationship between performer and spectator, the fundamental component of traditional theatre, which has been rethought by playwrights such as Genet. Modern drama has re-evaluated the aesthetics prevailing in Western thought, in which art is conceived of as predominantly the imitation of nature.3 The play within the play is an important means by which the interaction between art and life is reexamined. The possibility for the spectator to be completely detached from the play is brought into question. As Genet writes: ‘Without being able to say precisely what theatre is, I know what I will not let it be: the description of everyday gestures seen from the outside’.4 When the figure of the spectator is placed on stage, the border between the spectator and the actor is displaced and objectivity is undermined. As the distinction between the inner play and the outer play is transgressed before the spectator’s eyes, so too is the limit between the play and so-called reality and thus what constitutes playing needs to be redefined. Genet’s writings include poetry, novels, autobiography as well as plays, namely The Maids (1947; revised 1954), Deathwatch (1949), The Balcony (1956; revised 1960), The Blacks (1958) and The Screens (1961). Death, ritual and crime return again and again in his work, frequently centred on out1

2

3

4

Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). See also Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), p. 277; ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 439-524. For an overview, Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). For a detailed analysis of various forms of mimesis, see in particular, Sylviane Agacinski, Jacques Derrida and others, Mimesis des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975); Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ‘Comment jouer Les Bonnes’, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), IV, 269. All translations in this chapter are my own.

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casts in society. 5 Prominent thinkers such as Sartre, Bataille, Lacan and Derrida have turned their attention to aspects of Genet’s writing.6 Much has been written on his plays from different points of view, in particular on the issue of gender,7 although there has been little focus on the play within the play. Martin Esslin has described The Balcony and The Blacks in particular as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd.8 On the other hand, Robert Brustein believes that Genet is not an absurdist, and in a chapter of The Theatre of Revolt prefers to associate him with Artaud,9 despite differences such as Genet’s obvious reliance on written language.10 Genet, Brustein writes, ‘goes well beyond the limited boundaries of the avant-garde to create an alchemical, primitive, messianic theatre, embodying many of Artaud’s precepts: an Oriental theatre of metaphysical tendency, the modern equivalent of the mystery religions’.11 Through rituals and ceremonies in Genet’s theatre, in which characters lose themselves, the boundaries between the inner and outer plays are repeatedly crossed. Genet strenuously rejected realism and his drama makes use of many different visual and sound effects, as well as an often deliberately exaggerated use of masks, make-up, costumes, stilts and gestures. Bernard Dort insists on the fundamental notion of the game, as well as disguise in Genet’s theatre and states: ‘to be, it is necessary to appear’.12 Indeed,

5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

Various political texts and interviews, including on Genet’s support for the Black Panther Party, are to be found in Jean Genet, ‘L’ennemi déclaré’ Œuvres complètes, VI: ed. by Albert Dichy (1991). See also Simon Critchley, ‘Writing the Revolution: The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love’, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 30-50. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Saint Genet, comédien et martyr’, Œuvres complètes de Jean Genet, I (1952); Georges Bataille, ‘Genet’, La Littérature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 197244; Jacques Lacan, ‘Sur Le Balcon de Genet’, Le Magazine littéraire, No. 313 (September 1993), 51-57; Derrida, Glas. See, for example, Kristin Ross, ‘Schoolteachers, Maids, and Other Paranoid Histories’, in Genet: In the Language of the Enemy (Yale French Studies, No. 91), ed. by Scott Durham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 7-27; James Creech, ‘Outing Jean Genet’, in Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, pp. 117-40. The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. updated edn (New York: Overlook Press, 1973), pp. 166-97. ‘Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet’, The Theatre of Revolt (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 361411. See also Carol Rosen, ‘The Structure of Illusion in Genet’s The Balcony’, Modern Drama, 35 (December 1992), 513-19. Discussing a new role of language in theatre, Antonin Artaud writes about ‘Incantation’, Le Théâtre et son double (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), p. 67. Theatre is a performance which cannot simply depend upon dialogue, p. 66; see also p. 53. Theatre of Revolt, p. 377. ‘Le théâtre: une féerie sans réplique’, Le Magazine littéraire, 313 (September 1993), 46.

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in his use of the play within the play, Genet exposes the limits of a dangerous game entangling art and life, one which affords no safe haven.13 Dance with Death For Genet, theatre is inextricably tied to death.14 In one of his letters to the director Roger Blin, he wrote about The Screens: ‘Really, it is necessary that, at the exit, the spectators take away in their mouths that famous taste of ash and a smell of rottenness’.15 Truly tasting ash is part of the fundamental spectacle which Genet presents and one is not free to remain aloof from the action. Through the play within the play, the spectator is put right into the midst of a conflict with death. Being at the knife-edge is exemplified by the tightrope walker whom Genet describes in a short text. This character risks death, chasing his image with which he tries to identify on the rope: we come to see ‘a solitary lover in pursuit of his image, saving himself and fainting on a wire’.16 Between the tightrope walker and the image pursued is the risk of a fatal fall. It is this extreme limit which fascinates Genet, one at which the spectacle itself risks ruin, or at least transformation. Like the tightrope walker in a dance with death, the actors and the spectators in Genet’s plays are involved in the perilous making and unmaking of the spectacle. Death and treacherous make-believe are central in The Maids. However, unlike in The Balcony and The Blacks, which it preceded, the play within the play does not show the spectator’s role explicitly. Yet to a certain extent what is already questioned is the difference between role-play and life; that living might somehow be free of acting.17 Claire says: ‘What remains for us is to continue this life, take up the game again’, to which Solange replies: ‘The game is dangerous’.18 In the changing of places, roles become confused. When Claire drinks the poisoned tea as Madame, who does not drink it, is she really still acting as Madame? To what extent she is pretending is uncertain. Claire and Solange also interject in their ‘real’ identities. Yet it is as if they 13

14

15 16 17

18

This is contrary to Christiane Vymétal Jacquemont’s view: ‘The locus of the game provides a reassuring cosmos while, in the outside world with its unpredictable daily profane life, a threatening chaos reigns’, ‘The Essence of the Game and its Locus in Jean Genet’s Le Balcon’, French Review, 54 (December 1980), 285. See the startling text, ‘L’étrange mot d’…’, Œuvres complètes, IV, 7-18, and, in particular, Samuel Weber, ‘Double Take: Acting and Writing in Gene’s “L’étrange mot de…”’, in Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, pp. 28-48. ‘Lettres à Roger Blin, Œuvres complètes, IV, 224. ‘Le Funambule’, Œuvres complètes, V (1979), 19. Sartre, Œuvres complètes de Jean Genet, I, 567, states that the reader will recognize Claire and Solange as the Papin sisters. Les Bonnes, Œuvres complètes, IV, 154.

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were somehow suspended between themselves and the roles which they assume, like the tightrope walker chasing his image.19 Indeed, in the swapping of roles, it is the line between play and reality which becomes impossible to distinguish. Roles overlap; one is substituted incessantly for another. One figure lives on as another. It is as if the play were almost a game with multiple possibilities in which actions are at once mimed and realized, neither played nor accomplished once and for all. Focusing on the Spectacle Genet’s use of the play within the play in The Balcony and The Blacks draws the spectator into the play, so that he is even more compellingly confronted with a role which is neither simply imagined nor real. The notion of objective observation is cast in doubt, as is the possibility of a well-defined frame which would separate the actor in the play from the spectator in reality. Thus, distinguishing where the play begins and where it might end, indeed defining the work, becomes problematic. In particular, through the transgression of the space between the inner and outer plays, the spectator’s role is shown to be inextricably bound to that of the actor. The outer play is no more contained than the inner play, but opens out into a much wider space, in which the shifting limits between actor and spectator, play and reality, are at stake. The Balcony begins in Madame Irma’s brothel, ‘The Grand Balcony’, where clients are dressed up to act out their fantasies of various figures, including a Bishop, a Judge and a General. Madame Irma observes the activities in all of her rooms with a viewing apparatus. She is also seen dressing with the assistance of her confidante Carmen. Meanwhile, all around, a revolt is taking place. Chantal, a prostitute who left the brothel to become involved, meets with her lover Roger, a leader in the uprising. Chantal dies and becomes a symbol of the struggle. Madame Irma is persuaded to appear on the balcony in the role of the Queen, along with the clients who pass themselves off as Bishop, Judge and General, key figures in the society, and the Hero or Chief of Police. The revolt is then quelled. The Chief of Police’s longstanding dream to become part of the nomenclature of the brothel is finally realized when Roger asks to act out his role. In the designated room, a mausoleum, Roger castrates himself. The Chief of Police finally disappears into the mausoleum and Madame Irma closes her house for the night. The play within the play occurs in many scenes: in particular, in the clients’ theatrical performances observed by Madame Irma, a surrogate audi19

In ‘Comment jouer Les Bonnes’, Œuvres complètes, IV, 267, Genet describes the Maids’ gestures, and even their voices, as suspended or broken, adding: ‘Each gesture will leave the actresses suspended’.

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ence in her brothel; in the appearance of the key figures of society on the balcony of the brothel and in Roger’s role-playing in the mausoleum, as he is spied upon by other characters. What is apparent is that there is no clear-cut distinction between the play within the play taking place in the form of roleplaying and the so-called reality outside this make-believe. When figures playing roles become part of the political scene and calm the revolt, the line between play and reality, theatre and affairs of state, is obviously blurred. In fact, this is also the case in the brothel, also known as a ‘house of illusions’, where the clients require that there be a certain truth and at the same time a lack of reality, as Madame Irma explains to Carmen: Irma: They all want everything to be as true as possible… Less something undefinable, which makes it not true. (With a change in tone.) Carmen, I am the one who decided to name my establishment a house of illusions, but I am only the director of it, and each person, when he rings, enters and brings his perfectly worked out script. All that is left for me is to rent the hall, provide the props, the actors and actresses.20

Illusion is not separated from reality by the walls of this house of illusions, where, according to Carmen, the scenarios are all reducible to the theme of death (Balcony, p. 126). When Arthur, an employee of the brothel, is hit by a bullet which penetrated the house from the outside, he still plays a cadaver, but for real. To distinguish between acting and not acting poses difficulties; as Madame Irma says: ‘He didn’t believe that he would be able to play his role of cadaver so well tonight’ (Balcony, p. 98). In the fantasies played out in the house, characters move between roles and so-called reality, or else between the inner play and the outer one. The extent of the make-believe is difficult to determine, as in The Maids, and characters slip into and out of the game like the judge with the girl playing a thief (Balcony, pp. 48-49). The spectator in the auditorium sees the boundaries between the inner and outer play becoming unclear and is compelled to reassess his own position. In the play within the play, in which Roger takes on the role of the Chief of Police, there are a few spectators who watch clandestinely in the outer play, namely Madame Irma as the Queen, the palace Envoy and the Chief of Police, along with the Bishop, the Judge and the General. When the Chief of Police interjects, the Envoy tells him that he should let the roles be played right to the end. However, what sort of play does this entail? Might the Chief of Police see himself in Roger, and to what extent does Roger act this spectator? In seeing his role performed, the Chief of 20

Le Balcon, Œuvres complètes, IV, 73. The page numbers to The Balcony will be given in the text after the quotations.

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Police witnesses the grandeur of his image. He sees Carmen explaining to Roger towards the end of play that the Slave has left their role-play in the mausoleum in order to disseminate the ‘truth’ to the outside world: ‘The truth: that you are dead, or rather that you don’t stop dying and that your image, like your name, reverberates to infinity’ (Balcony, p. 131). The interjections of the Chief of Police to the Queen show his satisfaction with the ‘truth’ of his death, or, more precisely, that he never ceases to die, living on in his name and his ever-present image. If this show of truth is the culmination of the action for the Chief of Police, if after such a role-play nothing remains for him but to disappear into the mausoleum for two thousand years, this is not the case for Roger, who embodies his role in the inner play beyond all limits: ‘greater than great, stronger than strong, more dead than dead’, in the words of the Chief of Police (Balcony, p. 133). He carries on despite Carmen’s insistence that the ‘session is over’ (Balcony, p. 131). Indeed, Roger does not just represent the Chief of Police in the role-play, taking on the policeman’s chosen appearance as a giant phallus, but he merges ‘his destiny with his own’ (Balcony, p. 132). Roger castrates himself, as if to destroy the Chief of Police. It is evident that the boundaries of the inner play are unclear, as Roger leaves the stage and is replaced by the Chief of Police, who was a spectator. Taking over the roleplay, he acts himself on centre stage. To the photographers, who take his photo, he says: ‘You, look at me live and die. For posterity: fire!’ (Balcony, p. 133). Through his participation in the nomenclature of the brothel, through his image passed on to posterity, the Chief of Police is never simply dead once and for all. Thus, when he takes the place of the figure who personifies him in the inner play, it becomes all the more apparent that his role is in fact neither simply real nor represented, neither offstage nor onstage; that he is not just a spectator or an actor, but both at once, appearing on a much wider stage. Focusing on the spectacle is without a doubt a most problematic task. A People of Shadows In The Blacks, through the play within the play, Genet shows the fluidity of the roles of actors and spectators involved, at once in ‘make-believe’ and ‘truth’. The play is about a group of Blacks who stage the ritual killing of a White. This takes place in front of the spectators of the Court, Blacks masked as Whites, and consisting of the Queen, her Valet, the Governor, the Judge and the Missionary, some of the characters who also appear in The Balcony. This action serves to hide the ‘real’ action offstage, where a Black is judged by Blacks and executed. Ville de Saint-Nazaire makes several appearances during the play to inform the actors, indeed all of us as spectators, about the

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progress of these events. The members of the Court take off their masks, revealing black faces, and listen intently. They then put their white masks on again and are finally killed in succession. The play culminates in the murder of the spectators of the Court, as if they were meant to be the true victims of the murder re-enactment. To a certain extent, there is a reversal at work, because the spectators from the outer play are murdered on centre-stage in front of the actors from the inner play, who have become spectators. Moreover, the interweaving of the roles of spectator and actor is further complicated when the action offstage is reported to everyone onstage and the actors are realigned with the spectators to form an audience. In these ‘ceremonies’ involving death, as in The Balcony, the boundaries of the inner and outer plays become blurred. This dramatic staging of a murder in front of others has parallels with the fundamentally theatrical representation of crime within the court system in society. Significantly, for Genet, spectators are not removed from the action, but are implicated in this theatre and thus must share the responsibility for crime. Indeed, it is the queens, valets, governors, judges and missionaries in society who witness to a certain extent their own deaths. However, what is apparent above all in this play, in which murders are repeatedly staged, is that death is extremely elusive. While death is at the centre of this play, even literally, in the form of the catafalque covered in a white cloth onstage, this spectacle of death is without a doubt most difficult to grasp. Even the staging of the murder in the inner play is surrounded by a certain unreality, because the enacted events do not tally with Village’s account at the beginning of the outer play, in which he speaks of his attack on an old tramp on the embankment. It is apparent through the juxtaposition of these differing representations that there is no simple reality. However, it is through theatre, more especially the play within the play, that the spectator can get a glimpse of his mortality, or perhaps immortality; as Bataille affirms, the spectacle or representation is, in fact, the only way of ‘knowing’ death.21 About theatre, Archibald says to Village: ‘We’ll play at being reflected in it, and we’ll see ourselves – big black narcissists – slowly disappearing into its waters’, adding finally: ‘You’re becoming a spectre before their very eyes and you’re going to haunt them’. 22 Through the play within the play, the spectators in the Court and the auditorium are

21 22

See Bataille, ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice’, Deucalion, 5 (1955), 21-43. Genet, Les Nègres: Clownerie, Œuvres complètes, V, 101. The page numbers to The Blacks will be given in the text after the quotations.

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made to witness to a degree their own death and to see themselves as spectres. Through a certain unreality of death, both the Whites and the Blacks are caught in a twilight zone. While the Governor imagines ridding the earth of the ‘shadows’ of the Blacks (Blacks, p. 150), the Queen asks whether in killing the Court, the Blacks will boast about killing ‘a people of shadows’ (Blacks, p. 149). After complaining about this dangerous ritual conducted each night and each second, the Queen, undeniably a spectre, states that in fact she is always ‘sculpting herself’ in the ‘form of an eternal ruin’; she is an animated ‘cadaver’ (Blacks, p. 141). Indeed, the killing of the Court is somewhat unreal. When the Governor is shot, for example, Archibald gives him directions to get up and move to centre-stage: ‘No. Come and die here’ (Blacks, p. 150). Seeing oneself die or seeing another die, as if in one’s place, is a fundamental aspect of Genet’s use of the play within the play. The spectator occupies a position which is neither simply in the play nor outside it, and he can come to terms with an image of himself as neither dead nor alive, moving between make-believe and reality. What is apparent is that both actors and spectators alike must confront an intangible death, mortal yet continuing to live on in a state of suspended animation. The Frame in Play The play within the play is a means of tackling the issue of the limits of theatre by providing a glimpse of the viewing of the spectacle at the heart of the play. By displacing the borders of theatre, it effectively highlights the condition of the spectator, indeed, of the human being, as actor. Most significantly, it undercuts the spectator’s sense of reality by showing that he is also a shadow in the ever-changing scenes. Both The Blacks and The Balcony contain a play within a play in which the boundaries of performance are challenged and the external status of the spectator is brought into question. In a different way, Artaud’s replacement of the stage and the auditorium with a sole area without partitions or barriers recasts the traditional roles of spectator and actor.23 In ‘How to perform The Blacks’, Genet explains that, during one of Village’s speeches, both the stage lights and those in the auditorium are to be turned on. The spectators must be in the spotlight. Genet writes that his play is written for Whites by a White and that there must be at least one White in the audience. Seated at the front, he will receive attention and the light will be on him throughout the spectacle. If there is no White, and Blacks refuse

23

Le Théâtre et son double, pp. 146-48. See also Derrida, ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation’, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 341-68.

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masks, then a mannequin is to be used. Thus, the play opens out to include the spectator, a White spectator, although even colour is changed in the play, especially through the use of white masks, sometimes worn, sometimes removed. As Genet writes: ‘But what exactly is a Black? And first of all, what’s his colour?’ (Blacks, p. 79). In The Blacks, the spectator is necessarily forced to recognize his own part in the endless theatrical repetition of a play which finishes, only to begin again with the same sounds of Mozart. At the start, the Blacks salute not only the Court, but also the audience, as does Archibald when introducing the actors. The Blacks are thus overstepping the boundaries of the inner play to acknowledge at once the presence of both audiences. At the beginning of The Blacks, the Governor in the Court says: ‘And we know that we have come to attend our own funerals’ (Blacks, p. 86). This is the case for all the spectators. Yet death is neither onstage, nor offstage; neither make-believe nor real. After the members of the Court die, they lift their heads to listen, they talk, get up, lie down again and move off to Hell. Along with the Blacks, the members of the Court come back at the end, this time without their masks, and stand once again around the catafalque draped in white. Life, death and role-playing are also incessantly linked through the circularity of The Balcony. In ‘How to perform The Balcony’, Genet rejects the use of a turntable onstage and insists that the scenes follow each other from left to right, as if one fitted into the other in front of the spectator (Balcony, p. 274). Thus, what Genet describes is not independent vignettes, but one scene almost endlessly metamorphosing into another and witnessed by the spectator, as if he were part of an ongoing movement. The first four scenes of the play occur in different rooms of the brothel and are, of course, shown in sequence to the spectator. At the same time, the play within the play displaces the boundaries of this sequential movement by showing Madame Irma looking through her viewing apparatus at the salons simultaneously. The play within the play disrupts the borders of the play, because it assembles together within a frame role-playing which the spectator in the auditorium perceives not simultaneously but sequentially. However, it is evident that in trying to step back to take in everything within one frame, Madame Irma is no less caught up in the endless succession of scenes. Indeed, a spectator of the salons, Madame Irma also assumes a role-play in the outer play and where the role-playing begins and ends is certainly difficult to determine. It is evident that the spectator in the theatre can no more simply step back than can Madame Irma. On the wall of the stage in the first three scenes is a mirror reflecting an unmade bed and, if properly arranged, as Genet writes in his stage directions, the bed would be in the first seats of the auditorium (Balcony, p.

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39). This bed, shown on stage in the fifth scene, is set in Madame Irma’s bedroom. Thus, it is as if Madame Irma’s bedroom were also in the auditorium. It is as if the spectator were occupying Madame Irma’s place, in effect within the frame of the play and at the same time beyond it, indeed neither inside nor outside. It is evident that in this theatre, in this ‘maison d’illusions’, clients along with partners act out roles to the limit. If this role-playing involves dying, death remains somewhat unreal. When the figures appear ‘in reality’ on the balcony and help to quell the revolt, they play out their fantasies beyond imagination. As the Bishop says: ‘[T]here will never be a movement powerful enough to destroy our imagery’ (Balcony, p. 124). The differences between those figures and the people whom they represent are blurred. It is as if Madame Irma were no more real, nor unreal, than the Queen whose part she assumes and whose function she successfully fulfils. There is already some confusion about whether the Queen is alive or dead and, as the palace Envoy states: ‘The Queen is embroidering and she is not embroidering…’ (Balcony, p. 123). At the very end of the play, Madame Irma slips from her role as Queen into her role in the brothel. She frees the various figures, telling them to go out into the alleyway, and turns off the lights, pre-empting what will soon take place in the auditorium. Alone, she then speaks of her salons, which can all fit together and combine, and of the endless role-playing: ‘Soon, it will be necessary to begin again… to light everything up again… to get dressed […] To redistribute the roles… to get into mine’ (Balcony, p. 135). What is apparent is that no one, not even Madame Irma, is free from playing a role; no one, not even the Chief of Police, initially excluded from the nomenclature, can simply remain outside. Everyone plays a part,24 including the spectators in this house, the term ‘balcon’ meaning also ‘dress circle’. Finally, Madame Irma turns to the spectators and tells them also to prepare their roles, as judges, generals, bishops, chamberlains and insurgents. She tells them, just as she said to the figures in the play, to go home and there ‘everything, don’t doubt it, will be even more false than here’ (Balcony, p. 135). Playing the same roles, they are just as much actors in the theatre as the players. They are also told to leave via the alleyway. The entrances and exits in this scene are not confined to the stage. As the spectators watch, join, Madame Irma’s ‘house of illusions’, she too is a spectator of the theatre of which they are all a part.

24

For Lacan, ‘Sur Le Balcon de Genet’, pp. 56-57, however, everything pivots around the Chief of Police.

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In ‘The Tightrope Walker’, the performer is suspended, endlessly chasing his image on a rope. Balanced between reality and an image, this figure is neither one nor the other. As a tightrope walker, he is at once fragile and still part of an enduring tradition. In Genet’s plays, the characters are all involved in a similar dance fraught with danger. They see themselves incessantly in different roles. The Maids act to the limit, where play and reality, acting and not acting, cannot clearly be distinguished. What is important about the play within the play in The Balcony and The Blacks is that it demonstrates most powerfully the way in which make-believe and reality are necessarily part of the same scene. When spectators and actors onstage cross the borders between the inner and outer play, what is apparent is that the boundaries between actor and spectator are brought into question. There is no possibility for the spectator in the auditorium to remain aloof. If in The Blacks murder is staged, indeed ultimately that of all of the members of the Court who were spectators, the spectator is compelled to a certain extent to confront his mortality. Dying, he necessarily also lives on in another role or image. Death remains somewhat abstract for the spectator, as it does for the actor playing a part, which is symbolized above all by the empty catafalque. In this theatre, the borders of the stage, like the ‘house of illusions’, are certainly difficult to determine. What the play within the play shows above all is not a well-defined drama within another, but rather the transgression of the boundary between make-believe and reality; it redrafts the limits of the scene, drawing attention to the fragility of the separation between the stage and the auditorium. Both actor and spectator are part of a theatre in which the very possibility of representation is at stake. For this theatre is not about a work with a clear beginning or end, showing the ‘real’ world. It consists of the endless comings and goings, both on the stage and in the auditorium, of those who are at once actors and spectators. Changing roles, perhaps dying and reliving in another performance, is part of this ungraspable game. Like the tightrope walker one risks falling, unmaking a scene. However, roles are also transformed as people, a ‘people of shadows’, come and go: Queens, Judges, Bishops or Missionaries such as those who act in The Balcony or who return, with a different profile, in The Blacks. What is in play are appearances and disappearances on the world stage. Figures repeatedly take the place of others in a performance which goes on. It is not possible simply to be a spectator and to step back from the stage to see everything within one frame, for one is precisely a part of the scene, at once both a spectator and an actor in the infinite spectacle.

II The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre 1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference

Christian Sinn

The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob Bidermann’s Cenodoxus (1602)

Bidermann creates in his Cenodoxus a metatextual metaphor derived from the literary sense of ‘text’ as ‘textum’, i.e. carpet, which fulfills the function of the Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’ by providing the spectator with the figure of an implicit author who in the course of the drama interweaves the strands of Greek and Latin tradition with those of normative Jesuitical Christianity and, more important, keeps this process of weaving visible for the audience, so that the audience by being made conscious of this process. To emphasize this figure in the carpet Bidermann employs a combination of several media (the stage set, periochen (summaries) for the non-Latin spectators, music, dancing, allegorical figures, etc.) in what today is called a Gesamtkunstwerk in order to initiate the audience into an art of imagination.

On 3 July 1602, a new neo-Latin Jesuit drama was offered to the citizens of Augsburg in a production staged by its author, Jacob Bidermann. Many other stagings followed: Ingolstadt (1617), Paris (1636), Vienna (1637). Perhaps the most remarkable performance was that given on the Munich court stage in 1609: legend 1 has it that, in response to the horrific impressions left by the play, the distinguished audience, consisting mainly of important Bavarian court nobles and the foremost citizens of Munich, was moved to convert to Catholicism.2 A strange, simple title, Cenodoxus, suggested the theme of cenodoxia, i.e. vain glory, the mother of all sins. Opening with comic scenes, the drama then built up to a mercilessly shocking finish. Its tone was exacting in form and harrowing in content, threatening with hell on earth anyone in the audience who might not repent his sins. Later audiences, especially in the era of Enlightenment, were not amused by the tone and ideological fanaticism of the play, and the most famous neo-Latin drama of its epoch seemed long forgotten until Hugo von Hofmannsthal, fascinated by the Baroque theatrum 1

2

Günter Hess, ‘Spectator – Lector – Actor. Zum Publikum von Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus. Mit Materialien zum literarischen und sozialgeschichtlichen Kontext der Handschriften von Ursula Hess’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (1976), 1, 30-106. See Cenodoxus, ed. and trans. by Denis G. Dyer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), Introduction, pp. 1-25. All quotations are from this edition.

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mundi theme, revived the history of Cenodoxus’ reception by developing plans to write a play entitled ‘Xenodoxus’ [!]. Today Bidermann’s play is performed in the classical schools in Germany (Ettal, St Blasien, Augsburg) and at the University of Passau. At the University of Heidelberg, a new production was staged in 2005. What little we know of the life of Jacob Bidermann is quickly told. He was born in 1578 in Ehingen, a village southwest of Ulm, and educated at the Jesuit college in Augsburg, where he remained a pupil until 1594. In the course of his studies he became personally acquainted with the famous classicist and grammarian, Jacob Pontanus. In 1594 Bidermann entered the Society of Jesus at Dillingen. For three years he studied at the college in Ingolstadt and then started teaching Jesuit pupils in Augsburg. In 1606, after three more years pursuing theological studies in Ingolstadt, he moved to Munich to teach at the Jesuit college. In 1616 he first became professor of philosophy and then professor of theology at the Jesuit-controlled university of Dillingen. Six years later he was called to Rome to act as the official theologian of the Society and censor of books. He died in Rome on 20 August 1639. Bidermann’s oeuvre reaches far beyond the prescribed genres and didactic interests of Jesuit tradition. Nine dramatic texts are known, including Cosmarchia (1617), which not only preaches a spiritual reality, but is also a readable and highly comical satire of politics, and Joannes Calybita, which was staged with extraordinary success in 1638. There are epics in verse like Herodias (1622), which was very popular and even translated from Latin into German during his lifetime. Utopia (published 1640), an entertaining and aesthetically complex cycle of satirical novels modelled on Boccaccio’s Decamerone, went through nine editions and was also translated into German in 1677. There are epigrammatical writings – published in 14 editions – epistolary poems, such as the Epistolae Heroidum (1638), which tries for a Christian reworking of the Ovidian elegies, and there are hymns and stylized literary biograpies of the saints, Ignatius (1612), Elisabeth von Reute (1626), Graf Anton Maria von Urbino (1631) and Alosius von Gonzaga (1640). In short, Bidermann was an extremely productive author who experimented joyfully with nearly all the established contemporary genres. Today Bidermann is valued as one of the seventeenth century’s great German playwrights, along with Gryphius and Lohenstein. The reason his first and most popular play, Cenodoxus, has met for so long with such a biased reception is – always excepting the now unfamiliar Latin – that it has consistently been seen as a mere illustration of Jesuit dogma. But the fact that Cenodoxus was almost translated in 1635 in Munich by his pupil Joachim Meichel and was then adapted for a German performance in 1742 emphasizes

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that it was seen to differ quite significantly from other plays of its time, especially from traditional Jesuit drama. Still more importantly, the Society of Jesus itself honoured Bidermann after his death with an exceedingly costly and well-printed edition of his Ludi theatrales (1666) – including Cenodoxus – for having innovated traditional Jesuit poetics in a way that gave his Ludi the value of classical texts.3 This is all the more extraordinary as Jesuit dramas were usually only staged for single performances, instruments of an excellent and highly progressive concept of education based on the ancient theory of rhetoric practised in the form of a play. This play offered the pupils different models of acting, and more often than not the play was discarded once it had served its educational purpose. Thus printed, Bidermann’s Ludi, unlike those of most of his contemporary teachers, were read, quoted and performed until well into the eighteenth century. Literary merits aside, they were considered theoretically highly interesting.4 That it was called a comico-tragoedia already hints at this and implies an understanding of Cenodoxus as a metadrama in our contemporary sense of a ‘drama about drama’, and thus about the possibilities of drama itself.5 However, the play does not in itself represent a ‘pure’ dramatic genre, but employs a mixture of tragedy and comedy in which the comic aspects, in contrast to other forms of tragicomedy, function to deepen the tragic situation. Thus the concept of comico-tragoedia inverted the old Plautine idea of tragico-comoedia, in which comedy was used to create a non-tragic ending for a tragic situation. It is, however, not only this inversion which rendered Bidermann’s comico-tragoedia highly innovative, but also the coexistence of high and low characters in the same play, which was an offence against the Baroque rule that tragedy should deal exclusively with the high-born and comedy with the low. Bidermann’s Jesuit respondents, however, found three arguments for applauding this offence. To start with, it furthered the ends of Jesuit popular education, demonstrating that low-status persons could be shown to confront ethical questions just like high-status persons. Consequently, the techniques used to appeal to the audience covered a variety of ‘multi-media’ stimuli – the stage set, periochen (i.e. summaries in the vernacular for non-Latin3

4

5

See Fidel Rädle, ‘Die Praemonitio ad Lectorem zu Jacob Bidermanns Ludi theatrales (1666) deutsch’, in Der Buchstab töd – der Geist macht Lebendig, ed. by James Hardin and Jörg Jungmayer, 2 vols (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), II, pp. 1131-71. Hans Pörnbacher, ‘Cenodoxus, Der Doctor von Pariß’, in Dramen vom Barock bis zur Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), p. 9. Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1986), p. 31.

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speaking spectators), music, dancing, allegorical figures, etc. – in what Wagner might have called a Gesamtkunstwerk, aimed at awing the audience into humility and, at the same time, creating a heightened awareness of both the performance’s theatricality and human existence on earth. The effects added to Jesuit theatre after Bidermann – ballet scenes, operatic elements and, not least, the scenic stage with its deep perspective and infinite vanishing-point, where the boundaries between play and life seem to dissolve – served to intensify this awareness still more, continuing the process which had started before Bidermann with the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in England: ‘[P]rologues and epilogues, asides, direct addresses, and the play-within-aplay [...] remind the audience that it is watching a play, which, while pretending to reality, [it] is not.’6 This is precisely why the prologue of Cenodoxus informs us about the difference between history and fiction, implying, however, that history is formed by fictions. Seen against the backdrop of literary history, Bidermann thus represents an important part of the hidden and complex history of aesthetics before the term itself actually existed. First theology and then politics become metaphors for art – in the sense of the ‘fiction’ introduced by the prologue – so that Bidermann’s concept of the comicotragoedia is an interesting contribution to the notion of theatrum mundi in the Shakespearean sense, especially on its self-referential level, ‘where the world may become a stage, history a plot, kings dramatists, courtiers actors, commoners audiences, and speech itself the dialogue or script that gives breath to all the rest.’ 7 Secondly, the comico-tragoedia was a typological argument in a theoretical discussion. It was J.C. Scaliger (1561) who first defined and established the genre of tragicomedy, even if he himself criticised it for its heathen origins in the works of Euripides. Nevertheless, this led to a debate over the legitimacy of ‘mixing’ genres, to which G.B. Guarini, Donatus and Lope de Vega contributed with their respective theories of tragico-comoedia. From the first years of the seventeenth century Bidermann’s work, with its inversion towards a comico-tragoedia, anticipates this debate and argues for new formal possibilities that might be derived from genre-mixing. However, the later Classical poetics of Opitz and Gottsched strictly advocated preserving the purity of the genres for their own sake, and the art of mixing them did not 6

7

June Schlueter, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 2. James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 5. But the Shakesperean view is already founded in older metaphors of play since Plato’s Nomoi, see Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 8th edn (Bern: Francke, 1984), pp. 148-54.

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become acceptable until the German Romantics began to debate the theory and put it into practice on onstage. The third argument combines aspects of the first two: Biderman with his ‘Mischspiel’ (‘mixed-genre play’) strove to establish an art of imagination which served the interests of the rhetoric and poetics of Jesuits as well as that of Protestants.8 Traditional poetics, and with it traditional genre distinctions, had to be rejected if they did not serve to instill Christian sense in the public. By the same logic, mixing was legitimate, even compulsory, if it achieved its didactic goal.9 Therefore, Bidermann not only wrote a comico-tragoedia but also adopted the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, introducing allegorical characters who usually also combined antique and Christian aspects. This coexistence of heterogeneous traditions linked metatheatrality, i.e. the topos of the theatrum mundi, to a universal theological dogma: human beings do not act by themselves, but are puppets operated by God and unable to control their own existence. This dogma is most clearly illustrated by the fourth act of Cenodoxus: Cenodoxus cannot make his own decisions regarding eternal salvation, but must abide by a decision made for him. But herein lies a fundamental contradiction, one that reflects a deep division in Catholic ideology: in radical opposition to that of the Dominicans, Jesuit dogma insists on the freedom of the human will – freedom, for instance, to decide for or against actions which lead to redemption. In light of this, Cenodoxus causes one to ask why Bidermann should have adopted the Dominican-like, almost Lutheran, position of proclaiming that man is no more than a plaything in the struggle between God and Satan. The answer can only be found at the level of the play’s poetics: as the comico-tragoedia informs the audience about what determines man’s actions in the boundaries of the play within the play, it invites its audience to reflect on those determinants and to act accordingly at the level of and with regard to its – the audience’s – own worldly existence. The writing of this drama, however, presented a seemingly insoluble problem for its author: as the drama displays an impressive amount of knowledge derived from Greek and Latin sources, revealing its origins in quotations and allusions, it shows exactly that form of learned superbia for which Cenodoxus finds himself consigned to damnation. To resolve this theological difficulty of how to attack and surpass the pride of the Humanist scholars 8

9

See also the analysis by Georg Braungart, ‘Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus. Zeitdiagnose, superbia-Kritik, komisch-tragische Entlarvung und theatralische Bekehrungsstrategie’, Daphnis (1989), 18, 581-640. This is documented by the Praemonitio itself (see Fidel Rädle, note 4 above) and the representation of James A. Parente, Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500-1680 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987).

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without inviting the accusation of being proud himself, Bidermann employs three variations of the play within the play. First, the design of the persona Cenodoxus represents the construction of Jesuit virtue, dependent on prudentia, prudence. Cenodoxus’ application of prudentia operates within the idea of the theatrum mundi, the idea that everything that is perceptible to a human being is part of a play ultimately devised and staged by God Himself. In Cenodoxus’ case this idea does not confirm any virtues as God-given but rather deconstructs them as arbitrary elements of playacting, to be made use of wherever they seem to further the actors’s interests. Second, Bidermann applies prudentia himself against the false prudentia of Cenodoxus. He contrasts and comments upon Cenodoxus’ superbia by combining the antique tradition with Christian elements like the Last Judgment, those elements again clearly shown to represent a theatrical structure. So the guardian angel presents Cenodoxus with the latter’s book of sins, a gesture taken from Everyman,10 yet he talks to Cenodoxus using an antiquepagan vocabulary; and the devils, instead of being simply ‘Christian’ devils, descend from the antique Acheron. But this creates a new problem: As soon as religious – i.e. Christian – issues are put onstage, especially in this particular form, they lose their ‘own’ reality. They are no longer things but signs, i.e. something standing for something else, thus gaining the precarious ‘reality’ of stage performance and becoming an integral part of the play’s basically self-referential structure. And third: this structure finds its most explicit metaphor in a metatextual sign brought up in the so-called ‘carpet scene’ (II.8), a metaphor derived from the literary sense of ‘text’ as ‘textum’, ‘carpet’, and as such an early precedent of the Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’. It provides the spectator/ reader with an implicit author who in the course of the drama interweaves the strands of Greek and Latin traditions with those of normative Jesuit Christianity and, more importantly, keeps this process of weaving visible so that the audience, by being made conscious of it, may ideally be led to the right form of prudentia. In terms of poetics, the carpet motif focuses on what by now has become far more than the story of a man involved in sin and damnation. As play after play is introduced into the framing Cenodoxus-plot, it becomes clear that the plot’s end, Christ’s condemnation of the sinner, cannot even begin to exhaust

10

See also Barbara Könneker, ‘Das andere Sterben: Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus und die Tradition der Jedermannspiele’, in Der fremdgewordene Text, ed. by Silvia Bovenschen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 285-97.

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the kaleidoscopic multitude of moral and other elements of reflection added to the frame by its meandering subplots. Seen from this angle, Cenodoxus’ story seems little more than an axis around which the main interest of the play evolves. Indeed, in the opening scene of the comico-tragoedia Cenodoxus himself is not even present. He becomes even more absent, as it were, as his servant Dama misleads the parasite Mariscus,11 who is searching for Dama’s master: Dama lies to Mariscus about Cenodoxus awaiting him in the suburban gardens, and on top of that shows him the wrong way to these gardens.12 DAMA

MARISCUS DAMA

Walk past the tower, the one right here, and then You’ll see an arcade on your left – walk in it, Not to the right, though; bear then to the left, Around a corner; take the next turn right, Go left soon after, then turn right again. Before your eyes ... I’ll see the suburb gardens? No, no, just wait. You’ll see a man who’s called Hoplitodromus Megaloperiphronesterus, Come all the way from Pyrgopolitoxia. (l.108-15)13

Mariscus will then have to ask Hoplitodromus Megaloperiphronesterus for further information on how to meet Cenodoxus. This opening warns spectators/readers that if, like Mariscus, they fixate on Cenodoxus as the play’s central part, they too will be permanently misled by grossly fictional signals like the preposterous names given by Dama. For the same reason the audience is not allowed to see Cenodoxus himself, neither in the opening scene nor in those that follow. The audience only hears the comments made by other characters about him and, when he does finally appear, he himself quotes more such comments. Even in his monologues he does not so much speak in his own voice, as act as a medium through which the Philautia, self-love, and the

11

12

13

‘Mariscus’ may be derived from ‘marisca’, a bad figure, or perhaps from ‘Mariscus’, a kind of rush, in the sense that Mariscus is not worth a rush. ‘Dama’ refers to the Latin term for several animals, such as roe, deer, chamois, even antelope. This misleading is constitutive for Bidermann’s plays (cf. Philemon I, 9) and an intertextual allusion to Syrus as another form of the play within the play. In his Miles Gloriosus Plautus, one of the most quoted sources in Bidermann, invents similar names, which hint at the nonsense of what is proposed and which are not to be understood etymologically.

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Hypocrisis speak.14 The perioche of the performance in Munich 1609 therefore shows the Philautia as a shadow on stage, mirroring the fact that Cenodoxus, speaking the Philautia’s words, himself becomes a shadow of her peformance.15 Instead of simply telling the story of a haughty bookworm who meets his deserved, if ghastly, end, Bidermann uses these irritating devices to elicit the spectator/reader’s awareness that the convoluted process of the play’s development is itself at the centre of the play. A further clue to this is given by the last words of the opening scene. They are spoken by Dama, who announces himself to be a Cretan who tells lies, thus alluding to the ancient proverb that all Cretans are lying, even when they say they are. If these words are taken seriously, then there can be no distinguishing at all between what is true and what isn’t. Furthermore, this distinction must be supposed to be of secondary importance – if any at all – to the realisation that all characters, without exception, regardless of differences in their techniques and motivations, are practising the art of deceit. This is certainly true for the play as play, but disturbing as to the diagnosis of reality the play purports to aim at. If, for example, the dramatis persona Dama reflects on the actions he took to dupe Marisco as in a play, which finally leads to Mariscus being put into a lunatic asylum, the question is raised whether two wrongs ever make a right, whether it is ever justifiable to take immoral action against an immoral person such as Mariscus. This question is put to the spectator/reader in terms that leave no possibility of answering it outside the sphere of play, thus in fact multiplying the problem instead of resolving it. This is further complicated because the play makes it quite clear that Dama, on the surface the over-zealous and naive but faithful servant of Cenodoxus, is in fact a complicated character who professes to condemn wholeheartedly what he himself does most efficiently and even with clear insight into the moral depravation he thereby invites. Most notably, Bidermann further misleads the spectator by presenting several interesting cases of memory loss. His play might even be said to constitute an exercise in training the memory of his spectators/readers by confronting them with examples of memory loss which, at a later time in the play, must be recovered in order for sense to be made of the ongoing 14

15

Hypocrisis is not only the name of a character in the play. In Greek it does not mean ‘hypocrisy’, as we currently understand the word, but rather, ‘to play a part in the theatre’, thus emphasizing the self-reflexive quality of the play within the play. Through such an unconscious shadow play, Bidermann criticises the Stoic tradition (l. 26270, 276) and also the consequences of the Renaissance’s praise of fortune (l. 211-15), as well as the desire to immortalize oneself by acts and deeds (l. 237-39), an allusion to the Pharisees in the Bible.

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proceedings. The first play on the capacities of memory (Mariscus repeating word for word what Dama tells him without realising for a moment that the names Dama recites for him must be fictional), while in itself trivial, nevertheless already introduces the central motif of the last act of the tragoedia with the making and staging of oblivion at the beginning of the comoedia. There Cenodoxus, like Mariscus, remembers his life very well within the limits of his own perspective, but what he remembers lacks the context which condemns him. He has given alms to the poor, he has been a wise counselor, he has prayed to God, etc. – all perfectly true, but what he does not remember is that he acted throughout solely from self-interest. While Mariscus’ inability to remember accurately is pathological – and, indeed, part of what leads him to the asylum, Cenodoxus’ mnemonic inaccuracies are self-made, thus marking his guilt. He has not gained experience through suffering. Perfectly oblivious of what has made him what he is at the end, he cannot answer the angry questions hurled at him by his exasperated guardian angel: ‘Have you no memory of your own true self? / Is there no limit to your boundless arrogance?’ (l. 932-33) Bidermann here argues that the radical Stoicism that some of his contemporaries proclaim as a God-fearing way of life is, in fact, a perverted form of what Bidermann in general values as a correct adherence to the Stoic tradition,16 as it does not allow for re-evaluating one’s actions and decisions in the light of painful experience. It is not a philosophical fashion which concerns Bidermann, but the fundamental problem of the foundation of law. Cenodoxus is a lawyer, chief adviser to the King of France. The funeral Chorus laments over Cenodoxus’ death: Ah, courts of justice, now gone is your master. Land of our fathers, now gone is your guardian; Gone now, oh Gaul, is your own loving father; Gone now, oh earth, is your safe-guard and strength! (l. 1767-70)

Occupying a position between Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, who replaced the old concept of law as a reliable given with a new concept of law as a renewable construction, Bidermann saw this latter change as mere horsetrading. Even if one were able to deduce laws mathematically, he thought it impossibe to deduce the law’s premises themselves by this procedure; even more important, a mathematical construction fails to include social and cultural traditions in what was essentially a social and cultural process.

16

As Pörnbacher, p. 22, justly argues.

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First and foremost, the ‘carpet scene’ serves to illustrate this cultural horse-trading as a third form of memory loss by humorously showing how the physician Aesculap tries to acquire a carpet which actually already belongs to him, the carpet having been stolen by a thief who has been caught in the act. The sophistic argumentation of the thief and still more Aesculap’s ignoring his servant’s hints, together with several further misunderstandings, finally lead to the physician’s paying the thief for a stolen carpet which seems to be a double of one Aesculap supposes is in his possession. The content of this scene far surpasses its superficial entertainment value, as the insistently stressed origin of the seemingly new carpet from the Netherlands points to the Netherlandian philologist Justus Lipsius, who, in his Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex qui ad principatum maxime spectant (1589), had argued for the supremacy of natural law over divine law. By means of this intertextual reference, Bidermann hints critically at a similarity between Lipsius and the thief, insinuating that what Lipsius purports to be newly thought out by him is in fact nothing but the old philosophy of law stolen and sold anew to wrongfully achieve the glory of originality. Furthermore, it is highly suggestive that the subject in question should be a carpet and not, say, a ring or a casket. The carpet being a metaphor for textum, the woven, by which the old poetics referred to its own textuality, Bidermann specifially alludes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in almost every scene of his play. These allusions are mostly to the sixth book, in which the weaving of carpets is tied together with the very theme of the Cenodoxus, pride and oblivion. The book opens with the story of the proud weaver, Arachne, who provokes Minerva by representing the sins of the wicked gods in her carpet. The gods want that scandalous piece of truth condemned to oblivion; Minerva, in particular, is so enraged that she slashes Arachne’s carpet and strikes her. Minerva herself has woven another carpet, the four corners of which depict the punishments which the gods inflict on proud mortals and which are described by Ovid in the subsequent narratives. The final one of these is the horrible story of the tongueless Philomela, who is only able to reveal to her sister, Prokne, the unspeakable story of how she has been raped and mutilated by weaving it into a carpet. However, as this book with its aesthetics of both describing and performing the process of weaving is in itself part of the much larger texture of the Metamorphoses, it is by no means clear which of the carpets in Ovid’s text is to be compared with the weaving of the poet Ovid himself; it may be argued that the figure ‘carpet’ as such refers to poetic weaving wherever it appears. Along those lines it seems probable that Bidermann in turn refers to Ovid’s text as to a figure representing a poetic program that tries to encompass the

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totality of literature, showing it as a mise en abyme of the weaving of texts, not least because the Metamorphoses are constructed similarly to the metadramatic structure of Cenodoxus. By the intertextual interweaving of his own play with Ovid’s narrative on the process of creating texts, Bidermann creates a text which stages itself as an open system of thought. It is in sharp and critical contrast to the superbia with which fundamentalist dogma claims its infallibility. Moreover, it is a text that analyses the loss of cultural and social values incurred in the process of rewriting the philosophy of law (by scholars like Lipsius) as a particularly vicious form of cultural amnesia, a deliberate abandonment and consigning to oblivion of the great thesaurus of images and thoughts as woven together by Ovid. All in all, Biderman employs the case studies on memory loss as a strategy to train both the spectator/reader’s perception of the play and his ability to perceive the pitfalls of oblivion yawning throughout his present-day existence. There is the pathological loss of memory, induced by the parasite’s uncritical pursuit of his victim and leading straight into the lunatic asylum; there is Dama’s willingly incurred inability to remember the boundaries between playing and ‘reality’; there is the sinner’s oblivion regarding what has brought him to the threshold of hell, this oblivion in itself, tragically, the final reason for his condemnation. There is also – and this is at least as important as the individual’s sinful loss of memory and played out far more extensively – the sin of letting culture with its open systems of thought and its proliferating weaving of texture sink into an oblivion which the play Cenodoxus opposes by making that the real subject of its textual performance. For all the generalizing attitude towards life and death that it articulates, the following question, asked and answered repeatedly by the chorus – What is the life of mortal man? Scarcely are we born at all Than we death’s sudden victims fall; So must this life of mortals seem Nothing but an empty dream. (l. 1624-28)

– shows precisely what Bidermann aimed at with his play, as the ‘dream’ which the playwright weaves around the ‘mortal man’ Cenodoxus’ story is anything but ‘empty’. Quite the contrary – Bidermann does not teach resignation, but rather stages a wake-up call in accordance with the Jesuit poetics of didactic instruction, a call implying that the audience might well be in danger of forgetting that remembering their identity and its history is the key to leading a truly Christian life. Bidermann not only insists on the visionary, even

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God-sent quality of dreams and other simulacra, but even includes poetry itself in his affirmative analysis of such phenomena. This, however, poses a logical problem: To see the drama as a wake-up call implies a belief that the reformation of evil times and bad conditions depends on the will of man. But this voluntaristic position, represented by Philaretus, i.e. by someone who idealistically loves virtue for itself, is explicitly refuted by Guarinus: The times are evil, so are we, And worsening with the times. We’ve finished living, And so has probity. This must be said: The world is vitiated, vile and ruinous. Our crimes have reached their peak. Where now is found Integrity and trust? Who now inclines To modesty? We hate pride, but in others; Our own, we cherish! Wicked, impious age! What hemlock shall purge you? (l. 475-83)

The process of the drama shows more clearly than Guarinus himself knows that evil times are not conditioned by history or men, but founded in the condition of a world which is the battleground for the eternal strife between God and Satan. Every word from the angel is countered by a word from the devil, a perfect stalemate which seems to leave no space either for the will of man or for poetry. Poetry, however, offers one possibility that in Bidermann’s eyes legitimates its existence – the potential to instil doubt, to irritate and thus ideally preclude man’s falling under the powers of Hell by making him sharply and fearfully aware of them (l. 160). The main difficulty of this strategy lies in thinking and describing it: Ah, who can contemplate the flames of hell Eternally unceasing? Death’s long agony? The serpents and the stinging worms of Conscience? A thousand other things? – I’d rather spare All speech than name but few! For what I name Will be too little! nothing! My description Will be sweet bliss and blessed in comparison With sufferings in hell. (l. 2181-89)

The series of memory losses with which Bidermann confronts his audience all converge on the construction of a Hell, the knowledge of which, in order to become visual without the playwright resorting to merely spectacular stimuli of raw fear, is shown as having simply been lost to human memory and

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now, by activating the whole cultural thesaurus of images of Hell, must be brought forcefully back into remembrance. Thus, the general cultural amnesia attacked by Bidermann via the carpet metaphor is not only an abandonment of debatable luxuries of imagination, but an excruciatingly dangerous threat to man’s path to redemption. The founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola, had already developed a technique of how to imagine Hell in his Spiritual Exercises. The most important textbook of Jesuit rhetoric in Europe, Cyprian Soarez’s Three Books about the Art of Rhetorics (1560), points with equal insistence to the importance of imagining Hell, paving the way for Bidermann’s combining the Classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian with Christian didactic poetry. At the end of the seventeenth century, Jacob Masens’ Dux Viae ad Vitam puram, piam, perfectam, per Exercitia Spiritualia (1686) also strengthens the concept of imagination, demanding it be forced to its extreme limits of pain.17 Following those scholars, Bidermann in the course of the history of imagination goes far beyond the boundaries of Jesuit theology, especially when he stresses the difference between ritual and poetry,18 arguing that poetry, with its power to inspire imagination, fulfils a specific theological function which cannot be replaced by theological forms like ritual, liturgy or even treatises. Following this idea, Bidermann develops an idea of Hell that shows it to be just as orderly and planned as that of God’s sphere. Both God and the devil fight on the same level, employing similar strategies to get the better of one another. The protagonist of Hell in Bidermann’s play is Pan-Urgus, literally the one who can make all things,19 even ordering Cenodoxus to return to the game: PANURGUS

17

18

19

Now go, [Self-Love, and Hypocrisy]. I’ll not report to our commander

See Günter Hess, ‘Die Kunst der Imagination: Jakob Bidermanns Epigramme im ikonographischen System der Gegenreformation’, in Text und Bild, Bild und Text, ed. by Wolfgang Harms (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), pp. 183-96. Since the appearance of Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), this relationship has acquired some currency, as is documented by Stanley J. Tambiah and others. See Ritualtheorien: Ein einführendes Handbuch, ed. by Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger, 2nd edn (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003), pp. 227-50. In François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52) Panurgus is a technician, through whom Rabelais not only accepts but also satirizes the learning and pride of the new knowledge of the Renaissance. In Cenodoxus he is the proper adversary of God because he negates law, order, necessity and values by suggesting that anything goes, if only you have the right technique.

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Until I have my Cenodoxus back Playing his game of pride to match my rules. I’m damned if I’ll see him escape damnation! (l. 463-66)

Against the temptation of omnipotence represented by Panurgus, Bidermann sets a strictly controlled and deeply moral concept of poetry, the poetry of the comico-tragoedia, which serves to remind man of Hell by precluding a happy ending from the outset. The fight between God and the devil thus preordained to end with the sinner’s condemnation, it is only the temporal structure of Cenodoxus which allows for God’s intervention: the multitude of plays within the play all serve to temporarily cheat the devil of its prey. Even in the end the doctor’s dead body comes back to life three times, until it finally gives up its soul, while the devil’s growing impatience hints that his lack of time is his one weakness: PANURGUS

Back to him quickly! Delay Is dangerous. Urge him again, use all The subtleties your zeal contrives, to rid The house of Conscience; otherwise, we’re done. (l. 459-62)

But even the respite granted by God finally proves to be finite, when the Conscience says to Cenodoxus: ‘You dawdle, tarry? / Wretch, these delays will never serve your cause.’ (l. 1810-11). The shaping of time is of the greatest importance from both theological and aesthetic perspectives. As a form of limited deferment of the inevitable, the plays within the play alone cannot change the course of justice. They rather instruct the audience that, in the limited time allotted to him, mortal man must master a paradox: man should and can only by playing acquire a form of life which is not play-acting, meaning that the virtual reality of Bidermann’s play consists of a sphere in which there is no play at all – a sphere which, of course, cannot in itself be shown on stage. Here lies the main historical difference between the reality hinted at by Baroque metadrama and today’s awareness of reality’s intrinsic theatricality. The modern mania for authenticity is only the reverse side of the irreversible and unspoken understanding that authenticity is no longer possible, not even in literature, and that man’s existence is not only communicated but must even be supposed to be constituted by playing roles, social and otherwise. Even then, Bidermann’s plays may be seen to contribute to the concept of performativity which has become virulent after the ‘cultural turn’ towards a semiotics of theatrical performances. As early as the seventeenth century,

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Bidermann gives an ostentatious representation of ostentation20 as the founding moment of what is nowadays called ‘performance’.21 Thus Bidermann, shaking to its core the truth privilege automatically assumed by theological discourse in his time, states that performance is the wellspring of theology, truth and also philosophy, when, for example, he makes the actor playing the part of Cenodoxus speak the lines: ‘I am not the actor, I am the Cenodoxus. I am bad, but I should not be so and you should not be like I am. Therefore let us convert together to the pure doctrine.’ It is the performance that creates the power of ‘pure doctrine’, and emphatically not the doctrine that empowers the performance. Seeing the complexity with which Bidermann reflects on the relationship between poetry, ideology and rhetorics, it is obvious that Bidermann was capable of employing the interference between ideology and rhetorics to such an effect that any truth he made his characters utter is truth only insofar as it points to the figure of self-referentiality painstakingly woven into his text. This figure, in turn, creates a particularly paradoxical bond between the text and its recipients, already investing Cenodoxus with the very same ambivalence with which, centuries later in Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet, Gwendolen will reveal to herself – and to the reader – the secret of her existence: ‘I don’t review [...] I’m reviewed!’22

20

21

22

See Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 87-92, who speaks of ‘presentational conventions’, which hint at the dramatical representation itself. Umberto Eco, ‘Semiotics of Theatrical Performance’, The Dramatic Review, 21 (1977), 10717. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols (New York: Scribner, 1937), XV, p. 268.

John Golder

Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-35/36

The Baroque period abounds in dramatists who held a mirror up their own profession and to the arts of the stage as readily as to nature in Hamlet’s broader sense. The fifty-one years of Molière’s lifetime, from 1622 to 1673, saw over thirty plays reach the Paris stage containing the phenomenon of ‘internal performance’ or, in George Forestier’s words ‘action enchassée’, a performance of some sort incorporated within the action of the play. This chapter considers four of the earliest and most successful of these – Balthasar Baro’s Célinde (1628), two rival plays, both called La Comédie des comédiens, by N. Gougenot and George de Scudéry (both 1633), and Pierre Corneille’s masterpiece, L’ Illusion comique (1635) – and asks what it was about the state of the theatre industry, about contemporary dramaturgy and performance conditions that prompted such an exuberant outburst of self-referentiality.

In his Le Théâtre dans le théâtre, Georges Forestier examines forty examples of French plays staged between 1628 and 1694 that incorporate some kind of ‘internal performance’, very often the play-within-a-play device.1 This chapter will look at four of the earliest. One, Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique (1635/36), is an acknowledged masterpiece. The others, less well-known, are Balthasar Baro’s Célinde (1628) and two with the same title, La Comédie des comédiens, both very probably first produced in 1633, one by the ‘sieur de Gougenot’ and the other by Georges de Scudéry.2 Fascinating self-reflexive, metatheatrical pieces, these plays present onstage, for an onstage audience, action that is acknowledged within the play world as theatre. At the same time, however, each differs from the others in both subtle and not-so-subtle 1

2

Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du dix-septième siècle, 2nd edn (Geneva: Droz, 1996), Appendix II, pp. 351-54. Balthasar Baro, Célinde (Paris: Fr. Pomeray, 1629); Le sieur de Gougenot, La Comédie des comédiens, ed. by David Shaw (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1974); Georges de Scudéry, La Comédie des comédiens, ed. by Joan Crow (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1975); Pierre Corneille, L’Illusion comique, ed. by Georges Couton, in Corneille: Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), I, 613-88. Quotations are from these modern editions, and all translations are my own. See also La Comédie des comédiens et Le Discours à Cliton, ed. by François Lasserre, Biblio 17 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000), pp. 323-35.

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ways. Indeed, there is a clear development from the first to the last of them. In the first the inner performance is a mere plot device, and draws little explicit attention to itself as theatre. In the second it is independent of the rest of the action, but considerable attention is drawn to it as theatre. In the third the play is just about incorporated into the plot, and again attracts considerable attention. In the fourth it is integrated utterly and completely. Corneille’s play, his last flourish of flamboyant Baroque dramaturgy before he turned to a more restrained, neo-Classical mode, is about the theatre in every way. Interesting as they are, these structural issues need not detain us long: my theme is really the nature of the mirror that these self-conscious plays hold up to nature and the reflections shown in it. 1. Baro’s 1628 ‘heroic poem’, as the title-page has it, is the first French example we know of to incorporate an inner play, and it is as crucial to the plot of Célinde as The Mousetrap is to that of Hamlet. The idea of an inner play is first broached in Act II, when Amintor, Célinde’s father, and the father of a young man named Floridan arrange for these two youngsters to marry – predictably, their inclinations lie elsewhere! – and to celebrate the event they arrange a performance of Holoferne, the Biblical tale of Judith, played by Célinde, and Holofernes, by Floridan. Act III is devoted to the inner play, performed on a stage erected in Amintor’s house. As the Apocrypha insist, Judith visits Holofernes. He falls for her and arranges to meet her that night. In order to inspirit himself for their nocturnal encounter, he takes a drink … and promptly falls asleep. Judith arrives, and, as he lies sleeping, stabs him. Leaping from the stage, she brandishes the bloody dagger at her astonished father, and declares that she loves someone else! (Incidentally, we discover later, in Act IV, that Floridan isn’t really dead.) In other words, for Baro the inner play serves merely as a convenient plot device. Which is not to say that it does not implicitly raise any matters of theatrical interest – regarding the popularity of private theatricals in the early years of the century, or the use of plays based on Biblical stories in such circumstances – but the play is far less rich in references to specific stage practices than those that followed three seasons later. The two ‘plays about actors’ probably reached the stage during 1633, Gougenot’s early on and Scudéry’s prior to year’s end. Indeed, in all likelihood, Gougenot’s tragi-comédie, which is about – and was written for and

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played by – Bellerose’s troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne,3 still Paris’s only permanent public playhouse in 1633, and Scudéry’s ‘newly conceived dramatic poem’ – written for Montdory’s rival troupe at the Marais tennis court4 – followed upon the heels of one another: perhaps Scudéry hastily supplied a script so as to enable the Marais troupe to capitalise on their rivals’ failure.5 La Courtisane, Gougenot’s inner play, takes up three of the play’s six acts. The first two function as a kind of prologue to the inner play. The opening scene is a genuine prologue, a profuse compliment-apology to the audience by Bellerose, leader of the troupe, such as convention might have required on the occasion of an eleventh-hour change to the advertised program: two of his actors, Gaultier and Boniface, have argued and come to blows. Almost at once the bickering pair appear, with arms in slings. They are quickly joined by the other actors and a 750-line talkfest ensues on matters theatrical. The troupe then presents La Courtisane – which has nothing whatever to do with the preceding discussion. Scudéry’s play is twice the length of Gougenot’s. But, if it bears a certain formal similarity to Gougenot’s – Joan Crow argues that the dramatist seeks to give it a more orthodox structure6 – it does present a timid technical advance. Scudéry’s inner play is bookended, but in no symmetrical way. Such closure as it achieves, a perfunctory 10-line speech, is ambiguous as to its addressees, the actors in the inner or outer play. The prologue is a prose conversation between actors under their own stage names; the inner play, a ‘tragicomédie pastorale’, preceded by a ‘prologue dialogué’, entitled L’Amour caché par l’amour (Love Hidden by Love), is a verse piece that they have rehearsed. The inner play is of no consequence: any play could follow the twoact ‘prologue in dialogue form’.7 It all begins with Montdory explaining to us, the theatre audience, that he reckons his colleagues have all lost a few marbles: they want to persuade him that he is ‘a certain Mr de Blandimare’ (‘even though in reality my name is

3

4 5 6 7

This discussion is indebted to the introductions of both Shaw and Lasserre to their editions, especially pp. v-xxvi and 40-86 respectively. The Marais opened as Paris’s second permanent playhouse in January 1635. On the dating of these two plays, see Shaw, p. vii, Crow, p. xi, and Lasserre, pp. 323-25. Crow, p. x. I acknowledge a general indebtedness to Joan Crow’s introduction, pp. v-xix. Indeed, on 28 November 1634, when Scudéry’s play was performed at the Arsenal for the Queen, the inner play was replaced by another Marais play, Pierre Corneille’s first comedy, Mélite (1629). According to Renaudot’s Gazette, 30 November 1634, Mélite became a permanent replacement for Scudéry’s insipid original.

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Mondory’, he says8), that he is not on a stage, but in a street in the ‘town of Lyons, that over there is an inn, and here a tennis court, where actors who are not us, and yet who are, are putting on a pastoral’ – and that they should pretend that they’re going to be there for twenty-four hours, even though the pastoral only lasts an hour and a half – in which case he advises the spectators to send out for food and beds, for they’ll need to wrap up warm if they’re going to spend the night in a tennis court! He exits. Enter the troupe’s doorkeeper, quickly joined by their drummer and Harlequin, who have been trying, in vain, to attract an audience. Two actresses, wives of two of the actors, join them and they all talk about the theatre. Then Blandimare enters, a rich merchant in search of his long-lost nephew. He sees, from a poster on the wall, that the performance is due to begin soon. However, when no other spectators turn up, the performance is cancelled. Suddenly, he recognises the doorkeeper as his missing nephew and he invites all the actors to eat with him at the inn where he’s staying. The next act takes place in Blandimare’s room after supper. There’s more discussion, at the end of which Blandimare commends his nephew’s choice of profession and decides to become an actor himself. He joins the troupe and plays in the inner play – which he happens to know by heart! It would be going too far to say that the only similarity between the three plays thus far described and that of Corneille is that they all contain inner plays. But the truth is that L’Illusion comique is a considerably more complex play than either of the others, and, at least until the final moments, a more subtle apologia for theatre than Gougenot’s or Scudéry’s comparatively artless efforts. Moreover, L’Illusion is a ‘play within a play within a play’ – that’s about, on behalf of and for the theatre. Performed at the Marais, in late 1635-early 1636, by Montdory and his troupe, L’Illusion tells of a father, Pridamant, who asks a magician, Alcandre, to help him find his son, Clindor. As the father sits watching, Alcandre conjures up the spectacle of Clindor’s life: he’s working as valet to Matamore, a commedia dell’arte braggart Captain, and has become his master’s rival in love; after twists too baffling to recount, he ends up in prison and finally, after an amorous encounter in a garden at night, he’s killed. Only when the father, the onstage audience, and we, the bemused theatre audience, are convinced that Clindor is dead, does the magician reveal that Clindor managed to escape from prison and that he and his friends have become professional actors. The moonlit garden killing

8

Crow, p. 8. In fact, the real name of the Marais troupe’s leader was Guillaume des Gilberts. Seventeenth-century French actors had shifting identities – a christened name, one stage name for tragedy and another for comedy!

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that we have just witnessed was the climax of a tragedy that they have been performing in a Paris theatre. He raises a curtain and we see Clindor and everyone else alive and well, and sharing out the afternoon’s box-office. Corneille called the play ‘a strange monster’, which phrase he clarified thus: ‘The first act is merely a prologue, the next three constitute an imperfect comedy and the last is a tragedy.’9 In fact, Corneille might have considered it more ‘monstrous’ than he did: a pastoral in Act I, a mixture of farce and comedy of intrigue in Acts II-IV, and a tragedy in Act V – the whole package adding up to what the first edition called a ‘tragi-comedy’. In one sense, then, in terms of generic homogeneity, the play is an utterly irregular sampler of all the popular contemporary theatrical genres. In another, one might regard it as wholly obedient to the strictest rules of unity: action that from one perspective moves from Touraine, to Bordeaux to Paris over a considerable period of time might be said to have been conjured up inside a magician’s cave in the merest twinkling of an eye. This apparent anomaly is not the least of the play’s ‘illusions’. Though plays such as Gougenot’s or Scudery’s on the one hand, and Corneille’s on the other, are all apologias for the state, function and reputation of contemporary theatre, there is an important difference – namely that with Corneille the essential illusion, the fiction, remains intact: the father and the magician remain unquestionably themselves throughout, as do the central characters of the magician’s conjured-up world (Clindor, Matamore etc.). The illusion that they constitute is never broken, even when they are all finally revealed to be actors. Furthermore, despite first impressions, Corneille’s magician is not your usual theatre director or playwright (creators of illusion). Neither is the father any ordinary audience; neither compares the visions conjured up by the magician to ‘theatre’. And, compelling as the equation may seem, Alcandre’s ‘dark cave [… where] Night lifts its heavy veil but to the rays of unnatural light’ (I.1.2-4) need not be regarded as the description of an artificially-lit indoor playhouse. Alcandre and Pridamant both see the visions as past reality, reproduced by real magic: the magician’s ‘spectres’ are ghosts, not actors in disguise. The magician is not the author of the inner play, but simply responsible for its arrangement, choosing what to show and what not to show to his audience of one. He falls somewhat short of fulfilling all the functions of a real dramatist, whose work, according to Renaissance theory, would be composed in the three successive operations of invention, disposition and

9

Couton, p. 613.

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elocution. Alcandre only has control over disposition, the other two being beyond his reach, in God’s hands and those of actors, respectively. And while we, the theatre audience, have known all along that we’re in a theatre, Pridamant thinks he’s in a cave in provincial France. Nor do we share his perspective on events: while he is the father of a character within the illusion, suffering along with his son, his pain is our pleasure. And when he sees Clindor ‘restored to life’ and dividing up the box-office, we share his astonishment. But, while we quickly realise what’s going on, he remains bewildered: ‘What’s this! Do they count out money amongst the dead?’, he asks (V.6.1747). It never occurs to him that he’s been watching a theatrical performance. Unlike the situation in the earlier plays, here the basic illusion is never broken: all the characters remain behind the fourth wall, so to speak. Everything has been as it was, so that the magician might reveal to Pridamant, in a speech often seen as the play’s raison d’être, just how prestigious and worthy is his son’s new profession – that of professional actor. 2. It is useful to think of these four plays as ‘Baroque’ – a label it became customary several decades ago for literary historians to use –, markedly less controlled and disciplined, governed by a much freer aesthetic, less straightforward and clearly defined, both in form and subject, than the neo-Classical drama of the subsequent generation. There is no need to rehearse in detail here the features of the Baroque aesthetic.10 Suffice it to mention a few key words and phrases: delight in superficial embellishment; an appeal to the imagination and emotion, rather than the intellect and reason; themes of instability, surprise, disguise, metamorphosis; an indulgence in scenes of violence and suffering designed to impact on the senses. In short, ‘Baroque’ denotes restlessness, uncertainty, skepticism, subjectivity – and theatricality.11 It is precisely at this moment, as our plays are in gestation, that the Parisian literary scene begins to reflect a more ordered and disciplined attitude towards writing. However, the age responsible for the neo-Classical tragedy of Corneille and Racine was similarly intoxicated by ballets, operas, comédiesballets and pièces à machines, the very antithesis of regular tragedy. Here, if anywhere, was an age in which ‘nothing is but what is not’. It is not really surprising, therefore, that the theatre, either as reality or metaphor – human 10

11

See, for example, Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), especially pp. 29-39 &, on L’Illusion comique, pp. 164-72, and Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). See P. J. Yarrow, Corneille (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 43-57.

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beings as actors, life as a performance, the world as a stage –, should have struck dramatists, Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca as well as Corneille, as an ideal topic to write about, calling their plays The Great Stage of the World or naming their playhouses ‘The Globe’. The whole enterprise of social living, of human perception and relationships, clearly had much to do with emergent post-Renaissance theorising about the nature of dramatic illusion. But the preponderance of self-reference in the plays of this period must surely tell us something about the theatre itself, as reality, as social institution, as profession, as art-form, at this specific moment in time. Of our four plays only one has had a theatrical afterlife of any note, deservedly, Corneille’s Illusion. In other words, they have spoken more eloquently to their contemporaries than to subsequent generations. It may be worth remembering that of the twelve plays within plays created between 1633 and 1645/46, six appeared between 1633 and 1635. So, let us think now about the various ways in which these plays ‘hold a mirror up to’ contemporary theatre practice – bearing in mind that Hamlet overlooked to mention that it might be a distorting mirror, that the image it reflects back to us will necessarily be to some degree inflected. Put simply, the mirror’s purpose may be to advertise, to propagandise, to satirise, to satisfy the viewer’s curiosity to know how things work, to look backstage with prurience. These playwrights may not have been writing for the benefit of future historians, their work may nonetheless speak to us very eloquently. Indeed, Edward Forman has recently asserted that ‘the authenticity [of Gougenot’s and Scudéry’s plays] allows us to take their documentary significance at something close to face value.’13 3. The mid-1630s were watershed years, one aspect of which is strikingly visualised in Abraham Bosse’s well-known engraving of the three most popular farce actors of the years 1620 to 1630 on the stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne (Fig. 1).16 When, in L’Illusion comique in 1635/36, Pridamant discovers from

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David Shaw, p. VIII, goes further, calling Gougenot’s play, ‘as a document about the theatre [… ,] possibly the most important play of the first half of the seventeenth century’. See also Eveline Dutertre, Scudéry dramaturge (Geneva: Droz, 1988), p. 231 and ‘The actor’s profession in the 1630s’, in French Theatre in the neo-Classical Era, 1550-1789, ed. by W.D. Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 164. BnF, Est., Ed 30a. On this engraving, see the exhibition catalogue Abraham Bosse, savant graveur: Tours, vers 1604-1676, Paris, ed. by Sophie Join-Lambert and Maxime Préaud (Paris: BnF / Musée des Beaux Arts de Tours, 2004), pp. 135-36.

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the magician that his son Clindor has become an actor, he cries out in horror, ‘My son an actor! (V.6.1765) Like Scudéry’s unreconstructed Blandimare, a year or two earlier, he sees the theatre as Bosse does here, all filth and obscenity, low and vulgar farce, neither aesthetically nor morally attractive. He who says ‘actress’, of course, says ‘whore’: as La Beau Soleil, an actress in Scudéry’s play, puts it, the common perception is that an actress is ‘common property […] the wife of any one of you is incontrovertibly the wife of the entire troupe’ (77-79).

Figure 1. ‘L’Hôtel de Bourgogne’, by Abraham Bosse (c.1633). A farce scene in which Turlupin robs Gaultier-Garguille, who is watching Gros-Guillaume make love to a woman. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)

By placing Gaultier’s eye-glasses in the very centre of his image, Bosse indicates that eyes and looking are the key to the scene. Staring fixedly at the left index finger of Gros-Guillaume – whose pop-eyed gaze is similarly riveted, as it tickles the rim of his suggestively placed beret, unsubtly made to represent the exaggerated vaginal cleft of a not unwilling mistress17 – Gaultier is 17

Gros Guillaume’s obscene gesture calls to mind the opening words of Gaultier’s own Farce de la querelle de Gaultier Garguille et de Perrine, sa femme (c. 1616), ‘As there is nothing

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easy prey to Turlupin’s thieving fingers. Bosse’s engraving commemorates the passing of these ‘bad and bawdy old days’. Gaultier-Garguille was buried on 10 December 1633, shortly before this engraving appeared in the shops, and only a matter of months after he had played himself in Gougenot’s play, ‘virtually on the threshold of his tomb’.18 But the days of farce were numbered. Well before the end of the 1630s, all three farceurs in Bosse’s engraving, who appear under their stage names in Gougenot’s play, were in their graves. At the same time, new dramatists – the focus of whose concerns was above, rather than below, the belt, in the heart and the mind – had come onto the scene, our four authors for a start, and others, to whose plays Scudéry refers: Jean Mairet (Sylvie, Chriseide and Silvanire), Pichou (Les Folies de Cardénio, L’Infidelle Confidente and Philis de Scire), Racan (Les Bergeries), Scudéry himself (Ligdamon et Lidias and Le Trompeur Puni), Pierre Corneille (Clitandre and La Veuve) and Jean de Rotrou (La Bague de l’oubli). And, to bring this new work before the public, a new generation of actor-managers had begun to appear. The two principals, Bellerose and Montdory, feature in Gougenot’s and Scudéry’s play respectively. Bellerose, who brought a quietly rhetorical acting style to Paris in the 1620s, helped raise the prestige of the serious actor. As did Montdory, a cutler’s son, who had established himself in Paris in 1629, and, after working in a law office, attracted the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu. Reputedly, he is the first great French actor never to have played in farce. Indeed, on 15 December 1636 Guez de Balzac wrote to him: ‘[B]y cleansing your stage of all manner of filth, you can boast of having reconciled […] sensual pleasure with virtue.’19 There are not many aspects of the business and craft of the theatre in the early 1630s that completely escape mention in these plays. None, however, is so insistently laboured, from Célinde onwards, as that which Balzac congratulates Montdory on having corrected, namely its poor moral record. The plays re-echo with the classical dictum that the theatre’s function is to act as a corrective, and that of the playwright to teach, as well as entertain. As Scudéry’s Blandimare says: ‘The stage has become the scourge of vice and the throne of virtue’ (II.1). All our plays stress the positive value, the usefulness – moral and/or social – of the stage: from Baro’s Célinde, in which Amintor says: ‘There is nothing more honest, more pleasant, nor more useful [than theatrical performances]’ (III.1) to Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, where

18 19

more responsive to a tickle in the lower abdomen than a woman …’, in Emile Magne, Gaultier-Garguille, comédien de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne (Paris: Louis-Michard, 1911), p. 184. Magne, p. 62. Quoted in Couton, pp. 1423-24.

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Pridamant confesses: ‘I was unaware of [the stage’s] lustre, utility and attraction’ (V.6.1811: my emphasis). The manners in most need of correction are the sexual. Pleas in defense of actors as models of virtuous behaviour by the likes of Gougenot’s Beauchâteau and his wife, when neither of their real-life counterparts was a reliable advertisement for clean-living, must have amused more than one spectator. The irony of hearing a man ‘whom nothing chaste can possibly resist, and who only wants to be loved’20 reject ‘the opinion of many that life in the theatre is nothing but debauchery, a licence for vice, foulness, idleness and incontinence’ (451-55) cannot have passed unnoticed. And the presence in the cast of the three celebrated farceurs, especially Gros Guillaume and Gaultier Garguille, whose comic songs were carried more by force of obscenity than wit, can hardly have been reassuring to an audience all too ready to confuse the onstage and offstage lives of actors. ‘[Mlle de Beau Soleil] has rather too smart a tongue for a woman’ (69-70), remarks Belle Ombre, in response to Mlle de Belle Espine’s smutty equivoque, ‘If my husband’s tongue isn’t as loose as yours, he certainly has other parts that do him proud’ (63-65). In her long defence of her fellow-actresses against the charge of immorality and of leading offstage the life-style of the onstage wife in the traditional conjugal farce – ‘everyone […] imagines that farce is a reflexion of our real lives’ (7475) – La Beau Soleil shifts the blame onto the backstage attentions paid to her and her female colleagues by excessively assiduous male spectators: Every one of them believes he has the right to make us suffer his importunate demands […] One will spend an entire evening sitting on a skip and swinging his legs, without saying a word, just to show us his moustaches […]. Another […] will talk nothing but nonsense, as trivial as his mind: and, ever so obligingly, will try to place a beauty spot on our bosom, but only so that he can touch us there. (77-91)21

In view of these concerns it is surprising to find so few overt references to the Church and/or any Church control exerted over the behaviour of actors: Scudéry’s Belle Ombre attributes the absence of an audience to the fact that ‘the entire town is at its devotions today and they have been ordered to mortify their flesh by avoiding the playhouse’ (I.5). Similarly, it is no accident – rather obedience to the exigencies of plausibility and morality – that Baro chose the appropriate Biblical role of Judith for his heroine: ‘For a father to

20 21

Testament du feu Gaultier Garguille (1634), cited by Mongrédien, p. 114. On the actress and the backstage door, see Georges Forestier, ‘L’actrice et le fâcheux dans les Comédies des comédiens du XVIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 80 (1980), 355-65.

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agree to his daughter going on the stage (even in private), it was absolutely necessary that the subject matter be religious, lest the portrayal of ungodly love leave a bad impression on her soul.’22 4. On the other hand, both Gougenot and Scudéry make copious reference to matters of internal control and company organisation/administration. Gougenot’s Beauchâteau speaks of there being ‘twelve actors at most’ constituting a troupe (433). Anxious to join the troupe, he observes that, once Gros Guillaume and Turlupin have settled their differences and agreed to ‘take an equal share in the rewards accruing from the work [of the troupe]’, (963-64) it only remains for them to go before a notary and ‘draw up [a] partnership agreement’ (969). Predictably, the picture Gougenot’s propagandist brush paints is rosier than reality. His is a world governed by democratic principles of equality and fraternity, where differences are settled. ‘You think, Monsieur Gaultier,’ says Bellerose, who in his role as company orateur, endeavours to resolve the casting dispute and restore peace between Gaultier and Boniface, that your profession as a lawyer gives you preference over Monsieur Boniface, who is only a shopkeeper. Indeed, we all know that a doctorate gives considerable prerogative to the mind, that a knowledge of literature gives rise to fine thoughts and facilitates one’s understanding, but these are not what an actor needs most. (198-204)

Gaultier is a lawyer, Boniface a draper, the Capitaine a soldier. Gougenot’s theatre is a great equaliser, welcoming all ranks and conditions of men – and women. And, in Bellerose’s troupe, all make an equal investment and draw equal profits: as Guillaume reminds Gaultier, ‘People in the theatre recognize neither subservience nor control’ (532-53). That is not to say that an absolute equality reigned across the board. For example, the joint-stock reward system drew a clear distinction between sharers and wage-earners. Indeed, the entire second act of the play hinges on the decision of Gros Guillaume and Turlupin, small-part players here, to leave the troupe, should their request to be promoted, to ‘draw a share and not a wage’, be rejected. For Shaw, ‘the difference between salaried ‘employees’ and ‘shareholders’ is brought out ‘more clearly [here] than [in] any other contemporary document’.23 For Corneille, the need to bring his L’Illusion comique to a swift conclusion supercedes any question of specifying whether his inner-play tragedians have instituted a graduated share system: the stage-direction reads simply, ‘A 22 23

Forestier, pp. 330-31, n.17. Comédie des comédiens, p. VIII.

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curtain is drawn back and all the actors are seen sharing out their takings’ (V.6.1746). Georges Couton comments on the actors’ accountancy procedures: ‘Each day costs are deducted from the door takings, then what’s left is shared out, not according to a fixed division, but by going round the troupe: one livre for X, one for Y, one for Z … until everything is distributed.’24 This is certainly the stipulation made before notaries on 7 April 1625, when François Chastelet (the ‘real’ Beauchâteau), along with Jean Valliot and his wife, Gros-Guillaume, Turlupin and Gaultier Garguille undertook to play together, sharing profits and losses equally, on pain of a fine of 500 livres.25 But it was no more standard practice early in the century than it was in 1674, when Samuel Chappuzeau arged that it was unfair ‘that those […] who render little service […] have the same advantages as those who render considerable service’.26 When Valleran Le Conte and his colleagues made arrangements on 22 October 1615 for a four-year association, they agreed upon a most unequal division of profits: from 2 full shares for Valleran, Pierre Hazard and Barnabé David, 2 shares for Léonard Cutin and his wife, 1 share for Jacques Mabille and a two-thirds share for Charles Guérin.27 Even if there is no formal hierarchy of share-division in Bellerose’s troupe, some receive a larger share of the profits than others – or, at least, think they should. Doing no more than emulate the ‘real-life’ Montdory, who according to Gaultier’s satirical Testament (1634) habitually took ‘twice as much as the others’,28 once accepted into the troupe Gros-Guillaume insists his participation will be conditional on his being given what amounts to a lion’s share. On the other hand, it is not Bellerose alone, as autocratic troupe-leader, who will decide the fate of the two bit-players, but the entire company, including the three women sharers: ‘[W]e must necessarily submit our wishes to the opinion and judgment of all our colleagues’ (194-97: my emphasis) The same applies to Beauchâteau’s admission to the troupe. When arranging the meeting at which the decision will be made, democratically, Bellerose not 24 25

26 27 28

Corneille: Oeuvres complètes, p. 1447 (my emphasis). See Alan Howe, Le Théâtre professionel à Paris, 1600-1649 (Paris: Centre historique des Archives nationales, 2000), pp. 270-71. Of the 20 partnership agreements summarised by Howe, drawn up between 1600 and 1649 and detailing sharing arrangements, 18 specify a clear hierarchy of shares. Le Théâtre français, ed. by G. Monval (Paris: Bonnassies, 1875), p. 98. For a complete transcription of the documents, see Howe, pp. 355-60. Gaultier Garguille, Chansons de Gautier Garguille, ed. by Edouard Fournier (Paris, 1858), quoted in Georges Mongrédien, Les Grands comédiens du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Société de l’édition ‘Le Livre’, 1927), p. 30. Elie Cottier, Le Comédien Auvergnat Montdory (Clermond-Ferrand: Mont-Louis, 1937), p. 140, says that Montdory drew a double share, and Bellerose at the Bourgogne a share and a half.

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only emphasises that he will not be sole judge, but stresses that the company actresses will participate in the assessment of Beauchâteau’s talent: We shall meet this evening at Monsieur Gaultier’s lodging, where […] you shall receive the satisfaction you want and we that of giving it you; and these ladies, if they please, will take the trouble to give their opinion. (406-10)

It would be rash, solely on the evidence of Bellerose’s remark, to conclude that gender equity was the order of the day: involvement in the company discussions did not necessarily mean having voting rights.

Figure 2. Frontispiece to the first edition of Scudéry’s La Comédie des comédiens (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1635)

If we turn now to performance practices, again we find our texts to be rich in detailed references. The Tambour of Scudéry’s travelling troupe, accompanied by the Harlequin, literally walks the streets of Lyon ‘drumming up’ business for the afternoon’s performance of a pastoral at a local jeu de paume (Fig 2).29 Unfortunately, on this occasion to no effect:

29

The lower half of the frontispiece illustration to the first edition of Scudéry’s play appears to illustrate the moment at the end of I.1, when a masked clown (Harlequin?) and a drummer (Tambour) meet the doorkeeper (portier).

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There isn’t a main street or back alley that we haven’t been down half a dozen times, more assiduously than if we had been under a magistrate’s orders to patrol them. […] I even did more than I was supposed to, for what the posters showed them to look at I taught them to listen to: there’s isn’t a crossroads where I’ve not played town-crier. (31-42)

Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer takes Harlequin’s advertising methods as evidence that, except in the provinces, by 1632/33 posters had replaced drums and criers as the most effective means of advertising: ‘[T]hey have a drummer and a harlequin do the rounds, as minor troupes did in small towns’.30 Perhaps she had failed to notice that Gougenot pointedly sets his play in the large town of Lyons? By a happy coincidence the earliest surviving, but undated, French theatre poster advertises a play by Scudéry, Ligdamon et Lidias.31 The fact that the play was probably first given in 1629/30 has caused commentators to date it ‘before 1633’. While early posters rarely carried any actors’ or authors’ names, they did name the troupe and, of course, their venue: ‘that there are actors in this town and the tennis court where they are playing’ (I.2). It was not unusual for troupes to over-dignify themselves – the real ones in Scudéry’s Ligdamon – by calling themselves the ‘Chosen Troupe’, the fictional ones by the common strategy of dubbing themselves ‘Actors in Ordinary to the King’! (‘BLANDIMARE: (Reading the poster) The King’s Players. Ah, that goes without saying!’32) And there is no hint of exaggeration in Belle Ombre’s reference to ‘the poster’s lies’ (I.1): the Ligdamon et Lidias poster asserts immodestly, ‘The trivial amount you’ll pay at the door wouldn’t buy you a single scene of this divine play’.33 Nor, as Scudéry’s Comédie suggests, could potential spectators be sure to find the ticket prices

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L’Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre français à Paris de 1600 à 1673 (Paris: Nizet, 1960), p. 112. Posters were hardly a novelty in the 1620s. W. L. Wiley, Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 219-20, quotes an agreement of January 1599 in which Benoist Petit seeks assurance that Valleran Le Conte will perform in farces, otherwise, ‘the said Petit will not be able in any way to name the said Valleran on the posters that will be put up’. This poster – for ‘Les Comédiens de la troupe choisie à l’Hôtel de Bourgogne’ – is preserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal; see Exposition du IIIe centenaire de la mort de Molière, 1973-74 (Paris: Hummerlé & Petit, 1973), p. 14. The ‘chosen troupe’ was the ‘King’s Players’. Although Valleran Le Conte’s company is described in legal documents of 1598 and 1599 as ‘King’s Players’, Louis XIII dispensed no annual subsidies until 1629 (John Lough, Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 24-25. Quoted by Deierauf-Holsboer, Mise en scène, p. 113.

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printed on the poster: it is the portier, Belle Ombre, who tells Blandimare that they cost ‘eight sols!’ (I.5).34 If early posters announced the starting time of a performance, they never, of course, indicated its playing-time. Although the reference is as slippery as the ‘two-hour traffic’ of Shakespeare’s stage, Gougenot’s Beauchâteau does say that ‘twelve actors […] have to enact in five acts and two hours what in the real world might have happened to a thousand people in twenty years’ (433-36). But, hardly a considered remark about playing-time, this is rather a general theoretical statement about theatre as ‘a digest of the world’ (431), condensing ‘th’accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass’. Scudéry’s Blandimare may be nearer the mark when he implies a much shorter playingtime. Alluding to the consideration increasingly given to the unity-of-time rule and the real time/stage time opposition in the manufacture of dramatic illusion, he says that plays ‘should only last for an hour and a half, but these irregular madmen make sure [they] last for twenty-four, and call that following the rules’ (25-27). Blandimare has seen the troupe’s posters at street intersections and, if the frontispiece illustration to the first edition of Scudéry’s play is to be read literally, on either side of the entrance-door to tennis courts (Fig. 2). It was Blandimare himself, in his real-life persona of Montdory, who converted the Marais tennis court – where Scudéry’s play is actually, though in a Lyons tennis court fictionally, taking place – into a permanent public playhouse in 1634.35 That neither Gougenot nor Scudéry draw special attention to such a venue is not surprising: converted tennis courts were capable of housing far more complex mises-en-scène than the multiple settings required by both these dramatists. In his opening address – or ‘compliment’, as seventeenth-century troupeleaders called this conventional practice – Gougenot’s Bellerose says that ‘our stage is set for our Play about Actors’ (42-43). If the first 1080 lines offer no evidence of what that setting might represent – the action takes place ‘on the stage where the actors are playing’ and was probably played in front of curtains – the inner play, La Courtisane, is very different. Obedient to the rules of time and place as understood in the early 1630s, its action runs for fewer than twenty-four hours and is set in Venice, for the most part in a single street. There are references to a ‘lodging […] close by’, ‘this palace’ and 34

35

In 1619 the Lieutenant civil limited the price of theatre tickets in Paris to ‘five sous in the pit and ten in the boxes and galleries’, N. de Lamare, Traité de la police, 4 vols (Paris: 170538), I.440, quoted by Lough, p. 14. See John Golder, ‘The Théâtre du Marais in 1644: a new look at the old evidence concerning France’s second public theatre’, Theatre Survey, 25.2 (November 1984), pp. 127-66.

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a ‘canal’ (1084-6), and a ‘gondola’ (1853). Much use is made of the heroine Caliste’s window (‘Caliste is at her window’ (1102), ‘She […] closes her window’ (1147)) and for a couple of scenes the action moves inside her house: ‘Caliste and Filame go into a room, sit on a small day-bed. The room remains open’ (1847). The action opens at night: ‘It is as the night comes on,’ (2) says a stage direction, after which a new day dawns: ‘The cock is singing already, / Up, fair Caliste, get up!’ With complicated love intrigues, considerable onstage violence, one character attacked and stripped naked by robbers and a case of cross-dressing (Clarinde is breeched throughout as Floridor36), La Courtisane is a typical example of 1630s’ pre-Classical tragi-comedy. Indeed, the multiple setting implied by Gougenot’s text is the staging system required by the plays, largely tragi-comedies, which make up the touring repertory of Scudéry’s travelling troupe. These are ‘all [the plays] of the late [Alexandre] Hardy’, ‘Pyrame [et Thisbé] by Théophile [de Viau], ‘Sylvie’, ‘Chriséide [et Arimand], ‘Silvanire’ [all by Mairet],‘Les Folies de Cardénio’, ‘L’Infidèle confidente’, ‘Philis de Scire’ [all by Pichou],‘Les Bergeries’ by Monsieur Racan, ‘Ligdamon [et Lidias], ‘Le Trompeur puni’ [both by Scudéry himself], ‘Mélite’ [by either Rampalle or Corneille, ‘Clitan-dre’, ‘La Veuve’ [both by Corneille] and ‘La Bague de l’oubli’ [by Rotrou] (263-82). These had all been premiered at the Hôtel de Bourgogne by Easter 1632, staged by the theatre’s décorateur, Laurent Mahelot. Mahelot’s celebrated Mémoire contains the detailed production notes and sketches for all of them – except three. Two of the three, Clitandre and La Veuve, early pieces by Pierre Corneille, had probably been created at the Sphère tennis court by Montdory’s company in the 1630/31 and 1631/32 seasons respectively.37 The third is Mélite, commonly assumed to refer to Corneille’s first play,38 also first brought, by Montdory, to the stage of the Berthault tennis court.39 However, as there is in Mahelot’s Mémoire a Mélite, convincingly shown by H.C. Lancaster to be an alternative title for Rampalle’s Belinde, another Hôtel de

36

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38 39

Was it pure chance that caused Gougenot to choose Floridor, the stage-name of Josias de Soulas, who (a) comes first to historians’ notice in 1635, playing Corneille’s Mélite in London; (b) makes his debut at the Marais in 1638, and (c) nearing the peak of his fame, assumes Bellerose’s own position as director of the Bourgogne troupe? Can it be that the military career, which, according to Mongrédien, p. 133, he took up in 1633, was short-lived and that within the year he had made enough of a name for himself on the stage to warrant Gougenot’s using it here? John Golder, ‘The stage settings of Corneille’s early plays’, Seventeenth-century French Studies, 7 (1985), pp. 184-97, and Couton, p. lxx Crow, p. 62. Golder, ‘Stage settings’, p. 184.

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Bourgogne tragi-comedy and also listed in Mahelot’s Mémoire,40 we should perhaps pause before leaping to the conclusion that it belongs with Clitandre and La Veuve. Our hesitation is the more justified, if we recall that Rampalle’s play was first published by Pierre Drohet, in 1630 – in Lyons, the very town where Scudéry’s play is set! 5. Scudéry seems to have been at pains to give his actors an authentic repertoire. Not only are all the titles ‘real’, but they might very plausibly have constituted the repertory of a troupe under Montdory’s leadership at the time Scudéry’s text was published, i.e. prior to 28 November 1634. Since the plays we know to have originated at the Hôtel de Bourgogne were all published by 1634 – Scudéry’s own Trompeur puni was in print by mid-January 1633 – by virtue of being public, they were available for any troupe to perform. Only two of the remaining plays, Mélite and Clitandre, had been published by then: La Veuve only went into print during the course of 1634. In other words, these three plays are understood to have been created by Montdory’s company, who have ownership rights over them until they are printed. There can be no debate about the legitimacy of including any of the titles Scudéry proposes. Of the two Comédies, Scudéry’s is the more interesting from the point of view of staging. As Dutertre has noted, the action of its frame play is set, ‘successively in the street, at the door of a tennis court, at an inn, then again in the street’ and, finally, ‘at the inn’.41 It needs, therefore, two (probably practicable) compartments, a tennis court and an inn, one either side of the forestage, the open playing area before them representing the street. After a brief discussion between the Prologue and the Argument, ‘the setting changes to become woodlands’ (471). In other words, we might imagine that a traverse curtain – hung just upstage of the side compartments and against which the frame play has been played – is drawn, to reveal the bucolic setting required by L’Amour caché par l’amour. This we might imagine to consist of

40

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Le Mémoire de Mahelot, Laurent et d’autres décorateurs de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, ed. by H.C. Lancaster (Paris: Champion, 1920), pp. 21-5. H.C. Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature, 9 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929), supposes that Mahelot mentions neither Gougenot’s nor Scudéry’s play, because (a) Gougenot’s was no longer being played when he compiled his Mémoire and (b) Scudéry’s was written for the rival company, and still unpublished. He also asserts that Rampale changed his title from Bélinde to Mélite in order that the Bourgogne might have a similarly titled piece with which to oppose Corneille’s play (I.II.653 & 657). Scudéry dramaturge, p. 219.

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rocks and bushes, elements placed upstage right and left, behind which characters are required to hide in an overhearing scene (990-91 & 999-1001). If both playwrights demonstrate contemporary stage practice to advantage, they are no less interested to promote other arts of the stage, in particular those of the actor. There is some dispute, however, over the extent to which Gougenot’s play reflects the membership of the Bourgogne troupe in 1632/33. Since he does not believe that by 1632 women were yet authorised to sign leases (one of the historian’s most reliable sources of information regarding the composition of troupes), Shaw argues that ‘it is […] only from [Gougenot’s La Comédie des comédiens that we learn the real list of [GrosGuillaume’s] company’.42 Lasserre disagrees – ‘[I]t is simply a list of names’, he wrote in 1998 – arguing that some of these might have been editorial additions.43 In 2000, Alan Howe sided with Shaw: four of the actors named by Gougenot, he writes, Beauchâteau, Mlle Beauchâteau (Madelaine Du Pouget), Mlle Bellerose and Mlle La Fleur (Jeanne Buffequin), were very probably members of the Bourgogne company at this time, and should properly be added to the signatories of the lease document of 5 August 1632: Robert Guérin (Gros-Guillaume), Hughes Quéru (Gaultier-Garguille), Henri Legrand (Turlupin), Pierre Le Messier (Bellerose) Philbert Robin (Le Gaulcher) and Louis Galian (Saint Martin).44 On the other hand, although Bellerose was, indeed, as the play insists, the troupe’s spokesman at the time, in dramatising Beauchâteau’s admission to the troupe, Gougenot massages history a little: Beauchâteau had, in fact, joined several years earlier, in August 1626.45 While both dramatists are interested in the actor as social animal as much as stage artist, Scudéry is rather more concerned with the latter. Which is not, however, to imply that his prescription for the ideal actor offers us any clear impression of what pre-Classical acting might have looked and sounded like: 42

43

44

45

Comédie des comédiens, p. xi. Although Bellerose is the troupe leader in the play-world, it is unlikely that his namesake assumed that role at the Hôtel de Bourgogne until the death of Gros-Guillaume in 1634. ‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé: La Comédie des comédiens de Gougenot’, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 25 (1998), p. 518. Howe, p. 116. For the 5 August 1632 lease, see Eudore Soulié, Recherches sur Molière et sur sa famille (Paris: Hachette, 1863), p. 164. Lasserre, ‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé’, p. 513 and Howe, p. 273. Gougenot may also have massaged the ‘real’ Beauchâteau’s character a little. The portrait in Gaultier-Garguille’s (albeit satirical) Testament of someone ‘whom nothing chaste can possibly resist’ (quoted in Mongrédien, p. 115) hardly measures up to Gougenot’s portrait of someone who, ‘to be accounted a good actor’, must be ‘learned, bold, obliging, humble, a good conversationalist, sober, modest and, above all, hard-working’ (450-52).

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First, nature must give [the actor] an attractive appearance, for this is what makes the initial impression on his audience: he should carry himself well; be free and unrestricted in his movement, have a clear, strong voice, and speech that is free from poor pronounciation and untainted by any provincial accent. […] He should have the wit and sound judgment to enable him to understand his part, and a good memory to learn it quickly and retain it for ever after. He needs some knowledge of both history and legend; otherwise he will talk nonsense and regularly misconstrue his text, be as out of tune as a tone-deaf musician; he will move like a bad dancer, capering half an hour out of time and rhythm, which will lead to his striking so many extravagant attitudes and removing his hat inappropriately, the way one sees on the stage. Moreover, all these qualities must be accompanied by a modest boldness, which, without being either impudent or timid, maintains an equitable moderation. Finally, his face must be able to register tears, laughter, love, hatred, indifference, scorn, jealousy, anger, ambition – in short, every possible passion – whenever they are required. (225-50)

Using language that occasionally echoes Blandimare’s, Bellerose seems to imply that a good actor needs the advantages of nature, plus others that he must acquire for himself. He lays particular emphasis on elegance, control and moderation of both physical and vocal expression, underpinned by intelligence. If his primary requirement is aesthetic, that the actor present well, his final word is that the actor be able to express emotion in the face – a tacit acknowledgement that, as the more Baroque and expansive, action-packed drama of the pre-Classical era begins to give way to the more regulated and intense, psychological drama of the Classical period, a more internalised, contained mode of acting is developing, in which the face and the voice are the primary signifiers.46 Bellerose’s reference to a presumably conventional etiquette of hats – the only fleeting glimpse he gives of the actor ‘at work’ – and Boniface’s reference to his wife’s gloves seem somehow to suggest a further recommendation, namely that good manners never be forgotten. In fact, the wearing of gloves, in both comedy and tragedy, was standard practice until late in the eigteenth century.47 ‘You always have to have needless extras in your costumes’, scoffs the tight-fisted husband, allowing us a glimpse, not only of the patriarchal culture of their domestic life, but also of the fact that the provision

46

47

Cf. Dutertre’s reading of this speech (p. 219). Scudéry is surely having a little fun at the great actor’s expense when – having put his ‘definition of the ideal actor’ into the mouth of Montdory, an actor who (as Blandimare), having played in the troupe of the duc d’Orange, brought Corneille to the world’s notice, acted for Louis XIII and secured the patronage of Richelieu, known as ‘Roscius’ – he makes him request a ‘try out’: ‘[I]f you agree, I shall try out in a role tomorrow’ (369-70). See John Golder, ‘Costume in the second half of the [eighteenth] century’, in French Theatre in the neo-Classical Age, pp. 524-25.

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of stage costumes was the responsibility of the individual actor, not the troupe, ‘What’s the point of these ribbons, lace and embroidery on your gloves […] It’s all a drain on my purse’ (26-29). Kept on short supply, Mlle Boniface despairs of being able to dress herself appropriately, ‘with ornamentation suitable for empresses and queens’ and is fearful that ‘instead of gold brocade, brocatelle, flowered satins and taffetas, and other expensive material’, she will be reduced to appearing in ‘gilded leather, garishly painted fabrics with cheap tinsel, and instead of fine pearls, Venetian beads’ (84349). There is a reference in Bellerose’s brief remarks to the actor’s need for a prodigious memory. His suggestion that lines must be learnt quickly, then subsequently retained for ever, may well contain very little exaggeration. The fifteen-plus plays listed by Scudéry’s Blandimare (263-82), all played in repertory and not in runs, may be the only example we have of a travelling troupe’s repertoire in the 1630s. We are even less well informed about a troupe’s playing schedule at this time. Such evidence as we do have, however – that performances were given ‘at least three times a week’ 48 – suggests that the onus on the repertory actor’s memory in the 1630s was as heavy as that placed on any of Molière’s actors a few decades later. Molière’s Les Fâcheux, conceived, written, rehearsed and presented in a fortnight, may be an extreme example, but the evidence of La Grange’s Registre makes abundantly clear, not only that an actor had to hold numerous roles in his head at any one time, but also that there could have been little time for, especially group, rehearsals.49 Private study must have constituted the bulk of an actor’s preparatory work. And since any one play might remain in the repertoire for many seasons, without being given frequent or regular performances, an actor was indeed expected to retain his lines in his head ‘for ever’. Preparations for a new production, it would seem, began with a company meeting at which roles are cast and individual parts distributed. ‘As we’re going to cast the play,’ Bellerose tells his colleagues, ‘you must come and get your parts, so that we can get on with learning them and try out our first play as soon as possible’ (639-42). Then follows a period of ‘study’ and consultation, after which they proceed to (probably only a handful of) group rehearsals: ‘Let us go’, says Bellerose, ‘and rehearse our first play, and put it on as soon as possible’ (1080-81).

48

49

AN, Min. centr., XV.21 (2 September 1611), reproduced in Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer, La Vie d’Alexandre Hardy (Paris: Nizet, 1972), p. 205. Le Registre de La Grange, ed. by Bert and Grace Young, 2 vols (Paris: Droz, 1947).

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Although Gougenot makes no mention of the kind of role to which each actor might be suited, he implies that lines of business were the order of the day. It is in part over the emploi of kings that Gaultier and Boniface have fallen out: ‘[Y]ou both claim a preference for the characters of kings in plays’ (176-77). If the troupe has more kings / noble fathers than it needs, it could do with a juvenile lead: ‘(Y)ou know,’ says Bellerose, ‘that you don’t have a young man to play lovers: we must make a concerted effort to choose somebody decent from amongst the thousands who are turning up now that word of our business has spread.’ (315-19) And the Capitaine – a real soldier before becoming a stage braggart, and now no more able than Corneille’s Matamore to distinguish between art and life – is anxious to establish that ‘[i]f [they] needed two captains’, it would be ‘something [he] could not tolerate’ (323-24).50 While these self-conscious plays offer modern historians an abundance of evidence concerning the pre-Classical stage, their original purpose was different, probably to give an insatiably inquisitive audience a peep behind the curtain into the ‘reality’ of contemporary theatre and the on- and offstage lives of those who created it, and certainly to proselytise on behalf of an art form making desperate efforts to renew itself. The establishment by cultivated women of literary salons where literature, poetry, language, psychology were discussed helped generate a new refinement of taste, of manners in literature – and in theatre writing – and gradually encouraged respectable women to frequent the playhouses. A more refined theatre of moral dilemma began to replace the colourfully rambustious drama of the earlier years. A prime mover in these developments was the Prime Minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who drafted and commissioned plays, gave France its first proscenium-arch stage, was an active patron of the arts and who not only rebuilt the Sorbonne, but, in 1634, established the French Academy. According to article XXIV of its charter, the Academy’s main function was ‘to […] render [our language] pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and the sciences’, and also to maintain literary tastes, to which end Richelieu gave them for critical examination the work of contemporary writers (e.g. Corneille’s Le Cid). Nothing was more responsible for bringing into focus the enormous amount of critical thinking, recently come from Renaissance Italy, about the theory of drama and the stage, and was further refining the neo-Classical aesthetic in France. It is commonly said that it was for the sake of one speech – which acknowledges Richelieu and alludes to the favour theatre had long enjoyed at

50

Lasserre, ‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé’, pp. 514-16, insists that Gougenot’s ‘Capitain is not yet a Capitano (a stage braggart), but a soldier, who is a candidate for various roles’.

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court – that Corneille wrote his L’Illusion comique. The speech in question is that of the magician in the play’s final moments, disabusing Pridamant of his attitude to theatre: At present the theatre Is so prestigious everyone adores it; And what your age looked on with scorn Is today the darling of all men of good taste, The talk of Paris, what the provinces all want, The gentlest diversion of our princes, The people’s delight, the pleasure of the great, It holds first place amongst their pastimes: And those who with profound wisdom And great care keep all our nation safe Find in the sweet joys afforded by the stage The means to relax from such demanding tasks. Even our great King, that thunderbolt of war, Whose name strikes fear in every corner of the earth, His head crowned with laurels, deigns sometimes Lend ear and eye to the French stage. It’s there that Parnassus displays its marvels; And to which the finest minds give up their evenings; And those on whom Apollo casts his most favourable eye Devote to it a share of their learned work. Besides, if wealth’s regarded as a measure of worth, The theatre is a business that pays well; Your son has gained more wealth and honour from this trade Than he’d have won by staying home with you. So, in short, put this common error from your mind, And stop feeling so miserable about his good fortune. (V.5.1781-1806)51

This is the raison d’etre of all our plays. The picture they all paint, to a certain extent, is rosily attractive: rarely does any of them have a bad word to say about the stage or about actors. And while they are not beyond occasionally treating their subjects with gentle mockery, there is not much comic distortion or irony of tone in them. Everything and everyone are seen in a posi-

51

As he wrote these lines, Corneille surely had in mind the conversion of Blandimare, Scudéry’s bourgeois merchant and would-be actor: ‘One would be out of ones mind to scorn something so estimable: the theatre, venerated for as many centuries as science has flourished; the theatre, once the diversion of emperors and topic of intellectual discussion: the portrait of the passions, the picture of human life, talking history, philosophy made visible, the scourge of vice and the throne of virtue. No, no, far from thinking it an abomination, I see how you all glory in it, and I praise my nephew’s good sense in joining your troupe: and to show you that […] far from suspecting your profession of ignominy, I consider it glorious, if you will have me, I should like to join too.’ (345-58).

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tive light. Indeed, if anything, it all reads less like a report on past achievements, and more like wishful thinking on the part of a profession in need of strong support. Here is the distortion to which Hamlet failed to alert us.

Manfred Jurgensen

Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play

Believing that all human life consists of self-conscious role-playing, Frisch adopts a theatre of rehearsal as paradigm for staging imaginary variations of personal identity. In his comedy Biography, marriage is seen as the most intimate social model of role-playing. Linking its dramaturgy to the reconstruction of a lost game of chess, the fictional freedom of self-expression assumes fatal finality. Antoinette is the ‘queen’ with ‘all the moves’, while checkmate Kürmann loses his life. Based on playful identification of the actors with the spectators, Biography transforms the audience into participants. In an almost Brechtian manner, it demonstrates the model character of human identification, thereby allowing the theatre to reveal and play itself. The place of comedy is the stage, ‘completely identical with itself’. The ultimate self-realisation is death. Live rehearsals prove terminal. The comedy about death reflects the paradoxical nature of fiction and reality, identity and authorship. ‘Life theatre’ is a play within a play, a rehearsal of variable selves until the game is over.

Max Frisch’s Biografie: Ein Spiel appeared in 1967, at the height of the author’s international reputation, both as a playwright and a novelist.1 It takes its subject from a couple of lines, spoken by Vershinin, in Act One of Chekhov’s classic Three Sisters: I often think: what if one were to begin life over again, but consciously? If one life, which has already been lived, were only a rough draft, so to say, and the other the final copy! Then each of us, I think, would try above everything not to repeat himself, at least he would create a different setting for his life, he would arrange an apartment like this for himself, with flowers and plenty of light … I have a wife and two little girls, but then, my wife is not in good health, and so forth and so on, and … well, if I were to begin life over again, I wouldn’t marry … No, No! 2

1

2

Max Frisch, Biografie: Ein Spiel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). All quotations in this chapter are mine and refer to this edition, to which page numbers will be given in the text. It has also been translated by Michael Bullock as Biography: A Game (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969). In Anton Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. by Ann Dunnigan (New York: The New American Library, Signet Classic, 1964), p. 250.

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But, of course, the idea of living one’s life over again, with the aim of ‘correcting it’, applying the wisdom of hindsight, is not merely a quotation from one of the great plays of world theatre. It’s a widely indulged-in popular reflection of wishful thinking, by no means confined to men experiencing a midlife crisis, trying to escape their marriage. It is not a literary theme associated with one specific period of history or belonging to only one particular culture. Indeed, Frisch believes that, far from being pathological, it is in the nature of individual identity to be made up of multiple fictional personalities. Like Vershinin, his own protagonist, Kürmann, has no doubt that ‘If he could start again, he’d know exactly what changes he’d make in his life’ (Biografie, p. 7). Having decided to take Chekhov’s character (as well as his own) at his word, Frisch adopts a surprisingly simple dramaturgical model, uniquely suited to put their assertion to the test. It is a theatrical form designed to enact a wide range of incomplete, variable projections. In spite of the protagonist’s determined resolution to escape repetition, it is ironically in the starting-point of theatre, the rehearsal, that the playwright finds the perfect paradigm for staging imaginary variations of personal identity. It is precisely because of its constant repetition, the freedom to correct, change, vary and improve, that Frisch elevates the rehearsal to the dramaturgical level of performance. In the process of rehearsing, projecting, testing and evaluating various possibilities, fictional characters and self-conscious actors amalgamate. Such theatre lends voice to Frisch’s conviction that ultimately all human lives (‘biographies’) consist of self-conscious imaginary role-playing. The drama’s programmatic title proclaims this very correlation quite unequivocally. It is significant that in his notes the author compares this dramaturgy not just to a ‘game’ of chess, but, more precisely, to the ‘reconstruction’ of a ‘lost game’ of chess (Biografie, p. 111). The repetition of constant variation, emerging as the central formal device from which all other aspects of the play (plot, dialogue, etc.) derive, nonetheless leads by design to a final, fatal, ultimate version – the defeat in a fictional game promising unlimited moves and possibilities, a triumphant freedom of self-expression. The special feature of Frisch’s ‘comedy’, as he labels it, is that, as for Chekhov’s Vershinin, marriage appears as the most intimate social model of role-playing. In an ironic double entendre, Kürmann explains the game of chess to his future wife, Antoinette, ‘That’s the queen. She’s got all the moves’ (Biografie, p. 11). Later in the play Kürmann is asked, ‘Is that all you ever think about, your marriage?… Is that your problem in this world?’ (Biografie, p. 84). As almost all of Frisch’s plays and novels do in fact feature tragi-comic marital conflicts, it is difficult not to recognize in these questions,

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as in the earlier analogy with chess, playfully serious allusions of self-criticism. Despite Frisch’s undeniable, albeit ironic, at times self-indulgent, masculine perspective, it could be argued that it is indeed in marital and other intimate personal relationships that the problematic ‘game’ of self-realization unfolds. Kürmann ends up losing it, and, with it, his life. As it happens, German has a word denoting both theatrical staging (with an implication of both time and location) and the very nature of imaginative projection. The dual meaning of Vorstellung (literally ‘pre-positing’) thus calls for an intertwining of the production’s actual performance with the audience’s imaginative, empathetic and socially responsive participation in the play. It is a correlation particularly applicable to Frisch’s Biography: A Play, because it relies, more heavily than his other plays, on the spectators’ compulsive identification with the actor’s rehearsing a role they, too, have been trying to escape. Their participation in the play thus amounts to an act of recognition. What they are watching on stage is a process of variation including and defining their own selves. From the beginning the audience is confronted with the reflective spectacle of their own collective biographies. Once they become aware of this fact, they cease to be mere onlookers. In that sense, it could be said that, strictly speaking, a performance of Frisch’s Biography: A Play has no audience, only participants. Whenever it seems its protagonist Kürmann is speaking to the spectators – ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking now …’ – he is, in effect, addressing his own consciousness (cf. the opening of Part Two, Biografie, p. 61), the persona of the Registrar, as defined by the author in his postscript to the play (Biografie, p. 111). It is hardly a coincidence, then, that quite early in the play Kürmann makes a seemingly casual reference to the Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandello, for here Frisch has written what might well be described a variation of Pirandello’s classic, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Mindful of its own dramaturgical adaptations, the play could have been called either something like One Author in Search of Six Characters (referring to the six variations of Kürmann’s biographies) or else An Audience in Search of Itself. Even in the context of comparative modern world theatre, then, Max Frisch varies and ‘rehearses’ the nature and scope of role-playing. His Kürmann is not a purely fictional stage character play-acting individual projections of personal freedom; he also functions as a playwright’s, director’s and actor’s dramaturgical voice in contemporary theatre. In other words: Frisch’s Biography: A Play allows the theatre to reveal and play itself. The name of Frisch’s protagonist implies, of course, that he is a man who can choose (German Kür, derived from kiesen, ‘to choose’, ‘to examine’;

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MHG kür[e] or kur[e], OHG kuri, OE cyre, OIC kør). But in ‘choosing’ and declaring, ‘I know how it goes’ (Biografie, p. 10), he continues to make the same mistakes (‘Registrar: Then why do you always end up doing the same?’: Biografie, p. 26). Kürmann begins to ask himself, ‘How can I choose something different …’ (Biografie, p. 41). One possible reason for his recurring dilemma is provided by the Registrar when he explains to Kürmann: ‘You have permission to choose again, but with the same intelligence. That is a given’ (Biografie, p. 29). There is only one other consideration limiting the likelyhood of repetitions in personal history – ‘the others, too, can choose’. Again, it is the Registrar who reminds Kürmann that he is not alone in the world (Biografie, p. 46). In a socio-cultural context, the ‘given intelligence’ of a white European, ‘middle-class’ behavioural scientist like Frisch’s Kürmann may be assumed not too dissimilar to the social, political and moral preoccupations of the play’s general audience. His theatrical performance therefore does not merely relate to the fictional assumption of his own character; in line with the Chekhov quotation, it implicitly enacts the paradigmatic part of a collective identity. The representative nature of such role-playing powerfully asserts an inescapable identification between spectator and actor. In juxtaposing the personal and the social, the private and the public, Frisch stages his model concept of a shared role-playing identity. In such a context, it is important to bear in mind that throughout the play the location remains the stage, or, as Frisch puts it so succinctly, ‘a place completely identical with itself’ (Biografie, p. 111). In rehearsing variations, the theatre manages to realise what ‘in reality’ cannot be: experiencing possibilities of another life, choosing the option of a different biography. Because of the protagonist’s representative identity, the audience themselves leave the passive realm of the auditorium, as it were, and join the actors on the stage. Quite different from his more Brechtian, politically didactic, ‘morality without a moral’, The Fire Raisers,3 Frisch likens this kind of paradigmatic theatre to the reconstruction of a ‘game’ of chess with the aim of discovering if, where and how alternative moves would have led to a different outcome (Biografie, p. 12). With its heavy emphasis on rehearsal his dramaturgy of theatrical ‘play’ always remains a ‘game’. In the final conciliatory sentence of his notes, Frisch explains, ‘I consider it a comedy’ (Biografie, p. 111). Aurally, the play reinforces its structural logic with frequently repeated incomplete or interrupted sounds of a piano, emanating from rehearsals of a

3

See Max Frisch, Three Plays, trans. by Michael Bullock (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 1-88, also The Firebugs, trans. by Mordecai Gorelik (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963).

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ballet class next door. With its very first lines the persona of a Registrar introduces the theme, the subject or the challenge of the play by summarising the essence of the Chekhov quotation: ‘So he said: If he could start all over again, he’d know exactly what he’d do differently in his life’ (Biografie, p. 7). Thus, Frisch clearly considers his Biography part of a continuing dramaturgical development in the European theatrical tradition. In theatrical terms, the figure of the Registrar is a kind of director, who rehearses variable scenes based on a ‘dossier’ script expressing the consciousness of the play’s central character, Kürmann. Alternations of Arbeitslicht (work light) and Spiellicht (stage light) are designed to mark frequent switches from dramaturgical workshop reflections to rehearsals of ad hoc script variations, both prompted by coinciding determinations of actor, playwright and audience. From the beginning, then, dramatic production, fictional characterisation and projected plot are in a complementary relationship. Frisch’s Biography is not merely a play within a play, but a ‘life play’, exposing variable forms of role-playing by all individual and social identities, including that of the theatre itself. It explicitly endorses the concept of theatre as all-embracing paradigm of human life, applying Jaques’s famous declaration, ‘All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players’ (As You Like It, II. 7. 13940).4 It is, indeed, no coincidence that in this kind of dramaturgy quotations from, or allusions to, other dramas frequently play a vital part in the act of self-identification. For the history of the theatre itself is made up of selfquotations, variable interpretations and productions. Thematically and dramaturgically, Frisch’s play declares itself, somewhat self-consciously, to be part of this history, in that broader sense a ‘play within a variety of plays’. Correspondingly, in the consciousness of Frisch’s protagonist biography consists of a long chain of theatrical self-quotations. The challenge of expressing an authentic life is one of Frisch’s central themes. In his novel, Stiller, the eponymous hero makes the startling discovery that ‘[i]t’s possible to tell any kind of story except the reality of one’s own life’ (Stiller, p. 101).5 Elsewhere in the novel he goes even further. The imprisoned Stiller begins to grasp the frustrations of recognizing one’s own identity: ‘He who remains silent doesn’t even have the slightest idea of who he is not’ (Stiller, p. 119). In a 1964 essay entitled ‘Der Autor und das Theater’ (The Author and the Theatre), Frisch states, ‘However theatre projects 4

5

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W. J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1906; repr. 1962), p. 227. Originally published in Frankfurt by Suhrkamp in 1954, it is translated by Michael Bullock as I’m not Stiller (London: Abelard-Schumann, 1958). All translations here, however, are my own and references, to the original, Frankfurt edition, will follow quotations in the text.

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itself, it is art: Play as response to the inability to reproduce the world’ (p. 76).6 His novel, Mein Name sei Gantenbein, written the same year, offers perhaps its author’s most succinct definition of individual lives. In almost formula-like precision the blind narrator declares, ‘Sooner or later everyone invents a story of himself which he comes to accept as his life.’ 7 (The Australian poet, James McAuley, a contemporary of Frisch’s, summed up his own, very similar, belief in the words, ‘For what we are can only be imagined; /The story never lies.’ 8) All these quotations prove to be of immediate relevance to Frisch’s play. As the Registrar clearly demonstrates, the desire to change the course of one’s life is invariably based on a selective range of self-quotations. It is in effect always an attempt to re-write the biographer’s own account of himself. As we have seen, Frisch primarily likens aspects of such rehearsals of imaginary change to the reconstruction of a game of chess. By contrast, Antoinette, Kürmann’s wife-to-be, ‘the queen with all the moves’, is in turn fascinated by musical boxes that continue to delight, despite their figures forever repeating the same gestures following the same drum. Ironically, she longs to hear Kürmann’s ‘old musical box’ (Biografie, p. 8-9). In the context of the play’s production it is an ‘instrument’ not unlike the ballet practice’s piano in a nearby apartment condemned to play forever incomplete pieces, as it pro-vides a telling background to the protagonist’s tragic-comic attempts to im-prove the record of his own life. There is, of course, a decisive difference between the game of chess (Schachspiel), a game Kürmann is determined to teach Antoinette, and the moving figures of musical boxes (Spieluhren), a mechanical performance his wife-to-be loves to watch. Both may be Spiele, ‘games’ or ‘plays’, but only chess allows for direct, practical involvement and the possibility of actual change. The most appropriate staging of Frisch’s play, then, would need to aim for a balance between these two kinds of movement – seeming passivity and active control. What’s more, such ‘counter-acting’ would have to apply to both actors and spectators. Throughout the play, its protagonist, a professional behaviourist who fails to recognise the pattern of his own conduct, responds to the rehearsals of his life’s alterations with the same frustration: ‘I already know how it was!’ (Biografie, p. 10). In vain, the Registrar tries to explain the life-actor’s predicament. ‘You see,’ he informs Kürmann, ‘you don’t relate to the present but to 6

7 8

In Max Frisch, Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). The translation, from this edition, is my own. See Michael Bullock’s translation, A Wilderness of Mirrors (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 74. ‘Against the dark’, in Collected Poems, 1936-1970 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971), p. 196.

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a memory. That’s the problem. You think your experience can anticipate the future. That’s why you keep arriving at the same story’ (Biografie, p. 17). Repetition wrongly assumes the cognitive role of knowledge. Frisch’s playrehearsal is not merely a comedy of variable role-playing. What gives his Biography its full weight is its primary theme, the search for authentic existence. All attempts at self-realisation share an ultimate point of reference, death. Play-rehearsing seemingly endless variations of individual identity proves to be terminal after all. Beyond the realms of self-dramatising, human mortality determines physical reality, individual authenticity and social actuality. The second part of Frisch’s drama presents a decisive turning-point. Confronted with his fatal illness, the protagonist appeals to the Registrar, ‘You always said I could choose’ (Biografie, p. 105). In response, the Registrar once again confirms Kürmann’s Faustian pact to rehearse imaginary variations of his biography, their agreement to let the theatre explore the range and consequences of an alternative life. But when faced with the finality of his own life, Frisch’s protagonist wonders what there is left to choose. In stark contrast to the variability of his earlier self-projections, the answer is unconditionally brutal: ‘How you’re going to respond to losing it’ (Biografie, p. 105). The play of Kürmann’s biography ends with the fateful pronouncement: ‘You’re free – for another seven years …’ (Biografie, p. 110). In the final analysis, then, Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play is a powerful comedy about death. With judgmental severity, but very appropriately, given that the figure personifies the theatre, the Registrar delimits the stage from a variable presence to the finality of life. Biography turns into an end game, a theatrical play ending in death, the terminal fall of the curtain. Thus, Frisch’s correlative play remains as much about the theatre as it is about the freedom and limitations of individual life. Of the ten plays Frisch has written, Biography is, in more ways than one, by far the most theatrical – if at times rather self-consciously so. The last of his plays, its subject is both a homage to the theatre and a live rehearsal of his own obituary. As his health began to deteriorate in 1966-7, Frisch began work on his Tagebuch, 1966-1971 (Diary, 1966-1971).9 Central features in the book are recurring, seemingly playful, reflections on death and suicide – Frisch joined a group of men forming a Vereinigung Freitod (Association for Suicide). Preceding and following his joyful entry, ‘Renewed pleasure in the theatre!’

9

Originally published in Frankfurt by Suhrkamp in 1972, it is translated by Geoffrey Skelton as Sketchbook, 1966-1971 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971; London: Eyre Methuen, 1974). The translation here, however, is my own, from the original German.

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(Diary, p. 93), Frisch reports on the activities of the Association for Suicide. The playwright becomes increasingly aware that one function of the theatre has always been to enlighten its audience about the inevitability of death. Early theatre in particular saw the staging of different kinds of dying as one of its main social functions: the tragedies of classical Greece and Rome habitually enacted ‘biographies’ of heroic individual lives culminating in death. When Kürmann is told he remains free to choose what he will do with his life ‘for another seven years’, it is the mere passing of time that turns the mirror of theatrical self-reflection back to front. Confronted with the blunt dullness of death, the staging of self, the playing with images of varied lives, comes to an end. In modern theatre it is the captive spectator who, sitting in the dark auditorium, witnesses the complex unfolding of imaginary lives from the terminal vantage point of death. Frisch’s Biography offers the reconstruction of a post-mortem, even as its dramaturgy continues to anticipate, project and instruct. Ultimately, the staging of dramatic conflict poses only one all-embracing challenge: could a particular ending have been avoided? For, more than anything else, theatre is about ‘the end’. In comedy as in tragedy, plot and characterisation, performance and direction are geared to an inescapable, powerful conclusion. The very nature of the dramatic embodies a critical forward movement seeking resolution and finality. In the stage reenactment of life at least one of the aims of theatre is to function as intellectual and moral reflection, relating directly to the audience’s own experience. In Frisch’s terms, the spectator witnesses the transformation of an interchangeable biography into a play. Not the least reason for the worldwide success of Frisch’s Biography: A Play is the entertaining quality of its witty, at times scathing, social criticism, such as the Registrar’s biting comments when, crucially juxtaposing the public with the private, he tells the pseudo-revolutionary Kürmann: ‘You’re under suspicion of wanting to change the world, when in fact all you really want is change your biography’ (Biografie, p. 55). Kürmann himself categorically denies the assumption that a particular kind of meaning can be attributed to biographical events merely because they have occurred, and in doing so questions, in quite a fundamental way, any belief in a discernable meaning of life. In his Tagebuch Frisch appears to be doing the same thing, by integrating periodic questionnaires (Fragebögen) into personal analyses and critical self-reflections. German literary historians have characterised most of the author’s writings as the ironic or self-critical role-playing of a theatrical persona called ‘I’ (Ich-Theater). Both Frisch’s narrative and dramatic style do indeed express an ironic consciousness of the variable nature of authorship. As his narrative prose demonstrates so clearly, the author remains ever-

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conscious of the analogy between the freedom of occasional diary entries and the spontaneous, casual nature of stage rehearsals. What, then, is Frisch’s specific contribution to a dramaturgy of the play within the play? In the first instance, it is his belief that ‘life theatre’ is a primary, powerful, non-metaphysical means of projecting and reflecting the nature and limits of our being. Biographical role-playing defines man’s freedom to determine and vary self-images, individual as well as social values and commitments. However, as in the paradigmatic game of chess, motivation for such changes may at times seem frivolously willful or purely coincidental, only to be subsequently revealed as inevitable, indeed, logically inescapable. Either way, whatever the variety of moves, ultimately the range of self-expression remains fatally limited. Frisch’s analogy of life as a play within a play does not imply that either human existence or the theatre amounts to little more than self-centred exercises in pastime. Rather, it asserts the conviction that life must be understood and accepted as an end in itself. Frisch’s staged visions of homo ludens contain no metaphysical references. The paradigmatic nature of his dramaturgy calls into question even the assumed certainty that all dramatic conflict must lead to an end. While, on a practical level, in a time- and plot-related sense, a theatrical performance culminates in its designated conclusion, the paradigmatic character of most of Frisch protagonists – in particular, Kürmann in Biography: A Play, Biedermann in The Fire Raisers and Andri in Andorra 10 – extends their continued existence beyond finite dimensions. It is in the play-like model of their logic and validity that the cultural ‘game’ of individually, socially and theatrically staged biographies survives. Yet within this self-reflecting drama Frisch is anxious to prove there are, in fact, a number of special events in human life, unique experiences that cannot be altered, varied, repeated, recaptured, rehearsed or exchanged. Prominent among them are Freude, ‘joy’, Erwartung, ‘anticipation’, and Eregung, ‘excitement’. ‘How can one repeat something,’ his protagonist asks, ‘when all mysteries and uncertainties are spent?’ With bitter poignancy he adds, ‘You try reliving a joy, if you already know what’s going to follow!’ (Biografie, p. 70). Rehearsing play-like composite identities fails to come to terms with the unpredictable uniqueness of human individuality and the mysterious impact of shared intimacy. It is because Kürmann ‘loves’ Antoinette that he cannot escape into a life without her (Biografie, p. 92). Yet, once the ‘mysteries’ of a relationship are ‘spent’, he finds it impossible to re-experience ‘happiness’ (Biografie, p. 70, 69). He is stuck. The repetitions of 10

See Frisch, Three Plays, pp.165-254.

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Frisch’s play do not move forward; they are ‘dead ends’ demonstrating the impossibility of Vershinin’s, as well as his own protagonist’s, longings for a different life. Unlike much traditional drama, Frisch’s theatre nonetheless does not demonstrate inevitability either. Instead, it questions the search for a meaning of life beyond itself. Essentially, its dramaturgy amounts to a staging of unanswered questions. ‘I’m asking’ is the most characteristic of the Registrar’s repeated comments (Biografie, e.g. p. 95). Despite the fact that his plays are essentially models, or as he calls one of them, ‘a morality without a moral’ (Lehrspiel ohne Lehre), Frisch explicitly acknowledges the powerful influence of coincidence or chance on the staging of life. Biography: A Play culminates in the following exchange between Kürmann and the Registrar: KÜRMANN REGISTRAR KÜRMANN

REGISTRAR KÜRMANN REGISTRAR

You mean, I have to search for the meaning of what has happened; otherwise I won’t be able to bear it. I’m asking. And that meaning would lead me to believe that this was the way it had to be. Which no one can prove. But you can believe it. Only this way. Fate. Providence. Let’s call it that. I know how it happened. – coincidentally?

The dialogue concludes with the timeless question: ‘Mr Kürmann, it’s your choice.’ – ‘To believe or not to believe.’ – ‘Yes.’ When, in a final variation of his life having killed his wife Antoinette, Kürmann realises too late the full consequence of having destroyed someone else’s life. ‘How can I still think of choice?’, he calls out, ‘She’s dead – dead, and I choose between believing and not believing … Whether I believe or not, what difference does it make to her?’(Biografie, p. 95). The imaginary rehearsals and wishful variations of his life do not only come to an end with his own death. Finality, even in a model theatre of self-projection, is reached when there is no more identity to be challenged. Having killed the person he loves, the authenticity of Kürmann’s own life ceases to have any relevance. Death destroys the very assumption of his ‘life theatre’, the precondition which allowed him (and others) to play with, or rehearse, variations of his own, and thereby someone else’s, biography. The game is over. Even though he himself is not yet dead, his obsessive role-playing has come to an end. Without life there can be no theatre. The paradigmatic variability of Frisch’s life theatre is responsible for the continuing dialogue between actors and spectators, play and audience. It is in this very exchange that individual and social existence unfolds, the play

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within the play, the variable biography of who and where and what we are, the reality of fateful coincidences and arbitrary roles based on chance perceptions, the few precious, mysteriously shared, encounters of anticipation, pleasure, love and joy, sometimes referred to as ‘happiness’, even though they, too, may carry no ultimate purpose, no meaningful design, hold no promise of metaphysical ‘redemption’ or ‘salvation’.

Barnard Turner

Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982): New Frames and Old

Tom Stoppard has adapted the conventions of the play within the play frequently in his work, manipulating the relationships between ‘inner play’ and ‘outer play’ (and thus those between the audience and the performance) in ways which destabilise the former relationships while leaving intact those implicit in mainstream Western contemporary theatre-going practice. While there is great creativity in Stoppard’s staging and his correspondent adaptation of theatrical and literary conventions, tropes and gestures (ranging from a quasi-Brechtian episodicity to the classical contaminatio), the stage-audience dialectic itself is unshaken. Stoppard then offers only the illusion of flux or instability and, while this gesture increases the entertainment value, it lessens the provocation of the theatrical encounter. Considering two plays from different points in Stoppard’s career – The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982) – this chapter argues that, while in their various ways they compound generic postmodernist ludic fragmentation, they remain traditional in their core theatrical value. ‘Commercial recordings of orchestral rehearsals are now available, presumably to allow audiences an intimate glimpse of the conductor at work. One wonders how these strips differ from the real thing.’ Erving Goffman1

Intertextuality as theme and structuring device informs Tom Stoppard’s plays, which often incorporate elements of other authors’ plays for purposes of parody or – more importantly here – of frame-shift. These inflexions produce role-reversals and misunderstandings, as in the mixture of sub-plot and various off-sides in Professional Foul; discordant time-frames, as in Arcadia or Travesties; the bric[k]olage of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, and the more – at first glance – ‘traditional’ plays within plays that are The Real Inspector Hound 2 and The Real Thing 3 (the former one scene, the latter a se1

2

3

Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 126. Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound, in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 1-44. Further references will be given in the text as RIH followed by page number. Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (New York: Faber and Faber, 1984). Further references will be given in the text as RT followed by page number.

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quence). Harold Bloom has described Stoppard’s trans-generic plays in terms of Senecan contaminatio, the ‘interlacing between an old play and a new one’,4 and such is in miniature the case with both the Real plays with which this chapter is principally concerned. Often, Stoppard rewrites existing or hypothetical but possible scenarios, or – in the Real plays – has characters do so, as, in Hound, critics Moon and Birdboot both comment on the play that they are watching and modify it by transgressing through what for them, if not for Stoppard’s audience, should be the ‘fourth wall’. In the second scene of The Real Thing, a professional writer (Henry) tries to imagine the conversation of a young soldier (Brodie) who has met an actress (Annie, later Henry’s wife) on a train (RT 32). While Henry is far from accurate in his suggestions for the dialogue, which is based on stale pick-up lines, Brodie’s own writing of this scene, in a play which Henry resists reworking, but which eventually is made for television, is in no way more accomplished or provocative. If Brodie’s play is meant to ‘catch’ the national ‘conscience’, it is – like Hamlet’s interpolation into The Murder of Gonzago – an easy target, proving nothing and providing little which would encourage viewers to reflect on its more general political claims, any more than might the allusions to Shakespeare’s Danish play that litter the surface of Stoppard’s play, such as ‘these few precepts’, ‘what’s a petard?’, or the attention to ‘words’, innocent or superfluous (RT 63, 75, 53). In many of these superimposed contexts, not entirely ironically perhaps, playwright Henry takes on the questionable status of critic and anxious father Polonius. All drama has always been in the detective mode: ‘[T]oute pièce est une enquête menée à bonne fin [Every play is an enquiry brought to a successful conclusion]’, says Choubert in Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953),5 a play which in some ways prefigures Hound in its playing with the detective genre (a detective calls here, too), in its staged monologue (more minor however than the interstitial play in Hound), and, of course, in its absurdist humour. In this game of detection, the contaminatio also extends to the assessment of motivation, and the audience must be nimble in assigning motive, role and guise. While the theoretical, but oxymoronic, task of seeing through the mask, the persona, is required in normal circumstances of, say, Faust, Othello and Volpone, this is particularly apparent in the play within the play. Actors play their titular characters; they represent themselves playing other characters; they take each other for real and take a tableau – fake to them – as a prick of the conscience. And, of course, the paradigm of this last is not Hamlet, but

4 5

Tom Stoppard, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 1. Ionesco, Plays. Volume II, trans. by Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1958), p. 269.

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Macbeth at the banquet, ‘starting’ at what appears to his wife to be the ‘very painting of [his] fear’ (III.iv.60). In The Real Thing, actors play actors acting onstage and offstage in their ‘real’ lives. So far so Pirandello, in a sense, even if Stoppard’s debt to the Italian playwright is more applicable to the earlier play. As Felicia Hardison Londré has argued of Hound, it is difficult to assess whether Stoppard is ‘building upon Pirandello’s technique of forcing the spectator constantly to reexamine his [sic] assumptions about different levels of reality’, or ‘merely spoofing Pirandello for the amusement of the cognoscenti.’6 From Hound to Real Thing, indeed, Stoppard’s is the theatre of the crisis deferred, of a rather comfortable, even disengaged foregrounding of mediated reality.7 Much of the interest in his plays stems from the Wildean cliché about life imitating art, where – as in Henry James’s short story ‘The Real Thing’ (1893) – what best passes for ‘the real thing’ is a fake.8 Since this is by now but common, in his later work – The Real Thing, for example – Stoppard disengages the clichés with which he had charged his earlier work. Yet perhaps for those who cut their teeth on the critical chestnut of reality versus illusion, particularly as a stipulation of limit or framing conditions for a play, it is one difficult to extract. For example, June M. Schlueter says of Hound that it destroys the ‘distinction between reality and illusion’;9 Paul Delaney says of The Real Thing that the first two scenes ‘establish the contrast between real life and art’ and ‘the contrast between the real and the imaginative accounts for the genesis […] of the play’s form.’10 Here, one need only to note that in the theatre all is faked and feigned, but all is a real theatrical event, which is all that matters. The Real Inspector Hound presents what might be called a ‘play between the play’: the easy target of criticism, the spoof of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap – but also, if incidentally, of Hamlet’s identity politic – is placed between the first acting area, where critics Moon and Birdboot are sitting, and the audience. The disgruntled grocer in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607/08), or the semi-cardboard audience, mystics and all in Alexander Blok’s The Fairgound Booth (1906) are transformed into the critic 6 7

8

9 10

Tom Stoppard (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), p. 119. See, e.g., Londré, p. 119; Anthony Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-61; John Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 160; and June M. Schlueter, ‘Stoppard’s Moon and Birdboot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’, in Bloom, p. 81. Henry James, ‘The Real Thing’ (1892), in Tales of Henry James, ed. by Christof Wegelin (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 239-59. Schlueter, p. 81. Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of the Major Plays (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 114, 105.

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Birdboot, who wanders from the stage-auditorium onto the stage-stage to take up a real phone-call, i.e. from a supposedly functioning phone. Here Stoppard, like Beaumont before him, with what we might call Living or Forum Theatre, while at the same time disallowing it. If in his 1914 letter, ‘The Theatre of the Future’, Leonid Andreyev could opine that in ‘the theatre of the future there will be no audience’, since ‘the performing theatre will gradually fade away’ along with its edifices and conventional framings,11 in Stoppard’s real, existing future theatre, from Andreyev’s perspective at least, all notions of audience and theatre are mere convention. He therefore reinstates that separation, the relegation of the audience to the shadows, which his play literally highlights. Thus, the play is avant-garde in its content, its material, but not in its form and nature. According to Richard Schechner, ‘[E]ngaging intercultural fractures [here in a limited sense, of course], philosophical difficulties, ideological contradictions, and crumbling national myths does not necessarily lead to avant-garde performances.’12 Unfortunately, Stoppard’s critics have often been sidetracked or ‘ambushed’ by the seeming chaos, and have retreated into paraphrases of that critical rhetoric which plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Hound and Foul parody. In one such case, William E. Gruber says of the first-named play, ‘Here we touch the core, I think, of the play’s literariness […] What, this play asks again and again, is valid dramatic language?’ 13 Even the intonation appears to be Birdboot’s. And yet the search for such transcendent ‘validity’ is seldom a primary objective in the Bauhaus, the house of prompt-cards, of Stoppard’s plays. At times, and uncannily perhaps, he detaches showing and speaking roles, almost as in a mime or in the way some Asian theatres separate the performer who moves and the performer who speaks; so at least can these plays be read (and performed). After going onto the stage and answering the ringing onstage phone, and remaining there as the actors begin the scene, Birdboot speaks as himself while the actors repeat lines from a previous scene. As puppets or marionettes, they then feed off Birdboot’s manner and dialogue, which is so uncannily like Simon Gascoyne’s in the play between the play that they take his cues from his dithering and general demeanour, both of which override the actual words, even if some are reproduced, accidentally perhaps (or because the situation is itself clichéd), in what might be called an 11

12

13

The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts, ed. and trans. by Michael Green (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), p. 367. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. ‘Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, in Bloom, p. 105.

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innertextual contaminatio.14 But what they say fits the context of Birdboot’s philandering between the actress playing the Felicity role and the one playing Cynthia, so that the flurried Felicity actress confuses him and Gascoyne: ‘original’ ‘inner’ play scene (pp. 16-17) SIMON I love another! FELICITY I see. SIMON I didn’t make any promises – I merely – FELICITY You don’t have to say any more – SIMON Oh, I didn’t want to hurt you – FELICITY Of all the nerve! SIMON Well, I –

FELICITY You philandering coward – SIMON Let me explain – FELICITY This is hardly the time and place – you think you can barge in anywhere, whatever I happen to be doing – SIMON But I want you to know that my admiration for you is sincere – I don’t want you to think that I didn’t mean the things I said – FELICITY I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne!

‘contaminatio’ scene (p. 33) BIRDBOOT I want to call it off. FELICITY I see. BIRDBOOT I didn’t promise anything – and the fact is, I have my reputation – people do talk – FELICITY You don’t have to say any more – BIRDBOOT And my wife, too – I don’t know how she got to hear of it, but – FELICITY Of all the nerve! To march in here and – BIRDBOOT I’m sorry you had to find out like this – the fact is I didn’t mean it this way! – FELICITY You philandering coward!

BIRDBOOT I’m sorry – but I want you to know that I meant those things I said – oh yes – shows brilliant promise – I shall say so – FELICITY I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne!

Here the new has been assembled as part of the frame of the old, and the new action has taken the old with it into a third trajectory, distinct from each, but which partakes, loosely, of each. Down register (Birdboot wants to ‘call it off’, since he can hardly ‘love’ anyone or claim the stridency and Noel Cowardly quasi-camp of Simon’s ‘I love another’ line), pragmatism (‘my reputation’) and the farce of self-interest in the supposedly disinterested promotion 14

As between the acts of Pinter’s The Homecoming and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In response to Elliot Norton’s observation that he did not care much for the second act of The Homecoming, Pinter famously responded, ‘I'm not going to do anything about the second act. The second act is the second act.’ See Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern, 1994), p. 34.

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of others outweigh the farce of the heart’s impermanence. The occlusion of frame-play and framed play is here both metatheatrical and a denial of that related but detachable (here detached) viewpoint that makes metatheatre possible. Most surprisingly, Felicity’s line about Simon’s inopportune arrival is not repeated, but perhaps this goes without saying, or rather – since it is the point of Stoppard’s humour – saying it would be merely verbose, and would go around the Hamlet principle that a play within a play allows a speed, precision and laconicity to the dialogue-action inter-face. Anthony Jenkins, still not detaching himself enough from the theatre-as-staged-illusion/theatre-asreal-event opposition, has said that the Birdboot/Felicity confrontation ‘loops [the play within the play] back to what went on before. In a sense, nothing in the second half of Hound actually happens.’ 15 What does it mean to use motion as a metaphor for motive here, that which ‘goes on’, that which ‘happens’, ‘actually’ or not? To quote Erving Goffman, ‘[H]ere it is probably best to leave open the question of necessity, obligation, and interdependence.’ 16 Once the idea is set, that the critic will walk onto the stage, all else follows after, merely because it is possible to create a play this way. For all this wayward trajectory – ‘mad, according to [Stoppard’s] custom’, to quote Sheridan’s The Critic (III.1.286)17 – Hound still remains faithful to a traditional, layered or box-set conception of ‘play beneath the play’, even while it appears to have shifted the frames along a horizontal axis separating the traditional longitudinal spaces of any theatre event (the theatron, or ‘place for seeing’, and the dramaton, ‘place where things happen’). Stoppard works with the assumption, suppressed in most Western theatre, that seeing (thea) is an event (drama), even if the event (drama) is what one has come to see, and therefore needs to be separate from the seeing; in other words, seeing is an act too. It is therefore still a long way from the abandoning of ‘the skin of only one character’ which Eugenio Barba laments as uncommon in Western theatre,18 or even Strindberg’s ‘splitting, doubling, evaporating and recomposing’ of ‘personerna’ in his preface to A Dream Play.19 While Western theatre can partake of such diffusion through the use of image – from cyclorama to computer screen, and pre-taped segments, from Wagnerian adaptations in the 1920s through Beckett, Lanterna Magika, and the incorporation of audience typology in Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung and Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (see the three spectators incorporat15 16 17 18 19

Theatre of Tom Stoppard, p. 51. Frame Analysis, p. 44. Plays, ed. by Cecil Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 383. Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), p. 126. Ett Drömspel (Stockholm: Kungliga Dramatiska Teatren, 1986), p. 3. My translation.

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ed at the end),20 – such innovations are impossible in Stoppard’s Hound. In The Real Thing, which could go further in ‘evaporating’ character through these means, and in which the media play a more contemporary role, multimedia is again only incidental. In the final scene, and in some ways updating the distinction between visual and sound of the Noh Theatre, from a darkened stage set is heard the recorded dialogue from a television set projecting a video of Brodie’s play. Stoppard clings, as Henry does, to a humanist conception of the theatre, where characters have no prosthetics but their memories. In Stoppard, where character meaning and audience meaning are distinct, there is seldom a necessity or plot to make of this distinction a source of dramatic irony. The audience can see that characters are ‘playing roles’, although the relations between and among these are both indiscreet and indiscrete. What else should one expect? In The Real Thing, Henry makes snide remarks about urbane witty rhetoric: ‘I don’t believe in debonair relationships. “How’s your lover today, Amanda?” “In the pink, Charles. How’s yours?” I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness’ (RT 71). Here, in a gesture which would uncover real emotion beneath polite conversation, Henry succeeds in sidestepping Noel Coward, only to summon Richard and Sarah at breakfast in the opening scene of Pinter’s The Lover, and therefore merely substitutes one level of farce for another: RICHARD (amiably) SARAH RICHARD SARAH

Is your lover coming today? Mmnn. What time? Three.21

Claiming a belief is a telling, a description, even if this belief is that emotion should not be described but should be shown. Since Henry can both express faithfully his own belief and the limitations of that belief, there is little left for the audience to do in tracing irony, except to reflect on the layering within one role and one character who can so reflect on his framing but cannot escape it except by alluding to a cultural milieu with which the audience is familiar and the implication that – almost a commonplace for those critics who think lightly of British middle-class drama post-Osborne – many of the plays of Pinter, Stoppard and Hare are in a sense all one play. Erika Fischer-Lichte has cogently remarked that the framing process occurs on two levels one specific to a play and its theatricalized events, and the

20

21

Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (1992) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 63-64. The Collector and The Lover (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 49.

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other more general, establishing the perception of the theatrical itself as an event ([dass] Vorgänge überhaupt erst als Theater wahrgenommen werden). ‘And yet’, she writes, ‘the rules […] of combination and relation of perception and signification […] must first be formulated.’ 22 Similarly, the framing process accommodates the perception of connections between plays, those pertaining not only in Wagnerian sequential drama, or multiple plays (such as Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, Shakespeare’s Henry VI cycle or Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia plays), but also more widely those of theme, generation and characterization. In Stoppard or some of Hare, the character of a playwright or some other media figure or writer might well intercede between the dramatist and the work, and be seen as ‘himself’ in one play and as the implicit writer of another. This again is a debt Stoppard at least might owe to Pirandello, or even to Julian Beck and Judith Malina. Yet perhaps this is stretching the significance of the play within the play a little too far, as the audience is expected to take the immediate as real. It is still quite common, as audience member, to leave one’s reality outside with one’s overcoat. In a quaint, pre-Brechtian fashion, Goffman contends that audiences ‘hold [their] understanding [of dramatic unreality] to one side’, but he also makes the self-evident point that ‘it is perfectly obvious to everyone on and off the stage that the characters and their actions are unreal’.23 So it is with the mise en abyme: external occurrences have internal effects, perhaps the transference principle of dramatic communication in general. Yet, to keep the heraldic allusion, what is the fesse-point, the exact centre, which is extrapolated from and into? The two are related, not perhaps by mere transposition of the same, mere ‘inescutcheon’, but in the manner of an escutcheon of pretence, that is where the heiress’s or successor’s smaller shield or charge is placed at the fesse-point. In the contrast, the embryonic presence of the smaller icon within the larger, a forward momentum, a dramatic necessity for action (even if only taking control) is implicit. Stoppard plays with such control in the critical diatribe of Hound and the rehearsals, known as such by the audience in advance or not, of Real Thing, including the shifting of frames through repetition (sometimes rehearsal) of lines from Brodie’s play (pp. 47, 54, 72). Ever since Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, a rehearsal or an interrupted performance has provided an inherent opportunity for a play within a play. Hamlet, of course, has both, as does Real Thing, though in the latter case it is through the video performance Brodie etc. are watching.

22

23

Die Entdeckung des Zuschauers: Paradigmenwechsel auf dem Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Francke, 1997), p. 61. My rough translation. Frame Analysis, p. 136.

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When considering the mise en abyme and its roots in heraldry – but without recourse to the figure of the escutcheon of pretence – the stasis implicit in the pictorial allusion foreshortens its theatrical application. In a journal entry for 1893 André Gide notes that ‘in a work of art’, he likes ‘to find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of the work.’ 24 Here the analogy is with simple compression and repetition, rather than with a forward motion as in the figure of a rehearsal. While Gide does mention Hamlet, his other references are to paintings and prose works, and the use of the term ‘transposition’ implies a miniaturization of the whole, even if this provides another angle on the foreground (as in Hamlet’s own ‘hold[ing] the mirror up to nature’). This may be seen in the use Velázquez makes of specular reflection in Las Meninas (1656), which Gide mentions, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage (1434), or Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533), where a skull replaces the mirror, which he doesn’t. The dramatic specular makes of the clear the enigmatic, as in the original use of the Vulgate for St Paul’s ‘see through a glass, darkly’ (I Corinthians 13. 12), where the Vulgate reads per speculum in ænigmate and the Greek di’esoptrou en ainigmati, a paradigmatic case of sight not being equal to that which can be said (the root ainos or tale, later riddle). Many of Vermeer’s paintings of interiors include maps, globes, or paintings of the countryside and, need it be said, the all-important light falling from an open window. All these give an implicit pictorial inescutcheon, as in the case of the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (1657), with the girl’s face symbolically reflecting and reflected in the window as she reflects upon the contents of the letter. We are all in nature, in the macrocosm, even if the actual exterior to the room etc. is not shown at what would be the outer fringes of the frame. In his Woman with a Lute near a Window (c. 1663), the woman looks out the window to her right; she would see more, symbolically, and better understand her place in the scheme of things, were she to gaze behind her at the intricately painted map of Europe. As Sheridan’s Mr. Puff remarks on his actress announcing her vision of approaching ships, which are, of course, invisible to everyone else, ‘[O]ne of the most useful figures’ of a tragedy writer is that which allows a character ‘in consideration of their being often obliged to overlook things that are on the stage […] to hear and see a number of things that are not’ (The Critic, II.2.331-35).25 This is the case with the dead body under the sofa in Hound, which escapes the notice of many of the characters, including Mrs Drudge, who cleans so meticulously. It

24 25

Journals, 1889-1949, trans. by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 30. Plays, p. 369.

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is this tradition of the ‘picture window’ which Magritte parodies in his Domain of Arnheim (1949 version), and which is particularly crucial here since a companion piece to Hound has been After Magritte (1971). However, Stoppard’s experiments with frames do not reach this level of the lucid ludic, the impingement or transfer of the exterior onto, and thus into, the medium through which it is seen. Thomas R. Whitaker has called Hound a ‘game of mirrors’,26 and Stoppard’s opening stage-directions give a hint of the allusions both to Hamlet’s line about ‘mirror’ and ‘nature’ and to the specular genre: ‘The first thing is that the audience appear to be confronted by their own reflection in a huge mirror’ (RIH 5). Thus Moon and Birdboot are seated in the ‘royal position’, facing the auditorium, with the ‘play between the play’ interposed between them and the audience. Traditional, proscenium-arch stagings of The Murder of Gonzago suggest a somewhat similar arrangement, with Hamlet and Ophelia to one side of the stage and Claudius and Gertrude to the other, framing the Players’ acting area.27 Following from this, Hound’s ‘play between the play’ may be seen as an updating of The Arnolphini Marriage: a comparison of it with a performance still makes clear that the characters in the play Moon and Birdboot are watching are interposed between the critics and the audience of Stoppard’s play itself. In both Van Eyck’s painting and Stoppard’s play, the background presences constitute an act of testimony, of corroboration, and the legitimacy of the roles of painter/marriage witness in the Van Eyck is only marginally questioned by Birdboot’s betrayal of trust in philandering with actresses whose reputations he has meretriciously made (RIH 17). Stoppard does not so much break frames as play with them, and his work is as culinary as ever, the mirror of the audience as consumer. The Real Thing, then, is described as a play about the ‘reality’ of one’s emotions, rather than about the medium itself. The play’s revival at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 1999 prompted John Peter in the Sunday Times to say that the first scene was ‘only a play within the play’, to speculate at length about the characters as real people and to praise an actor’s ‘luminous’ performance (all this, as if Brecht had never written). Michael Coveney engaged in a Birdboot moment by talking of ‘the delectable Miss [Jennifer] Ehle’, who played Annie. (He was writing in the Daily Mail after all!) Even the Guardian’s Michael Billington foregrounded the real emotional content over the form: ‘Stoppard is really a romantic who uses cerebration as a shield against emotional excess.’ 26 27

Tom Stoppard (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 74. Cf. Van Lochon’s well-known engraving, ‘Le Soir’, showing Louis XIII and other members of the French royal family watching a performance of Le Ballet de la Prospérité des Armes de France at the Palais-Cardinal in 1641.

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And the Spectator’s Sheridan Morley said that the play involved ‘not just love but betrayal, divorce, obsession, anger, anguish and reconciliation’ (Was it a Hollywood movie?), and only added afterwards that ‘in it somewhere are some truly wondrous insights into the craft of the dramatist.’ 28 Again, then, these critics present paradigms of ‘the real thing’ in their insouciance to that Futurist irony, as depicted in Marinetti’s ‘Variety Theatre, 1913’, which would foreground a viewpoint which ‘mechanizes sentiment’,29 but which in these critics apparently partakes more of the knee-jerk reaction to what newspaper reviews should be, the equivalent of the human interest story in the arts section or feuilleton perhaps. The changes of scene, frame and register appear incidental to this criticism, although it could well be said that, by foregrounding Henry and his woes, Stoppard indeed slips back into what Kandinsky, in his 1912 essay ‘On Stage Composition’, claims was the ‘form of the drama’ of the time: ‘External happenings and the eternal unity of the action.’ 30 However, given that so many of Stoppard’s critics have focused perhaps too much on the ‘inner life’, it is paradoxically (contra Kandinsky) in the oscillation between the Kandinskyesque external (the regard for the outer world) and an interstitiality that has replaced the ‘eternal’ that Stoppard’s drama moves. Toby Zinman draws attention to the ‘Chinese-box succession of sets as [The Real Thing] moves from one living room to another.’ 31 Yet the juxtaposition of scenes is necessarily temporal rather than spatial, and one set is not subsumed within the other. Every scene, as Brecht notes of his ‘epic form’, should be regarded on its own terms (‘jede Szene für sich’),32 and Stoppard goes partway to this fulfilment. In Jenkins’s view, ‘[I]nterconnecting pictures dictate the structure of the entire play, so that we continually challenge the reality of one such picture in relation to another.’ 33 One painting or tableau in a series cancels out, or at least modifies, the impression created by the one before, as in Macbeth’s imagination at the banquet and, to give a more contemporary example, Heiner Müller’s Bildbeschreibung.34 To return then

28

29

30

31

32

33 34

All quotations from reviews of David Leveaux’s 1999 production of The Real Thing are taken from (accessed 21 April 2006). Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Apollonio (1970), trans. by Robert Brain and others (Boston: MFA, 2001), pp. 128-29. Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 182. ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’, in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. by Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 131. ‘Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater’, in Über experimentelles Theater, ed. by Werner Hecht (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 81. Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pp. 160-61. Werke 2. Die Prosa, ed. by Frank Hörningk (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 112-19.

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to Bloom’s argument adumbrated at the beginning here, one could say that one frame ‘contaminates’ the next one, even though the principle is that what is described as chronologically prior is not necessarily aetiologically or causally antecedent. Post hoc, of course, is not propter hoc, either in chronology or in any identification of scenic series. For example, in scene 11 of The Real Thing, Henry – jokingly – says that Bach had plagiarized Procul Harum: he had heard the latter’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ before Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ and so for him the pop song predated the baroque piece (RT 74). The audience laughs, perhaps rather mildly, at this ignorance (more likely we are puzzled by it), yet Stoppard plays with the hysteron proteron principle throughout. Henry can differentiate ‘good writing’ from the banal (RT 50), but he cannot apply such generic principles to music. He confuses Verdi with Strauss (RT 44) and thinks that there are two Italian composers named Verdi, one Giuseppe and the other Monty (as in ‘the full’, rather than ‘mountain’). All that which would constitute the ‘frame’ of one composer’s music, and place it generically and historically – its instrumentation, patterns of repetition, gradients of crescendo and diminuendo, etc. – are not salient features for him; consequently, any musical historical charting of oppositions and progress is impossible. This inability to define an origin and thus a cogent holistic perspective in an immanent world which provides anticipation, but which by definition denies transcendence, is evidenced in the sequencing of rehearsals, where personal motivation and desire contaminate the words. Henry says that ‘words are sacred’ (RT 53), but the play shows that such transcendence is impossible; there is always in a performance what Brecht calls the attention ‘to everything unsteadfast, fleeting [...] to the contradictions in all conditions’;35 one should, as he suggests in his defence of Peter Lorre’s acting in Mann ist Mann, ‘play against the flow’,36 or, as he writes, famously, in a later piece, an actor should ‘go on functioning as long as possible as a reader’.37 One can ‘read’ the words of another, in this sense, but one is always taken to imbue them with one’s own voice and discursive purpose. In The Real Thing, this is most apparent in a short section from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, which Annie (now married to Henry) and the younger actor Billy act out on the

35

36

37

‘. . . auf alles Unfeste, Flüchtige . . . auf die Widersprüche in allen Zuständen’ ‘Notizen über die Dialektik auf dem Theater’, in Über experimentelles Theater, p. 154. ‘The Question of Criteria in Judging Acting’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 55. ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect’, in Brecht on Theatre, p. 137.

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InterCity train from London to Glasgow, where they are to appear as incestuous lovers, Giovanni and Annabella: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (I.iii.176-219)38 GIOVANNI Come, sister, lend your hand, let’s walk together; I hope you need not blush to walk with me; Here’s none but you and I. ANNABELLA How’s this? GIOVANNI I’faith, I mean no harm. ANNABELLA Harm? GIOVANNI No, good faith; how is it with thee? ANNABELLA (Aside) I trust he be not frantic – (Aloud) I am very well, brother. GIOVANNI Trust me, but I am sick; I fear so sick, ’Twill cost my life. ANNABELLA Mercy forbid it! ’tis not so, I hope.

The Real Thing, scene 6 (pp. 57-58) ANNIE If you weren’t a child, you’d know that you won’t get anywhere with a married woman if you’re snotty abut her husband. Remember that with the next one. BILLY I’faith, I mean no harm, sister. I’m just scared sick of you. How is’t with ye?

ANNIE I am very well, brother. BILLY Trust me, but I am sick; I fear so sick ‘twill cost my life. ANNIE Mercy forbid it! ’Tis not so, I hope.

GIOVANNI I think you love me, sister. ANNABELLA Yes, you know I do. GIOVANNI I know’t, indeed – y’are very fair. ANNABELLA Nay, then I see you have a merry sickness. GIOVANNI That’s as it proves.

BILLY I think you love me, sister. ANNIE Yes, you know I do. BILLY I know’t, indeed. You’re very fair. ANNIE Nay, then, I see you have a merry sickness. BILLY That’s as it proves.

[…]

[…]

ANNABELLA Fie upon ’ee! ANNIE Fie upon ye! GIOVANNI The lily and the rose, most sweetly BILLY The lily and the rose, most sweetly strange, strange, Upon your dimpled cheeks do strive for Upon your dimpled cheeks do strive change: for change: Such lips would tempt a saint: such hands Such lips would tempt a saint; such as those hands as those Would make an anchorite lascivious. Would make an anchorite lascivious. […]

38

[…]

While Stoppard appears to have used the text edited by W. Gifford in vol. 1 of The Dramatic Works of John Ford, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1827), I have used the Revels edition, by Derek Rogers (London: Methuen, 1975). Stoppard’s own text is in italics.

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ANNABELLA Oh, you are a trim youth! GIOVANNI Here! – (Offers his dagger to her) ANNABELLA What to do?

ANNIE O, you are a trim youth! BILLY Here! (His ‘reading’ been getting less and less discreet. Now he stands up and opens his shirt.) ANNIE (Giggling) Oh, leave off. (She looks around nervously.)

GIOVANNI And here’s my breast, strike home! Rip up my bosom, there thou shalt behold A heart in which is writ the truth I speak Why stand ’ee? ANNABELLA Are you earnest? GIOVANNI Yes, most earnest. You cannot love? – ANNABELLA Whom? GIOVANNI Me. My tortured soul Hath felt affliction in the heat of death. Oh, Annabella, I am quite undone!

BILLY (Starting to shout) And here’s my breast; strike home! Rip up my bosom, there thou shalt behold A heart in which is writ the truth I speak. ANNIE You daft idiot. BILLY Yes, most earnest You cannot love? ANNIE Stop it. BILLY My tortured soul Hath felt affliction in the heat of death. Oh, Annabella, I am quite undone!

‘His “reading” been getting less and less discreet’ (RT 58): he is not cautious, circumspect enough (given that they are on a train), but also – to trace the word back to its Latin root – not discrete enough in discriminating between the play and the present purpose. The relapses to the personal serve as commentary on the material’s ebullience, its balance, and on the clichés apparent – and even in Ford’s day, perhaps – in the metaphor of love written on the heart. With Billy’s shirt open, the primary connotation of ‘undone’ is changed to buttoning, rather than the moral dilemma of loving one’s sister. That the passion can only be conveyed through seventeenth-century language shows that this passion is as unreal as the characters portrayed. This in turn reverses the Hamlet paradigm; if Hamlet wants to use the play within the play to discover something of which he is not certain (Claudius’ guilt), Billy would like to think that Ford’s dialogue here reveals what is known but which, for decorum’s sake, cannot be expressed. And yet there is no such distinction between what is thought and what is expressed, either in authentic sentiment or in linguistic theory, as the expression does not predate the content of the message, but both forms and informs this message itself. Set on a train, this scene is not, of course, a rehearsal in the true sense, nor a read-through, as the primary frame – Billy’s desire for Annie – is retained throughout, unlike scene 8, which shows a presumed re-

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hearsal of a slightly later scene from Ford’s play (II.i), which shows Giovanni and Annabella after they have consummated their love. While Stoppard’s later scene, played twice ‘to accommodate a scene change’ (once as a ‘word rehearsal’ and once as ‘an acting rehearsal’), plays the Ford straight, with no interpolations or interruptions in its twenty or so lines, it ends with the ‘earnest’ kiss Annie gives to Billy. Again, in its details, there is a ludic, ironic ephemerality in the scene, worthy of much modernist writing, but Stoppard collapses this, as the imperatives of the outer frame require. Here then, as so often in Stoppard, the provisional is regulated by the compulsion to exact decisions and pattern climaxes, and thus inevitably perhaps relapses to traditional mimetic Aristotelianism at last. The play within the play, therefore, even if, as here, it extends to the very limits of the transitive space between theatron and dramaton (that is, the audience cannot know at the outset whether they are watching ‘the real thing’), shows both the limitations of all theatrical innovation, which a predominantly middle-class audience increasingly expects and against which, therefore, it is already inoculated, and also the limitations of the societal role of theatre today.

Ulrike Landfester

The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss’s Postmodern Metadrama and the History of Theatrical Reality

In the traditional play within the play established most notably by Shakespeare, the Fool is the one persona allowed or even bound to speak what the drama stages as ‘the truth’, this ‘truth’ being the knowledge of just where the boundaries between the metadrama’s different levels of playacting are to be found. In postmodernist play-within-the-play structures, for example in Botho Strauss’s comedy Besucher (1988), the Fool as a stage persona has become invisible. This very invisibility, however, underscored as it is by the recurrence of the word ‘Narr’ and other allusions to the theatrical tradition of the visible Fool in the play within the play, serves to keep the Fool very much present, in the shape of a blank which must be filled by a knowledge about ‘truth’ which threatens to be lost together with theatre itself.

In the traditional play within the play established most notably by Shakespeare, the Fool is the one persona allowed, or even bound, to speak what the drama stages as ‘the truth’. This ‘truth’ is the knowledge of exactly where the boundaries between the metadrama’s different levels of playacting are to be found – and, more importantly, where they are superseded by those levels’ structural affinities to each other. Whenever the Fool tells the truth about the relationship between the play and the play within the play, he also tells the truth about the structural affinity between the drama onstage and reality offstage. Thus it is the Fool’s privilege to reveal that fact and fiction, or, in terms of the drama, playacting and reality, not only both participate in basically the same formal designs of communication, but that the significance of each is dependent on that of the other. The Fool makes it clear that there is no speaking the truth without using theatrical forms to express it, while on the other hand the form’s self-conscious theatricality paradoxically serves to underscore that what is spoken is, in fact, the truth. Especially in his later works, Botho Strauss stages patterns of the play within the play that finally allow no one, least of all the audience, to locate such boundaries. Again and again his protagonists lapse from their parts on one level and relapse into them as soon as another level seems established. The simple concept of the play within the play turns into an undistinguishable multitude of what, in the end, cannot even be called different levels of acting.

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Strauss’s metadrama thus surpasses the epistemological doubt introduced into the play within the play by German Romanticism, doubting the ontological security of there being, after all, recourse to a single reality. Strauss makes it very clear that while Romantic playwrights at the end of the eighteenth century took up the Shakespearean tradition of the play within the play and showed an artistic value derived from the blurring of any difference between playacting and reality, in the twentieth century there are no such boundaries to be blurred, only a compound of realities derived from individual ways of performing one’s identity. The perception of reality that is the subject matter of postmodern theatre1 does not allow for the secure knowledge of a sphere that is perfectly and unshakeably authentic, untouched by any infestation of fictional elements. Reality is constituted by a flow of information that owes as much – and probably a lot more – to the techniques of simulation used by the new media in conveying such information as to the factual events reported. Between the ritualistic aspects of communication and the loss of any co-ordinating influence on the ever-growing multitude of specialized micro-languages, this ‘medialisation’ of reality confronts the postmodern theatre with a singularly paradoxical situation. The lack of a co-ordinating macro-code of communication throws everybody back on his or her own self-conception for the security of his or her identification, as Lyotard put it, concomitantly instilling knowledge of this security’s arbitrariness,2 while the growing awareness of the imminent theatricality of the ‘real’ led to the paradigm of performance taking hold in literally every sphere of social existence. If this is what the postmodern theatre aims at exhibiting, then it is anything but remarkable that it can, even must, dispense with the Fool persona. The differences once managed by the 1

2

For a typological description of the postmodernist theatre see Alfonso de Toro, ‘Die Wege des zeitgenössischen Theaters – Zu einem postmodernen Multimedia-Theater oder: das Ende des mimetisch-referentiellen Theaters?’, Forum Modernes Theater, 10 (1995), 135-83. De Toro states that postmodern theatre, developing since ca. 1970, ‘ist gekennzeichnet durch seine Ambiguität, seine Diskontinuität, seine Heterogenität, durch Pluralismus, Subversion, Perversion, Deformation, Dekonstruktion und Dekreation, es ist antimimetisch und widersetzt sich der Interpretation. Es handelt sich um ein Theater, in dem Kunst als Fiktion und das Theater als Prozeß, Performance, Nicht-Textualität gefeiert werden (‘is characterized by ambiguity, discontinuity, heterogeneity, pluralism, subversion, perversion, deformation, deconstruction and de-creation; it is anti-mimetic and resists interpretation. It is a theatre in which art is celebrated as fiction and theatre as process, performance, non-textuality’; 137). See also Dieter Kafitz, ‘Bilder der Troslosigkeit und Zeichen des Mangels.: zum deutschen Drama der Postmoderne’, in Tendenzen des Gegenwartstheaters, ed. by Wilfried Floeck (Tübingen: Francke, 1988), pp. 157-75. See Jean-François Lyotard, Das postmoderne Wissen: ein Bericht, trans. by Otto Pfersmann, ed. by Peter Engelmann (Vienna: Passagen, 1986), p. 54.

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Fool seem to have comprehensively lost their importance for the state of consciousness with which theatrical discourse used to concern itself. In Strauss’s postmodern metadrama, however, there remain two aspects of the Fool’s absence to be accounted for, aspects which lead one to believe that this absence must be treated as conspicuous, indeed even as an invisible presence. On the one hand, by having his personae lapse in and out of roles, Strauss obviously works on the assumption that there is a difference between two or more levels of playacting, so that his aesthetics of metaleptics still realise the Fool’s privilege, however rudimentary. On the other hand, the term ‘fool’ (Narr) itself appears recurrently in his plays, sometimes in a title, such as the 2001 Der Narr und seine Frau heute abend in Pancomedia (‘The Fool and his Wife Tonight in ‘Pancomedia’), where there is no Fool among the protagonists, and sometimes, even more significantly, in lines spoken by protagonists who are desperately seeking hold where the sequence of metaleptic changes offer none, as in the earlier comedy Besucher (1988). These appearances serve to create an intense awareness of the Fool’s presence, even if the concretisation of a dramatis persona is denied him. The lines sketched above suggest that the invisible Fool’s significance in Strauss’s metadrama may well be due, at least in part, to a radicalization of what has always been part of the visible Fool’s history. The earliest Fool on record dates back to ca. 3000 B.C.; the position of the Fool in the sense of the jester was a social institution and as such part of the institution of the royal court. His job description covered the typical function of merry-making at public events as well as, more often than not, that of close companion, even friend, to the king. The institution of the Fool was found by Beatrice Otto to have existed in every historical society that was hierarchical, the king’s caste strictly distinguished from that of his subjects.3 It is in fact this distinction which both fuels and marks the Fool’s specific social position. Sheltered by an a priori acknowledgement of his words’ fictionality, the king’s jester is privileged to speak truths which, if spoken by anybody else, would be deemed treacherous; armed with this privilege, the Fool can act as intermediary between the sphere of the king’s perception of reality formed by the ritualist behaviour of court life and that of the framing, ‘real’ reality of his subjects. Taking on the Fool as its structurally most important dramatis persona, Shakespearean metadrama stages his truth as that of a fixed world order kept

3

See Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For the history of the Fool, see also Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935) and Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).

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in place by God.4 This God, master director of all, directs man’s playacting just as he directs reality, so that all boundaries between playing and reality are those between different levels of playing installed to advance awareness of God’s omnipotence.5 As such they are mirrored by the play within the play on the theatre stage, the structure of which in itself simply exhibits the relationship between playing and being as it is placed by the topos of the theatrum mundi: ‘Ist die ganze Welt Spiel, so ist das Theater schon Spiel im Spiel’ (‘If the whole world is play, then theatre is always play within play’).6 Under these circumstances, the persona of the Fool, pointing out, in the words of the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, that ‘[a]ll the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players’,7 balances precariously on the narrow brink between the affirmative and the subversive. Even in his ostentatious resignation he seems to imply blasphemously that there is a sphere where men and women might be more than ‘merely players’. Precarious it is, but balance he does, a trickster jesting his way across the boundaries between levels of playacting. If the ‘purpose of playing, […] both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’,8 reflecting an historical reality consisting of separate political and social spheres, the Shakespearean Fool embodies the aims of the play within the play, i.e. the privilege of both showing 4

5

6

7

8

The terms ‘play within the play’ and ‘metadrama’ have been repeatedly discussed. The former is generally applied to a structure which puts forth a play within the framework of a consistent masterplot, this structure being not necessarily a priori concerned with the subject of the theatre, while the latter explicitly denotes the processes of creating, staging and performing. As I am concerned with the concept of theatrical reality as shown by the play within the play, this distinction is academic in my case and I use both terms synonymously. For the term ‘Spiel im Spiel’, see Joachim Voigt, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel: Versuch einer Formbestimmung an Beispielen aus dem deutschen, englischen und spanischen Drama’ (unpublished dissertation, University of Göttingen, 1954); for the term ‘metadrama’, see Karin Vieweg-Marks, Metadrama und englisches Gegenwartsdrama, Literarische Studien, 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1989). See Manfred Karnick, Rollenspiel und Welttheater: Untersuchungen an Dramen Calderons, Schillers, Strindbergs, Becketts und Brechts (Munich: Fink, 1980), pp. 16-17. Bernhard Greiner, Welttheater als Montage: Wirklichkeitsdarstellung und Leserbezug in romantischer und moderner Literatur, Medium Literatur, 9 (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1977), p. 19. See also Dietrich Schwanitz, Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie der Lebenswelt und zur Tiefenstruktur des Dramas, Hochschulschriften Literaturwissenschaft, 22 (Meisenheim: Hain, 1977). William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. by H.J. Oliver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), II.7, p. 87. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), III.2, p. 288.

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up and bridging the chasms which divide said spheres by speaking the truth. This truth in the play within the play encompasses not only information carried from one sphere into the other, but also points to their similarity, knowledge of which is deemed necessary for holding both spheres’ functioning intact by making it clear that the difference between them must be held up willingly and strategically. Fulfilling this function, the Fool is the axis which guarantees both the play’s and the world’s integrity by allowing the spheres to meet, even mesh, under the tight control of a trickster who, by always doubting the restrictions put upon man by God, effectively seduces his audience into accepting them. So it is fitting that the first invisible Fool to appear in the history of the play within the play should turn up in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his invisibility representing the threat to ‘all the world’ incurred by the tragedy’s starting point, the vicious murder of the rightful king by his brother. Shortly before the final showdown rights this wrong, Hamlet’s encounter with the Gravedigger opening up old graves for further use gives the crucial clue as to what precisely lies at the bottom of Hamlet’s seemingly mad behaviour. ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, Hamlet mourns, holding in his hand the skull of the late King’s dead jester; without the Fool’s ‘most excellent fancy’,9 the time is ‘out of joint’,10 lacking the trickster to mediate between the spheres and thus endangering the theatrum mundi onstage as well as (by implication) offstage. To put the time back into joint, to pave the way for revenge of his father’s murder by providing the framework of communication necessary for perception of the truth about the murder, Hamlet himself has to take the place of the Fool. To do this, he simulates a madness whose very efficiency depends on being taken seriously by everybody concerned, including himself: assuming the Fool’s privilege, Hamlet can speak the truth about the theatre mirroring ‘nature’ and thus uncover the structural affinity between them. As it is the true content of the play within the play that makes the closure of revenge possible in the framing master play, the closure of the master play in turn points to the truth that theatricality is common to all communication. Precariously and self-destructively replaced as the legitimate heir to the throne – who is himself king in all but form, as the acting king having murdered his predecessor has no right to his position – the Fool’s importance for the theatrical discourse and, through that, for the discourse on reality’s theatricality, is em-

9 10

Hamlet, V.1, p. 386. Hamlet, I.5, p. 228.

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phasized once more by Hamlet’s last words, as with the death of the King turned Fool: ‘The rest is silence’ indeed.11 In the history of German theatre, Gottsched’s banishment of the Fool from the Enlightenment stage in the early eighteenth century was due to the phenomenon that the role of the Fool in early modern theatre had transformed the court jester’s truth privilege into the Fool’s license to improvise freely – and lewdly – in direct reaction to his audience. This meant that the Fool constitutionally threatened the distance between play and audience necessary to the ideal moral and aesthetic wholeness of didactic Enlightenment theatre. Gottsched’s cleansing act, however, might have remained merely an episode, had not the French Revolution of 1789 rendered the classical Fool obsolete by dramatically challenging the pre-modern idea of man ordained by God to fill the social position he was born into. The fact that dramatists from then to the present have chosen to set their plays within the play in the context of this Revolution – e.g. Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller – is testimony to the fundamental change wrought in 1789 when the hierarchical separation of social spheres was, at least in theory, overthrown in favour of the idea that man could and should take responsibility for his own life and its achievements. This development affected the history of the metadrama in a contradictory way, reflecting already the ontological problem later tackled by postmodern dramatists like Strauss. On the one hand, Romantic authors like Ludwig Tieck and Clemens Brentano created metadramatic plays that mirrored the new reality by subverting the traditional structure into a perfect mise en abyme that afforded no security of perception on any levels of play. With the background of the metaleptic breaking up of the ancien régime, metalepsis, once carefully controlled by the Fool, now changed into a near-autonomous mode of representation. The Revolution had effectively exposed the historical structure on which the traditional play within the play had been based as what its Fools always had known it to be – an artificial instrument for imposing order on a reality which, in truth and opposed to what clerical and political powers had argued before, was not naturally organized by class separations.12 Consequently, the Romantic metadrama no longer needs the Fool to point out explicitly that all the world’s a stage. Moreover, as the Fool’s voice cannot but imply the authority of a sovereign power that keeps the playing spheres apart, the Fool finds himself dethroned along with his king. In his comedy Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss In Boots) Ludwig Tieck ascribed the same ridi-

11 12

Hamlet, V.2, p. 416. See Axel Schalk, Geschichtsmaschinen: über den Umgang mit der Historie in der Dramatik des technischen Zeitalters (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsverlag, 1989), pp. 71-96.

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culous superfluity to both King and Fool, pointedly leaving to the Poet the privilege of telling the truth about the time being out of joint without any possibility of restoring its former status quo. However, the Romantic metadramas’ reception in their time proved that the public depended on the tangible separation of spheres now more than ever before: Brentano’s metadramatic capriccios were not even staged, and the first performance of Der gestiefelte Kater was not successful because the audience, far from being amused, were openly furious at the disorienting proceedings onstage – particularly when actors crossed the border between the stage and the unsuspecting spectators in the front rows. The audience felt cheated of the hoped-for theatrical illusion. While the Shakespearean metadrama had exhibited ‘truth’ as the knowledge that man’s existence on earth was nothing but that of a puppet, the emancipation of man in the name of reason required a strict separation between playing and reality in order to establish a firm ground of authenticity on which man could rely for his sense of self; that included plays being unquestionably and consistently fictitious. Subsequently, at least German metadrama has more or less had to revert to conventional lines to achieve stage success, and the Fool has subsided into an unobtrusive, if persistent, existence at fairgrounds, in carnival festivities and puppet shows. With the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea – still mainly theoretical, of course – of man shaping his own social position without being hampered by prescribed roles merged with the development of the then new audiovisual media into a conception of reality which focussed on epistemological frameworks of perception. The questions posed to reality were now concerned with ways and means to organize knowledge about it which, as Brian McHale notes, is a typically modern approach, as opposed to the postmodern questioning of ways and means to organize reality or even realities.13 Looking at the play within the play within this period of so-called ‘classical modernism’, the Fool (in contrast to Romantic ‘early modernism’, when he still played at least a token role) is already invisible in a way similar to the postmodern play within the play; his presence is part of the play without manifesting itself as a dramatis persona. Arthur Schnitzler’s one-act play Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo), first staged in 1898, gives a particularly fine example of the early invisible Fool. Set on the day when the Revolution of 1789 began, the play denounces the difference between play and reality as a collective cultural fantasy. In a pub called The Green Cockatoo, the former theatre director 13

Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987).

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Prospère combines his old profession with that of host: his ensemble assume the roles of prostitutes and murderers, thieves and even revolutionaries to provide the blasé nobility visiting the pub with the frisson of mixing with the most dangerous subjects in all Paris. (Of course, the audience remain secure in the knowledge that the atrocities narrated and partially enacted by Prospère’s crew are nothing but make-believe.) When the Revolution breaks out in the streets outside the pub, it only confirms what is happening inside the pub. None of the characters assembled there manage to tell play from reality, so much so, that when the leading actor gives a spectacularly passionate account of having murdered the Duke of Cadignan moments earlier because he had found the Duke in bed with his – the actor’s – woman, the host’s horrified reaction provides him with the information that the said woman has indeed been betraying him with the Duke for months. Right on cue, the Duke himself appears and is promptly murdered by the infuriated actor, this time ‘for real’. With the Revolution already under way, the rules that would have condemned a nobleman’s murderer to death mere hours before the crime was committed have changed, and the murderer is forthwith celebrated euphorically for his service to the young republic. At the beginning of the play the Duke had explicitly ascribed the term ‘Fool’ to one of its characters, thus the Duke’s murder equals the abolition of King and Fool alike along lines similar to the Romantic metadrama. Having been elaborately insulted by Prospère, the Duke muses aloud: ‘Wenn ich der König wäre, würde ich ihn zu meinem Hofnarren machen, das heißt, ich würde mir viele Hofnarren halten, aber er wäre einer davon.’ (‘If I was king I would make him my jester, that is I would have many jesters, but he would be one of them.’).14 Prospère’s position can indeed be said to resemble that of the classical Fool, to the extent that at first he is the only one of the characters who can explain to the police officer investigating his pub for revolutionary tendencies precisely where the boundaries between playing and reality are drawn in his pub. During the course of the play, however, the qualities of the knowledgeable functionary of theatricality are successively deconstructed, until Prospère’s Foolishness degenerates into mere foolishness when he fails to realise that Henri’s story is an act, thus unwillingly instigating the Duke’s murder, while the revolution outside the pub sets the stage for a reality no longer in need of anything like a Hofnarr. As it is, the Duke’s musing itself is conducted in the speculative mode of fiction, the Duke no more a king than Prospère is a traditional Fool (either as the King’s jester or even as the Fool

14

Arthur Schnitzler, Der grüne Kakadu, in Der grüne Kakadu und andere Dramen, Das dramatische Werk, 8 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1977-9), III, p. 25.

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onstage). Prospère had set up his business without the sheltering authorisation of jesting by the sovereign and, moreover, collapses out of his role as a director in unintended and therefore perfectly un-Fool-like clumsiness. The introduction of the term ‘Hofnarr’ thus serves to hint that what lies at the core of the play directed by Prospère (collapsing into its framework and vice versa) is not the category of knowledgeable Foolishness impersonated by one dramatis persona in disguise; rather, it is the embarrassing triviality of a foolishness common to all protagonists without exception. In its extreme form of not being able to even realise, much less articulate, the difference between playing and not playing, this foolishness is most clearly represented by two characters, one of whom speaks only the unadulterated truth, while the other speaks anything but. Early in the play, a ragged newcomer by the name of Grain enters the Green Cockatoo to ask Prospère for a job in the mistaken belief that the pub-theatre’s director would be delighted to have an actor who is entirely truthful about his felonies; Grain hails straight from jail where he has served two years for murdering his aunt. Now Grain wants to become an honest man, but Prospère is appalled at the thought of a real murderer on his premises, and only consents to let Grain stay because of his convincing appearance, the perfect makeup of a murderer. While Grain implicitly insists on ‘reality’ being the perfect stepping stone for an actor imitating it mirrorfashion, the former actor and present politician Grasset suggests the contrary, that playacting is the key to acting ‘real’. Grasset begins boasting of the inflammatory public speeches he makes while drawing on his experience as an actor, and in the end claims authenticity for the voice of the Revolution by loudly approving of the Duke of Cadignan’s murder. He is a liar turning his playacting into a representation of a new political truth. Having shifted the attribution of foolishness once from the honest felon to the dishonest politician, the play leaves its cast wide open to further shifts, by implication including the historical citizens of 1789 Paris as well as the actual audience of 1898; small wonder, then, that Schnitzler’s play was closed by the Austrian court not long after its very successful first night. Boasting many of the characteristics of the postmodern play, especially in view of the connection between metalepsis and the Fool’s invisibility, Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu is in substance still distinctly modern. For Schnitzler, disillusionment concerning the indistinction of playing and not playing still remains a truth, however arcane; moreover, the play’s author can make this truth systematically available to its recipients. Following the logic implemented by Tieck, Schnitzler even has the poet Rollin, in the manner of the author’s mouthpiece, voice the generic impossibility of distinguishing between playing and being: ‘Sein…spielen…kennen Sie den Unterschied so

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genau […]? […] Ich nicht.’ (‘To be…to play…do you know the difference so very well […]? […] I don’t.’)15 There is, however, at least one important difference to be discerned between the Fools in modern and postmodern invisibility. While Schnitzler is still concerned with the topical analysis of reali-ty’s theatricality as such, presenting at least an atrophied version of the Fool’s role onstage to be identified, Botho Strauss in his comedy Besucher (1988) uses the term ‘Fool’ only to signify that no such role can any longer be distinguished among the dramatis personae. Here Strauss is concerned with the modes and techniques of simulation through which a given individual might define him- or herself within the flow of images – visual and others – constituting reality at the end of the twentieth century.16 The play begins and ends in a theatre, but what looks like a simply constructed frame for a play or plays within quickly dispenses with any pretention to coherent levels of playing, shifting abruptly from rehearsal stage to living room to bar to fairground to a TV station and back to a stage. Crossing all those spaces without ever motivating his transitions, the young actor Max is driven by the desire to fill his existence’s empty stage by means of performing a charismatic, even auratic identity.17 To achieve this, he draws all the play’s characters into a playing game seemingly promising himself as prize – seemingly, because the others are playing just the same game with just the same end in view. The famous actor and male protagonist of the rehearsed play, Karl Joseph, imposes the double bind of ‘Sei frei’ (‘Be free’) to enforce the actor’s conventional adherence to the script which marks his (Karl Joseph’s) hitherto successful technique of playacting, while Max, feeling threatened and marginalized by the play’s rigid textuality, tends to 15 16

17

Der grüne Kakadu, p. 33. Strauss’s earlier works are mainly concerned with the relationship between contemporary consciousness and the perception of the theatre in its conventional sense. It is only with Besucher that he programmatically crosses the line towards a theory of the theatre in connection with contemporary media, even if studies written before the publication of Besucher already diagnose many of the elements that later became part of his concept of theatrical as ‘mediatised’ reality. It might, however unlikely, even be supposed that Strauss was aware of these diagnoses when he wrote his comedy. See Monika Sandhack, Jenseits des Rätsels: Versuch einer Spurensicherung im dramatischen Werk von Botho Strauss, European University Studies: Series 1, German Language and Literature, 905 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1986); Ursula Kapitza, Bewusstseinsspiele: Drama und Dramaturgie bei Botho Strauss, Literarische Untersuchungen, 9 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1987) and Verena Plümer, Zur Entwicklung und Dramaturgie der Dramen von Botho Strauss, European University Studies: Series 1, German Language and Literature, 942 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1986). For the ambiguous significance of the paradigm ‘performance’ for postmodernist drama, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Postmoderne Performance: Rückkehr zum rituellen Theater?’, Arcadia, 22 (1987), 55-65.

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disrupt rehearsals, feeling that performance should develop from the process of playing itself. The equally famous actress Edna Gruber, cast as the female lead, at the same time seduces Max with devastating efficiency by prophesying that he will only have one other chance of love during his entire life – a prophesy she uses on men she desires at every given opportunity, unashamedly using it to introduce yet another love scene into her life. At the same time, Max is in danger of losing Lena because he won’t tell her that he loves her, believing the words Ich liebe dich to be an exhausted line and not worthy of his feelings. The problem exposed by Max’s violent detestation of textuality in all its forms, private or public, is that of being conscious that however authentic the individual experience, the words necessary to communicate it have been used before and thus, considered in their textual materiality, can never be anything but lines quoted from somebody else’s script.18 Thwarted in his hopes to convert Karl Joseph to his aesthetics of a living, ever-changing performance on stage – ‘Revolution um der Revolution willen, das ist l’art pour l’art’ (‘Revolution for the sake of revolution, that is l’art pour l’art.’) 19 – Max is rebuked by Karl Joseph and his ideas denounced as intrinsically conventional and, by implication, textual. Having delivered a catastrophically incongruous, if spontaneous, statement during a conference on TV, Max turns to the fairground for a space in which to stage an unrestrained identity performance. Here, however, where the traditional play within the play – see, for example, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair – establishes a kind of topos in which the script followed by everyday existence is annulled by the carnivalesque’s laws of exception, Max still more emphatically than before finds himself anything but a singular individual. Looking into a broken mirror,20 he gains ‘einen äußerst verwechselbaren Eindruck’ (‘an impression extremely susceptible to being mistaken’) of the face reflected there. Worse still, when he identifies the entrepreneur of the throwing range as a fool, obviously hoping for the Fool’s authority on the difference between playing and being, the entrepreneur echoes Max’s line like that rehearsed from a script: MAX WURFBUDENMANN 18

19

20

Ich sehe, Sie sind ein Narr. Sie sind ein Narr.

See the study of this particular problem in Andreas Englhart, Im Labyrinth des unendlichen Textes: Botho Strauss’ Theaterstücke, 1972-1996 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 171-88. Botho Strauss, Besucher, in Drei Stücke (Munich: Hanser, 1988), p. 22. Further references will be by page number in the text. See Kenneth Little, ‘Masochism, Spectacle, and the “Broken Mirror” Clown entree: A Note on the Anthropology of Performance in Postmodern Culture’, Cultural Anthropology, 8 (1993), pp. 117-29.

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MAX

Es ist enttäuschend, am Ende seiner Wege anzukommen und dort als erstes jemanden wie sich selber zu treffen. (66)

(MAX SHOWGROUNDMAN MAX

I see you are a fool. You are a fool. It is disappointing to reach the end of one’s road and the first thing you’ll find there is someone like yourself.)

Max’s desire for the truth includes a pathological misinterpretation of his perceptions, a quality which might be pronounced narcissistic self-love if anything approaching a positive and distinguishable self were not so utterly and conspicuously absent from the persona itself. The concept of ‘someone like yourself’, disappointingly encountered at what Max believes the end of his wanderings, is that of a negative self, the image of a vacuum created by the excess of identically preformed images inscribed into the idea of ‘self’ through the intermedial linkages in the fabric of what Max experiences as reality. Contemporary media of communication – represented by the TV conference, a walkie-talkie, an advertisement whose subject, a girl posing with a diamond, talks back at Max, and, last but not least, an eye-shaped loudspeaker – have left techniques of mimesis behind in favour of a referenceless flow of audiovisual artifacts which lead any quest for identity ultimately to the unsubstantial existence of oneself as a bodiless image generated by those media. ‘Gehen Sie ins Kino!’ (‘Go to the movies!’), Max desperately cries out: ‘Sehen Sie dort: die Methode erzeugt Gespenster’ (‘you’ll see: the method creates ghosts’; 22), populating countless worlds with equally countless ghosts or spectres like Max himself. Now that everybody speaks the truth about everybody else, everybody talks in jest, and no position of power maintains the order once imposed on reality by guarding it fiercely against the intrusion of different spheres of playing on each other: ‘Jeder des anderen Narr. Und keiner mehr gehört zu einem König.’(‘Everyone everyone else’s fool. And nobody belongs to a king anymore’; 74) And at the end of the comedy the rehearsal begins again – similar to what it had been earlier in every detail save one: the director’s table is now nowhere to be seen. This missing table opens Strauss’s comedy programmaticcally towards virtual reality. With the electronically-based possibilities of simulation, everybody owns his own director’s table; the rules organizing the simulation of artificial worlds are rules implemented technically and their relationship with what Schnitzler still recognized as a ‘reality’, however ontologically doubtful, has lost any representational quality. Now, not even the tension between textuality and performance remains as a space for the Fool to appear invisibly between the textual term ‘Narr’ and the process of Max’s fruitless revolution against the strategic elements imminent in any, even the

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most radically self-centred, performance; a process which still bears a remote resemblance to the classical Fool’s ambivalence. Characterised by Karl Joseph as a time when ‘das gesprochene Wort noch König war auf der Bühne’ (‘when the spoken word was still king on the stage’; 81), modern theatre has lost its authority to postmodern performance theatre, while the latter is in danger of losing even its precarious hold on the reality of the act of staging, as the director’s table and with it the last bastion of the boundaries between playing and being is removed from sight, leaving behind the omnipresence of an intrinsically theatrical reality where offstage is always onstage: ‘Zuletzt’, Karl Joseph resignedly states finally, ‘verlassen der König und sein Narr die Bühne. Ordnung und Unordnung ziehen gemeinsam ab’ (p. 84) (‘Finally, the king and his jester leave the stage, order and disorder disappear together’; 84), and as far as the institution of the ‘real’ theatre is concerned, now more than ever the rest is indeed silence. In 1992 Strauss elaborated on this melancholy diagnosis by publishing a collection of essays titled Beginnlosigkeit (Beginlessness). All the essays deal with the relationship between theatricality and reality as determined by the field of tension between, on the one hand, the loss of authenticity characterizing the so-called ‘real’ at the end of the twentieth century and, on the other, the indubitable reality of cultural theatricality. Within this field of tension, postmodern drama is only one of many different media existing simultaneously, indistinguishably intertwined. Seen with this background, the Fool’s invisibility in Strauss’s plays gains its significance from the idea of playacting as such: ‘Der Mime’, Strauss remarks on the development of the art of drama since early modernity, ‘Trickster des modernen Bewusstseins, dem es gelang, sich der Affekte der früheren Epochen zu bedienen, deckt eine Weile noch seinen zerrissenen Zustand mit zerrissenen Gebärden ab. [...] Im Spiel der Spiele indessen gewinnen weder Tod noch Leben, sondern allein der künstliche Gesell.’ (‘The mime, trickster of modern consciousness, who succeeded in appropriating the affects of earlier epochs, could manage for a while to cover his tattered condition with tattered gestures. […] However, in the play of all plays neither death nor life can win, only the artificial comrade.’) 21 Careful to use the word ‘Mime’ instead of ‘Schauspieler’, the actor, Strauss develops his concept of playacting from the mimetic capacity used by the actor to embody a persona instead of simply speaking its lines. Thus, the ‘Mime’ represents the tension between the power of the textual material to which Karl Joseph adheres and the art of performance practised by the perso21

Botho Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit: Reflexionen über Fleck und Linie (Munich: Hanser, 1992), p. 25.

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na of Max, displaying this tension as the ‘zerrissenen Zustand’, the tattered condition, of playacting within a present in which the distinction between playing and ‘Tod und Leben’, death and life, has become obsolete. What remains is the ‘künstliche Gesell’, the artificial comrade who has not only lost whatever ‘life’ the actor identifying with his role breathed into it during times when theatre and reality were clearly separated, but who also (due to the same logic which, because of this separation, had invested the artificial life onstage with its specific reality) has become a descriptive category for man both onstage and offstage. Seen in this light, the postmodern play within the play texts’ invisible Fool still acts as an intermediary in the sense of bridging and at the same time stabilizing the chasms between different levels of playing. He is an intermediary who, by being turned into an invisible presence at the time when the aesthetics of metalepsis replaces the traditional structure of the play within the play, becomes a means for underscoring the truth privilege of metalepsis in itself, while his conspicuous absence functions as a blank to be filled – and identified with – by actors and audience alike. Quite literally, however, there is more to the invisible Fool than meets the eye: in postmodern drama he transcends his significance for the once different spheres of playing towards a new significance both linking and keeping apart different media as different modes of cultural theatricality. One notes that the concept of theatricality applied to the texts quoted above is based mainly on literary, i.e. textual, evidence. The reason for this is the condition of the invisible Fool’s existence: part of postmodern drama courtesy of its techniques of intertextual bricolage drawing from traditions which, especially in the Fool’s case, are markedly literary and thus textual, the invisible Fool, apart from his structural significance as such, represents the residuary of literary aesthetics in the flow of audiovisual artifacts which constitutes present-day perceptions of reality, so that his invisible presence may even be said to retain the memory of the knowledge that the systematic employment of intermediary strategies has its roots in dramatic literature.

2. The Theatre and its Audience

Shimon Levy

Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and Ethical Metatheatricality

Hanoch Levin (1943-1999), the most prolific contemporary Hebrew playwright, has written 60 plays that have proven to be a major contribution to Israeli culture. He began with scathing political cabaret reviews, continued with ‘Neighbourhood and Family plays’, some of them highly metatheatrical. Since the early 1980s he dealt intensively with the very ethics of the theatrical event and its vicarious enjoyment of agony. In concentrating on the theatrical gaze itself and on the much-too-often merely entertaining aspects of theatre, his play-within-the-play techniques question the precarious relationships between art, message and box office rather than exploiting a free-floating general self-referentiality typical of post-modern tendencies. Many of his horror stricken scenes ought to be appreciated as moral traps for the audience, who are invited to ask themselves to what extremes they are willing to witness in life (as ‘theatre’) the suffering of an other.

1. By far the most prolific, keenest and best-known Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin is less known outside of Hebrew-language cultural circles. Beginning in the late 1960s, Levin, born in 1943, wrote 60 plays (22 of which he directed himself) of increasing finesse and sophistication, and they have gradually proven to be a major contribution to Israeli drama and theatre.1 Levin began with political, satirical cabaret reviews such as You, I and the Next War (1968) and Ketchup (1969), attacking the militaristic hubris that flooded Israel after the Six-Day War victory in 1967. He continued his dramatic course with ‘Family and Neighbourhood’, existential malaise plays depicting lower middle-class anti-heroes who set out to meet the world, the ‘others’ and especially themselves with a sharpened sense of valuelessness. His deliberately two-dimensional puppet-like characters are often motivated by a pseudoCartesian ‘I humiliate (alternatively: ‘I am humiliated’) – ergo I am’. They are also stripped down to basic needs of survival, sex, food, excretion and – 1

About 25 of Levin’s plays have not yet been performed; for details see The Man with the Myth in the Middle. Anthology of New Essays on Hanoch Levin, ed. by Shimon Levy and Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 2004). All translations from Levin’s plays are my own, except otherwise indicated.

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rarely – a minimal degree of respect. Perhaps not so strangely, Levin’s characters are recognizable by Israelis as lower middle-class ‘Ashkenazi’ (Jews of European origin), although he hardly ever uses idiosyncratic characteristics. Later Levin engaged in a dramatic discourse with the Classics, adapting the Bible and various Greek and Sumeric mythological sources in plays such as The Sorrows of Job (after the Biblical Job), The Lost Women of Troy (after Euripides), Everybody Wants to Live (after Alkestis and Everyman). Levin also wrote The Child Dreams, an open parable, examining not so much the Holocaust itself, but rather the Holocaust as an existential filter through which Israelis see their lives. At one and the same time he was a provocative critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians (and other ailments of Israeli life) and a central culture hero deeply rooted in the Israeli social consensus, presented in and represented by the two biggest State- and city-subsidized theatres in Tel Aviv, Habimah and The Cameri. Levin, who died prematurely in 1999, is the most written-about Israeli playwright, whose shows aroused many public scandals as well as receiving enormous critical acclaim. The Queen of a Bathtub production in 1970 was the third in a series of Levin’s three satirical cabarets, and did not comply with the tacit Israeli theatre commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any ugly image of thyself.’ Nonetheless, Queen of a Bathtub must be regarded as radical less because of its politically offensive messages per se, already experienced by squeamish audiences from Aristophanes’s Greece to Brecht’s Germany, and more due to its uniquely local reception. Levin’s characteristically satirical weapons such as exaggeration, distortion and the frequent usage of oral, anal and genital images were reciprocally turned against him by critics and audiences alike, and perceived as clear indications of his overall infantile character and perverse sexuality. Queen of a Bathtub, rather than playing to an aggrandized perception of Zionism, presents the country as a bathroom, a centre for bitter feuds between family members cooped up in a much too small space. The radical rejection qua mode of reception given to Queen of a Bathtub occurred in a country that still takes pride in the highest per capita theatre attendance in the world. Whether a reflection of entertainment or snobbery, theatre in Israel is sometimes taken more seriously than politics, especially such as those criticized by Levin in his shows. Public response to Levin’s scathing satire proves that his critique was right, and serves as a sadly amusing example of the sanctimonious escapism in Israeli society almost forty years ago. More than other Israeli playwrights, Levin harnessed secular liberal Jewish values in waging his war against the right-wing pact between secular national-Israeli and national-religious Israeli political movements. Until the

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late 1960s, Hebrew theatre had been intensely harnessed to the ideology of the Zionist endeavours. In the Hebrew plays of those days, the Palestinians played minor, sometimes symbolic roles as dramatic characters in the work of conscience-burdened Jewish Israelis.2 By the 1960s, Hebrew drama had gained a certain distance from burning ideological issues, a fact well reflected in a more international choice of plays for the repertoire together with a more universal, less local flavour in Hebrew drama itself.3 Nissim Aloni, for example, introduced a highly poetic stage language side-by-side with a kind of Hebrew idiom that had not been used before. His plays, like the highly selfreferential The American Princess that has a film instead of a play within a play and The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter, have enriched the Israeli stage with theatrical imagination while aspiring to emerge from a world drama, ironically not at all Israeli. Similarly pretending to ignore the local political and social scene, Nathan Alterman wrote the self-reflexive ‘ars-poetic’ play, The Inn of Ghosts, vaguely in the footsteps of Goethe’s Faust and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. These are some examples of the delicate balance that Hebrew drama still manages to maintain between specific local issues and an overall, universal struggle of Eros and Thanatos. At the same time, such important plays in the Israeli repertoire (or even canon) present the question about the interrelationships between theatrical self-reference and political messages. In 1969, A.B. Yehoshua wrote A Night in May, examining the precarious thresholds of Israeli sanity threatened by inner and external conflicts, using no metatheatrical devices. The play is set in a small Jerusalem apartment, a semi-underground, tomb-womb-like space in which the members of one family try to sort out their interrelated neuroses on the eve of the Six-Day War (June 1967). During the early 1970s (because the politically and aesthetically radical 1960s reached Israel belatedly, due to more pressing political and military issues), Israeli theatre examined its own capacity to portray reality in a theatrical and forceful way without losing either local or universal elements. Among the important contributions during this period were Josef Mundi’s socially critical, political-absurd play Around and Around, in which a ‘Herzl’ and a ‘Kafka’ are locked in an asylum, comparing two extreme images of the Israeli: the sadistic thug and the passive, masochistic spiritual Jew. Whereas Mundi depicted the State of Israel as a besieged, claustrophobic prison-hospital space, Ya’akov Shabtai’s Spotted Tiger compared the country to a circus. In the wild fantasies of Pinek, the 2

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Shimon Levy, Here, There and Everywhere (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), pp. 64-65. Shimon Levy and Corina Shoef, The Israeli Theatre Canon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002).

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protagonist, the Land of our Forefathers will be ‘normal’ only if we have a circus. Both Mundi and Shabtai employ play-within-a-play techniques, especially regarding the dramatic space: the State of Israel as an asylum (not unlike Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade), the country as a circus without a safety net. Also in the 1970s, Hillel Mittelpunkt began writing social plays about the down-and-out characters of society and, like many other playwrights, did not forget to depict the Arab as lowest on the Israeli totem pole in his Underground Waters. He, like many other Israeli docu-dramatists, resorted less to metatheatrical techniques qua message. These plays reflect on the most pernicious of problems: how to think universally (later called ‘globally’) while acting (dramatically, theatrically) effectively in the local sphere. Yet it was Levin’s politically radical theatre that tore apart the Israeli post-1967 War hubris. His work, too, promoted radical political activity in Israel. He slashed political, pseudo-emotional sanctimonious and blackmailing attitudes to the Holocaust, presenting it as a poor excuse (among others) to oppress the Palestinians and occupy their land. Levin went furthest in telling his Israeli audience how inhumanly the Arabs have been treated under the Israeli ‘liberal’ regime.4 He also attacked the Israeli petty bourgeoisie, dealt with ethnic social taboos, and chose to project a precise, highly unfavourable image of Israel and the Israelis. Ironically, probably consciously as well, Levin paraphrases Samuel Beckett’s lines in Endgame: ‘Can there be misery – (he yawns) loftier than mine?’ 5, transposed to the Arab-Jewish-Israeli context of manipulated comparative post-Holocaust suffering.6 Queen of a Bathtub raised the biggest theatre-related scandal in Israel to date because Levin’s play exemplifies a uniquely sharp mode of theatrical referentiality, the socio-political one. Obviously, most plays ‘refer’ to their audience in one way or another. Levin, however, placed the psycho-sociological Israeli self-image at the centre of his Queen of a Bathtub and attacked it. Moreover, I contend that Levin’s extensive future engagements with playwithin-a-play devices, metatheatricality and self-referentiality, can already be clearly detected in his first political plays.

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The newspaper Ma’ariv (17/5) reported that an Arab Member of the Knesset, Tawfik Toubi, and some friends had seen Queen of a Bathtub in Haifa and enjoyed it tremendously. However, this is still far short of a balanced cultural ‘textual exchange’. I suggest that Emil Habibi’s (Arabic) novel The Optimist has been read, thanks to Anton Shamas’s Hebrew translation, by far more Israeli Jews than Levin has been read or seen by Arabs. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p.93. Shimon Levy, ‘Beckett and Levin, Greatness and Death’, Theatre, 01 (2000), 22-27.

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Queen of a Bathtub contains 24 scenes, 12 songs and 12 dramatic skits in its published version.7 The following is an annotated outline of the content, emphasizing the Israeli collective ‘self’ as Levin depicts it. 1. The Interview with a group of Israeli youth unable to explain their attitude to the ‘Arab problem’, while using self-righteous Zionist clichés. None of the youngsters says anything coherent, and other than presenting their empty selves, they do not relate to the question posed. 2. (Song) The OK People, with lines like ‘Late at night when no one sees, we’re out in the garden to fart bluish farts of self-satisfaction’ and the refrain ‘A finger in the arse and a song in the throat, because it’s good and stinking and warm.’ The impression implied in the first skit is reinforced in the second: self-satisfaction is the key notion, yet this very ‘self’ is portrayed in a state of moral autism. 3. Courting is an encounter between Boaz and Hulda, stereotypes of young male and female Israelis, hopelessly in love with themselves while pseudo-courting each other. Hulda (‘rat’!) is caught on a public bench ‘enthralled with her own inner charm’. Levin then uses the worst clichés in depicting the image of the Sabra – the Israeli-born ‘healthy’ young people with no experience of exile, unable to recognize an ‘other’ even when in love. Following the first skit where the ‘Arab problem’ was totally ignored for the same reason, the message is made utterly clear: pure self-reference is unethical – in theatre as in social life. 4. (Song) I’m Unhappy completes the previous skit with a song in which the lovers bewail the impossibility of kissing their own buttocks. 5. Shluki and Fatzluches are two proud mothers praising their sons for eating when they say ‘I eat’ and sleeping when they say ‘I sleep’. Levin not only exposes banality, he also slashes the Israeli version of the ‘Jewish mother’ syndrome and portrays a particularly ugly ‘Israelification’ of traditionally Jewish characters, such as Elija the Biblical prophet. Elijah indeed enters and praises the two mothers for their sons’ credibility and character traits necessary for building the country and fighting the enemy. Finally he salutes in military fashion. 6. (Song) I Met a Bashful Cannon tells of a shy cannon with a charming beauty spot. 7. (Song) At the Age of Three ends with a warning to three- and five-year old children, prematurely aged due to war, that their best years are already

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Hanoch Levin, Siman Kri’a (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987). Quotations in the text refer to this edition, all translations are my own.

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behind them. Typically for political cabarets, the order in which skits and songs are edited is important. 8. Fly, a monologue, is the (self-) praise of a man in light of the realization that he is not a fly. At the same time the Arabs are compared to flies, only to realize at the end of this fly-reflective monologue that the Israelis themselves are (not-) flies. 9. (Song) My Ghetto sends a poisoned arrow to the Israeli ‘ghetto’ syndrome, portraying it as a pretext to commit crimes ‘because we suffered’. Levin turns the well-known Israeli ghetto-excuse into a womb and tomb. In fact, the song tells of an internalized ghettoization, another aspect of distorted Israeli self-reflectiveness. 10. The National Library (presented on stage as a matchbox hanging on a thread, reminiscent of the Hebrew University library building in Jerusalem) is an encounter between a tourist, an Israeli driver and a tourist guide, poking fun at Israeli pride in anything Israeli, especially the high culture of books – ascribed to Jews but blatantly nonexistent in contemporary Israeli culture. 11. Chambalulu is a meeting between two men, one rich, one poor, perhaps one oriental Israeli, the other of European origin. They fought together in a war. Only war, Levin says, is a social equalizer in Israel. 12. (Song) Brothers Chambalulu delivers the message explicitly: ‘Once in ten years we get a war, and (only) then we [i.e. the rich] are with you.’ 13. Samatocha is one of the first and sharpest satires on the relation of Israeli Jews to Arabs. Here especially Levin’s characters use a deliberately silly, child-like style that renders them flat, puppet-like and exaggerated in an overly theatrical way. 14. (Song) Beautiful Moments praises regular, normal death by suicide, murder or accident in counter-distinction to death in war. ‘God in Heaven, surrounded by [war] pilots, will comfort us with everyday dead.’ 15. (Song) Ten Commandments tells how on Mount Sinai, for reasons of national security, the Israelis of today returned all Ten Commandments to God and came back without them, relieved and breathing freely. Levin often measures Israeli behaviour by classic Jewish values. 16. Government Meeting is directly addressed to then Prime Minister Golda Meir and her dealings with her male ministers (including more immediately identifiable characters such as Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban) whose testicles she squeezes to make them obey. The government meeting is depicted as a pseudo-theatrical congress of fearful twits. 17. Promise is a take-off on Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ speech. Levin prefers: ‘And if I promise you blood and tears,

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not to mention sweat […] and if I say that some will survive, then some will survive, but do not ask what for.’ 18. The Binding opens with the Biblical Abraham saying: ‘Isaac my son, you know what I’m going to do to you now?’, continues with a series of infantile emotional blackmail, and ends with Abraham so excited that he does not hear the angel telling him to stop. Intertextuality is a mode of metatheatricality which is superbly used here. The myth of the eternal victim is clearly satirized. 19. (Song) Dear Father, When You Stand at my Grave changes the macabre mood of the skit and introduces an Isaac who says ‘Dear Father, When You Stand at my Grave, old and tired and very bereaved … then ask for my forgiveness, my father.’ Isaac here is the Israeli soldier, sacrificed by the ideology of the elder leaders of Israeli society. 20. In Queen of a Bathtub (the title piece), Yekutielli is a sub-tenant (a Palestinian) in his cousin’s small flat, and the use of the bathroom becomes a major feud. The (‘rock-bottomed and copper sheathed’) One and Indivisible Whole Kingdom of Bathtubia becomes the ridiculed issue. Later Levin will develop the skit into his full-fledged play Hefetz. Many of Levin’s later characters too, as noted, are deliberately shallow, thus theatrically exaggerated. 21. (Song) But the Kingdom is Whole is a mock lullaby comforting a child for all evils with the (right-wing religious) Israeli slogan ‘But the Kingdom is Whole’. 22. (Song) Lick, Brothers, Lick engages in a variety of licks: lick fingers not yet lost, lick wounds, lick arses (so as not to look at faces): ‘“Good night” says the warplane, “good night” says the cannon. “Good night and golden dreams” say the children in the gas-masks.’ 23. How I met my Husband is a woman’s monologue, replete with the words piss and shit, a reaction to Levin’s critics who accused him of excessive usage of such words. Towards the end of Queen of a Bathtub, Levin becomes explicitly self-referential in the first-person singular and satirizes his critics relating to his two previous cabarets. 24. In his Personal Declaration after the show was hounded off the stage, Levin published a mock apology in which he takes back everything he has said and wishes to be given a second chance to prove himself as a useful citizen. This speech is not even camouflaged as theatrically selfreferential because the author signs the speech with his real name.

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2. The following is an analysis of Queen of a Bathtub’s reception, in particular with regard to the very people it set out to attack. It is based on hundreds of newspaper clippings: news items, personal columns, caricatures, (counter-) satires, advertisements, editorials, letters to the editor and other sources. The items were taken from the eight main Israeli daily newspapers, Ha’aretz (‘liberal’-left), Davar (socialist, centre), Lamerchav (socialist, ‘hawkish’), Al Hamishmar (socialist, left), Yediot Ahronot (centre), Ma’ariv (centre), Omer (in simplified Hebrew for new immigrants, centre), and Hatzofeh (religious, right-wing). They range from February to December 1970, with the majority between April and June. In February 1970, Davar reported that the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre repertoire for the coming season was to include Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Neil Simon’s Plaza Hotel and Hanoch Levin’s Queen of a Bathtub. Journalist Michal Snunit, who published a survey on Tel Aviv fringe theatre, (Al Hamishmar 27/2), ended her review with the few rare words that Levin was then still willing to give the press about his new show: ‘This time it is a satire on the national self-satisfaction in the shadow of the “security situation”. The ministers compete among themselves as to which of them can promise a bleaker future. The Minister of Defence promises constant war. Hatzofe reported that National Religious Party officials in the council of the Tel Aviv municipality would not support the motion to adopt the Cameri as the municipal theatre of Tel Aviv. Right-wing religious members of the city council suggested that the theatre censure the ‘repulsively tasteless’ scenes in Queen of a Bathtub, especially the Ten Commandments scene. The Director-General of the Cameri Theatre, Mr. Weinberg, commented by saying: ‘The song does nothing of the sort, in fact it criticizes those who think that contemporary conditions permit “neglecting the moral values of the Ten Commandments”.’ Some of the founding members of the Cameri, well known public figures such as actor Orna Porat (shortly to found the Youth Theatre), Hannah Meron (who had recently lost a leg in a terror attack) and Yossef Yadin (son of archeologist Professor Sukenik and brother of ex-chief-of-staff Yigal Yadin), demanded a vote of no-confidence by the Theatre Board and artistic committee because of the show. Ha’aretz (25/6) quoted actors (like Yossi Graber and Israel Gurion) who had quit the show because they could not ‘identify with its message’, and others who were allegedly blackmailed by right-wing activists. Director-General Weinberg was under pressure: to lose the financial support of the Tel Aviv municipality because of religious-party opinions in the city council would have meant fewer productions, firing actors and loss

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of reputation. ‘Putsch at the Cameri’, wrote the daily Yediot Ahronot, but Weinberg, bravely, did not give in. Finally the Cameri board decided to back Weinberg, who might have realized that the Queen did not have any real chance of survival anyway (Yediot Ahronot, 28/6). Right-wing students of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem frequently interrupted the show. The University even filed a (very rare) complaint against one student, Shalom Goldman, one of the first settlers in Hebron, who was found in the auditorium with eggs he had planned to throw at the actors, should he decide that the evil rumors about the show were justified. The second show for the same evening was cancelled since Dean Cohen was unable to vouch for the actors’ personal safety (Yediot Ahronot, 28/5). A fascistoriented new group called the ‘Wolf-cubs’ planned riots against all the ‘lifters of the flag of defeatism’, with Queen of a Bathtub first and foremost among them. Interestingly, Yigal Alon, then minister of Culture and Education and Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, who saw the show and were thoroughly observed by the audience, especially in the scene that mentions the Minister of Defence, indeed disapproved of the content but more so of the hooliganism of the show’s opponents. Dayan thought the play should not be taken off. However, most audiences were vehemently against the Queen. Many threw eggs, stones and stinkbombs, ran on stage, tore microphones from their sockets, yelled, held posters, and whistled. There were fistfights, even one real bomb scare (Ma’ariv, 15/5). The Jerusalem Workers’ Union cancelled a visit to the show on May 28. Bereaved parents, who had lost their sons in the war Levin repudiates, yelled at the actors ‘Shame on you! Take pity on our wounds!’ – referring to the lines in which a son accuses his father of sending him to die in an unnecessary war – and ‘It is a pile of filth, a vicious desecration of the nation’s holiest values’ (Ha’aretz/5). The extra satirical twist, genuinely – and deliberately – shocking many Israelis, was the allusion to the myth of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). The Israeli Censor ordered this scene cut and the theatre appealed to a higher judiciary. The censorship rescinded its decision (Hatzofel, 7/4) and the show could then be performed in full and, consequently, no further changes were allowed without the author’s explicit consent. A group of war invalids cancelled their plan to demonstrate against the show (Ma’ariv, 21/5). At the Writers’ Association’s twenty-fourth anniversary meeting there was a motion to accept Arab writers (!), and writer Anda Amir spoke out against the Queen of a Bathtub. The President of the Israeli Lawyers’ Lounge, Dr. Rottenstreich, wrote a harsh letter of protest to the Tel Aviv mayor regarding the Queen. The police were often called in to keep order.

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More and more voices in the ongoing scandal related to the issue of Freedom of Speech. Towards the end of May even the Cameri Theatre actors were demanding the removal of Queen of a Bathtub. ‘“Bereavement mustn’t be a source of income”, they claimed’ (Lamerchav, 17/5). Shortly before the inevitable execution of the Queen, Levin presented a poster with a big Z on it, linking his show with Costa Gavras’ famous film on silencing criticism and on dictatorship in Greece. Finally, towards the end of May, the Cameri Theatre gave up and closed the show; the headline of the sleepiest Israeli daily, Yedioth Hadashoth (in German), read: ‘Königin der Badewanne wird vom Spielplan abgesetzt’ (‘Queen of a Bathtub taken off’; 20/5). In early June there was talk that the Queen was to be resurrected. But satirist Levin and the director of the show, his brother David, soon after confessed that they were unable to rent, even at cut-throat prices, any auditorium in Tel Aviv or its vicinity in order to stage the show because no landlord would take the risk. In May, when the scandal was at its peak, the Queen was to be discussed in a new talk show called Free Entry, on Israel’s then single television channel. However, the TV managers cancelled the original program for fear of further public scandal, thus missing the actual relevance of relating to a stillrunning show. Several relatively harmless excerpts were shown a few weeks later to the television audience as well as to some panelists who had not seen the original. ‘The Queen’s ghost haunts the Israeli Broadcasting Service like Caesar’s ghost haunts Brutus’, wrote Yediot Ahronot (16/5), ‘and the discussion on Freedom of Speech added nothing new.’ For the medium of television, then in its infancy in Israel, Queen of Bathtub was wrongly timed and much too moderately presented. Although the televised Queen was therefore a negligible event, this paradoxically proved its socio-artistic importance. Israelis identified with the ugly picture reflected in Levin’s production. As late as September 1970, Yediot Ahronot reported on the cancellation of the trial of a 53-year old man accused of misdemeanour; he had allegedly snatched a microphone and caused heavy damage during a Queen of a Bathtub performance. Judge Aladgem explained: ‘The judicial process may take too long and become a focus of various matters, likely to disturb the bon ton.’ In December, both Lamerchav and Al Hamishmar (9/12), briefly reported that 19-year old Aviva Neumark from Bat Yam was fined 50 Israeli pounds (a symbolic rather than financial burden) for having thrown a stinkbomb during a performance of Queen of a Bathtub. Judge Dov Levin [not a relative of the playwright; SL] showed consideration to the girl, whose fiancée had been killed in the 1967 war and who was therefore ‘deeply shocked and hurt by the show’.

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Many influential columnists and public figures participated in the Queen of a Bathtub Freedom of Speech debate. Among them were Yoel Markus (Ha’aretz, 6/5), Law Professor Dr. Amos Shapira (26/4), Moshe Oren and Steven Gelbart (Al Hamishmar, 7/5 and 8/5), and Azaria Alon (Lamerchav 8/5), to name but a few. Poet Haim Guri’s reaction is particularly interesting, since in 1948 it was he who had written ‘To Danny and his Friends’ (following Wilfred Owen’s well known poem ‘In Flanders Fields the Poppies Grow’), using an indigenous Israeli red flower given the symbolic Hebrew name ‘Maccabean Blood’. Guri’s lines ‘Here our bodies are lying in a longlong row, we do not breathe, death looks from our eyes’ immediately became a major component in the nationally canonized texts of mourning the dead in all of Israel’s wars, long after 1948. It is indeed this very sentiment (or ‘myth’) that Levin was trying to shatter in his satire. Guri, the epitome of a writer presenting conformist, established national consensual values, nevertheless defended Levin’s Freedom of Speech: ‘Instead of discussing the Akeda [the Biblical scene of the Binding of Isaac] song in the show, we are forced to discuss the right to express our mind.’ Poet, translator and columnist Moshe Ben Shaul (Ma’ariv, 28/4) understood that the satirical review was addressed to and against the self-satisfied, those who commercialize wars and bereavement. He considered Queen of a Bathtub to be an educational play. So too thought Rubik Rosenthal (Al Hamishmar, 12/6), who suggested that whoever did not make the effort to think in response to the play had missed a personal opportunity. Chief Censor Levi Gerri told his interviewer (Lamerchav, 26/6) that ‘the majority of the Israeli population is not against censorship.’ He based his opinion on the many letters he claimed to have received from people demanding ever-stricter censorship. (Regrettably, my research in the Israeli press proves him right.) Ma’ariv theatre critic Nahman Ben Ami loathed the production (24/5) and refused to accept the image he believed Levin wanted to impose on him. ‘Lick, brothers, lick the right arses,’ he quoted, and added that ‘Levin cannot force the audience to satisfy his desires.’ Poet Moshe Dor (Ma’ariv, 25/5) ended up defending Levin. Novelist and critic Yoram Kanuk (Davar, 22/5) put in a word about directing, texts, acting and other theatrical components that had been largely overlooked in the overall public hysteria, but was unable to abstain from offering a pun he created on ‘anal’ and ‘banal’. Baruch Adler and Dr. Emil Feuerstein (Hatzofe, 29/5) of the right-wing religious sector represented the extreme opposition to Queen of a Bathtub, for easily understandable reasons. Levin had re-appropriated the Holy Scriptures and harnessed them to his own wagon. Theatre critic Feuerstein went out of his way to defame the show: ‘This is a perverted (satirical) whip, self-hatred,

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spiritual degeneration as never seen before in this country.’ He concluded: ‘Quite a few years will pass before the scar inflicted upon us by the Cameri Theatre will heal.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Feuerstein’s heavy-handed dictum has unwittingly proven right. Almost thirty years after Queen of a Bathtub’s glorious flop, Levin inserted the Binding-of-Isaac song ‘Dear Father, when you stand at my grave’ into his new play Murder, a grim reminder that the lyrics were still as relevant (in 1997-8) as they had been in 1970. The scar has not healed because the wound is not the one that had been identified by the play’s critics. Among dozens of public figures repudiating Levin, the show, and the Cameri Theatre, we find Dr. Herzl Rosenblum, Yediot Ahronot’s editor, who attacked the production in an editorial (12/6), and even law Professor Amnon Rubinstein who suggested that journalists were courageous enough to attack the government, but not the ‘anti-establishment establishment’. Rubinstein (later Minister of Education) debated the issue with columnist and publicist Boaz Evron on the pages of both Ha’aretz and Yediot Ahronot. General Chaim Herzog, soon to become the President of Israel, expressed his view that the permission given to the Queen to show herself was nothing less than proof of our admirable national strength and sense of security (Ma’ariv, 29/5). Winner of the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize for Peace’ Uri Avneri wrote in his Haolam Hazeh weekly on 27/5 that Queen of a Bathtub had become a target, a symbol for hatred in the eyes of the Israeli fascists. He was only partly right since many left-wingers too had hated the show, less because of politics and much more because of their own liberal self-image. A number of counter-satires to Queen of a Bathtub were written and published. Yossi Gamzo wrote Princess of the Shower about a theatre manager in deficit, saved by the sewer language of a new play (Davar, 12/6 and Ma’ariv, 1/5). Binyamin Galai (Ma’ariv, 24/4, 19/6) published Kings of the Bathtub. Yonatan Geffen (Al Hamishmar, 22/6), like many others influenced by Levin, published a pseudo self-accusing confession in the style of ‘I did not mean to offend the government.’ This was done in the wake of Levin’s own mock apology. Haim Heffer, (Yediot Ahronot, 18/5) wrote ‘In Praise of Tolerance’. Amos Kenan (Yediot Ahronot, 8/5) wrote ‘Confessing my Guilt’, another mock confession, also in line with Levin’s style. Haolam Hazeh (27/5) experimented with humorous attempts proposing the Cameri Theatre’s next shows: King of the Toilet, Princess of the Bowl, Count of the Corridor, Duke of the Bedroom, Prince of the Public Pissoir. On the other hand, there were writers, translators and columnists who spoke in favour of the Show. Yoram Bronovski and Mark Geffen, satirist B. Michael, and theatre critic Michael Handelsaltz are some of the Israeli pub-

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licists whose reactions to Levin’s play were mildly favourable – or at least ‘understanding’, and who subsequently became much more politically critical. These people’s reactions, to name but a few known journalists, show how Levin’s writing helped radicalize their socio-political perspectives. If satire can be considered a success because it is fiercely attacked, Queen of a Bathtub was a smashing hit. The enormous upheaval, consequently, ought to be ascribed to Levin’s ability to stir the self-image rather than his (equally aggressive) talent for presenting a (generally unpopular) political alternative. In staging a negative view of Israeli self-reference, he forced his audience to reflect upon themselves. Levin influenced, directly or indirectly, such interesting authors and playwrights as Itzchak Laor, mediocre epigones such as Shmuel Hasfari, and younger talented writers like Boaz Gaon, Naphtali Shemtov, Lilach Dekel or Shai Shabtai. Levin’s highly critical works certainly influenced the modality and tone of the theatre reviews of Amir Urian (Ha’Ir, Tel Aviv’s main weekly), and performance artists like Danny Zackheim, Honni Ha’Meagel, director Dudy Maayan and many other young and old theatre-makers alike, especially on the fringe theatre scene. Since Levin’s works are studied in Israeli high schools, he has also had influence on young peoples’ sensibilities, as is clearly noticeable when many of them come to auditions at the Tel Aviv University Theatre Department and other theatre schools. Levin seems to be the playwright they know best and identify with most. Queen of a Bathtub made a real, noticeable change in Israel’s theatre life. Judging by the unsurpassed public response to the show, it was a major cultural, social and political event. Considering that the show ran for only ten performances, this necessarily means that the vast majority of the people who responded to the show (in many hundreds of written and broadcast reactions), could not possibly have been even remotely familiar with the actual subject matter, or with the actual mode of presentation to which they were so vehemently objecting. Consequently, it becomes clear that the ‘subject matter’ in question was neither the satirical text in the show nor the theatrical mode of directing, acting or designing it. The crux of the matter thus lay in the 1970 Israeli reception of projected, reflected, staged and spoofed Israeliness itself, its myths, its hubris and its self-satisfaction. To conclude, unlike sly universal Jewish exile humor, the edge of Israeli satire has been blunted by an overdose of sentimental affection combined with real love and identification with the State and its conformist values. As long as the British ruled Palestine (1917-1948), it was easy to poke fun at ‘them’. As long as ‘our’ life, values and regime are endangered, Israeli theatre resorts to parodies, political burlesques and harmless ironies. Weaned on a

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softer diet, Israelis therefore found it hard to stomach Levin and to deal with all the other orifices he uses and intentionally abuses. Hardcore satire like the Biblical Prophet Elijah’s (not the character mentioned in the Queen of a Bathtub) was made of sterner stuff. When Elijah spoke to the priests of Baal: ‘Cry aloud! […] Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened’ (I Kings 18:27), it was politically a risky thing to do. Aristophanes took real chances with his Peace and Frogs and naturally less so with Lysistrata, because sex can be a wonderfully soothing padding for harsh politics. When Brecht and George Grosz wanted to mount a procession of handless and legless war invalids in the epilogue to their Brave Soldier Schweyk, director Piscator had to cut the scene immediately after the premiere. The post WWI audience could not stomach it. Costa Gavras chose to film Z outside of Greece. Lenny Bruce was not always ‘liked’. Queen of a Bathtub was theatrically radical because it forced Israelis to think concomitantly with their wounded guts and feeble heads. Often the stimulation was too violent and produced a counter reaction. People who are, or believe they are, facing existential survival problems rarely appreciate the type of ideological gallows humor that Levin offered, especially when they are called upon to change their self-image. Levin’s followers are a legion. He has been widely performed on professional stages and in drama schools and high schools. His work constitutes an important part of the obligatory reading list in high schools. Lines by Levin are often quoted by people who have never seen his plays. Some of the plays have become (relatively) popular even among the Arab sections of the Israeli population. The unprecedented public response to Levin’s belligerent political satires reflects a variety of the modes in which Israeli society in the early 1970s reacted to the global nature of 1960s radicalism. Levin’s early political-satirical writing relied on predecessors from Aristophanes to Swift, and from Karl Krauss to Bertolt Brecht. He used a unique blend of social theories borrowed from the Biblical prophets and Herbert Marcuse, a touch of the Beatles and the radical student movement of 1968, together with a dollop of pure political common sense, and applied them to Israeli society. Levin’s political satire not only reacted to Israeli society, it also responded to American imperialism, to the USSR and the UN, from the perspective of radical vectors that arose in the late 1960s all over the world. Levin, moreover, brought an ‘exile’-liberal Jewish left-wing mentality to an Israel that was power-drunk and right-wing following the victorious (to Israel) 1967 Six-Day War, at a time when Israelis were least tolerant to criticism, perhaps understandably but to Levin, unforgivably. First rejected then tolerated, in the last twenty years of his life Levin was the best known and most performed Israeli playwright. Levin’s secular, anti-national and fundamental-

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ly humanistic ‘diasporic’ views still serve as a wonderful theatrical antidote to chauvinist national-religious tendencies in contemporary Israeli society. 3. In the context of Levin’s political engagement, it is important to consider the function of self-referential and metatheatrical devices in his other plays, too. I contend that Levin’s usage of this dramatic and theatrical device is predominantly of a moral-ethical nature, rather than reflecting, often self-indulgent ‘aesthetics’. In its many manifestations in Levin’s drama as well as in his short prose pieces and poetry, self-reference is particularly enhanced by his often highly metatheatrical direction of his own plays. In his political satires, later in his semi-camouflaged political pieces Shits, Hefetz, Murder or The Patriot, the socio-political message understandably dominates the self-referential dramatic and theatrical elements. In his so-called ‘Family and Neighbourhood’ plays, metatheatricality and other self-referential elements are often harnessed to enhance deeper self-awareness and achieve a tragicomic realization; ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ 8 to use Samuel Beckett’s words. Both Beckett’s and Levin’s protagonists are frequently maimed, blinded and paralyzed, but their (self- and stage-) consciousness still flickers on with a criminally zestful humor and brilliance. In fact, they both exhibit self-reference as a powerful performative act, creating rather than describing itself, as obvious in Beckett’s Not I or in many of Levin’s monologues. Moreover, actors performing self-referential texts can hardly avoid ascribing the self of the characters to their own selves. Audiences are invited to follow suit. Many of Levin’s self-conscious characters deprive the spectators of the easy, pseudo-cathartic pity so often extended to earlier, less self-referential dramatic sufferers. In Jacobi and Leidenthal the latter indulges in a mock self-referential soliloquy: Why should anybody like me? What’s there to like in me? Is there anything worthwhile in me? There’s nothing in me. Am I tall? Strong? I am neither tall nor strong. And maybe I am a little tall? No, I am doubtlessly short.9

In this early play Levin explores the gap between great expectations of the self and petty exploitations of ‘the other’, male and female alike, sex and friendship, human frailties, and loneliness. Leidenthal’s reflection on himself

8 9

Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Collected Dramatic Works, p. 101. Hanoch Levin, Jacobi and Leidenthal, Translated by Shimon Levy (Tel Aviv: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1979).

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is quite obvious. The Labor of Life ends with an appeal to a playwright, indeed the very one writing it. Shortly before her husband dies right next to her, and in a Chekhovian atmosphere reminiscent of Uncle Vanya, the heroine Leviva appeals to (and in fact through) the implied playwright: A writer will arise. A noble man, with a conscience, a heart, and a soul. He’ll understand. He’ll listen and understand. He’ll hear the whole story of our life, he’ll find the right words, he’ll create something beautiful and profound with us, something full of compassion and feeling. With all the mistakes, the flaws, there’s still material in us for a good creation.10

Similarly, Levin’s Rubber Barons ends focusing on the image of life as a poorly lit cheap melodrama, Like that moment at the play, twenty years ago, when the light in the auditorium went out and the light on the stage hadn’t yet come on, and we sat in the dark and waited in silence, all expectation, all dreams focused on one spot in the dark before us: and then the old curtain creaked open, a weak yellowish light rose on the stage, and three miserable people stood on the boards up there with cardboard and rags, and for two long hours churned up our lives, as if there was something there we didn’t know.11

Levin’s tragedies (such as The Sorrows of Job, The Lost Women of Troy, Everybody Wants to Live) and, generally speaking, his later plays are replete with a variety of plays within plays, metatheatrical references to playwrights, actors and audiences, to the myriad visions and revisions of the theatrum mundi metaphor. In his tragedies, sometimes designed along thematic and structural patterns of classical Greek drama, metatheatricality fulfils yet another and, I argue, more sophisticated and much more demanding function, appealing to the spectators’ ethics: what does it mean to witness humiliation, shame, oppression, cruelty, torture and death, mourning and suffering – if ‘only’ on stage – and what, if any, are the implications of theatre-watching, of theatre as entertainment – for ‘real’ life? Everybody Wants to Live presents a man summoned by the Angel of Death, pleading for his life and looking for someone, anyone, to sacrifice their lives to save his: his parents, his wife, or a poor boy who happens to pass by. As a poetic device Levin supplies a little mime performed by The Angel of Death and a maiden, a lovely image of the major conflict between Eros and Thanatos, love and death: ‘Death chases her to kill her and wave the sickle over her. At the very last moment she manages to free one hand, grabs his penis and begins to rub it.’ 10

11

Hanoch Levin, Labors of Life, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 126. Hanoch Levin, Rubber Barons, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 50.

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The Sorrows of Job is Levin’s fifteenth play. He seems at first to shift from tragic-comic situations to full-fledged tragedy, in which the most classical Biblical sufferer becomes an Everyman agonistes, demanding an answer regarding the very origins of pain. Here Levin examines the theocentric Jewish-Hebrew religious doctrine to justify, if not to explain, human sorrow, and finds it insufficient. With Job’s three friends, Levin explores the anthropocentric, Christian-Catholic alternative, which turns out to be equally disappointing. What is left as a possible – and certainly dramatic – explanation for suffering on earth is theatricality itself. People like to see: […] such a performance as this to go to waste. All those potential tickets mutely crying out Like the souls of unborn children dying. Not to mention the educational worth For those who will still think god exists on earth. […] five hundred Dinars to the royal treasury For the right to put this man In my circus. (The Sorrows of Job, p. 95)

The circus director buys Job, skewered and about to die, from his torturers and sells his sufferings, because they are ‘theatrical’, to the on-stage audience, incidentally quite similar to the audience of Levin’s play on Easter and Passover Eve in 1981. Elsewhere Job’s friend Bildad expresses the ultimate, perhaps inevitable cop-out of all those who see suffering from afar: Look how he looks at me. His tormented eyes Pierce me with the impudence of a person to whom you owe something. What’s the matter? What did I do wrong and what do I owe? Does a skewer in your stomach suddenly make you a just man? […] And if I were sitting up there in your place On the skewer and pierce you with my look, what then? Would you have come to sit instead of me? […] So remove this imploring from your eyes! I told you: you are you and I am I. You hear? You are you and I am I! You are you and I am I! (The Sorrows of Job, p. 93)

The audience is invited to dislike Bildad, but then again to reflect further and wonder who of us would (like Jesus?) take upon him- or herself to climb onto this mock-cross and feel the skewer tearing our bowels from behind? The Sorrows of Job harnesses self-reference to a moral rather than a predominantly emotional or even mental reflection of the self. Levin, paradoxically, sacrifices the entertaining aspect of theatre to its morally efficacious potential,

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perfectly in line with the implicit promise made already in his first, ‘purely’ political shows. In The Child Dreams, he examines this point yet more analytically in dealing less with an actual Holocaust ambience but rather with the Holocaust as a filter through which Israeli Jews (or whoever suffered immensely) might see their own lives as well as theatrical plays, especially self-referential ones. In a particularly cruel scene a mother is about to lose her child, and they will both die. Characteristically, Levin employs dramatic tactics of enhancing extreme emotions while pretending to neutralize them with chilling irony. Having heard the mother’s lamentation over her son, a ‘poet’ (in fact, Levin’s Doppelgänger in the play, or the implied playwright) ‘rips up his notebook of poems and tosses the scraps into the sea’ as though unable to poetically cope with the horror he has witnessed. But an ‘idler’, another Doppelgänger of the previous ‘double’, comments: You wrote your poems to make an impression And now you’re trying to impress By tearing them up. It’s too dramatic, superfluous, unnecessary; You attribute more importance To them than they have. You might just as well Publish them in a book, even Win a little fame; The world would still look the same. You’ll learn to despair More quietly, more modestly, In silence. Properly.12

Levin’s Requiem (the last play he fully directed, which is still being performed in 2006) is based on three of Chekhov’s short stories. In it two elderly people get sick, some die, and a baby is scalded by boiling water that another woman purposely poured on him. The bereft mother now meets three cherubs, who perform a little story-theatre for her: Once there was a child. He was a prince, but nobody knew that except him. How sad he was when all the princesses in the world passed by his window. He lay in bed and didn’t want to eat. He grew thinner by the day. In the end, he became very sick. He couldn’t move; he just lay with his eyes open and waited. One night, when the moon was shining, a gorgeous princess finally passed by, stopped at his window, and looked inside. Through the mists of frost, 12

Hanoch Levin, The Child Dreams, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 158.

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dust, and dirt, through her own reflection, she saw him. He wasn’t strong enough to speak. Tears flowed from his eyes.13

Requiem completes a fascinating theatrical circle Levin began in Hefetz (a Hebrew word that connotes both ‘thing’, ‘object’ and ‘will’), where human characters became reified, objectified, and ending with Requiem, where living people play stage properties such as the horse, the cart, the house. On stage, the theatrical self-reference enables the audience to move quickly between a ‘thinged’ person and a personified prop. The prologue of Agape, perhaps Levin’s most acutely self-referential play, tells of a mother and her boy who sit in an onstage theatre box. The prologue ends with the opening of yet another curtain, actors come on stage, and the mother says: And here are the actors too, ready to begin. But don’t get overly excited, It is a wonderful world, but Nothing here is real. You will see the world’s entire tale of agonies Through the veil. Now open your eyes or shut them – The show is yours. (Agape, p. 188)

Immediately thereafter an agape, ‘open-mouthed’ sentry, pacing in front of the Queen’s bedroom, utters the words ‘Who is there’, the first in a series of allusions to Hamlet, and especially to its intricate play-within-a-play layers, the ‘mouse trap’, the pantomime before the ‘mouse trap’, Hamlet’s speech to the actors, etc. Levin, however, turns ironically and explicitly to his onstage audience, represented by one actor who dies at the end of the play within a play and is buried on stage. This actor represents the real audience who, it is clearly implied, will also die soon. CHILD:

MOTHER:

13

And tell me, mommy, About the frightening creature Who is half above the earth, Half underneath. Son, it is the gravedigger Standing in the pit, Waiting to cover you With a blanket of dirt. (Agape, p. 223)

Hanoch Levin, Requiem, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 259.

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Certainly Levin alludes here to the Hamlet graveyard scene, and to Beckett’s ‘They give birth astride a grave’ in Waiting for Godot. However, the metatheatrical tension between the temporal, tentative and suspended reality of experiencing an onstage performance, and the usually less entertaining mo-ments of offstage real life, is self-referentially expressed as well as flaunted: Gentlemen, people have expended here their best money and time, sitting here in the dark for two hours, seeing on stage another darkness, so either create here some surprise, bring the dead back to life or something, or else let the curtain down and let us all go home. (Agape, p. 221)

In Agape Levin clearly poses the question whether the auditorium sucks vitality from the stage or vice versa: the stage buries its audience. Theatre, in the gospel according to Levin, is an amusing torture generated by a displaced hope for eternity. Ironically, only the dramatic characters can be and are indeed eternal: because they never had a real life. In Agape, Death is not only ‘the show’, but the show itself is Death. The tortures of hope are the metatheatrical materials with which Levin plays with his characters, his onstage audience and his auditorium audience. More explicitly than in other plays, Agape deals with the ethics of experiencing performances. The actual audience is constantly goaded to examine its ‘spectating’ motivations; the morality of peeping, the audience’s vicarious enjoyment of agony, of the suffering of others, whether real or acted-out. In Levin’s plays since the 1981 Sorrows of Job, metatheatrical techniques are harnessed primarily as a device employed against moral-stupor. The playwright focuses on the ethics of art, especially the public and much-too-often only entertaining art of theatre. Through his play-within-the-play techniques, Levin comments upon the precarious relationships between art, message and cashbox, at least in their Israeli context. He is profoundly occupied with the morality of those who see evil and do nothing, who see suffering and do not extend a helping hand. In his own way (he himself would turn in his grave, reading this), Levin is an angry satirist, a modernist committed to ideals. Rather than exploiting a free-floating general self-reference typical of postmodern attitudes, Levin harnesses his shrewdly metatheatrical modes first to psychological ends, and then to ethics. Moreover, many of Levin’s extreme pain and horror scenes ought to be appreciated not only in relation to their author’s inclination for S/M, but indeed as moral traps for the audience, now invited to ask themselves to what extremes they are willing to go and witness in life, in a performance of the suffering of another.

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To conclude, (self-) conscious theatricality must be regarded as a tool for enhancing deeper engagement of audiences with the stage, its theatrical events and their addressees. It necessarily involves thinking, feeling and (sometimes) acting – in theatre as well as in life. Metatheatricality also involves an ethical approach to histrionics, rather than the more habitual noncommittal, sentimental, mostly commercial theatre most Westerners see. It invites free and egalitarian participation by an audience and, sometimes, it may even suggest that the playwright does not want solely to amuse us.

Gad Kaynar

The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious Play in Israeli Stage-Drama

The chapter explores the aesthetic construction and prominent socio-political and ethical roles of the play-within-the-play structure as a rhetorical device in Israeli stage drama. In view of the enormous prestige of theatre art in Israel as identity generator, the rhetorical manipulation modes of the play-within-the-play device often enable the ‘fictitious’ theatrical texts to serve as critical parables that disseminate ‘higher’, ‘theological’ truths regarding the ‘authentic’, extra-theatrical Israeli reality usually defined by the theatrical text as self-deceptive. This function asserts itself in three strategies. Strategy A: Reality as a play within the play and the spectator as an ousted outsider. Within this strategy – observed already in The Dybbuk, the signature performance of Israeli theatre – the play-within-the-play device is devised as a defamiliarizing mimesis of actual reality proper, thus exposing the discrepancy between it and the implied spectator’s predominant reality convention. Strategy B: Social criticism through detached evidence. This strategy, culminating in plays by the bards of Israeli drama, Hanoch Levin and Nissim Aloni, employs nonrealistic, a-mimetic and self-conscious theatrical means in order to ‘distance the evidence’ about the extra-performative referent to the never-never land of myth, legend or autonomous stage metaphor, thus stimulating the spectator’s suggestive interpretive intervention. Strategy C: Merging the frame-play with the play within the play. This strategy blurs the boundaries between framing and framed plots and involves the implied spectator in the process. Through these strategies Israeli drama has transformed the play-within-the-play convention into a method for enabling society to present itself to itself. ‘Real Life is only in the Show.’ Nissim Aloni, Eddy King

In this chapter I offer several observations concerning the aesthetic construction and prominent socio-political and ethical roles of the play-within-theplay structure as a rhetorical device in Israeli stage drama. This should be understood in the context of the special significance and high esteem that theatre art enjoys in Israel’s young society, as the artistic medium that at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to the revival of the Hebrew language and to the modernized resurrection of the ancient Hebraic culture. In this respect there is a correspondence between Israeli drama and the play within the play, since this device also holds such elevated status within the affective devices of world stage-drama in general. As a meta-theatrical enclave con-

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tained in a framing theatrical reality, the ability of the play within a play to hold a mirror up to nature – namely, to reveal a higher degree of ‘truth’ regarding extra-theatrical (and sometimes theatrical) reality – is doubled, for this truth has in many cases already been validated by the mediating prism of on-stage spectators. (Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’ performance, the animals’ parody on the human race in Woyzeck’s ‘Fair’ scene and Treplev’s lake-theatre performance in the first Act of The Seagull are obvious examples). Following these initial observations, my basic thesis is that the rhetorical manipulation modes of the play-within-the-play device on the Israeli stage often enable the ‘fictitious’ theatrical texts to serve as critical parables that disseminate ‘higher’, ‘theological’ truths regarding the ‘authentic’, extratheatrical Israeli reality usually defined by the theatrical text as self-deceptive. This, in fact, leads to a role reversal in many plays: the play within a play is charged with the connotation of an absolute, fundamental, dogmatically veritable reality, whereas the extra-theatrical referent is depicted as ‘play’ or pretense (or giving an extra turn of the screw to John O’Toole’s definition, what we may call the play outside the ‘play outside the play’).1 This by no means precludes the approach that occasionally subjugates the play-withinthe-play vehicle to transmit affirmative (or only mildly reserved) messages on the ideology of Israeli society and its realization. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this latter category mostly includes plays from the ‘naïve’, idealistic pre-State era. This phenomenological, ontological and socio-ethical function of the play within a play as an affective device in Israeli drama asserts itself in three modes. All three are rhetorical strategies devised to impose effectively the stage drama’s usually critical input on the implied spectator’s mind.2 This addressee (the implied spectator) is defined, referred to and activated differently in every stage-drama, thus indicating the dynamic and transmutable nature of Israeli society, theatre, and hence, the different play-within-the-play strategies employed. The following subdivisions will examine the three major categories of the rhetorical strategies through which the play within the play obtains its effects.

1

2

John O’Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 85. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hebrew are mine. G.K. ‘Implied spectator’ means here the characterized dramatis persona and image of the play’s intended addressee that emerges from the work’s rhetorical system as a prescribed spectatorrole that the real spectator has to play during the theatrical event. See for example my ‘Audience and Response-Programming Research and the Methodology of The Implied Spectator’, in New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis, ed. by Günter Berghaus (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), pp. 159-73.

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The most conspicuous phenomenon is that of the increasing involvement of the implied spectators in deciphering and internalizing the ‘lesson’ they have taken from the peculiar strategic use of the play within the play by the theatrical text. 1. Strategy A: Reality as a play within the play and the spectator as an ousted outsider Within this strategy the play within the play is devised as a defamiliarizing mimesis of actual reality proper, thus exposing the discrepancy between it and the implied spectator’s predominant reality convention (i.e. the ideal or mythologized collective self-image and the implied spectator as representing the social sector addressed by the theatrical text. This self-image has become so entrenched and institutionalized in the communal consciousness that reality is no longer interpreted but, rather, defined categorically according to the history, ideology, and interests of the society).3 This strategy of processing the play within the play is distinguished by signs that devise an extreme, parodied or satirized representation of actual reality that enacts its ‘real’ referents in their own habitual pseudo-iconic and ontological manifestations. The strategy is in most cases designed to engender a tension between the implied spectator’s aspired to (and sometimes detested) reality convention, on the one hand, and the performative manifestation of the truth about ‘reality proper’ on the other, even if the form of presenting it is unrealistic. The implied spectators are consequently encouraged to revise their realityconvention (i.e. their collective identity) and eventually reform their society. As such this strategy has much in common with Brecht’s epic theatre technique,4 in the sense of being ideologically mobilized, didactic and instrumental, both in the formal and teleological respects. The first strategy of the play-within-the-play device in Hebrew theatre was already evident in this theatre’s formative signature production: The Dybbuk (1922), Yevgeney Vakhtangov’s intercultural (Jewish-Armenian) staging permeated by the director’s Bolshevist convictions, performed by the

3

4

Moreover, within the phenomenological realm of the reality convention there is no distinction between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic notions and no hierarchy of relative importance. Reality convention constituents, whether they are ‘real’ or ‘fictitious’, represent each other as segments of society’s collective mind and self-image in a synecdochal manner. On the the subject of ‘reality convention’ sees also my ‘“Get Out of the Picture, Kid in a Cap”: On the Interaction of the Israeli Drama and Reality Convention’, in Theater in Israel, ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 287-8. See Bertolt Brecht, ‘Das epische Theater’, in Die Stücke von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 983-98.

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young Habima company (later the National Theatre of Israel), of S. Anski’s allegory of love that conquers death and the oppressive society alike. The story unfolds as follows: Leah and Hannan – two youngsters, who were brought up in different stetls (small, mostly Jewish townships in pre-Holocaust Poland) – were betrothed by their fathers, the bosom friends Nissan and Sender, even before they were born. Sender, who became wealthy, while his friend remained poor, forgot his promise and offered his daughter Leah to the pathetic son of a well-to-do Jew. Meanwhile, Hannan, Nissan’s son, arrives in Leah’s small town as a bright, itinerant scholar, and as predestined by Heaven, they fall in love. Hannan employs all possible means, including prohibited Kabbalah rites, to prevent Leah’s marriage to another and dies uttering God’s explicit name. His spirit returns as a dybbuk – a dead person that haunts the living – to enter (literally penetrate, in the sexual sense) Leah’s body, and he refuses to depart from his beloved. The Zaddik (a Hassidic sage) manages to exorcise the spirit, but love proves stronger. Just before Leah’s imposed wedding she dies, to join her true bride-groom in the other world. The exorcism of the dybbuk, the deceased Hannan, from the body of his beloved, Leah, is not merely presented as a therapeutic rite, but as a deliberately histrionic play within a play. It is performed by the Zaddik who serves as the ‘director’ and main actor of the simulated religious ceremony – for an audience of witnessing spectators, his devout followers, whose gaze and reactions are among the major factors that frame this scene as an enclosed performance. The syntax of this theatrical act is intended, under the legitimate and sanctified cloak of a religious practice and the overpowering expressionist style, to demonstrate to this stage audience the absolute hegemony of the Orthodox society. Devised as a grotesque and repulsive estrangement of the elements that made up the most sacred segments of Jewish life in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe – a reality that still existed when Vakhtangov’s Dybbuk was first presented – this play within a play conveys a rather shocking message to the Jewish implied spectator, whether traditional-religious, atheist-Bolshevik or secular, Zionist-Socialist. The predominant utopian image of the devout, spiritual and benign Jewish congregation is exposed as a dystopian self-delusion when the Zaddik’s performance (or more precisely, a show within the show) exposes the mech-anism of the reactionary authority of the cruel Jewish bourgeois society, set upon crushing the free love of the young and non-conformist lovers. Engendering an eerily discrepant attitude between the stage audience and the implied spectator, the Zadik’s ‘number’ incites the addressed spectator against the materialistic Weltanschauung that

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his play within the play serves, as well as against the overall decadence of the represented Jewish Diaspora society in its entirety. This rhetorical orientation is implicitly reflected in the claim to embody the absolute truth inherent in the performative act of the Zaddik, Reb Azrielke. This claim is, for instance, imbued in his instructions to his devotees concerning the expected appearance of Nissan, Hanan’s father: ‘Soon there will appear among us a man from the True World so that we may judge between him and one who is from our world of illusion.’5 In this inversion of roles the spectators, either on the stage or in the audience, belong to the theatrical make-believe world of illusion, whereas the presented and enacted ritual incorporates the unveiled ‘true’ reality, which only the Zaddik can conjure up. Such inversion is ironically modified when the Rabbi orders that his followers ‘make a partition for the deceased’, or in other words – to ostensibly (and unwittingly, of course) expose his own pretense by screening it off through the use of the arch semiotic sign for it: a theatre curtain.6 Let us look more closely at the defamiliarized ingredients, drawn from the familiar and idealized icon-repertoire of the diasporic Jewish world, that constitute this rhetorically mobilized play within a play. The following analysis refers to the mythological production of Vakhtangov, as conveyed through the extant visual and written documentation, rather than to the text of S. Anski’s quite mundane melodrama. The director converted the semi-realistic architecture proposed by the dramatist’s stage instructions into a symbolical play-within-a-play topography. This was, first and foremost, manifested in the symmetrical, highly-stylized visual composition, based on the ominously expressionist Schrei aesthetics and choreographic mise en scène, juxtaposing the ‘performer’, Reb Azrielke, and his engaged audience, the Hassidim. The Zaddik, with his blatantly white visage and the shroud-like Kittel worn by rabbis on Yom Kippur (‘Day of Atonement’) – a pronounced histrionic costume that transforms him into a Jewish counterpart of Death in the Moralities – is seated on his throne at the head of a perspectively distorted and upwards directed, phallus-like and strategically overpowering theatrical table. This alienating position lends him the prominence of a meta-protagonist on a focused, optically centered stage within the stage. His male entourage, the Hassidim, with their ghoulish, black costumes and convoluted, vulture-like gestures,7 are lined up along the walls 5

6 7

Shlomo Anski, ‘The Dybbuk’, Act IV, trans. by Joseph C. Landis, in The Dybbuk and Other Great Yiddish Plays, ed. by J.C. Landis (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 60. Anski, p. 59. See my ‘National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima’, Theatre Journal 50 (1998), 13-18.

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awaiting their prey as involved spectators of the play within the play – i.e. the exorcist ceremony performed by the Rabbi – thereby ‘keying’ or framing the situation that, according to Goffman, is essential for defining its playful (and here, its performative) character.8 The victim, the dybbuk-possessed Leah – performed in Vakhtangov’s production by the would be First Lady of the Hebrew stage, Hanna Rovina – appears in this meta-theatrical situation in the performative costume of her deconstructed and multifaceted role as the bride. She is at one and the same time the deceptive performer of the intended wife of a husband imposed on her by the greedy, superstitious and inconsiderate congregation, the loving bride of her true dead beloved, and – with her big black eyes, neatly drawn lips and overtly made-up face alluding both to the heroines of silent expressionist horror-features and No-theatre conventions – the incarnation and tangible presence of this deceased soul-mate. These salient theatrical attributes of costume and make-up are magnified by LeahRovina’s expressive body language. On the one hand it reveals the anguish of an impotent, virginal girl exposed to the brutal, dark, male aggression of the onlooking Hassidim crowd that apparently sets out to save her, yet is depicted as if about to assault and rape her (both physically and mentally). On the other hand, it embodies the defiant resistance of the girl and her alter ego against the threatening mental, sexual, social and ideological violation. The deictic markers of the play-within-the-play device in this scene, as directed by Vakhtangov, are further foregrounded through the enclosed position of Leah: she is situated standing stage-center, her back to the table, with an harassed expression and posture, encircled – literally entrapped – by the apparently well-wishing, yet actually malicious, wolfish representatives of the Jewish congregation as regarded from a communist perspective. The whole stage picture thus constitutes a highly charged, iconographic playwithin-a-play paradigm, which highlights the unbearable inner-contradictions (exorcist-therapeutic aims versus offensive ones) inherent in it. It thereby steers the implied spectators to decipher by themselves the performance’s true politically-subversive message that refutes the habitually romantic reading of the play. Vakhtangov’s Dybbuk is therefore a typical example of Strategy A: namely, the manner in which a play-within-the-play structure – constructed from radically estranged familiar elements – is rhetorically recruited to expose, through the fictitious metaphor, the truth about established deception for the sake of preserving reactionary social power; and to project this truth on the referred to extra-textual society. This is done behind the

8

Erving Goffman, ‘From Frame to Analysis’, in Performance Analysis, ed. by Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 26-7.

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back, so to speak, of the unsuspecting dramatis personae, and through the mediation and hermeneutic deciphering of the implied spectators who, in this case, do not belong to the society under attack (although the effectiveness of the attack depends on their stemming from this milieu), but stand on the verge of a new, enlightened era. Another example of Strategy A is found in Yoram Matmor’s A Regular Play, which premiered at the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre in 1956. Here the play within a play becomes the major rhetorical device of the entire piece and clearly illustrates my argument that the allegedly fictitious meta-theatrical world exposes the falseness of ‘actual’ reality. The spectators appear to be ‘attending’ a first rehearsal of an Israeli drama in which an inexperienced playwright presents to a theatre manager and a group of young actors an undeveloped idea for a play ‘about life.’ This play is to depict scenes from the life of the protagonist, Danny, a youngster who had fought – like the actors – in the war of independence. A wooden plank stands in for the central character, whose designated impersonator, Rafi, has left the troupe and gone to a frontier kibbutz. The other characters evolve from improvisations. They are a group of confused young men and women, who functioned admirably during the struggle for the foundation of the State but have failed to find their true identity and proper place after the war. Their parents’ generation is no better off, delineated as ideologically and publicly engaged figures who nevertheless fail to communicate with their children and cannot help them overcome their plight. A Regular Play is an inverted ‘Pirandellian’ drama, not of characters in search of an author, but of actors in search – through their dramatis personae – of their own identities in the temps perdu of their glorious past and dreary present. Meta-theatricality is used in this context to engender a quasi-existentialist insight into the human condition of the loveless, disenfranchised, unemployed and nihilist past heroes, who, as Gideon Ofrat puts it, ‘refuse to capitulate to the gradually spreading petit-bourgeois reality’9 that rejects them, as symbolized by a short exchange between a waitress and a writer in a coffee shop: WAITRESS: WRITER: WAITRESS:

What would you like? Tea or coffee? Love. Love we don’t have. Maybe a cake, with Schlagsahne.

In a reverse relation to Plato’s famous cave parable, the implied spectators are drawn nearer to the ‘truth’ about their own modus vivendi through three 9

Gideon Ofrat, The Israeli Drama (Herzliya: Tcherikover, 1975), p. 84.

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agencies: that of the real actors as persons (i.e. the Cameri Theatre ensemble), that of the fictitious actors in the play, and that of their roles. While either acting or watching their imperfect counterparts, the fictitious actors in this theatrically-conscious and self-referential play-within-a-play scenario deconstruct what Glenda Abramson terms the ‘myth of the sabra [native-born Israeli]-hero’s perfection.’10 The audience for its part is entrapped in a closed-circuit mirror situation: it finds itself reflected by its Doppelgänger, the real stage actors acting the fictitious performer-characters, who, in turn, are emulated by their alter egos, the dramatis personae of the rehearsed play within the play. These characters – Chico, Yitzchak, Tzipora, the Mother, the Father, the Theatre Manager, the Writer, etc. – close this vicious circle by, once again, replicating the unacceptable existential circumstances of the audience as perceived by the implied dramatist. The play within a play as employed here is thus a highly efficient tool in amplifying the mutually-negating experiential pulls of the play: towards identification (in a double sense) with the agents of the three performed reality strata; and towards growing alienation from them (again in a double sense as this is, in fact, self-alienation). Regarding Pinter’s initial stage-instructions for The Homecoming, Egil Törqnvist contends: ‘The “square arch” within the proscenium arch may suggest a play-within-a-play idea, helping us to see the family dwelling in the large living-area outside the square arch as comparable to the audience dwelling outside the proscenium arch.’11 Israeli drama, and especially A Regular Play, quite often exposes the spectators to a similar kind of meta-theatrical consciousness of their ‘ousted outsider’ position in a double sense: that of being cast out from the territory colonized by the play within the play and its intrinsic spectators, even if this territory resembles their own; and, on the contrary, that of being incorporated ‘by proxy’, through these stage-counterparts, in the sphere of the performed parable, yet in the function of criticized objects and referents. The consequent sense of frustration by the spectators is intensified by their awareness that the social, political and aesthetic furor raised at the time by the production of Matmor’s subversive A Regular Play, which shows reality as is and refuses to partake of the officially boosted selfadulation of the young and fragile Israeli society, has been prefigured from the outset by and in the play itself. This is manifested in the form of selfreferential controversies among the actors, who endorse the play’s bleak message; of conflicts with the manager who wishes to mitigate the hopeless situa10

11

Glenda Abramson, Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 30. Egil Törnqvist, Transposing Drama: Studies in Representation (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), p. 149.

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tion according to the ideology of the day; and with the writer, who insists that ‘there is no connection whatsoever between the stage and reality, since reality is not well-made, cannot be squeezed into two and a half hours and does not have two intermissions.’ Furthermore, by resisting the spectators’ self-adulation, the play within the play not only reflects, but also generates a revised version of the reality convention that comprises its usually suppressed darker aspects, thereby drawing this convention closer to ‘reality proper.’ It is this merged empirical and phenomenological reality that constitutes the play within Matmor’s play, both in the sense of being immersed in and molded by the dramatist’s peculiar point of view, as well as in the socio-theatrical sense of the ‘regular’ make-believe play acted by the spectators in their everyday life: an unfounded, false belief in a just society, true to its basic ideals and grateful to its founders. The overtly theatrical sign of a plank (keresh in Hebrew), stands in for Rafi, the missing performer of the play-within-the-play’s protagonist, Danny, a leading fighter in the Independence War whom disappointment with the greedy, careerist society – mainly represented by his father – has turned into a lazy, drunken bum. Rafi, in contrast to the character that he was supposed to play, seems to be the only one to have shunned the theatre’s decadent society and he has gone to a kibbutz as a productive existential solution, only to be killed by Arab infiltrators. Therefore, his metonymic replacement, the plank, symbolizes – as Glenda Abramson maintains – ‘absence: it is passive and lifeless, unrelated to its environment, an image of non-existence.’12 Most critics go no further than that literary reading of the keresh symbol. However, what has remained unnoted is that this plank, the paramount sign of the play within the play, has a concrete stage presence and function in this context as a ‘gap’ – i.e. as a self-referential point-of-indeterminacy,13 capable of stimulating the imagination of the actors within the play. Yet failing to realize the infinite potential that this object suggests, the actors fail to transform the stage, the artistic endeavour itself, into their own self-assertion, spiritual salvation and realization of their reality-convention – a place where decadent, grey reality may be sublimated into a poetic piece of art – and are consequently doomed to remain entrapped in this sordid reality. An oblique analogy between Matmor’s A Regular Play and the performers of the Vilna Ghetto cabaret reality-theatre in Joshua Sobol’s famous Ghetto (1984) might help us to understand the uniqueness of the play within

12 13

Abramson, p. 30. Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1976), pp. 276-80.

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the play in A Regular Play. Sobol’s performers, dancing on the edge of a volcano, enact their sardonic vaudevillian transposition of the gloomy life in the Ghetto, within the external epic-realistic frame of the play that deals with the ‘authentic’ Holocaust reality. Far from trying to create an escapist haven and delude themselves and their absent stage Ghetto audience as to the fate that awaits them, these entertainers perform several functions aimed at the Israeli implied spectator of the 1980s. By relativizing and humanizing the horror through their slightly alienated, or hyperbolically melodramatic sketches and songs – a typical example of Strategy A, in which defamiliarization is never so far detached from the familiar as to render it unidentifiable) – they alleviate the plight and dread in which their Ghetto audiences live, and (for Sobol’s Israeli implied spectators) unravel the truth behind the fabricated, manipulative, theological Israeli myth of the Holocaust. This black-and-white myth, featuring innocent and thoroughly righteous martyrs butchered by inhuman beasts, is promoted by Israel as a political argument to justify its belligerence and its occupation of Palestinian territory. The play – especially the cabaret parts – presents this myth in a more balanced and humanly credible light. Moreover, the cabaret inserts break the Israeli taboo on dealing with the Holocaust in terms of grotesque black humour and light music, thus turning it into an intelligible, discussible human experience and legitimate historical analogy (in the well-known manner of George Tabori’s plays). The rehearsing actors in A Regular Play prefer to delve, instead, into a flat, dreary, self-pitying sociodramatic reconstruction of their plight. This is the inverted Pirandellian aspect of A Regular Play, which highlights the real tragedy lurking in the enclosed play within the play of the lost generation. Matmor’s actors, who fail to create for themselves an alternative theatrical reality that corresponds to their dreams, are akin to Pirandello’s Henry IV performers, who are scolded by their master as his dissimulation mask is ripped off: ‘You are fools! You ought to have known how to create a fantasy for yourselves, not to act it for me […] but naturally, simply, day by day, before nobody.’14 Thus, the fault of Matmor’s decadent freedom fighters, and of the implied spectator that they represent, does not lie in their stars, i.e. in the depressing reality depicted in the play within the play, but in themselves – in Cassius’ words in Julius Caesar – that they are underlings.

14

Luigi Priandello, ‘Henry IV’, Act 2, in Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952), p. 194.

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2. Strategy B: Social Criticism through Detached Evidence Strategy B conveyed the imperative critical effect on the existential, sociopolitical or ethic-cultural circumstances of the implied spectator through a direct, realistic or pseudo-realistic codification system. Strategy B of devising the play within the play in Israeli drama employs, on the other hand, nonrealistic, a-mimetic and self-conscious theatrical means in order to ‘distance the evidence’ about the extra-performative referent to the never-never land of myth, legend or autonomous stage metaphor. The parable rhetoric of the play-within-the-play device is thus based on compatible open-parable means that by force of their enigmatic nature stimulate the spectator’s suggestive interpretive intervention. In other words, the usually passive spectators are empowered to choose and elicit the relevant meanings for themselves and – as a shrewd affective tactic – on their own responsibility. The most conspicuous auteurs in this respect in the Israeli theatre were the dramatists-poets-directors Nissim Aloni (1926-1998) and Hanoch Levin (1943-1999). The meta-theatrical bent of Nissim Aloni had already been detected in the early stages of his work: ‘Aloni writes plays about theatre and on theatre. Everything is theatre in his plays,’ contended the critic Gideon Ofrat already in 1975.15 And, indeed, Aloni was the first Israeli dramatist to transcend the narrow local-realistic approach of Israeli dramaturgy in the early decades of the State’s existence. His iconoclastic plays revolve, in the wake of the French so-called Absurd Theatre writers, around the central axis of exclusively performative, a-psychological and complex metaphor and imagery of a play-within-a-play structure that often includes additional enclosed layers such as a TV-show or a movie, a theatrical ceremony or a medley of theatrical styles within the play. These metaphors and images abound with mythical, legendary and poetic allusions that pertain exclusively to the realm of the collective Israeli imagination, just like Brecht’s Londonese Soho in The Threepenny Opera or Chicago’s grocery market in Arturo Ui, which bear no resemblance to the authentic references of these loci but address the German spectator’s mythological conceptions of them. Thus, they are never disengaged from local ramifications despite their esoteric character. Most of Nissim Aloni’s plays deal with the demise, abduction, or fall of metaphoric archetypal kings (exiled rulers, mad Napoleons, vanishing Gypsy dynasties, mob Godfathers and leaders, etc.). These ‘monarchs’ represent, through various play-within-the-play forms, a professedly reactionary and romantic Weltanschauung that regards the past – either the historical past of monarchist Europe or the idealistic past of the Zionist pioneers – as based 15

Ofrat, p. 213.

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upon a solid, hierarchical World Order, permeated by religious, humanist and cultural values. This past is negated by the modern present, distinguished by its materialism, commercialism, mass production and the media-brainwashed masses that have lost their individual identity. When, for instance, in Eddy King (1975), the fake astrologist, the identity-less and androgynous Teresa (a grotesque paraphrase of the blind prophet Teresius in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) blinds the New York mob leader Eddy in his live TV show within the play, Aloni transmits a provocative message concerning the intolerance of instant, reproductive, false and substitutive modern reality towards real, substantial human greatness like Eddy’s, even if it’s the greatness of an archcriminal. The spectators, however, must by themselves draw this conclusion from the enclosed meta-show’s fantastic elements, which do not lend themselves to easy, unilateral interpretations. ‘Each new play by Nissim Aloni is an additional stage in the endless conflict between two eternal adversaries: Performance and Death,’ contends Aloni’s first biographer, Moshe Nathan: ‘Theatre and Play are the only weapons that the dramatist has in the relentless struggle against the bitterness of Death, a means to deceive death, to conjure it.’16 This ‘magic against death’ as Aloni himself defined it, is a quality of the framed play within the play, while dreary, prosaic and grey reality – death, in Aloni’s terminology – is incorporated in the framing play level: namely, the main plot that very often represents the implied spectators’ reality (and eventually the spectators themselves through onstage spectator-agents who witness the play within the play). However, in several of Aloni’s plays these ‘real’, ‘fictitious’ and ‘super-fictitious’ reality-planes often change positions and hierarchy in accordance with the dramatist’s motto: ‘Real life is only in the show.’ These faculties could be distinguished in their embryonic mold already in The Emperor’s Clothes (1960), Aloni’s second play which launched his series of ‘Royal drama.’ Whereas Andersen’s original legend has a tectonic, optimistic Happy End, in which the crooked tailors are unmasked, Aloni’s ironic updated version begins from the end of the tale and progresses towards a not so happy denouement. The person who shouts ‘the Emperor is naked’ in Caspar the Eighth’s monarchy is not a child, but a young political opponent, the poet Hector Bassone. He, together with his girlfriend, the singer Marie, initially protests against the surrender of the citizens to the deceptive, dictatorial policies of the ruling Prime Minister, Baron Zum, and the financial overlords, Dukes Turno and Corvo, the tailors who now head the syndicate of

16

Moshe Nathan, Magic Against Death: The Theatre of Nissim Aloni, ed. by Ze’ev Shatzky. (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996), p. 85.

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the Emperor’s Clothes. Baron Zum, with his keen political intuition, realizes the true mettle of the young rebel, and manipulates him for his own devious schemes, starting with promoting Bassone to a high-ranking official. Then, while the entire population – in a similar manner to the characters in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros – comply with the order to change into underpants and admire them as breathtaking regal fineries, Hector Bassone also forgets his former self, rejects the attempts of Marie to save him, brings about her execution, exposes the aging and sickly King Caspar to a severe draught that causes his untimely death, marries Princess Lucy, exiles the Prime Minister and becomes the new despotic Emperor. This multi-layered piece, replete with allusions to the Dionysian and Oedipal myths, to inverted Pagan fertility rites as well as to classical theories of tragedy and comedy, intermingled with references to the Elizabethan Chain of Being and modern politics, overflows with play-within-the-play patterns. I shall here single out and concentrate on one device: the media image. The media image evolves from the general orientation of Aloni’s adaptation of Anderson’s tale. The play begins in the Prime Minister’s office. In the midst of the resounding advertising jingle of the Emperor’s Clothes syndicate and jubilant shouts coming from the outside, one hears a faint cry: ‘The Emperor is naked!’ Count Zum looks at his watch: ‘Precisely on time’, he utters. His deputy expresses his concern that the mob will lynch the rebel, but Zum stays calm: ‘The police will save him. I gave orders.’ While the original tale ‘ghosts’ in the minds of the Israeli implied spectators of the early 1960s, whose predominant feature was their relative unfamiliarity with meta-theatrical techniques and non-realistic rhetoric, they become privy to the stratagem through which Hector Bassone’s authentic outburst was transformed into a play within the play. The poet-rebel might consider his protest to be authentic, yet – as the implied spectator has seen – in fact it is nothing but a vehicle in the Baron’s pretence play machinations within the play, a trite and recycled slogan serving the corrupt regime that the young, naïve boy wished to topple. The cynical tailor Corvo confirms this impression: ‘A shouting guy is worth more than a thousand publicity posters. Let him just agree – and I will turn him into a TV star, shouting against… against whatever. Just let him shout’. This reading is substantiated through the double framing of the act that turns it into a play within the play: the fact that the (real, theatre) spectators, rather than being directly confronted with the protester as in the original tale, are a captive audience to Baron Zum’s opportunist mediation and interpretation; and the framing by the TV coverage that conveys to the spectators the entire proceedings through the moderator Bobo Fortuna, thus serving both as a super-frame and onstage spectator of the play within the play. In

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being the one who transmits and comments on the inner plot, the TV correspondent, like most of his colleagues, is more than simply a reporter: he is actually the factor whose words and corporeal rhetoric engenders and evaluates the inner plots about which he reports according to the media rules, as a kind of a TV-drama-within-the-TV- coverage play. Seen through these prisms, Bassone’s sincere protest is from the outset converted into a dubious ostentatious pastiche. Thus, almost ten years before the inauguration of Israeli television, Aloni had unraveled what would become its underlying device of turning actual and substantial, even incidental reality, into a play within a play, i.e. into its public image. This image turns authentic life into an utterly absurd, grotesque and hollow gesture, as the Baron himself maintains: ‘With all this media and publicity, reality has such a negligible connection with life.’ However, in contrast to the imagistic reception mode of reality on television, Aloni confronts the spectators (at least in most of the scenes) with the real, living stage presence of both the media agents (moderator and camera) – the play – and their objects and victims – the play within the play – at one and the same time and in the same space. In this manner the spectators can witness the brainwashing process by the media in action. This becomes manifestly obvious in the ceremonial ‘dressing’ scene of the ‘naked’ King that, being nothing but a make-believe putting on of non-existing clothes, transforms this scene into a play within the play attended by the courtiers as well as by the covering and commenting media. The ‘fascinated’ TV moderator attempts to sweep us, the theatre spectators, and the stage-audience alike, into boundless ecstasies of admiration for the non-existing ‘wonderful garment, Ladies and Gentlemen…What colours…What shape…the imagination…unspeakable,’ and the attending courtiers are indeed ‘exhilarated’ by the beauty of the ‘clothes’. We witness how the ostensive commentary and the act of its transmission eradicate their referent – the naked king, in fact, reality itself, which succumbs to the absolute, totalitarian authority of the media’s image-making mechanism. And yet again, as a typical paradox, precisely by denouncing this brainwashing and cynical twisting of the truth, as well as the herd mentality of the crowd that adopts it, the unique play-within-the-play rhetoric of Aloni charms us with this tangible evidence of the tremendous power ascribed by the dramatist-director to theatrical imagination and illusion. In Aloni’s second ‘royal’ play – The American Princess (1963) – Strategy B of manipulating the play-within-the-play device for enhancing rhetorical ends attains an even more traditional, and concurrently more elaborate, manifestation than in The Emperor’s Clothes. The play’s frame-plot begins with Prince Freddie, one of the two protagonists, who sits in a contemporary

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police station in the unsuitable, stereotyped, and archaic stage costume of a regal red cloak and black gloves, being charged with the murder of his father in a movie studio. Thus, it intertwines at the outset mysterious and piquant play-within-a-play elements, alluding to some obscure, remote and decontextualised royal ambience, on the one hand, and the almost naturalistic, grey and down-to-earth milieu of a contemporary detective play, on the other. Freddie’s father is a dethroned, exiled, legendary King, an exclusively theatrical and self-referential ‘super-monarch’, as his heavily pregnant title – Bonifatius-Victor-Felix of Hohenschwaden, King in Gratia Dei over big Bogomania, Prince of Upper-Augusta and Count of the Puck Region – implies. Yet he finds it difficult to accept the loss of his kingdom and his own conversion into a nondescript French teacher in a nondescript democracy in which ‘everybody searches his lost soul.’ When the cynical Freddie’s protracted alibi concerning the stages that led to the murder of his father becomes too fantastic for the unseen, ‘metaphysical’ interrogator to believe, he demands that Freddie tell him ‘the truth! The truth!.’ ‘Look’, answers Freddie, and leads the interrogator’s and the implied spectator’s gaze to an inner stage, on which the curtain (literally) rises on an obvious yet intricate play within the play dealing with a ‘whodunit’ narrative, which becomes the main core of the play’s plot. This so formally presented, circumscribed and reified story (i.e. the framed plot) of the cynical and opportunist Freddie, who is merely attempting to escape capital punishment, is indeed a far cry from looking like the ‘objective’ truth; yet it suggests some higher, meta-truth, on the world we live in. Freddie urges us to see a pathetic operetta King, standing in Cothurnae on a raised platform that defines and highlights him as pertaining to a play-withinthe-play higher existential-aesthetic reality plane, being tempted by a mysterious American Princess to record his implausible romantic-theatrical kitsch memories, and participate with his son in a grotesque movie within the play within the play. This movie is an extreme ‘biographic’ parody on his life, on Greek tragedy and on Hollywood epics alike. The greedy son, Freddie, has no scruples about playing, for fame and a generous amount of money, his father’s character in this pastiche version of his past; and then, unwittingly on his own part, murders the King in collaboration with the old man’s movie double. This latter actor, who undergoes plastic surgery for every new historical part he plays – the skin for which is taken from his behind – is a monstrous personification of the loss of identity in the modern, capitalist world. The entire play is removed from any familiar and ‘literal’ reality, indulging freely in its fantastic, lyrical, and enticing theatricality. The interplay of

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the cryptic, epic narration by the interrogated Freddie, and the different concentric planes of a play within the play and movie within the play within the play, which are the farthest removed from any recognizable modern socioexistential mode, accentuate this spellbinding impression. This polyphony of meta-theatrical levels underscores the implied dramatist’s nostalgic identification with the old monarch’s vanishing romantic world, with its poetic, even if a little ludicrous, insubstantial and pathetic vision, against the cold, careerist, whorish and inhuman sphere of Freddie, the implied spectator’s counterpart. The most grotesque episodes, which Nissim Aloni uses to denounce the cynical commercial exploitation of the truly emotional and imaginative assets of the ‘old’, ‘European’ world, incorporated in the King’s figure, by the modern consumer society, are those of the movie-shooting scenes. These scenes apparently pertain to the realm of art aggrandized by the dramatist. Aloni employs an absurd amount of blatantly theatrical props in these shooting scenes (like a wooden hobbyhorse, a paper crown or party balloons), as well as stylized dialogue and expressionist acting – all invested by him with a childish, naïve and poetic aura – as a blatant, provocative contrast to the required iconic, lifelike, realistic film aesthetic (presented by Aloni as glamourous, but ‘cold’ and heartless). This contrast is used to exemplify and denounce the deformation of the human spirit by the unrefined, uncultured and mercantile mental colonialism of the entertainment and film industry, as a metonymic symbol of the entire modern era. Owing to Strategy B of removing the play within the play – with its faculty of transmitting ‘transcendental’ truths about empiric reality – from any explicit formal connection with an extra-theatrical reality, this apparently bizarre play is paradoxically capable of conveying codified, veiled yet poignant messages about Israel in the early 1960s. It was then a young country, on the verge of liberating itself from the solipsist and zealous Zionist ideology of its founders and developing a cosmopolitan orientation. Nevertheless, Israeli society was still absorbed in narcissistic self-glorification, and reluctant to accept direct criticism, especially in the most prestigious cultural institution at that time, the Hebrew theatre. Aloni therefore takes advantage both of the Israeli theatre’s and the play-within-the play’s lofty phenomenological status, as well as of his play’s detached dramatic metaphor, in order to impose his ironic judgment of society on the implied spectator’s mind behind this spectator’s back. For this purpose, he manipulates Freddie’s wry, sardonic discourse pertaining to the frame-play level (the police investigation, throughout which Freddie addresses the implied spectator while apparently responding to his unseen interrogator), as a commentary on the

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framed play within the play that features in its midst the abducted King with his beautified, partly fabricated memories and romantic flair backed up, with reservations, by the implied dramatist. The reception-regulation mechanism of the play determines, in each context, the light in which Freddie’s comments are meant to be seen – either as sarcastic remarks on his father’s viewpoint, that boomerang-like, incite the spectator against the speaker, or as witty insights that elicit the ‘super-truth’ from the proceedings at the playwithin-the-play level, formulate it and convey it to the audience. Thus, for instance, while the old monarch reminiscences in his lyrical idiom about his ex-lovers, and wonders whether one of them, the Jewish Zelda, has emigrated to Palestine, Freddie remarks: ‘A small country in liberated Africa. Extremely fanatical. Lots of folklore.’ The haughty, ethnocentric self-image of the patriotic Israeli spectator in the early 1960s is thus put in a belittling and relative light, by shifting Israel through Freddie’s paternalistic approach from its central position in the local consciousness to the peripheral position of a not merely estranged, but also strange, negligible and exotic phenomenon. It is thereby subject to the process that Guy Debord defined as détournement,17 explicated by Chris Megson as ‘The “turning around” of perceptions of a phenomenon through the strategic, but often playfully irreverent, reconstitution of its familiar elements.’18 In other words, the Israeli spectators are challenged to acknowledge their provincial position, and start to relate to their collective self with appropriate humbleness. This is accomplished, among other measures, by lending Freddie’s quasi-‘lexical’ definition of Israel the attributes of an indifferent epigrammatic cabaret joke (in keeping with Freddie’s build-up as master of ceremonies), and ascribing this observation to a foreign, legendary context, which is then even further relegated to the superior meta-context of the play within the play that has triggered Freddie’s satirical insight in the first place. We might therefore contend, in general, that Strategy B of exploiting the play-within-the-play device for rhetorical purposes by ‘detaching the evidence’ about the referent, achieves its aims by heightening the fascinated, medium-affiliated, theatrical consciousness of the implied spectator. Thus it lulls such spectators’ critical awareness, making them open to endorsing the play’s unflattering thematic observations at their own expense, and without resistance. This process is substantiated through the legendary, parable character of the dramatic metaphor, which is even further removed from reality 17

18

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by David Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Press, 1994), pp. 144-5. Chris Megson, ‘“The Spectacle is Everywhere”: Tracing the Situationist Legacy in British Playwriting since 1968’, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 14, 2 (May 2004), 23.

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through the play within the play, thus forcing the spectators to draw and decode the codified social criticism by themselves, thereby converting it into self-criticism. 3. Strategy C: Merging the frame-play with the play within the play Strategy C of manipulating the play-within-the-play device as a rhetorical vehicle resorts to the extreme measures of blurring the boundaries between framing and framed plots and involving the implied spectator in the process. This strategy applies mainly to theatrical events within which, due to the nature of the Israeli collective memory and imagery, the manifestations and meanings of the framing play and the play within the play are so inherently interchangeable and interactive that the entire theatrical event, its space and the role of the implied spectator in it are incorporated in, and modified by these symbiotic and synaesthetic relations. Consequently, we are confronted here not only with two enclosed reality-planes – the frame and the framed plays observed as such by the outsider gaze of the audience – but with three, which include the play of the spectator as participant. The rhetorical effectiveness of this amalgamation evolves from the recognition that it is not a merger based on a clear-cut and dichotomous relation among the play-levels that constitute it, like the relations observed by John O’Toole between ‘the fictional boxes [that appear] as the central box framed within a number of other boxes representing aspects of the percipients’ real context.’19 In the Israeli theatrical event these ‘boxes’ overlap and intermingle, yet their intertextual interrelations are extremely uneasy, even eerie and gory, especially when the framing, the framed and the spectators’ play-contexts are ethically and ideologically incongruent. This kind of complex interplay comes most conspicuously to the fore in theatrical events that deal with the horrendous and pathological imprints that the Holocaust memory and heritage have left on the deformed Israeli social ethos, human relations and quality of life, as for instance manifested in Adam Resurrected, staged by the Gesher Theatre (1993). This production interpolates Holocaust paranoia, represented as a show within a show performed in a mental hospital for deranged Holocaust survivors, with the shockingly irreverent attributes (in the context of dealing with the Shoah) of an encompassing circus show (the frame-play). The implied spectators, sitting in the circus tent, are partly flabbergasted witnesses to this ‘denigration’ of the Holocaust’s sacred memory, and partly – in their imposed role of circus addressees – participants malgré lui in this ‘debasing’ show within a show within a 19

John O’Toole, p. 16.

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show. Their dire situation critically reifies and reflects the manipulative attitude of society to the tragic fate of European Jewry in World War 2, which in Israel feeds trivial political controversies between the Left and the Right, mainly over the kind of militant power politics ‘justified’ by the Shoah for ‘security’ reasons, as well as being exploited to extort financial and diplomatic support, thereby often treating the Holocaust in terms of cultural pornography. Blatantly exploitative forms of the play-within-the-play device have attempted to drive this point home, such as through the obnoxious sado-maso night-club ‘numbers’ of chained-Nazis-versus-Jews-and-vice-versa in Yosef Mundi’s The Gay Nights of Frankfurt; the fascist striptease scenes in a cheap German bar in Arnon Grünberg’s You are also very attractive when you are dead; or Choni Ha’Meagel’s performative event at the Acre Festival for Alternative Theatre that confronted the embarrassed, especially male implied spectator – defined as a chauvinist voyeur by the performance and the journey that he had made throughout it – with a weird fashion show. This show featured, among other ‘attractions’, half-naked models holding familiar Israeli rifles in a phallic position, provocatively posing as a receptively unbearable mixture of porno dolls, Wehrmacht officers and Israeli Defense Force soldiers – a hybrid and deliberately offensive image within a symbolist performance of the Israeli perverted Holocaust complex, the avenging victimizedvictimizer syndrome, erotic attraction to the cult of power as well as malechauvinist and sexist mentality. The most significant project in this direction to date is Arbeit macht frei from Teutland Europa (Acre Theatrical Centre, 1991), in which the interpolation of the various play- and play-within-play planes is driven to its ultimate and most perplexing manifestation. A small group of participant-spectators is brought by bus to the Holocaust museum in a kibbutz, north of Akko (Acre). In this authentic site and situation (reality) they meet their guide, whose authenticity is the only dubious phenomenon in this context, consequently setting the authenticity of the entire situation and the spectators alike in doubt, i.e. rendering their reality a fictitious ‘play’ reality. This impression ensues from their recognition that Zelma, the guide, is actually a young actress impersonating an elderly and mentally unstable Holocaust survivor. This can be inferred from her twisted body-language, eccentric and utterly grotesque dress, multi-lingual, broken articulation and methodology of presenting the exhibits, all dealing with the Jewish persecution and extermination, with a kind of obvious affection and titillating ecstasy, as if siding with the murderers. Thus, her enactment of a ‘regular’ museum guide nevertheless rearranges and modifies the spectators’ standard conception of the Holocaust by, among other means, drawing ‘unintentional’ and subtle analogies be-

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tween the German and the Israeli power cult, popular culture and occupation patterns. She accomplishes this in several ways: by defamilarizing the meaning of well-known Holocaust icons and ‘re-directing’ the agents acting in these photographs, models, movies etc., thus reconstructing them as playwithin-the-play constituents, in order to associate them with contemporary atrocities committed by Israel; and by intriguing the spectators into challenging their own habitual patterns of thinking and updating them in view of current political events, by presenting them with an ongoing ‘Holocaust Quiz’. Thereby Zelma triggers off the play within the play (or performative event) of the spectators, making them apply to this dialogue its relevant interpretation. One overwhelming instance of criticism on society’s sick Shoah consciousness is produced in the inter-medial station of film within the play within the event, in which the spectators watch Zelma standing in front of a screen on which is projected the Polish semi-documentary The Ambulance – on Nazi experimentation with gassing via the exhaust gases of motor vehicles – while she caresses with immense, self-conscious pleasure the horrid images screened on her own body as if wishing to become immersed in the frame. This presents an unusual utilization of multimedial performance art attributes, intended to make the implied spectator internalize, and not merely accept, the denunciation of exploiting the Holocaust memory for sociopolitical ends: an iconoclastic museum scene in a performative event in which we, as half-spectators / half-actors, empowered and driven to articulate taboo truths on the effect of the national trauma on our lives, are walked about by an actress in the fake role of a museum guide, acting the part of a Holocaust survivor-instructor, who turns out to be as sort of a self-referential, victimized-victimizer SS officer. And this is just the first part of the event’s manipulation of playwithin-the-play manifestations for critically exposing the ‘real’ Israeli Shoah discourse as a hypocritical, theatrical and self-contradictory play. Conclusion In summary, the play-within-the-play pattern in its three-fold strategic manifestations in Israeli drama and theatre as demonstrated here, fulfills a vital function: either idealizing, affirming, fortifying and amplifying; or criticizing, condemning and denigrating the contemporaneous self-image of society at each junction of its development. The young and fragile Israeli society, having a constant need to boost its self-confidence and re-empower its national ideology in view of external threats and inner doubts, is shown to take advantage of the theatrical institution’s enormous prestige, and especially of the play-within-the-play’s ability to render a decisive verdict on the state of social sectors and supreme interests. It has thereby transformed the play-

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within-the-play convention into a method for what the socio-theatrical critic Uri Rapp called – enabling society to present itself to itself.20 This is achieved in an either ceremonial, self-ritualizing or self-deconstructing form, or by incorporating the implied spectators themselves in the play within the play, and exposing them to a tortuous emotional and ethical experience. In the end, we are often confronted by an inverted pattern, in which the ‘authentic’ reality of the play within the play unmasks the self-deceptive foul play of society, as well as unmasking the gulf that lies between society’s wishful realityconvention and dreary reality per se.

20

Uri Rapp, ‘Theater als Artikulation von Alternativen’, in Uri Rapp, Rolle, Interaktion, Spiel: Eine Einführung in die Theatersoziologie (Wien: Böhlau, 1993), pp. 30-1.

Zahava Caspi

A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflexive Theatre: The Case of Israeli Drama

The reflexive split structure of the play within the play is a fitting form for serious themes, philosophical as well as social. It is particularly suitable for the representation of a torn, split, wounded, or complex culture – especially one conscious of itself as such. The chapter will discuss the complexity and numerous faces of Israeli reality, through its dramatic representation in three variations of the model of the play within the play. In the first play, Moshe Shamir’s He Walked in the Fields, written in the ‘heroic’ period of the establishment of the state of Israel, the reflexive structure of play within play exposes an ideological inner tension or contradiction. While the outer play represents the normative and consensual ideological stand of the Israeli collective, a subversive attitude arises from within the inner one and complicates their mutual relations. In the second play, Nissim Aloni’s The American Princess, written in the early sixties, the structure of the play within the play is only one of the multiplied devices of redundancy and hybridity used by the author. A spiral form (a play within a play within a play) which dissolves time and space and enables a fluidness between different levels of play without one main axis, is deeply rooted in the ‘here and now’ of the multicultural Israeli immigrant society of the fifties. In the third play finally, Hanoch Levin’s Mouth Wide Open, the author’s critical stand towards the political situation in Israel is detected through the way in which he manipulates the spectator’s response. The blurred boundaries between the outer and inner plays arouse a sense of uneasiness, of perceptual dislocation and hesitation in the spectator. These effects challenge the spectator’s usual modes of reception and lead to a new gaze on the fictional and actual reality presented in the drama.

In the early days following the establishment of the State of Israel, when Israeli culture was still in its infancy, a great need arose for an artistic medium to reflect and express the developing new socio-cultural reality. There was a need for a powerful apparatus that could take on a founding role, shaping a new national consciousness and a new collective identity. These challenges were met by the budding Israeli theatre. By staging plays for a live audience, the dramatic mode of representation managed to reflect, and simultaneously to shape, Israeli society’s collective identity, its national and cultural modus operandi and its most characteristic discourses. Theatre thereby became deeply involved in Israeli society. The ongoing commitment to a changing collective reality, parallel to the lengthy formation process of Israeli

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society, is a process that still continues.1 In the years following its inception, Israeli theatre reflected mainly hegemonic national values, but in recent years it has often provoked a re-examination of these values. Indeed, most of the plays written in Israel reflect the central turning points and changes in the country’s complex historical development. They are interwoven with powerful ‘regions of memory’, describing the collective Israeli experience, its traumas and its conflicts. This may be the main reason why the structure of the play within the play, which always makes a profound statement about the society within which it is written, is so frequently used in Israeli dramas. The play within the play is a dramatic model of a rhetorical device called mise en abyme, which always contains a certain duplication. Reflexivity lies at the centre of all mise en abyme structures.2 The reflexive structure, involving two (or more) levels of time and space, creates a semantic superimposition allowing different meanings, appearing one above another, to be seen simultaneously. The real play is thus situated ‘in-between’. This device works not only on the thematic level; it affects theatrical transmission and reception as well. Therefore, the model of the play within the play can provide insights regarding the functions and meanings of the play as a whole. The reflexive split structure of the play within the play is particularly suitable for the representation of a torn, wounded or variegated culture, and especially well suited to Israeli culture, which is conscious of itself as such, while concomitantly compelled to adhere to an ideological consensus due to its constant state of war. In addition to its self-reflexive dimensions, the play within the play tends to comment, often profoundly, on the life, society and era in which it is produced. Whenever the play within the play is used in the

1

2

The ‘Hebrew Theatre’ (as distinguished from the ‘Israeli Theatre’, the latter relating to the Theatre that came into being following the establishment of the State of Israel) was committed to this national mission from its early days in Moscow, where the Habima Theatre Company performed in 1917; the Israeli Theatre continued this tradition. The term ‘Hebrew Theatre’ relates not only to Israeli Theatre before and after the founding of the State of Israel, but also to the Jewish Theatre performed in Hebrew in the Diaspora. For further reading on the historical development of Israeli Theatre, see: Shosh Avigal, ‘Patterns and Trends in Israeli Drama and Theatre 1948 to present’, in Theatre in Israel, ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 9-50. The concept of the mise en abyme is taken from the image of a shield, which contains in its centre a miniature replica of itself. The first researcher to refer to it as an artistic and literary device was André Gide in 1893. Lucien Dallenbach developed it as a reflective model with multiplied variations. Dallenbach presents its applications to the genre of the novel, but the model is even more common in drama. See Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 7-74.

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theatre, it is ‘projected onto life itself, and becomes a means for gauging it.’3 Thus the play within the play is ‘conscious or overt metadrama […]; the playwright examines in it the manner in which his society perceives reality.’ 4 In his book The Mirror in the Text, Lucien Dallenbach presents three subgenres of this model: simple duplication, in which a play is connected by similarity to the play that encloses it; infinite duplication, in which a play is connected by similarity to the play that encloses it, which itself is connected to another play that encloses it, etc.; and aporetic (paradoxical) duplication, in which a play is supposed to enclose the play that encloses it.5 This chapter will discuss three functions of the structural model of the play within the play, each based on one of the sub-genres and implemented in a different Israeli play, representing different views of developing Israeli society. From its inception, Israeli theatre, a new medium in a new country, was ideologically committed to the national Jewish movement and to the formation of a new national and cultural identity. But at the same time, due to the constant state of war with the Palestinians, the theatre was also compelled to express opposing voices, especially following the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. The mirroring effect of the play-within-the-play format enabled the deep conflict between conformity and opposition in Israeli society to be expressed in all its complexity. In this chapter I will attempt to describe how, through means of structural duplication or by implementing the fractured mirror technique of the play within the play, Israeli drama became a mirroring apparatus of change in Israeli society. In other words, I will show how change in ‘social structure’ was translated into complex dramatic structures. The first of three plays to be discussed is He Walked in the Fields by Moshe Shamir, written in 1948, i.e. during the ‘heroic’ period of the establishment of the State of Israel.6 This was considered the first Israeli play to deal with the highly dramatic current events of the period. Due to the circumstances in which it was written, the Israeli audience and critics regarded it as a tendentious play, staged mainly in order to motivate and encourage the Israeli public during the difficult period of the War of Independence. I would like to present a different perspective on this play, whose complexity has largely 3

4 5

6

Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (London and Toronto: Backwell University Press, 1986), p. 45. Hornby, p. 32. See Dallenbach, pp. 35-38. Dallenbach uses the word ‘sequence’, which I have changed to the word ‘play’, but the principle remains the same. Dallenbach comments that these models do not necessarily appear in a pure form and have many complex variations. Moshe Shamir, He Walked in the Fields (Tel Aviv: Or-Am Press, 1989).

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been neglected. I should like to suggest that the play’s reflexive structure of a play within the play exposes an inner ideological tension: while the outer play indeed represents the normative and consensual ideological stand of the Israeli collective at that time, a subversive attitude emerges from within the inner play, thus complicating their mutual relations. The second play, The American Princess by Nissim Aloni, was written in the early sixties.7 In The American Princess, the structure of the play within the play is just one of the playwright’s many devices of redundancy and hybridism. Nissim Aloni, son of an immigrant family who grew up in a marginal Tel Aviv neighborhood, uses the potential of infinite duplication of the play within the play as reflective of the ‘here-and-now’ of the multicultural immigrant society in Israel in the 1950s. The spiral form (a play within a play within a play) in The American Princess allows fluidity between one play and the other, creating more than one main axis in the drama. It thus reflects the author’s conviction that there is no single valid truth. Instead, the spectator is confronted with a variety of options. He is not expected to choose between them, but rather to balance them all. The third play, Mouth Wide Open, was written in 1995 by Hanoch Levin.8 Levin became one of the most extreme critics of the Israeli political situation from the very start of the occupation of the Arab territories in 1967. In an attempt to speak out against what he considered a growing and desperate indifference of the Israeli public to this troubling reality, Levin expresses his criticism by manipulating the spectator’s response. The demolished or blurred boundaries between the outer and inner plays arouse a sense of unease, of perceptual dislocation and insecurity. These effects, as I intend to show later, rupture the spectator’s interpretation, challenging his habitual modes of reception and compelling him to form a new view of the fictional and actual realities. The first play, He Walked in the Fields, represents the simple model. The outer play takes place on the memorial day that commemorates the death of the hero, Uri, one year earlier.9 The inner play is comprised of a series of fragmented flashbacks that tell the story of Uri’s life from the day he returned from boarding school until the day he was killed while attempting to blow up a bridge during a clandestine military action.10 He Walked in the Fields was first performed by the Cameri Theatre at the end of May 1948, just two 7 8

9 10

Nissim Aloni, The American Princess (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot Press, 2002). Hanoch Levin, Mouth Wide Open, in The Whore from Ohio, ed. by Menahem Perri (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad Press, 1996) pp. 183-224. In the canonical 1966 version, twenty years have passed since Uri’s death. During the time of the British Mandate in Palestine.

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weeks after the declaration of the State of Israel.11 Although the play’s events take place during the years preceding the 1948-49 War of Independence, the timing of the play’s presentation strengthened the bond between the reality presented on stage and the ‘heroic’ reality being acted out in Israel. This is only one of the reasons why the author’s critical stance was not noted by the audience at the time. Shamir’s decision to use a version of what Dallenbach termed a ‘simple duplication’ of the play within the play (albeit by way of contrast) was probably intended from the start to moderate the criticism expressed in the novel on which the play was based, while truthfully representing the ethos of an Israeli collective fighting for its life and liberty. 12 Shamir’s intention was to provide a mythical framing of the events of the inner play in order to cover its subversive materials. The outer play was moulded as memorial pageantry, designed to emphasize a communal commitment and to underscore the ideological importance of the death of the nations’ sons.13 This connection is further indicated in the constant ‘skipping’ from outer to inner play and back again, which takes place nine times in He Walked in the Fields. This particular device can be seen as an effort to blur the boundaries between the two plays in order to cover their contrasting stances and to impose the ideological concept, reflected in the memorial service of the outer play, on the ‘actual facts’ of Uri’s life as presented in the inner play. Despite these efforts, the play does not reach a resolution between the two concepts struggling within it. ‘Veneration’ of the fallen hero, the message of the outer play, is shown in the narrator’s summary narrative and represented by a static picture of the dead Uri, re-appearing in the background from time 11

12

13

The play was presented three more times: In 1956 it was performed by the Cameri Theatre in Paris with the original cast, but some changes were made for the foreign audience and for the new Israeli generation not familiar with the historical facts. In spite of the changes, the structure of the play within the play and the characteristic features of each play remained the same. In 1966 it was performed by the Haifa Theatre with minor changes; this became the authorized version. In 1997 it was performed again by the Beer-Sheva Theatre on the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel. The concept of the moderating role ascribed to the outer play can be seen in the following articles: Gad Kaynar, ‘The play He Walked in the Fields: A Milestone in the History of the Israeli Theatre’, Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 39 (1999), 67-76; Avner BenAmos, ‘He Walked in the Fields in 1948: Bereavement, Memory and Consolation’, in The Cameri: A Theatre of Time and Place, ed. by Gad Kaynar, Fredie Rokem, Eli Rozik (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv Press, 1999), pp. 25-47. For further insights into the ideological characteristics and propaganda of pageantry and its origins see Gideon Efrat, Earth, Man, Blood: The Myth of the Pioneer and the Ritual of Earth In Eretz-Israel Settlement Drama (Tel Aviv: Charikover, 1980), pp. 200-224; Stephen J. Whitfield, ‘The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946’, American Jewish History, 84.3 (1996), 221-251 .

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to time. In contrast, the inner play, portraying events as they ‘really’ happened and presented on stage for the spectators to watch and judge, presents us with a character far from ideal. Uri is shown as a confused young man who cannot deal with the separation of his parents and who avoids taking responsibility for his pregnant girlfriend, using his national military service as an excuse to escape his personal responsibilities. Thus while the outer play functions as a mythical text within the framework of the dominant Israeli ethos, the inner play subverts and mocks this idealization by revealing the falseness of the mythical perception of its hero, Uri. It becomes clear that the so-called ‘heroic acts’ which lead to Uri’s death in military action originate in an inherent death-wish which is revealed on the day he returns home from boarding school, when he learns not only that his parents have separated, but also that his elderly father is leaving for yet another national mission. Uri feels that his father, one of the founders of the kibbutz, does not leave him, the first son born on the kibbutz, with any space to grow. The founding fathers precede their sons in every area of life: in settling, in farming, in absorption of immigrants, in volunteering for military combat, and even in the hearts of the young women (it is hinted that Mika, Uri’s girlfriend, is also attracted to Uri’s father Vili). The founders’ mighty libido does not leave their sons’ generation with any space to conquer their own virgin territory except through heroic death. Therefore, in the inner play the blame for Uri’s death is laid mostly upon the founders, the fathers’ generation. And Uri the Sabra (the native-born Israeli), who is not able to cope with the ideal they have set, is exposed as their victim. As depicted in the inner play, Uri’s life is far from suitable for creating the image of the ‘mythological Sabra’. Only after his death (which is commemorated at a memorial ceremony in the outer play) will his image be recreated as the ultimate ‘new Israeli man’, who sacrifices his personal world and his young life for the sake of the nation. This is why the play does not end with Uri’s controversial death, but rather with the decision of his pregnant girlfriend, Mika (a Holocaust survivor), to give birth to his child. Uri’s ‘rebirth’ through his new son will sanctify his memory in the context of one of the most powerful myths of the young state of Israel, that of the ‘living dead’, promising eternal life to the young men killed in battle while serving their nation. With regard to the adoption of the myth of the ‘living dead’ in the iconography of the Israeli War of Independence, Hannan Hever claims that nurturing the mythic immortality of those killed in battle was that generation’s ideological response to bereavement. This myth served as part of the mechanism of denial and repression of the soldiers’ deaths, and even

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helped to compensate for unconscious feelings of guilt for the ‘sons’ murder’.14 While He Walked in the Fields used the simple duplication of a play within to impose social myths on historical events, Nissim Aloni’s play The American Princess uses a very different structure of the infinity duplication: a play within a play within a play. The outmost play is a detective story: Freddi, the Crown Prince, is accused of killing his father, the King-in-exile, by a police officer. The inner play presents Freddi’s defense speech, interspersed with examples and evidence from the lives of the King and his son, which Freddi presents to the captain to prove his innocence. On another level, the representation of representation (play within the play within the play) is interlaced through scenes from the set of a film-in-progress depicting the King’s life during his rein. In the course of Freddi’s presentation of events, facts from the so-called reality are mixed with the King’s own memories, with segments from the fictional film and with arguments which serve in Freddi’s defense. This mixture reaches its climax when we learn that the murder of the King by his son, which was intended to occur in the fictional world of film, actually occurred in real life. The different narrative representations of the play within the play within a play offer, in fact, contradictory versions of the King’s life without giving any of them the validity of truth. Their truth-value equivalence, due to the structure of infinite duplication, is increased by a wild intertextuality in the mode of pastiche, which results in a very high degree of fluidity and the refusal of categorization. Needless to say, this type of textual formation also determines the play’s meanings. In contrast to most of the interpretations of the play, which see Aloni’s main axis as comprised of binary and oppositional patterns,15 the linguistic, stylistic, generic and structural plenitude of the play creates, in my opinion, an open, dynamic and borderless textual world. These devices enable the co-existence of eclectic materials without hierarchical or oppositional classification and without judgmental evaluation. A binary reading of this play tends to oppose the King and the Prince as representing two generations in Israel: the generation of the founding fathers,

14

15

Hannan Hever, ‘In Prize of Labor and Political Controversy: The Emergence of Political Poetry in Eretz-Israel’, in The Hebrew Literature and the Labor Movement, ed. by Pinhas Ginossar (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 1989), pp. 116-157. See for example Haim Shoham, ‘Duality and Duplicity: The Dramas of Nissim Aloni’, in Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1975), pp. 166-218, and Yitzhak Ben-Mordechai, ‘Myth, Reality, Parody: On the Structure and Meaning of Nissim Aloni’s The American Princess’, Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, xviii (2001), 292-308.

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the pioneers, who embody a superior ethos and who brought about the Zionist revolution, and the generation of sons, the native-born Israelis, those cynical and sober citizens of the already existing state. This interpretation has mistakenly led critics to identify the author’s ideological stand as giving priority to the past, to the majestic, to the mythic, to the generation of the fathers; while the present, democracy, the modern age, the era of the sons’ generation, is deemed inferior. In my opinion, the structure of the play within the play within the play allows Aloni to avoid a dichotomous presentation of the King as a positive character and his son as a negative one. Aloni indeed sees the sons’ generation as cynical, but at the same time he recognizes their realistic attitude which allows them to cope with present-day realities. He sees the manipulation of the fathers’ generation in re-shaping the past and constructing a post-factum positive image of its own, but he also validates their longing for the sublime, the heroic, the romantic and the mythic. Aloni’s rich and heterogeneous poetic style was inspired by the Israeli multicultural immigrant society of the fifties. This starting point affected how Aloni captured the ‘Story of Israel’ not as an absolute meta-narrative but as possible multi-narratives of the Israeli subject as an assemblage of linguistic, historical, ideological and cultural constructs, substituting for and clashing with each other but also confirming each others’ existence. By using the snail structure of the play within the play within the play, as well as other components of the text such as multiple points of view and complex combinations of different layers of reality, Aloni creates a vivid and variably paced representation of the multicultural immigrant society in Israel, and expresses it with understanding and compassion.16 In contrast to Aloni’s accepting attitude towards the Israeli reality of his time, Hanoch Levin’s play Mouth Wide Open offers an acute criticism of the Israeli public of the 1990s, which tended to deny and suppress the violent political deadlock in which it found itself. The play was first performed by the Cameri Theatre on October 28, 1995, a week before the traumatic assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. We must take into account that, at this point, the Israeli collective memory was already influenced by the divisive Lebanon War and the first intifada (Palestinian uprising), which took place in the mid-eighties. The Israeli public was tired of the constant state of war with no solution in sight. Levin uses paradoxical duplication to create an interrup16

For a more detailed discussion on Aloni’s American Princess see Zahava Caspi, ‘“It’s like a kaleidoscope. Try to hold something vital, real, in this play of colors”: Poetics of Pastiche in American Princess by Nissim Aloni’, in On Kings, Gypsies and Performers: The Theatre of Nissim Aloni, ed. by Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv: The Porter Institution for Poetics & Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, 2005), pp.110-121.

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tion in the very strongly channeled procedures of interpretation and reception, forcing the spectator to reconsider the fictional as well as the actual reality. Similarly, Richard Hornby has stressed the fact that for the audience, the meta-dramatic experience of the play within the play is always ‘one of unease’ and ‘dislocation of perception’.17 Patrice Pavis notes that the scenes that cause a cognitive distortion in the spectator’s perception are exactly where the ‘real’ play takes place.18 These are the key moments when the audience changes from passive to active: their consciousness is awakened and they are challenged emotionally. In Mouth Wide Open, the main technique used to create this cognitive disruption is a split structure.19 In the framing play, a cast of spectators (a mother, her son and an old man), go to the Theatre and see a show, the inner play, which portrays the torture, punishment and execution of one of the queen’s guardians, named Mouth Wide Open, who dared to peep into the queen’s personal bedroom. As the plot unfolds, the characters from the outer ‘real’ play actively interact with the events of the inner play. Thus, the boundary between the two plays is violated and the centre of gravity moves discursively from the outer play to the inner play and vice-versa. This repeated crossing of boundaries between the different levels of reality cracks the ‘conceptual frame’, in Nelson’s terms, through which the spectator can identify the inner theatrical happenings as fiction, as separate from the so-called ‘reality’ of the outer play, evoking an unsolvable hesitation.20 The main effect of this practice forces spectators to ‘see double’, undermining their channelled perception and forcing them to re-evaluate reality, both onstage and in the real world. Spectators are forced to repeatedly waver between contradictory options of orientation, an oscillation that breaks down defences, allowing them to move beyond the ideological dimension in which every language is trapped. This eventually causes them to recognize not just a fictional story far

17 18

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Hornby, p. 32. Patrice Pavis, ‘The Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships’, in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 81-82. For further discussion on Levin’s techniques of the play within the play, see Zahava Caspi, Those Who Sit in the Dark. The Dramatic World of Hanoch Levin: Subject, Author, Audience (Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Keter Press, 2005). Nelson argues that in order to confirm separation of the spectator from the play, the theatrical happening must be formally presented as a performance. Only thus will it secure the audience’s conceptual frame which will allow them to recognize the performance as fiction. Cf. Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), pp. 1-10.

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from their actual lives in the horrible events that take place in the inner play, but their own real and communal lives outside the stage. I will present one prime example. In the play’s epilogue, the old man, a spectator from the outer play representing the audience, leaps on stage and protests the exaggerated cruelty of the playwright and his play. He takes his protest a step further and physically interferes in the plot of the inner play, reviving Mouth Wide Open and restoring his eyesight. Suddenly the boundary between what is supposed to be reality and the fictive story disappears. But is there really a crossing of borders? In the Theatre it is not difficult to bring a dead character to life. Moreover, this scene takes place at the end of the show, when in any case the actor who plays Mouth Wide Open is expected to come back to life in order to join the rest of the cast and take his bows before a cheering audience. The person who ‘actually’ dies on stage is none other than the old man himself, from the outer play, who represents the actual reality, the real live audience sitting in the auditorium. The old spectator, who a minute earlier performed a miracle, collapses and dies, and this time all the fictional characters from both plays try to resuscitate him. On the other hand, the old man is also no more than a fictional character in Levin’s play, and the actor playing him will also take his bow before the audience after the show, resuming his fictional life, which is internal, the following day. This, needless to say, is not the case with regard to the play’s real audience, who are mortals. The spectators’ inability to distinguish between the different levels of reality leaves them in a state of anxiety, underlining the fragile existence of their/our actual lives. Feelings of anxiety at life’s fragility rise from the depth of our subconsciousness to our emotional surface, no longer allowing us to repress the circumstances and outcomes of our real lives which, like Mouth Wide Open’s, are characterized by violence and death. Another way of examining the structure of the play within the play is by verifying each play’s genre, as suggested by Dallenbach. The essence of plays within plays greatly differs between those whose outer and inner plays belong to the same genre and those whose outer and inner plays belong to different genres, and even to different sub-genres.21 This generic criterion supports my conclusions in this chapter. In He Walked in the Fields, the inner play is presented as a realistic story (a chronicle survey of Uri’s actual life), while the outer play is a memorial ceremony, that is to say, the same story ‘improved upon’ retroactively by society, turning it into a myth. The different genres of the inner and outer plays reflect the contradiction between historic 21

Dallenbach, p. 73.

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and mythic reality. In The American Princess, the mixed genres (detective story, realistic story and melodramatic film) mirror the co-existence of disharmonic components without creating any sort of hierarchic order. This phenomenon is compatible with Aloni’s non-judgmental acceptance of the multicultural immigrants’ society in Israel, to which he himself belonged. In Mouth Wide Open the outer play has a realistic quality (spectators coming to watch a show in a theatre), while the inner play is a fairy tale (a story about a queen and her subjects). The audience’s awareness of the fictional existence of the inner story (it is only a show) allows Levin to defuse their resistance from the start and then lead them, via the techniques I have described, to acknowledge the fundamental resemblance between the fictional fairy tale of the inner story and the reality of their own lives. Thus, through these three representative Israeli plays, we see how a complex and conflict-laden society is drawn to the model of the play within the play as a means of signifying its tensions, contradictions and even reconciliation.

III Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy, theatrum mundi

Frank Zipfel

‘Very Tragical Mirth’: The Play within the Play as a Strategy for Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy

The dramaturgical strategy of the play within the play can have different functions within the structure of a play. Besides the rather technical function of foregrounding (i.e. the mirroring and thereby highlighting an element of the outer play in the internal play) and the more philosophical function of questioning our experience and our understanding of reality by blurring the borders between the different levels of fiction, i.e. between drama and metadrama, one of the most important functions of the play within the play is to shed light on the same problem, the same theme or the same element of a story from different, even mutually exclusive perspectives. The tragic and the comic, if looked at from a systematic point of view, seem to represent such mutually exclusive perspectives. Though both the comic and the tragic are in certain respects based on the violation of a rule (i.e. a social, cultural or religious norm) by one or more characters, the preconditions of tragedy are sympathy and compassion for the characters, their faults, and their remorse whereas the preconditions of comedy are dissociation from the characters and a feeling of superiority towards their misbehaviour. In the history of drama, however, there are quite a few plays and even genres, where tragic and the comic elements are, more or less successfully, brought together. The present chapter proposes to investigate and analyse the different ways in which comic and tragic elements are combined by means of the play within the play by studying some characteristic examples drawn from Renaissance/Caroline English, neo-Classical French and modern German theatre.

Tragedy and comedy are traditionally regarded as contrary genres. Tragic and comic action, or tragic and comic effect, looked at systematically, would seem to be mutually exclusive. Though both comic and tragic conflict are in certain respects based on the violation of a rule (i.e. a social, cultural or religious norm or premise) by one or more characters,1 the preconditions of tragedy are the audience’s sympathy and compassion for the characters, their faults, their suffering and the consequences of their actions, whereas the preconditions of comedy are the audience’s dissociation from the characters and lack of empathy for the unpleasant and awkward situations they provoke or are brought into. Over the long history of European drama, however, there have been many plays in which tragic and comic elements are, more or less successfully, brought 1

See Umberto Eco, ‘The frames of comic “freedom”’, in Carnival!, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 1-9.

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together.2 The object of this chapter is to examine different ways in which comic and tragic elements – in examples drawn from Renaissance/Caroline English, neo-Classical French and modern German theatre – have been combined by means of the play-within-a-play device. My analysis will also focus on the functions that these combinations may fulfil. 1. The Play within the Play: Form and Function Studies of the play-within-a-play device have focused their attention on issues of both form and function.3 Inquiries into formal matters deal with questions related to a wide range of topics, for example, the nature of the inner play (play, rehearsal etc.),4 the onstage/offstage audience, the characters in the inner and outer play. The present chapter, however, will limit itself to a discussion of the question of genre, that is, the relationship between the genre/s of the inner and outer plays.5 It will also examine the question of function. Two quite distinct functions may be distinguished in plays within plays, the immanent, concerning the relationship between the plots of the inner and outer plays, and the transcendent, concerning the function of the total, play-within-a-play structure.6 At least three kinds of immanent function may be distinguished: (1) the catalytic function, which occurs when the inner play furthers the plot of the outer (e.g. The Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s Hamlet); (2) the function of resolving the conflicts of the outer play or simply of concluding its plot (e.g., in revenge dramas such as Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy); and (3) the function of creating or promoting a particular atmosphere, especially when the inner play is not a substantial element in the plot of the outer play (e.g. in the case of the 2

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There is also, of course, the genre – if such it can be called – of tragic-comedy, on which, see J.L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Lionel Abel, Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2003); J. Orr, Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); R. Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and Storey (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); K.S. Guthke, Geschichte und Poetik der deutschen Tragikomödie (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1961); V.A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). See, e.g., the subtitle of K. Schöpflin, Theater auf dem Theater: Formen und Funktionen eines dramatischen Phänomens im Wandel (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1993) or Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1996), pp. 85-171 (‘Structures et fonctions’). I use the term ‘outer play’ to refer to the play as a whole and ‘inner play’ to refer to the play embedded within it. On these formal questions, see Schöpflin, pp. 668-72 and Karin Vieweg-Marks, Metadrama und englisches Gegenwartsdrama (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 43-72. Vieweg-Marks, p. 72.

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inner play in Goethe’s Das Jahrmarktsfest von Plundersweiler (The Fair at Plundersweiler).7 These functions are technical and may be regarded as aspects of the play’s overall form. In the following, however, I will concentrate on the play-transcendent functions of the play within the play. Regarding play-transcendent functions I would like to distinguish between four different potential functions or ‘potentials’, meta-dramatic/metaliterary, philosophical, response-centred and perspectival.8 As a kind of metatheatre, the play within the play always has a meta-dramatic, meta-literary and meta-aesthetic potential, and lends itself to reflections on the technical, social and political preconditions and practices of production of and response to staged drama in particular and to literature and art in general.9 The philosophical potential embraces ontological and epistemological concerns regarding the distinction between fiction, illusion and reality in general. The responsecentred potential, on the other hand, originates from the fact that the reactions of the audience of the inner play invariably have some influence on the real audience, the audience of the outer play. The real audience may be intended to identify with and approve of the reactions of the fictional audience or it may, on the contrary, be led to rebel against the comments and responses of the fictional audience to the inner play. Finally, the perspectival potential refers to the fact that one of the most important potential functions of a play within a play is to shed light on a particular conflict, theme or story/ story element from different, even mutually exclusive, points of view. This last function is evidently the most interesting in view of the combination of comic and tragic elements in play-within-the-play drama. 2. Comedy within Tragedy: Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor Massinger’s The Roman Actor, first performed in 1626, is unique within the play-within-the-play tradition in that it contains no fewer than three different inner plays. The outer play interweaves two stories: the fate of the ‘Roman Actor’, Paris, and the reign of terror of the Roman emperor Domitian. Paris becomes the victim of the ‘tragic triangle’ 10 of Domitian’s friendship for his actor-protégé, of Domitian’s adoration of his wife Domitia, and of her

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Vieweg-Marks, pp. 73-75. Vieweg-Marks, pp. 75-80 and, on ‘potentials’, see Werner Wolf, ‘Spiel im Spiel und Politik: zum Spannungsfeld literarischer Selbst- und Fremdbezüglichkeit im zeitgenössischen englischen Drama’, Poetica, 24 (1992), 165-66. These reflections are often linked to an impairment or breakdown of the dramatic illusion in the inner play. Patricia Thomson, ‘World Stage and Stage in Massinger’s Roman Actor’, Neophilologus, 44 (1970), 409-26 (p. 412).

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infatuation with Paris11 in a romantic ‘tragedy of circumstance rather than of character’.12 Notwithstanding the title, the play’s central theme is the cruelty of Domitian. Some of the emperor’s ruthless deeds are reported (his incest with his niece Julia and rape of his cousin Domitilla), though most of them are shown onstage. He forces the noble Lamia to divorce his wife Domitia and leave her to the emperor, he sentences to death almost anybody who dares to contradict him or disapprove of his actions13 (including Lamia), and he eventually kills Paris out of jealousy. In the end Domitian is killed by a conspiracy of his enemies. The outer play, then, is full of intense and irrevocable suffering more or less contingently brought about by the unrestrained power and will of the emperor. It may be considered either a revenge tragedy, depicting Domitian’s reign of terror and how he finally pays for it, or a de casibus tragedy, combining ‘the vicissitudes of fortune with retribution for sin in bringing about the fall of a prince’.14 The second and the third play-within-the-play sequences also have tragic plots: one depicting the Ovidian story of Iphis’s unrequited love for Anaxarete (Act III) as a romantic tragedy, the other presenting a revenge tragedy within the revenge tragedy (Act IV), following the paradigm of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1587). The first play-within-the-play sequence (Act II), however, is a comedy.15 The performance consists of a play called The Cure of Avarice,16 and depicts the classical comic stereotype of a miserly old man who trusts no-one, not even his son, and therefore keeps the key to his treasure fast between his teeth. The obsession for guarding his wealth has driven the old miser into a kind of coma or paralysis, described by his son: 11

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Furthermore, Thomson, p. 421, describes the tragic fate of Paris as follows: ‘If Paris’ is the tragedy of a man induced to act against the grain of a noble character, it is also the tragedy of an actor whose well articulated professional ideals are refused their proper expression.’ Thomson, p. 418. See Martin Butler, ‘The Roman Actor and the Early Stuart Classical Play’, in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, ed. by Douglas Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 151. Douglas Howard, ‘Massinger’s Political Tragedies’, in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, p. 120. Howard also notes that this kind of tragedy is ‘bleaker in outlook than those where suffering results from some failure of the individual’. Just how well the three plays within plays have been integrated into the outer play, or whether The Roman Actor is an ill-structured patchwork play, has been widely discussed; see Peter H. Davison, ‘The Theme and Structure of The Roman Actor’, AUMLA, 19 (1963), 39-56 (p. 39). These issues, however, fall outside my concerns in the present chapter. The story is, as Domitia says, ‘filch’d out of Horace’ (II.1. 411). More precisely, it is taken from Horace’s Satires, Book 2, Satire 3, see C.A. Gibson, ‘Massinger’s Use of His Sources for The Roman Actor’, AUMLA, 15 (1961), 60-72 (p. 64).

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O master doctor, he is past recoverie; A lethargie hath ceas’d him. And however His sleepe resemble death his watchful care To guard that treasure he dares make no use of Workes strongly in his soule. (II. 1. 287-91)

By staging a feigned robbery, the doctor (played by Paris) first startles the old man out of his stupor and then cures him of his avarice by picturing how his son would dissipate all his money after his death. He finally persuades the old man to try to prolong his life by spending some of his money on treatments to restore his health. Thus the inner play comes to a happy end. The opposite, however, happens in the outer play. In fact, the object of staging The Cure of Avarice was to cure Philargus, the miserly father of Parthenius, a freeman of Domitian, in the outer play – as Paris explains to Parthenius: ‘Your father, looking on a covetous man / Presented on the Stage as in a mirror / May see his owne deformity, and loath it’ (II. 1. 97-99). Philargus actually recognises himself in the miserly old man from the inner play (‘We were fashion’d in one mould.’ II. 1. 298). He identifies with the old miser even to the point of calling the emperor to help when the old miser in the inner play is about to be robbed; but he rejects the outcome of the play and sticks to his avarice: ‘An old foole to be guld thus! had he died / As I resolve to doe, not to be alter’d, / It had gone off twanging’ (II. 1. 406-08). Thus the intended cure fails. Domitian is not satisfied with this outcome and, taking Philargus at his word, promptly sentences him to death because of Philargus’ lack of insight. Parthenius pleads in vain for mercy for his father. In the few studies of The Roman Actor, the play within the play of the second act has been interpreted differently.17 Some critics see a contradiction of Paris’s famous defence of theatre as a moral instrument in the first act in the fact that Philargus is not cured.18 Thus the play-within-the-play sequence subverts the positive image presented in the first act’s eulogy on theatre,19 possibly because Massinger is much more sceptical about the power of art to correct and inform the audience than his protagonist, and is therefore un-

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On the lack of interest in Massinger and in staging his plays, see Anne Barton, ‘The Distinctive Voice of Massinger’, in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, pp. 221-32. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scenes defending theatre in Act 1 were often performed by celebrated actors like Kemble, Macready and Kean; see Jonas Barish, ‘Three Caroline “Defenses” of the Stage’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. by A. R. Braunmüller and J.C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 195-96. Barish, p. 201, has pointed out that the other two inner plays also contradict what is said about theatre in the first act.

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willing ‘to accept easy answers to complex questions about the relationship between life and art’.20 Moreover, A.P. Hogan argues that the doctor/Paris is anxious to cure the old miser/Philargus, but ‘has no real power over intractable human nature’,21 whereas Domitian has the power but lacks good intentions and therefore his cure, putting Philargus to death, perverts the meaning of ‘cure’. Hence The Cure of Avarice can be seen to unite the two main subjects of the play: on the one hand, the power (especially monarchical power, conceived as authorised by divine right) in conflict with human weakness (lust and cruelty) and, on the other, the function and power of actors and theatre.22 Finally, C.A. Gibson directs attention to the fact that Suetonius – one of Massinger’s sources – selects avarice and cruelty as Domitian’s two chief characteristics. The play shows Domitian’s cruelty well enough, but not his avarice. Thus Massinger may indeed have transferred the second vice to Philargus in order to present a second instance of what Gibson sees as the main theme of the play: And Such as govern’d onely by their will, And not their reason, unlamented fall; No Goodman’s teare shed at their Funerall. (V. 2. 91-93)

By the ‘juxtaposition of the avaricious Philargus gloating over his wealth and the lustful Domitian praising the beauty of Domitia’, Massinger seems to underline ‘the folly of uncontrolled appetite and will’.23 To these well-grounded interpretations of The Cure of Avarice, new insight can be added by taking into account the genre of the inner play of Act II. It is noteworthy that, of the three inner plays, only one is a comedy. All three mirror situations in the outer play. But while the tragic love-triangle between Domitian, Domitia and Paris can, it seems, only be represented in the romantic and revenge tragedies of the inner plays in Acts III and IV, avarice lends itself to comic representation. In fact, avarice, the actions and the behaviour linked to it are or can be represented as a painless incongruity. Not spending money on clothes, proper food or medical care and holding the key to one’s treasure between one’s teeth are, perceived from an emotional distance, nondestructive violations of rational behaviour. Hence, the miser in the inner

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Howard, p. 123. A.P. Hogan, ‘Imagery of Acting in The Roman Actor’, Modern Language Review, 66 (1971), 273-81 (p. 276). See Davison, passim. Gibson, p. 69.

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play and the avaricious Philargus in the outer play are comic characters.24 Regarded with somewhat diminished emotional distance, however, this avarice and its consequences are not altogether harmless. The father of the inner play has fallen into a stupor, making his son feel obliged to send for a doctor, and the self-neglect of Philargus threatens to shorten his life. Seen from the point of view of the loving sons (Parthenius in the outer play and the son in the inner play), the avarice of the fathers is self-destructive and gains a tragic apect insofar as the life and well-being of the fathers are threatened by their own irrational behaviour. This tragic aspect is acted out in the outer play: Domitian’s death-sentence is the logical consequence of the Philargus’s intractability (he would rather die than change) and can be seen as the condensed representation of what the avarice would have done to Philargus anyway, i.e., bring him to an untimely death. In the inner play the potentially tragic elements of avarice are avoided by the cure of the miser and the happy end typical of comedy. Thus we can conclude that by means of the play within the play, avarice is shown from two perspectives: one highlighting its comic, the other its tragic, aspects. Showing the tragic aspects of the typically comic theme of avarice may also have helped integrate the comedy The Cure of Avarice into the tragic outer play without dissipating too much of the tragic tension. Comic scenes are by no means unusual in tragedy, of course, but a play within the play is usually too complex a strategy and too long a sequence to have no other function than that of comic relief. The danger of losing the necessary emotional participation of the audience when embedding comedy in tragedy may be one of the prime reasons why literary history does not offer very many examples of comedies within tragedies.25 3. Tragedy within Comedy a) William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Of the several Shakespeare plays that make use of play-within-the-play techniques, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96) is one of the most interesting. The following analysis, however, will not focus on the intriguing multiplicity of meta-theatrical devices used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – e.g., the different ‘worlds’ or levels of reality represented,26 or the relationship be24

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Philargus’s very name gives this character of the tragic outer play a comic note: characterrevealing names are typical, not of tragedy but of comedy. Though he discusses Massinger’s The Roman Actor at length, Schöpflin, p. 671, wrongly asserts that among the different possibilities for combining the genres of outer and inner play there will be absolutely no comedy within tragedy. For example, James L. Calderwood, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Illusion of Drama’, Modern Language Quarterly, 26 (1965), 506-23 (p. 512), sees two plays within the play:

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tween reality, theatre and dream – but on the genre relationship between the inner play staged by the mechanicals and the outer play. The various plots of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are well known and need no rehearsal here. It is well accepted that the outer play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy. The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the imbroglio of the four young lovers, Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius in the Athenian forest, the quarrel between the king and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, Puck’s practical jokes, and the mechanicals’ efforts to stage a play for Theseus’s wedding celebrations are full of comic elements of all kinds. There is much harmless incongruity in Titania’s falling for the ass-headed Bottom under the influence of the magic love potion, in the confusion between the four lovers, caused by Puck mistakenly giving the potion to Lysander, and, last but not least, in the mechanicals’ shortcomings as they rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe. The entanglements of the story, of course, also bring forward some troubling and darker notes, especially in the love story,27 but they are neutralized by the comic language in which they are written and by the fact that the audience is granted broader knowledge of the background of the imbroglio than the characters. The brutal insults hurled at Hermia by Lysander, for example, who claims to love her and with whom she has eloped, might well seem extremely painful: LYSANDER HERMIA LYSANDER LYSANDER

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Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose; Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent! Why are you grown so rude? What change is this, Sweet love? Thy love? Out, tawny Tartar, out! Out, loathed med’cine! O hated potion, hence! […] Get you gone, you dwarf, You minimus of hind’ring knot-grass made, You bead, you acorn. (III, ii, 261-331)

‘One, actual play in which Bottom and crew act the parts of noble lovers; the other, a metaphoric play in which the young lovers figure as actors in a drama written, produced and directed by Oberon and Puck.’ And Stephen L. Smith, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare, Play and Metaplay’, Centennial Review, 21 (1977), 194-209 (p. 196), who writes: ‘The questioning of reality is not just a theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is an integral part of seeing it, and […] reading it.’ E.g., Egeus threatens his daughter Hermia with a cloister, death even, if she refuses to renounce her love for Lysander. Helena has been abandoned for Hermia by Demetrius, whom she loves, and Hermia in turn will be abandoned by Lysander and Demetrius while they are under spell of the love juice.

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But the outrageous and fantastic language of these insults is likely to distance the audience emotionally from the pain they cause the characters, and thus these insults are likely to provoke laughter. Moreover, even if Puck’s practical jokes occasionally frighten the young lovers and the mechanicals, the play’s atmosphere clearly indicates to the audience that no-one will come to any harm. This allows the audience to laugh at the incongruities in the reactions of the frightened characters. The ‘follies of mispaired doting lovers, their excessive praises and mispraises, their broken friendships, even the threat of bloodshed’ add up to ‘potential tragedy were it not for Oberon’s protection, of which we are so well aware that we can laugh at the folly they themselves take so seriously’.28 Thus, even in its darker moments, the outer play remains a comedy.29 The genre of the inner play, however, seems less easily identified, especially if we look closely at the evidence of the text. In the first act the inner play is introduced as ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (I. 2. 9-10) and later is presented as ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe: a very tragical mirth’ (V. 1. 56-57). These titles are probably not to be taken too literally as an indication of the genre of the mechanicals’ play: they may have been intended to parody the title of a play by a predecessor of Shakespeare’s, Thomas Preston: A lamentable tragedie, mixed ful of pleasant mirth, conteyning the life of Cambises king of Pericia, from the beginning of his kingdome unto his death, his one good deed of execution, after that many wicked deeds and tirannous murders, committed by and through him, and last of all, his odious death by Gods Justice appointed. Still, the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe is chosen by Theseus from the selection offered him as entertainment between the wedding supper and bedtime, especially because of the contradiction in the title, which promises a combination of tragedy and comedy.

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R. W. Dent, ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 115-129 (p. 120). Paul A. Olson, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage’, ELH, 24 (1957), 95-119 (p. 117), also points out that ‘it is part of Shakespeare’s art that, while the plight of the lovers seems more and more desperate to them, it appears increasingly comic to their audience, possibly because in this play the benevolent Oberon can send his Robin to rescue the squabbling pairs.’ For Jan Kott’s controversial reading of the dark side of the play, and David Bevington’s reply, see Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 213-36 and Bevington, ‘“But We Are Spirits of Another Sort”: The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: New Casebooks , ed. by Richard Dutton (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 24-37.

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‘Merry’ and ‘tragical’? ‘Tedious’ and ‘brief’? – That is, hot ice and wondrous strange black snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord? (V. 1. 58-60)

Theseus’s question is easily answered: the tragic elements stem from the plot of the play, the mirth from the mechanicals’ performance.30 During the performance of the inner play in Act V, the comic effects certainly prevail. All the attention of the onstage audience is focused on the comic features of the mechanicals’ performance, as will be that of the theatre audience, if we assume that an identification of the audience of the outer play with that of the inner play is indeed intended. On the other hand, there is no doubting that the inner play is a tragedy. As in Romeo and Juliet, the two young lovers Pyramus and Thisbe cannot unite because their families live in enmity. Moreover, when they attempt to meet secretly at night, they both die due to fatally bad timing and a tragic misunderstanding.31 But the story of Pyramus and Thisbe does not only bear similarities to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, it also parallels the starting point of the story of Hermia and Lysander, whose love is threatened by the hardheartedness of Hermia’s father, Egeus. Moreover, it shows us ‘how their story might well have ended: with blood and deprivation’.32 Even though the mechanicals’ performance is hilariously funny, the plot of Pyramus and Thisbe represents a tragic version of the outer play, and thereby highlights the dark and potentially tragic notes of the outer play. The inner play here directs attention to the fact that love relationships do not naturally come to happy endings and are liable to be threatened by all sorts of external impediments (for example, hardhearted parents) or internal ones (for example, the lovers’ own inconstancy). Pyramus and Thisbe illustrates the possibility of a ‘disastrous end of doting, of love brought to confusion’;33 ‘it is the potential tragedy of the lovers in the woods’.34 Moreover, it is obvious

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Schöpflin, p. 671, generalizes this situation to all tragedy-within-comedy plays: ‘If a tragedy is inserted in a comedy, the small tragedy is distorted into parody by means of textual features or by the way it is performed, so that the tragedy actually becomes a comic interlude’ (my translation). On the similarities between Pyramus and Thisbe and Romeo and Juliet, which was written during the same period as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Amy J. Riess and George Williams Walton, ‘“Tragical Mirth”: From Romeo to Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 214-18. Barton, p. 220. Frank Kermode, ‘The Mature Comedies’, in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-AvonStudies 3, ed. by John Russell Brown and Bernhard Harris (London: Arnold, 1961), p. 216. Olson, p. 118.

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that the outer play would not come to a happy end for the four young lovers without the help of the fairies’ supernatural power, and specifically if Demetrius had not been left under the spell of the magic juice. Thus the outer and inner plays deal with the same problem, but from different perspectives.35 Moreover, the comic perspective of the outer play is contaminated by the tragic perspective of the inner play, and vice versa. The inner play tells a tragic love story but converts it to a comedy through its staging;36 the outer play is a comedy on the surface but ‘constantly flirts with genuine disaster,’ 37 and its happy ending is continuously threatened by potentially tragic elements.38 b) Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique Commissioned especially for the opening of the Théâtre du Marais in Paris in 1635, L’illusion comique had considerable initial success, and although it was subsequently forgotten until the second half of the nineteenth century, it has met with renewed interest in the twentieth century. Its plot may be summarised as follows: Pridamant is desperately trying to find his son Clindor, whom his hardheartedness had driven from the parental home over ten years earlier. He goes to a celebrated magician, Alcandre, who, in his cave – the locus classicus of magicians in contemporary pastoral plays 39 – shows Pridamant what Clindor has been doing since his departure. These ‘flashbacks’ are pre-

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Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel: Formen dramatischer Illusion bei Shakespeare’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 198 (1962), 209-26, also believes the inner and outer plays deal with the same problem, but in his opinion their common issue is metamorphosis. For him, the difference between the two perspectives lies in the ease of the transformation of the outer play and the inability of the mechanicals to incorporate fictive characters. See Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Das Englische Drama: vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Dieter Mehl, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1970), I, 93. Dent, p. 124, points out that most critics recognise ‘the necessity that Pyramus and Thisbe be treated farcically if it is to harmonise in tone with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole’. Bevington, p. 32. The potentially tragic elements are well described by Calderwood, p. 521: ‘The lovers make the “perilous journey” beyond the safeguards of society and reason into the realm of nightmare. Former relationships disintegrate; truth, honour, and love metamorphose into falsehood, disloyalty and malice; and the whole structure of reason and order is swallowed up in a chaotic absurdity whose effect on all of them is summed up in the helpless frustration of Hermia’s “I am amaz’d, and know not what to say” (III. 2. 344).’ See Forestier, p. 209, and Hans Sckommodau, ‘Die Grotte der Illusion comique’, in Wort und Text: Festschrift für Fritz Schalk, ed. by Harri Meier and Hans Sckommodau (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1963), pp. 281-93.

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sented in a form similar to a play within the play during Acts II, III, IV and part of Act V. There is a two-layer structure, with an inner play (scenes from Clindor’s life) and an outer play (Alcandre and Pridamant watching them), but the inner play is not actually staged as a play, rather as a kind of supernatural vision.40 The plot of the inner play in Acts II, III and IV is mainly comic. After leaving home, Clindor has not only become the servant of a captain called Matadore, but also his rival for the love of Isabelle, whom her father wants to marry off to the noble Adraste. Matadore, a boastful yet cowardly captain, is a particularly comic character, descended from the Latin miles gloriosus and the Italian capitano of the commedia dell’arte.41 Clindor himself is a picaresque character, who has had many different professions and is constantly on the lookout for new love affairs.42 He tries, not only to marry Isabelle, but also to seduce her servant Lise, who is truly in love with him, although she is aware that he is courting Isabelle. Although Clindor stabs Adraste to death at the end of Act III, for which he is imprisoned and sentenced to death in Act IV, the inner play maintains its comic tone until the end of Act IV, when Clindor manages to escape from prison with the help of Lise and Isabelle. In Act V, however, the story seems to turn tragic. Clindor, who in the meantime has married Isabelle, has been pursuing a new love affair with a noble lady. When Isabelle calls him to account, he promises to be faithful in the future. But at just that moment he is killed by a servant of his mistress’s husband. Seeing this, Pridamant bewails his son’s death and wants only to go and die of grief. But Alcandre shows him another vision, in which Clindor is revealed to be a member of a theatre company, counting and sharing with his colleagues the night’s box-office receipts. The magician tells Pridamant that Clindor’s death was not real but in fact part of a play, in which both Clindor and Isabelle had leading roles.43 Alcandre also explains that after Clindor’s escape from prison he became an actor and, along with Isabelle and Lise, joined a theatre company. At first Pridamant is bitterly unhappy about his son’s vocational choice, since it is not commensurate with

40

41

42 43

See Rainer Zaiser, ‘Struktur und Bedeutung des Metatheaters in Pierre Corneilles Illusion comique’, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 50 (1999), 110-126 (p. 116). See Jürgen von Stackelberg, ‘Corneilles L’Illusion comique’, Das französische Drama vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Jürgen von Stackelberg, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1968), I, p. 65. Stackelberg, I, p. 63. For a detailed explanation of how Corneille constructs the play within the play of Act 5 in order to make the audience believe that we see the story of the magical vision of the previous acts continued, while in reality we see a stage representation of an analogous story, see Forestier, pp. 242-45.

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his rank. But, in the light of Alcandre’s fervent apology for the theatre, he forgives and decides to make up with his son. Closer analysis of the play reveals that its structure does not correspond to a simple play within the play. In Acts II, III, and IV there is a magic vision within the play. Scenes 2-5 of Act V present a play within the vision, even if neither the fictional onstage audience nor the real audience are initially aware of this structure. Hence, the mentioned scenes actually follow a three-layer structure: a play within a vision within a play. It will be necessary to consider this structure for the inquiry into Corneille’s specific way of combining comedy and tragedy. Corneille himself referred to his play as a ‘strange monster’: Here is a strange monster […]. The first act is only a prologue; the next three constitute an imperfect comedy; the last one is a tragedy. And all of this, sewn together, forms a come44 dy.

The plot of Act V scenes 2-5 is tragic, at least according to Corneille’s understanding of Aristotle, which he explains in his Discours de la tragédie. Corneille quotes Aristotle’s rule that tragedy should excite pity and fear and sums up Aristotle’s explanation in the following sentence: We pity those whom we see suffer from misfortune that they don’t deserve, and we fear that 45 a similar misfortune may happen to us, when we see it happen to people like us.

What Pridamant and with him the audience see in Act V is the killing of Clindor (actually the character played by Clindor) at the precise moment when he decides to change his life and become a better person. The tragedy then lies not only in the fact that the protagonist is killed, since it could be argued that he deserved punishment for his former life and infidelity (though perhaps not death). The potential tragedy stems mostly from the fact that

44

45

Dedicatory letter to The Theatrical Illusion, in Pierre Corneille, The Cid/Cinna/The Theatrical Illusion, trans. and ed. by John Cairncross (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975), p. 200. R. Albanese Jr, ‘Modes de la théâtralité dans L’Illusion comique’, in Corneille comique : Nine Studies of Pierre Corneille’s Comedies, ed. by Milorad R. Margitic, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, Biblio. 17 (1982), p. 130, sees more than two different genres combined in L’illusion comique: ‘Corneille […] uses alternatively the different genres en vogue in his time like pastoral play, farce, picaresque novel, comedy and tragedy’ (my translation). Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique, ed. by Bénédicte Louvat (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), p. 95. My translation.

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Clindor seems to be killed at the moment when he least deserves it, namely when he repents and wants to change his life.46 For Corneille, the different elements of L’Illusion comique add up to form a comedy. But while it is obvious that the vision-within-the-play is a comedy and that the play-within-the-vision is a tragedy, the genre of the outer play is more difficult to establish. That is because the outer play is rather short and devoid of action. It consists only of the first meeting of Pridamant and Alcandre and the preliminaries of the vision (act I), of Pridamant’s reactions to the different parts of vision at the end of each act, and of Alcandre’s defense of theatre in Act V. Thus the outer play is neither particularly tragic nor comic. Yet the absence of tragedy, the playfulness with which Alcandre deals with Pridamant and the happy ending may explain why Corneille sees his play as a comedy. Thus, the structure of L’Illusion comique can be stated as a (feigned) tragedy within a comedy (or magic comic vision) within a comedy. In a way this structure also serves the function of shedding light on the same issue from different perspectives. Pridamant’s initial reaction, on learning that his son has become an actor, is absolute disapproval: My son an actor! […] I thought his death was real; it was but feigned; Yet I find everywhere grounds for lament. Is this the glory, this the honoured rank, To which good fortune was to help him rise? (V. 2. 1628-44)

Only after Alcandre has declared theatre to be a highly moral art form and that acting should be regarded as an honourable profession does Pridamant change his opinion. In the end he accepts and even praises his son’s choice of vocation, which acting’s poor reputation had earlier caused him to regard as a tragedy (in a broader sense of the term). But had he not minutes earlier believed his son to be dead, his change of opinion might not have been brought about so easily. Ultimately, one of the functions of the (feigned) tragedy within the comedy is to convince Pridamant that his son’s vocational choice is not a tragedy after all,47 especially in comparison to his son’s staged death, which he at first mistook for real. Moreover, this interpretation coincides with Georges Forestier’s view, namely that the ending offers a double cathar46

47

Starting from a different conception of tragedy, Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), pp. 60-61, advances the dubious opinion that neither the final act of L’Illusion comique nor the rest of Corneille’s theatre production are at all tragic. For other functions of the play-within-the-play structure here, e.g., to allow Alcandre to reassess reflections on theatre, see Stackelberg, p. 41.

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sis. In Alcandre’s defence of theatre, Forestier sees not only a defence of the art form, but also a theatrum mundi argument: the way to look at life is to see it as theatre or play. Helped by experiencing his son’s death, Pridamant becomes able to accept the theatrum mundi vision of life and to acknowledge that by becoming an actor his son has most likely already had the same insight. Moreover, the intended cathartic change is not only directed at Pridamant but through him at the theatre audience, who may not only be invited to accept theatre as a highly moral art form, but also to accept the same theatrum mundi vision of life.48 4. Tragedy and Comedy interwoven My last example of tragic and comic elements combined in a drama that contains a play within the play is Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and Richard Strauss’s opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. My analysis is based on the second and final version (1916), which has a composed prologue and hence represents the form of an ‘opera within an opera’.49 Moreover, I propose to concentrate solely on the libretto and disregard its musical realisation.50 The prologue is set in a room in the house of the wealthiest man in Vienna, where two groups are backstage preparing for an after-dinner performance: on one side the young composer of the opera seria, Ariadne auf Naxos, his teacher, a soprano, and a tenor (the singers that are going to perform the leading roles in the opera seria), and on the other side Zerbinetta with her company Harlekin, Scaramuccio, Truffaldin, Brighella – all commedia dell’arte characters – engaged to improvise a kind of opera buffa after the opera seria. Shortly before the performance, the wealthiest man in Vienna decides he does not want to see the opera seria and the opera buffa performed one after the other, but rather together, one within the other. Despite the young composer’s protest, the performance is changed accordingly. In the opera we see Ariadne on the desert island of Naxos. She has been abandoned there by Theseus, whom she loved and who had promised to marry her. Unable to live without her beloved Theseus, she is awaiting death. Zerbinetta and her ensemble try in vain to cheer her up with songs and laughter. Eventually Bacchus arrives on the island and takes Ariadne with him onto his

48 49

50

See Forestier, pp. 307-09. In its original, 1912, version, Ariadne auf Naxos was included in a shortened version of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and hence became an opera within a play. On the relationship between music and text, see Klaus Felgenhauer, ‘Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Richard Strauß: Ariadne auf Naxos’, in Querlektüren: Weltliteratur zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. by Wilfried Barner (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 1997), pp. 154-67.

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ship while she, ignorant of his identity, believes him to be the messenger of death. On the surface, Ariadne auf Naxos presents two opposing concepts of love, Ariadne’s and Zerbinetta’s.51 Ariadne has found the love of her life in Theseus. Even after he has abandoned her, she wants to remain faithful to Theseus and cannot imagine loving anyone else.52 As there is no hope that Theseus will return, Ariadne awaits death on Naxos. Her response to his infidelity could be described as a tragic conceptualization of love and life, in which the unhappy love story is seen as an irrevocable loss leading to suffering so intense that death is the only remedy. Unlike Ariadne, Zerbinetta cannot imagine loving only one man. She is faithful for the duration of an affair, then without much regret leaves one love behind and moves on to the next one. Where love is gone and Ariadne anticipates death, Zerbinetta sees nothing but the time to be passed before a new lover appears. Her position then can be seen as a refusal to view love and life in a tragic way. Far from seeing an unredeemable disaster in the ending of a love story, Zerbinetta takes existence (her own and that of others) with an emotional calm and distance that enable her to embrace the potentially comic elements of love and life. Yet Ariadne auf Naxos does not only depict two opposing concepts of love; at the same time Hofmannsthal juxtaposes two conceptual paradigms. The first embraces concepts of remembrance (and the inability to forget), continuity, tradition, and faithfulness, but also rigidity, impediment of movement or development, and death. The second embraces concepts of forgetfulness, discontinuity, and unfaithfulness, but also the possibility of renewal, the capacity of movement or development and vitality.53 These two paradigms are represented by Ariadne and Zerbinetta as well as by their mutual lovers, Bacchus and Harlekin, and surface again in the character of the young composer in the prologue. This composer is torn between his adoration for

51

52

53

See Hofmannsthal’s explanation to Strauss: ‘The symbolic, the contrast between the woman, who loves only once and the one who gives herself many times is at the centre of the opera.’ In Richard Strauss und Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefwechsel, ed. by Willi Schuh, 5th rev. edn (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1978), p. 139 (my translation). For Emil Staiger’s description of Ariadne as a typical case of a woman’s unlimited love for a man who has abandoned her, see ‘Ariadne auf Naxos: Mythos, Dichtung, Musik’, in Emil Staiger, Musik und Dichtung, 5th expanded edn (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1986), p. 295. For Martin Sterns’s description of Hofmannsthal’s use of mythological elements, see ‘Spätzeitlichkeit und Mythos: Hofmannsthals Ariadne’, Hofmannsthal-Forschungen, ed. by Wolfram Mauser, 9 vols (Freiburg/Breisgau: Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft, 1985), VIII, 29495.

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Ariadne, in whom he sees the ideal woman whose love is absolute and unconditional, and his erotic interest in the inconstant Zerbinetta.54 Hofmannsthal pits those two paradigms against each other in different ways in several of his other works, such as Elektra, Christinas Heimreise and Die Ägyptische Helena.55 What is most interesting about the two paradigms is that both contain positive as well as negative elements. In all likelihood, the aim of pitting them against each other is not to come to a final choice, but to present the consequences of favouring one. Specific to Ariadne auf Naxos is the fact that, by means of the opera-within-the-opera structure, Hofmannsthal associates the Ariadne paradigm (remembrance and death) with the opera seria and the tragic vision, whereas he associates Zerbinetta’s paradigm (forgetfulness and vitality) with the opera buffa and the comic vision.56 Thus Hofmannsthal uses the play-within-the-play structure to shed light on the exact same issue from opposing perspectives, although the tragic and the comic perspectives are not linked exclusively to one level of the opera, that is either to the outer or the inner play, but they run through both parts.57 In the prologue the composer is a somewhat tragic-comic character. He is really suffering from the fact that the work in whose perfection he has put all his heart will be combined with comic improvisations and thus, in his eyes, destroyed – and to a certain extent this suffering is comprehensible. At the same time, the composer’s youthful inexperience, his exaggerated seriousness, and the discrepancy between his adoration for Ariadne and his infatuation for Zerbinetta lead to comic situations. In the opera the tragic suffering of Ariadne is contrasted with the comic behaviour of the commedia dell’arte characters. Moreover, the opera has an open ending, leaving unresolved whether the misunderstanding of Ariadne’s mistaking young Bacchus for the messenger of death leads to confusion and more tragic suffering or, in fact, to new love and the happy ending so characteristic of comedy.

54

55

56

57

See Stern, p. 306. Moreover, it is noteworthy that besides the composer’s openly displayed interest in Zerbinetta toward the end of the prologue, right at the beginning he tries to find the Primadonna who is supposed to sing the Ariadne part in Zerbinetta’s dressing room: see Ariadne auf Naxos, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke XXIV. Operndichtungen 2, ed. by Manfred Hoppe (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1985), v. 12, pp. 10-15. See Frank Zipfel, ‘“Machen wir mythologische Opern, es ist die wahrste aller Formen”: zur Bedeutung des Mythos für die Libretti Hugo von Hofmannsthals’, in Komparatistik als Arbeit am Mythos, ed. by Monika Schmitz-Emans and Uwe Lindemann (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004), pp. 161-63. See Barbara Könneker, ‘Die Funktion des Vorspiels in Hofmannsthals Ariadne auf Naxos’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 22 (1972), 124-41 (p. 125). See Könneker, p. 129.

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5. Conclusion I have tried to show how play-within-a-play structures have been used in different ways to combine comic and tragic elements in one and the same play: a comedy within a tragedy (Massinger), a tragedy within a comedy (Shakespeare, Corneille), and comic and tragic elements interwoven in both the outer and the inner play (Hofmannsthal). Though these four plays differ in many ways (for example, in the theatrical conventions of their respective periods, in their stories and themes, in their way of mixing comic and tragic elements, in the messages that can be assigned to them), it is possible to see common ground with regard to their combinations of tragic and comic elements: in each one the combination of comic and tragic elements leads to a realization of the play within the play’s perspectival potential. Thus, the function common to all four dramas is to shed light upon the same situation (young lovers in conflict with their parents), the same motif (avarice, inconstancy in love), or the same problem (choice of vocation) from different points of view. This, however, does not mean that these different perspectives are always comic and tragic in a similar way. In Massinger’s The Roman Actor we are confronted with the comic and tragic consequences of avarice. In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the comic and tragic effects of a conflict of young lovers with unsympathetic parents are enacted. In Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, the exaggeratedly tragic vista of the father is defeated by means of a feigned tragedy and transformed into a more balanced arrangement which, though not comic in the narrowest sense, brings about a happy ending to the story. Finally, in Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos we are offered a comic and a tragic view of love and its inconstancies, yet both seem to encompass positive and negative features.

Herbert Herzmann

Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister Ludi

In Calderón de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World), the Creator/God wishes to see a play performed, and he orders the World to arrange it. He distributes the roles and then watches and judges it. In short, he is a Magister Ludi. The impact of the Baroque tradition, and especially of Calderón’s paradigm, can be detected in many Austrian works for the stage, works which show not only a predilection for a mixture of the emotional and the farcical, but also a strong sense of the theatricality of life, which often leads to a blurring of the borders between play and reality. This chapter concentrates on the function of the Magister Ludi and the relationship between play and reality in Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (1633/36), Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790), and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo; 1898) and Felix Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube (In the Lion’s Den; 1998).

Felix Mitterer: In der Löwengrube (1998) The Vienna Volkstheater premiered Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube on 24 January 1998.1 The plot is based on the true story of a Jewish actor, Leo Reuss, who in 1936 fled from the Nazis in Berlin and went to Austria, where he took on the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer who claimed to be obsessed with the desire to become an actor. He managed to be interviewed by Max Reinhardt, who employed him in the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, and he enjoyed a remarkable success. However, he was ultimately recognized, and in 1937 emigrated to the USA, where he died in 1946. Mitterer, who did not intend to write a documentary play, used these facts very freely. He was particularly daring in the way in which he mixed different forms, genres and styles. The result is a fascinating mélange of fact and fiction, play and reality, tragedy and comedy, emotional drama and farce, which is very effective on stage. Mitterer’s plot runs as follows. In the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer named Benedikt Höllriegel, the actor Arthur Kirsch returns to the very theatre in Vienna from which he had been expelled after the Anschluss a year earlier. 1

In der Löwengrube: Ein Theaterstück und sein historischer Hintergrund (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1998). All references will be to this edition. With the exception of Così fan tutte, translations of all titles and quotations are my own.

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He is given the title role in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, in which he triumphs. The Nazi press hails him as a true blood and soil ‘Naturtalent’ who can play the archetypically ‘German’ Tell, by the equally essentially ‘German’ Friedrich Schiller, in a way in which none of the ‘semitic’ actors who allegedly dominated the Viennese stage before 1938 could have done. Kirsch-Höllriegel plans to reveal his true identity after one of his performances. By unmasking himself he would unmask the prevailing political system. Of course, this would not only mean the end of his career as an actor, but also the end of his life. Ultimately, he does not summon up the courage to do this and settles for having gained the respect of his peers (who up to then had never recognized his talent as an actor), the admiration and love of his wife (who is not Jewish and who is the star actress of the theatre) and, of course, he succeeds in saving his own life and the lives of his children. His strategy almost goes wrong when one of the Nazi actors recognizes him as an imposter, and calls the Gestapo to arrest him. Minutes before the Gestapo rush in, the real Benedikt Höllriegel (whose identity Kirsch had taken on) arrives. He had sheltered Kirsch on his farm in the Alps and taught him to speak and behave like a mountain farmer. The real Höllriegel passes the identity test (a scar on his left knee) and the Gestapo arrest the Nazi colleague for falsely denouncing ‘den größten Schauspieler deutscher Zunge’ (‘the greatest actor of the German tongue’; Löwengrube, p. 103). This slapstick ending does not detract from the serious message of the play, but rather fits in with it. Arthur Kirsch, an actor by profession, is forced to act in real life. Everybody – the audience in the theatre, his colleagues, his wife, the director of the theatre and the holders of political power – become his audience, whom he must please. Failing to please them would not only cost him his career, but also his life. Thus the whole world becomes his stage, and his life is merely a play. It is of the utmost importance that he plays his role as well as he can. The famous Shakespearean metaphor of ‘all the world’s a stage’ is a quintessential Baroque figure of speech that expresses the world view of an entire epoch. It was given its definitive shape by the Spanish playwright, Calderón de la Barca in the middle of the seventeenth century. The way in which Mitterer revives this metaphor is as striking as the mixture of tragedy, comedy and farce, of emotionally charged scenes and pure slapstick, which he employs and which also can be found in Baroque theatre. It is remarkable that the theatrical language and sign-system of the Baroque proves suitable to express the dilemmas of twentieth-century Austrian and German history.

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Calderón de la Barca: El gran teatro del mundo (1633/36) 2 In classical Greek tragedy human beings are shown to be pawns in the hands of the gods, who devise all kinds of trials and tribulations, which humans experience as destiny, or ‘Fate’. The gods appear to enjoy watching how the humans try their best to cope with them. What is entertaining theatre (play/ Spiel) for the gods is a serious matter for us mortals. The plot of El gran teatro del mundo is a Christian variation of this model. El autor (Creator) orders el mundo (World) to arrange a play for the glorification of his own greatness: ‘una fiesta hacer quiero / a mi mismo poder, si considero / que sólo a ostentación de mi grandeza / fiestas hará la naturaleza’ (‘I wish to arrange a festivity / in order to celebrate my own power as I see fit / that solely for the display of my greatness / Nature puts on festivities’). El mundo provides the stagesetting and the props, el autor distributes the roles. In this way all human life becomes a theatrical performance, that is to say, an entertainment for el autor: ‘y como siempre ha sido / lo que más me ha alegrado, y divertido / la representación bien aplaudida, / y es representación la humana vida, / una Comedia sea / la que hoy el Cielo en tu Teatro vea’ (‘and as a well received theatrical production has always given me much pleasure and diversion / and human life is a theatrical representation / it shall be a play / which Heaven will today attend in your theatre’; Gran teatro, pp. 8-9). However, there is a difference between the theatre of the world and that which we traditionally understand to be a theatre. In the latter the actors can rehearse their parts; in the teatro del mundo there is no time for rehearsal. The ‘actors’ must play their parts without ‘ensayar’ (‘rehearsing; Gran teatro, pp. 30-31). They do not even know how much time they have, because el autor can call them from the stage whenever it pleases him. What is a ‘fiesta’ and a ‘representación’ for the divine author is deadly serious for the human ‘actors’. After the play has ended the author will judge the performances and invite those who have performed well to dine with him at the heavenly table; those who have acted badly will be condemned. The hero in Greek tragedy only had the choice between collapsing miserably beneath the fate which the gods had sent him or bearing it heroically and accepting it as his own. The human actors in Calderón’s auto sacramental enjoy more leeway. True, they have no say in their choice of roles; the author decides that for them. But he has given them ‘Albedrío’ (‘free will’; Gran teatro, pp. 32-33), with the help of which they can decide how to play their

2

El gran teatro del mundo: Das grosse Welttheater, trans. and ed. by Gerhard Poppenberg, Reclams Universalbibliothek, 8482 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988). All references will be to this edition.

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parts. Before they receive their roles, the humans are ‘informes’ (‘unformed’; Gran teatro, pp. 22-23). It is the roles that enable them to live and to play their part in the world. The only way of realizing one’s potential as a human being is through (role-)play. While the cruel gods of antiquity determine that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, the omniscient author of El gran teatro del mundo knows what his actors will do, but he does not determine it in advance. Furthermore, he wants them to choose the right path to the heavenly table and provides them therefore with a helpline. This is his law (ley), which will serve as prompter, an inner voice which tells them what is right and wrong.3 In a sense, el autor is detached, but not uninterested. At no time is there any danger that he will become entangled in the play and lose control. The authority of the author – who is at the same time creator (playwright), director of the troupe, audience and judge – rules supreme. Although the human actors have freedom in that they can realize their roles, they remain part of a team, and that is more important than the individual. To the ‘pobre’ (‘pauper’) who complains about the miserable part he has been given the divine author replies that all roles are of equal importance for the staging of the ‘representación’ (Gran teatro, pp. 28-29). Variations of Calderón’s model from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries Once one has become aware of Calderón’s auto sacramental, it is easy to see that his model of the world as a play has made a tremendous impact on subsequent centuries, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Austrian theatre and music theatre. Whether or not later authors knew El gran teatro del mundo, they used its structure and varied it according to their different needs. In Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute; 1791), for example, Sarastro and the Queen of the Night are the ‘gods’ who assign roles (tasks) to Tamino, Papageno and Pamina, and observe how they perform with the intention of dishing out the appropriate rewards or punishments at the end. In Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790), Don Alfonso is the equivalent of the autor who distributes roles to his friends for what becomes an intriguing mixture of play and reality. He strikes a wager with them and observes how they perform. Of course, there are differences, but the Baroque model clearly shines through.4

3 4

See Gran teatro, pp. 32-33. Henry W. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 290, is convinced of Calderón’s influence on Mozart: ‘The number of direct and indirect borrowings in Mozart’s output for the musical stage is so striking, moreover, that some selective intuition, if not actual familiarity, must be allowed to have existed. Most of the Calderón materials

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The same can be said of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1870), in which Doktor Falke acts like el autor and assigns roles to his friends and has them caught up in a game of which they are largely unaware. He does so to revenge himself on his friend Gabriel Eisenstein, who had played a foul trick on him some years earlier. I call figures like Don Alfonso or Doktor Falke Magistri Ludi (Spielmeister) and interpret them as a secular (and therefore less powerful) version of the divine author. Because they are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, they are in danger of becoming caught up in the games they start and, ultimately, of losing control. This happens, for example, to Prospère, the innkeeper in Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (The green Cockatoo; 1898). And, of course, Arthur Kirsch, in Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube, is another Magister Ludi. He directs his own ‘play’, he assigns to himself the role which he feels is the best under the circumstances. The main difference between him and Calderón’s divine author is that he is drawn into the play. This is already the case up to a point with Don Alfonso and Doktor Falkenstein and, more radically, with Prospère. But Kirsch is author and actor in one. He creates the play, but once he enters into it he must perform well in order to survive. The part of the divine spectator who will judge in the end has been taken over by his colleagues, his wife, the Nazi press, and the holders of political power. The highest representative of the political power is the ‘Doktor’, a great supporter of German art, who pays a visit to the theatre. He – the character is clearly recognizable as Dr. Göbbels – is so impressed by KirschHöllriegel that he invites him to dine with him and Helene Schweiger, Kirsch’s wife (and probably the Doktor’s mistress) after the performance. Kirsch has passed the test and is invited to the (albeit not heavenly) table of the all-powerful Doktor! The Magister Ludi who plays (or experiments) with humans has much in common with the scientist. The scientist steps outside and above the process he instigates and observes. In so doing he achieves – or hopes to achieve – a sort of likeness to God. Faust is a case in point. Ilya Prigogine has pointed out the analogy between scientist and God, one in which our Magister Ludi can easily be included: ‘For God everything is given; only for us humans do new things exist, choice and spontaneous action. In the eyes of God the present contains the future as well as the past. Viewed like this, the scientist by his knowledge of natural laws comes close to having divine knowledge.’ 5

5

reached Mozart through Italy, the usual intermediary in the diffusion of the Spanish comedia to the theatres of Austria.’ Die Gesetze des Chaos, trans. from French by Friedrich Giese (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), p. 17: ‘Für Gott ist alles gegeben; nur für uns Menschen gibt es Neues, gibt es eine Wahl und spontanes Handeln. In den Augen Gottes enthält die Gegenwart sowohl die Zukunft wie die

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Mozart: Così fan tutte (1790)6 When Don Alfonso persuades his young friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo, to test the loyalty of their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, he is convinced that the young women will fail the test and that he will win the 100 zecchini. Ferrando and Guglielmo, however, are deeply convinced that the women will remain steadfast as rocks and therefore accept the wager. On their honour as soldiers they promise Alfonso that they will do everything he asks of them. In his capacity as Magister Ludi Alfonso orders the men to pretend they have to go to war. After a touching farewell scene the men return disguised as Albanian noblemen and good friends of Don Alfonso and start to woo the women with great passion. Like el autor, Alfonso is at once creator and spectator of the play that unfolds. And, like el autor, Alfonso sees the performance as a ‘fiesta’ which shows his ‘poder’ (‘power’; Gran teatro, pp. 8-9). In the case of Così fan tutte, Alfonso’s superior knowledge of the human psyche, along with his ability to manipulate it, is confirmed. Alfonso also decides what roles his friends are to play. Furthermore, he directs the play, provides the props and takes part in it. In other words, he takes on the function of el mundo and does allow himself to be drawn into the play – but only up to a point. In contrast to el autor, Alfonso is not omniscient. He runs a certain risk of losing control over the game he has initiated. In contrast to the humans in El gran teatro del mundo, Ferrando and Guglielmo have voluntarily taken on the roles suggested to them by Alfonso. However, once they have accepted them and once the game takes on its own momentum, they have no choice but to continue playing as well as they can. So, once again, their freedom consists only in how to play, not what to play. The success which both men score proves that they perform exceedingly well: the women turn out not to be angels, as the men had claimed, but humans of bones, blood and flesh, just like men. Therefore they are susceptible to amourous advances. Ferrando and Guglielmo would lose the wager if the women were to fall in love with their partners whom they do not recognize. But there is worse to come. At first, Guglielmo wins the heart of Dorabella, the fiancée of Ferrando, and, soon after, Guglielmo’s beloved Fiordiligi declares her love for Ferrando, the fiancé of Dorabella. Why do the two men continue to play, when they realize what is going to happen? There are several reasons. First, they have accepted a wager and it is

6

Vergangenheit. So gesehen, nähert sich der Wissenschaftler durch seine Kenntnis der Naturgesetze der göttlichen Erkenntnis.’ Così fan tutte: Textbuch (Italian-German), ed. by Kurt Pahlen and Rosemarie König, Serie Musik Piper-Schrott, 8004 (Munich: Piper, 1988). All references will be to this edition.

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a matter of honour not to break the agreement. Secondly, they feel sure that they will win – or do they? Perhaps, unbeknownst to themselves, they have doubts, and wish to put their women to the test? Like the ever-doubting lovers in Schnitzler’s comedies, they seem to be looking for certainty. There may even be a third reason why the men do not stop playing: it is possible that what they pretend – namely, that they are in love with each other’s women – becomes reality. In duet no. 23 the hearts of Dorabella and Guglielmo begin to beat in the same rhythm. Kurt Pahlen and Rosemarie König argue that the music Mozart has written for Guglielmo has lost all trace of irony and expresses that he has caught fire.7 Alfonso turns love into a game/play, but this takes on its own momentum and becomes reality. Intially, the line of demarcation between play and reality appears to be very clear: the women have real feelings and the men merely pretend, but after a while things become less clear. Like El gran teatro del mundo and In der Löwengrube, Così fan tutte is about life as a play. Intrinsically linked to this theme is that of the relationship between determinism and freedom. In El gran teatro the humans do not have the freedom to choose their part, it is merely left to them how they perform. In contrast to the ‘actors’ in Calderón’s world-theatre, Kirsch decides for himself what role he will play. Like Calderón’s players, Kirsch must perform as best as he can in order to be saved. What is the situation regarding freedom in Mozart’s opera? Guglielmo and Ferrando enter into the game of their own free will. However, once they have started they cannot readily stop. Their freedom to leave the game/play is purely theoretical. The women do not even know that they are taking part in a play. Nevertheless, their decision to start flirting with the two ‘visitors’ is a free one. This is apparent from duet no. 20, in which they decide amongst themselves which of the two men, the dark-haired or the blond, each of them will flirt.

7 8

DORABELLA

Prenderò quel brunettino, Che piu lepido mi par. (I’ll take the dark one, Who seems to me more fun.)

FIORDILIGI

Ed io intanto col biondino Vo’ un po’ ridere e burlar. (And meantime I’ll laugh And joke a bit with the fair one; Così, p. 259.) 8

See Così, p. 176. The translation is taken from the text enclosed with the Deutsche Grammophon recording of the 1974 Salzburg Festival production (no. 2740118, 1975).

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They consider the whole thing to be nothing but ‘fun’. According to Pahlen and König, Mozart’s music expresses their willful and increasing playfulness, and the anticipation of a new kind of fun ‘in koketten Phrasen, unternehmungslustigen Koloraturen’ (‘in coquetish phrases and daring coloraturas’; Così, p. 160). The highest measure of freedom is enjoyed by Don Alfonso. He has invented the play, he directs it, and his actors have to follow his instructions. For him, as Magister Ludi, the division between play and reality ceases to exist insofar as for him everything is a play. In this way he comes very close to the divine author in El gran teatro del mundo. Although Alfonso is not omniscient, he has excellent insight into human nature and therefore predicts more or less correctly the outcome. What he could not predict is the cross-over of relationships. Just when the women agree to marry their new friends, the trumpets sound, announcing the return of the sol-diers from war. The two ‘Albanians’ run out and return almost immediately in their original attire. The women ask for forgiveness, which is granted. The two estranged couples reunite. It is a problematic ending, since a great deal has happened to upset the original relationships between the lovers. However, the happy ending does not consist of thoughtless reconciliation, but rather is based on a newly-gained insight. The men now know and accept that women are human (of flesh, bones and blood) just like men. Everybody can now join the final ensemble: Fortunato l’uom che prende Ogni cosa pel buon verso E tra I casi e le vicende Da ragion guidar si fà. Quel che suole altrui far Piangere Fia per lui cagion di riso E del mondo in mezzo I turbini Bella calma troverà. (Happy is the man who looks At everything on the right side And through trials and tribulations Makes reason his guide. What always makes another weep Will be for him a cause of mirth And amid the tempests of this world He will find sweet peace; Così, p. 267) 9

9

Pahlen and König’s German translation reads: ‘Glücklich preis ich, / wer erfasset / alles von der guten Seite, / der bei Stürmen / niemals erblasset / wählt Vernunft als Führerin. / Was im

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I fail to see the cynicism that Pahlen and König find here in da Ponte’s libretto.10 I think that Mozart agreed with this philosophy which reflects the views of the Enlightenment of which he was a follower. It is the mixture of opera buffa and opera seria, of fun and seriousness, of play and reality, that has caused commentators such considerable difficulties over the last two centuries. Mozart’s first biographer, Nikolaus von Niessen, called the libretto a bad text – ‘einen schlechten Text’ 11 – out of which Mozart managed to distil great beauty. Richard Wagner had a different view: he found the music of Così fan tutte less impressive than that of The Marriage of Figaro, and expressed relief because it would have dishonoured music if Mozart had allowed himself to be inspired by such a weak text in order to compose divine music.12 Beethoven could not understand what possessed Mozart to compose the music for such a frivolous libretto. To him, as to many others in the years following the French Revolution, women were sacrosanct.13 Throughout the nineteenth century most commentators found the libretto to be in bad taste and unworthy of Mozart’s music. It was felt that it was not proper to play with such a serious matter as love. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did a process of re-evaluation set in. Viennese modernism around 1900 was, once again, fascinated by the relationship between play and reality and it was not surprising, therefore, that Così fan tutte was seen in a new light. Recent commentators like William Mann have praised the libretto as a masterpiece.14 But even at the end of the twentieth century Kurt Pahlen felt obliged to defend Mozart for having composed the music for da Ponte’s text which, as he admitted, was a masterpiece – though a diabolical and cynical one. He felt that Mozart’s ‘herrliche Musik’ (‘exquisite music’) ignored the abysses which the libretto opened up and that it made the basically deeply disturbing story appear more harmless. However, the opposite is the case, and as Pahlen himself points out, Mozart’s love melodies are not faked but genuinely felt.15 Surely, what Mozart’s beautiful music is trying to represent – the cross-over of feelings and partners – is anything but harmless?

10

11 12 13

14 15

Leben andre / weinen macht,/ ist für ihn nur ein Grund / zum Lachen,/ drohn Gefahren noch / so fürchterlich, / wahrt er seinen heitern Sinn.’ Così, p. 13. On p. 16 they go so far as to accuse da Ponte of ‘Menschenverachtung’ (‘disdain for human beings’)! Quoted by Pahlen and König, p. 9. See Pahlen and König, p. 9. See William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (London: Cassell, 1977), p. 524 and Pahlen and König, p. 11. Operas of Mozart, p. 563. See also Pahlen and König, p. 13. See Così, pp. 15-16.

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Viennese Modernism and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (1898) One must not overlook that Mozart and da Ponte created Così fan tutte while the Bastille was being stormed and the ancien régime overthrown.16 Although Mozart had a strong sense of his own worth and loathed the polished behaviour of the court, he had nevertheless assimilated the musical tradition of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century.17 The tension between aristocratic norm (beauty) and personal emotions characterizes his work.18 This may help us to understand better the relationship between playfulness and seriousness (play and reality), not only in Così fan tutte but in many of his compositions. The culture of the Rococo allowed for genuine emotion, but it demanded that it should be contained within the realm of beauty, that is to say, it had to stay within certain boundaries.19 One could even show the terror of reality but it had to be expressed in beautiful form. The aestheticism and sensualism of Viennese modernism has a strong affinity with the emotional culture of the Rococo. Indeed, many of the Viennese artists of the turn of the century had a particular predilection for the theme of play. Besides Greek tragedy and myth and German Classicism, the theatre of Spain’s Golden Age – Calderón’s, in particular – was of paradigmatic importance for the modernist dramatists. Hofmannthal’s Der Turm (The Tower) is based on Calderón’s La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), and El gran teatro del mundo is the model for Hofmannsthal’s Das grosse Salzburger Welttheater (The Great Salzburg Theatre of the World).20 Other sources for this Viennese obsession with the theatricality of life can be found in the popular Viennese comedies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which in turn are a continuation of the Baroque tradition. Of all the Viennese modernists no one has been more fascinated with the relationship between play and reality than Schnitzler. In his autobiography Jugend in Wien (My Youth in Vienna), he relates the following episode that 16 17

18

19 20

Mann, p. 524. Norbert Elias, Mozart: Zur Soziologie eines Genies, ed. by Michael Schröter (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 139-140. Elias, p. 140: ‘Diese Bindung seines Gewissens bot ihm genügend Spielraum, die höfische Tradition in ganz persönlicher Weise weiterzuentwickeln, ohne daß er die Grenzen ihres Kanons je durchbrach. Aber er trug sie durch seine individuelle Phantasie in vielen Fällen weit über das Verständnis des realen höfisch-aristokratischen Publikums hinaus.’ (‘The embedment of his artistic conscience in the courtly tradition allowed for enough freedom to develop this tradition in a highly personal way without ever transgressing the borders of the canon. But his individual imagination made him carry this tradition far beyond the expectations of the contemporary courtly audience.’) See Pahlen and König, p. 313. See Sullivan, pp. 341-53.

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occurred in his childhood. His parents once took him to a performance of Gounod’s Margarete at the Theater am Kärtnertor. In the intermission two of the singers waved a greeting to Schnitzler’s parents and then carried on representing Faust and Margarete. Schnitzler’s comment is the following: Doch bei aller Verwunderung hatte ich keineswegs das Gefühl, auf schmerzliche Weise aus einer Illusion gerissen worden zu sein; ja, ich zweifle nicht, daß mir schon damals – wenn auch nicht so klar und bewußt wie heute – die Welt der Bühne duchaus nicht eine der Täuschung und des Trugs bedeutete, deren Störung durch ein unvermutetes Eingreifen aus der Sphäre der Realität ich wie eine Beleidigung oder wie das Aufgescheuchtwerden aus einem holden Traum zu empfinden hätte; […]. Ja, dieses kleine Erlebnis mag in all seiner Geringfügigkeit das Seine zu der Entwicklung jenes Grundmotivs vom Ineinanderfließen von Ernst und Spiel, Leben und Komödie, Wahrheit und Lüge beigetragen haben, das mich immer wieder, auch jenseits alles Theaters und aller Theaterei, ja über alle Kunst hinaus, bewegt und beschäftigt hat. (Although I was puzzled, I did not have the painful feeling of disillusionment. Even if I was unaware of it at that time I did not, even then, look upon the world of the stage as an illusion whose disturbance would have been like being woken up from a beautiful dream [...]. This small event, insignificant as it may seem, may have precipitated the development of the leitmotif of the fusion of seriousness and play, life and comedy, truth and lies which has occupied me throughout my life beyond the realm of theatre and play-acting.)21

This brings us to our next play, Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu. It is no coincidence that the action takes place in Paris in the evening of 14 July 1789: the date of the storming of the Bastille. The doomed aristocrats attend the improvised theatre performances which take place in the tavern Der grüne Kakadu’ because these enable them to enjoy as a play what is really happening outside on the streets of Paris. The tavern of dubious repute called This brings us to our next play, Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu.22 It is no coincidence that the action takes place in Paris in the evening of 14 July 1789: the date of the storming of the Bastille. The doomed aristocrats attend the improvised theatre performances which take place in the tavern ‘Der grüne Kakadu’ because these enable them to enjoy as a play what is really happening outside on the streets of Paris. ‘The Green Cockatoo’ is a kind of theatre, whose ‘director’ is Prospère. The play opens before the ‘performance’ proper starts. Grasset, a former member of the troupe, who is visiting his old comrades, explains to a friend what is going on:

21 22

Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie (Vienna: Molden, 1968), pp. 27-28. Arthur Schnitzler, Das dramatische Werk, 8 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1977). All references to Schnitzler’s plays are to this edition, cited in the text as Schnitzler followed by volume and page numbers.

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Meine einstigen Kollegen und Kolleginnen sitzen hier herum und tun, als wenn sie Verbrecher wären. […] Sie erzählen haarsträubende Geschichten, die sie nie erlebt – sprechen von Untaten, die sie nie begangen haben … und das Publikum, das hierher kommt, hat den angenehmen Kitzel, unter dem gefährlichsten Gesindel von Paris zu sitzen. (My former colleagues are sitting around here pretending to be criminals [...] They tell hairraising stories they never experienced, talk about crimes they never committed ... and the audience gathered here enjoy the pleasant sensation of mixing with the most dangerous elements of the Parisian underworld; Schnitzler, III, 10-11).

The audience is made up of the most elegant people of Paris. What the ‘actors’ perform in this improvised theatre is, basically, what happens outside: the Revolution, which is going to start any moment. At first sight, play and reality are clearly separated: the play takes place inside, reality is outside the tavern. However, when Grasset, who has joined the revolutionaries, asks Prospère in jest if he would take him back, should his career as politician fail, Prospère replies with an emphatic ‘Nicht um die Welt!’ (‘Not for the world!’; Schnitzler, III, 11). He is afraid that Grasset would attack one of the paying guests in earnest. Prospère’s part consists of hurling verbal abuse at his guests. Although he is worried that Grasset may turn play into serious business, he indicates that his insults are seriously meant: Es macht mir Vergnügen genug, den Kerlen meine Meinung ins Gesicht sagen zu können und sie zu beschimpfen nach Herzenslust – während sie es für Scherz halten. Es ist auch eine Art, seine Wut los zu werden. – Zieht einen Dolch und läßt ihn funkeln. (It gives me enough pleasure to tell those wasters to their face what I think about them and to hurl abuse at them to my heart’s desire – while they think it is only in jest. This is the best way to get rid of one’s aggression. – He draws a dagger and holds it, gleaming, in the light; Schnitzler, III, 11).

When Grasset teases him and suggests that the dagger is not sharpened, Prospère answers: ‘Da könntest du doch irren, mein Freund; irgend einmal kommt ja doch der Tag, wo aus dem Spass Ernst wird – und darauf bin ich für alle Fälle vorbereit.’ (‘You may be wrong there, my friend; the day will finally come when this becomes real – and I am prepared for it’; Schnitzler, III, 11) But we do not even know if his dagger is real, or simply a prop. Grasset, however, who appears to have left the stage and joined the real world of revolutionary politics, is attracted to his new vocation because it offers him a bigger audience and a grander stage. He boasts that at a recent gathering his speech had been applauded more than that of Camille Desmoulins: Ich habe mich auf den Tisch gestellt … ich habe ausgesehen wie ein Monument ... jawohl – und alle die Tausende, Fünftausend, Zehntausend haben sich um mich versammelt – gerade so wie früher um Camille Desmoulins … und haben mir zugejubelt.

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(I jumped onto the table ... I looked like a monument ... yes, and a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand gathered around me – just as they had around Camille Desmouslin earlier ... and cheered me; Schnitzler, III, 9).

The distinction between play and reality, which appears so clear at first sight, very soon becomes eroded. Some of the characters in the play find this confusion disturbing, for example, Albin, the naïve gentleman from the provinces. Others, like the poet Rollin, find it wonderful. Rollin is fascinated by the fact that in all play an element of reality shines through. This he calls ‘enchanting’ (‘das Entzückende’; Schnitzler, III, 35). Reality revealed through play (art, fiction) can be enjoyed aesthetically (as something delightful or beautiful). In other words, the poet Rollin turns the threatening political reality into fiction (play). The erosion of the separation between the spheres of the real and the fictitious is indicated very clearly by the stage setting. There is the real audience watching a play called Der grüne Kakadu. The stage represents the interior of a tavern of that name. In the tavern we see a fictitious audience onstage and the improvised play performed onstage, watched by this fictitious audience. We are dealing with a play within a play. However, the separation between the fictitious audience and the stage they are looking at is not clear. The ‘actors’ move freely among the fictitious audience and occasionally members of the (fictitious) audience join in the improvised play. Furthermore, a small theatre could be turned into a tavern just like ‘Der grüne Kakadu’ in which the real audience shares the same room and even the same tables with the fictitious audience. In the course of the action the revolution gets ever closer. What is at first perceived as noise outside (Lärm draussen), at the end invades the tavern: ‘Es kommen Leute herein, man hört schreien. Ganz an ihrer Spitze Grasset, andere, unter ihnen Lebrêt, drängen über die Stiege nach. Man hört Rufe: Freiheit, Freiheit!’ (People come in, one hears shouting. In front of the mob is Grasset, others including Lebrêt follow from behind. One hears calls: Freedom, freedom’; Schnitzler, III, 40) It is tempting to conclude from this that reality finally triumphs and that the game is over. However, one may draw the opposite conclusion, namely, that by invading the stage, the so-called reality of the French Revolution has become a new kind of play: thus everything is just a play. But this is not the end and the ambivalent relationship between the two spheres leads to further confusion. The invasion by the mob brings an air of reality into the theatre and the guests of the tavern finally believe that the star actor Henri is telling the truth when he claims that he has murdered his wife because he has discovered that she had been unfaithful to him with the Duke of Cardignan. The trouble is that everybody except Henri has known for some time that Leocadia was cheating on her husband and is therefore inclined to believe him.

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There is a point when not only the fictitious audience but even the real one can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. It is only then, when he becomes aware of the reaction of his friends, that Henri realizes that his wife has indeed been disloyal and when, at this moment chance wills it that the Duke enters the tavern, Henri stabs him. This surely must be the end of the game/play? Nothing is more real than death – but it is not quite so. The police inspector whose task it is to decide whether the goings-on in the tavern are entertainment or meant for real, is completely confused and apparently thinks that the murder of the Duke is not real but part of the play. When he says ‘Das geht zu weit!’ (‘This is going too far!’; Schnitzler, III, 40), he takes offence that the murder of a high aristocrat should be portrayed on stage. And the Marquise Severine de Lansac, when realizing that the murder is for real, manages to turn this into a new kind of entertainment: ‘Es trifft sich wunderbar. Man sieht nicht alle Tage einen wirklichen Herzog wirklich ermorden’ (‘This is wonderful. It isn’t every day that one sees a real duke really murdered’; Schnitzler, III, 40). While she converts bloody reality into bloody art (as in a snuff movie), the revolutionaries celebrate Henri as a hero for having killed the Duke – not realizing that his motive was entirely apolitical. The Marquise, who is the mistress of the poet, feels sexually aroused by the events of the past hour and is looking forward to an exciting night with her lover. Play becomes reality, reality becomes a new kind of play, this again becomes real, and so forth ad infinitum. Although play and reality constantly swap over, it is impossible to see precisely where the transitions occur. If there is a higher sphere, where the distinction is obsolete, it is the sphere of the divine, of el autor of El gran teatro del mundo. If humans are half-god and half-animal, it is understandable that they strive towards the divine. The scientist attempts to approach divine knowledge by studying the laws of nature, the Magister Ludi strives for divine power by playing with people. Schnitzler’s Paracelsus, which was written in 1898, the same year as Der grüne Kakadu, sums it up like this: Es war ein Spiel. Was sollt’ es anders sein. Was ist nicht Spiel, das wir auf Erden reiten [...] Mit wilden Söldnerscharen spielt der eine, Ein anderer spielt mit tollen Abergläubischen. Vielleicht mit Sonnen, Sternen irgend wer, – Mit Menschenseelen spiele ich. Ein Sinn Wird nur von dem gefunden, der ihn sucht. Es fließen ineinander Traum und Wachen, Wahrheit und Lüge, Sicherheit ist nirgends. Wir wissen nichts von andern, nichts von uns;

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Wir spielen immer, wer es weiß, ist klug. (It was a play. And what else could it be? What is not play that we are mounting here on earth [...] One plays with armies of wild mercenaries, Another with extravagantly supersticious persons, Others with suns and stars, – I play with human souls. Meaning Is only found by those who look for it. Dream and reality, truth and lies merge, Security is nowhere to be found. We know nothing about others and nothing about ourselves; We are always playing, and he who knows is wise; Schnitzler, II, 240)

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Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical Drama from Lessing to Büchner

This chapter argues that the transformation the genre of tragedy underwent in eighteenth century German classicism, exemplified by the subgenre of the Schauspiel (serious drama with nontragic outcome), can be understood as a detachment of tragedy from itself through its integration of playful self-reflection. This tendency can be traced from Lessing’s Philotas, Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti and Nathan the Wise through Goethe’s classical dramas Egmont, Iphigenie and Natural Daughter, Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and finally to Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Taking issue with Carl Schmitt’s distinction between ‘true tragedy’ (e.g., Shakespeare’s Hamlet), which owes its political effect to a ‘kernel of historical factuality’, and the German Trauerspiel alleged to be mere aestheticistic Schauspiel, I propose to show that the internal distancing of tragedy from its tragic substance via the device of the play within the play itself constituted a political effect. The theatrical distanciation from tragic heroism served the instantiation of a peaceful society.

As a theatrical device compounding the split on which theatre is based (between actor and role, body and meaning), the play within the play has its roots in comedy rather than in tragedy; it serves as a defence mechanism allowing many a comedy to forestall the encroachment of tragedy within its genre. My objective here will be to turn the tables and explore how the play with in the play came to act as a catalyst in a major transformation of tragedy in eighteenth-century German classicism. It appears with increasing regularity in the bourgeois tragedy and the new subgenre of the Schauspiel, the serious drama with a non-tragic ending, to defuse the story’s tragic potential and open the way for a happy resolution of the dramatic conflict. A common thread emerges if we glance at some of the most important plays of the period between 1750 and 1830, from Lessing’s Philotas (1759), Minna von Barnhelm (1767) Emilia Galotti (1772) and Nathan the Wise (1779) to Goethe’s Iphigenie (1779-86), Egmont (1788) and Natural Daughter (1803) to Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg (1811) and finally to Büchner’s Danton’s Death (1835), a historical drama which carried the device of the comical onstage play to a cynical extreme, thereby depriving political and revolutionary action of all higher tragic meaning. In all of the above with the exclusion of

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Büchner, the tragedy that seems so inevitable is averted through the resolute action of moral individuals who believe in communication and rational compromise or reconciliation – the Versöhnung grounded in the familiar ideology of Humanität – with the help of a dramaturgical process that enables the dramatis personae to distance themselves from the forces about to doom them. If what Northrop Fry called the ‘myth of comedy’ is devoted to the affirmation and celebration of life over death (as symbolized by the victory of the young lovers over the ossified order of the old generation), then this new genre of the Schauspiel, which uses the play within the play similarly to thwart impending doom, celebrates a heightened idea of ‘life’. This sense of life seems implicit, to cite just one example, in the last line of Goethe’s Iphigenie when the newly moralized barbaric tyrant Thoas bids farewell to his Greek enemies. In the light of the preceding near-tragic conflict, Thoas’s ‘lebt wohl,’ (literally, ‘live well’), takes on a deeper meaning than that of a simple ‘farewell’ or goodbye. I begin with a discussion of Lessing as the seminal figure in the development of the classical-drama tradition in Germany. The second section uses an essay by the legal theoretician Carl Schmitt attacking the presumed ‘aestheticism’ of modern tragedy, contrasting it with the political involvement of the Greek and Shakespearean model. By this means I hope to deepen the Lessing discussion and make the transition to the historical drama that forms the core of the tragic tradition in Weimar classicism and its nineteenth century successors. Due to its referential character, the Geschichtsdrama (historical drama) appears to be more resistant to the play-within-the-play device. Nevertheless – and significantly – features of the latter find their way into its structure as well, and in so doing, alter its character. As examples, I draw on Goethe’s Egmont, Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and Büchner’s Danton’s Death. I should mention from the start that I use the play-within-the-play concept in a broad sense so as to include all phenomena in which a doubling of the stage occurs, and not just the literal staging of a play within the main play, as in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such phenomena may include fantasies or visions that are seen by the characters and that suggest a ‘second stage’, even though that stage may not be visible to the spectator. A case in point is Orestes’s inner vision of the affectionate reunion of his family and kin, once torn by internecine strife, in the underworld of Goethe’s Iphigenie, which contrasts with Egmont’s and Homburg’s theatrical externalization of their heroes’ hallucinations.

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1. ‘Perhaps you expect me to turn the steel against myself and conclude my action as in a stale tragedy?’ (‘Sie erwarten vielleicht, daß ich den Stahl wider mich selbst kehren werde, um meine Tat wie eine schale Tragödie zu beschließen?’) 1 With these words, the old Galotti in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti turns to the Prince after he has fulfilled his daughter’s wish to die (and be killed by her father) rather than endure an assault on her sexual integrity. At the end of this bourgeois tragedy, tragedy becomes conscious of its own generic convention; by denouncing and rejecting suicide as a worn-off ploy, the hero extricates himself from the tragic tradition. But Galotti had of course already been tricked into the ‘stale’ script when young Emilia confronted him with the image of the ancient Roman hero Virginius killing his daughter for the sake of patriotism and freedom. The modern family father had been seduced by a wholly incongruous tragic-heroic scenario. ‘Bourgeois tragedy,’ one might say, is intrinsically unable to generate the energy needed for a tragic ending; by borrowing from past tragedy it signals the end of tragedy, along with its own tragic impotence. Lessing’s exhibition of tragedy’s ultimate dispensability, however, is counterbalanced by his compelling empathy for its victims. His audience is provoked into a response of encompassing compassion – Mitleid – just as it distances itself from the ideology of tragic sacrifice. In Emilia Galotti, the two contradictory but nevertheless cooperating moments of empathetic identification and cognitive distancing find a symbolic expression in the way the dagger – the tragic prop par excellence – circulates from one person to another, as though in desperate search for a meaningful use to which it could be put. The parodistic point is driven even further by its trivial substitute, the hairpin, with which Emilia threatens to kill herself if her father does not obey her heroic wish. To be sure, there is ‘meaning’ in Emilia’s tragic outcome, but not the meaning associated with the demise of the traditional hero or heroine. Emilia conceives of her death at the hands of her father as a rebirth, and Lessing’s play as a whole can be read (and seen) as the transformation of the physical body – especially the erotic, seducible, and procreative female body – into the product of culture and pedagogy. As in the earlier Miss Sara Sampson (1755), tragic death ushers in a higher life. The father who kills his daughter in order ‘to give her a second life’ (‘ihr zum zweiten das Leben gab’)2 fathers a spiritual family built on the sacrifice of that which is purely natural and

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. by Herbert G. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser, 1970), vol. 2 [Emilia Galotti] p. 204. Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Emilia Galotti], p.203.

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which Nathan the Wise will reveal as the family of humankind. Corresponding to this transformation of the physical into the cultural body is the genre’s transformation of the comedic celebration of life’s vital procreative energy into an idealization of the life of the spirit, ‘Geist’. The ‘new’ (bourgeois) tragedy sacrifices the ‘old’ genre in order to articulate and initiate a spiritualized ideal of collectivity set against pre-modern particularism (e.g., Roman patriotism, aristocratic honour, absolutist rule etc.). From the perspective of genre tradition, the split between empathy and reflexive distancing in audience response to tragic events is the experience of a sacrifice in which deprivation (of the body) and gain (of spiritual unity) collapse. Put still differently, and with respect to the play within the play, the dismissal of the tragic tradition is enacted as its ‘last performance’. ‘Do you humans not believe that one gets fed up with it?’ (‘Glaubt ihr Menschen, daß man es nicht satt wird?’).3 This rhetorical question, addressed to those onstage as well as to the audience, concludes Lessing’s earlier tragedy Philotas (1759). The king Aridäus lays down his crown after he has witnessed the spectacle of a heroic suicide acted out by his captive Philotas, son of the enemy king. Young Philotas, consumed with fantasies of bravery and war fame, seeks to compensate for the perceived shame of his capture (brought upon himself by his foolhardy inexperience) and to gain the name of hero after all by killing himself and sparing his father the ransom. He indulges his heroic obsession with the rhetoric of patriotic self-sacrifice and glory even against the persuasive pleas of his captors, foremost the humane king and, moreover, the potential of a peaceful resolution through a prisoner exchange. Aridäus’s being ‘fed up’ with ‘it’ thus relates just as much to the heroic spectacle he has been forced to watch as to the rule of the absolutist monarch and his obligation to conduct war. Disenchanted with the obsolete ethics and aesthetics of heroism, Aridäus turns to the ‘humans’ on and off stage for support. The king’s abdication effectively – performatively – creates a new audience of mere human beings (‘Menschen’) distancing themselves from the ideal of heroic sacrifice and harbouring the promise of a humane community. The fact that this one-act play has been read for some two hundred years as straight heroic tragedy (motivated by the groundswell of German patriotism at the height of the Seven Years War) does not seem to attest to the success of its critical intention. One cause for this failed reception lies in the complex nature of the text that is not exhausted in being a polemical critique

3

Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Philotas], p. 126. Cf. for the following my article: ‘Aufklärung der Tragödie. Lessings Philotas’, in Horizonte. Festschrift für Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by H. Mundt, E. Schwarz, W.J. Lillyman (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), pp. 10-39.

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of heroism, but also offering a study of its psychological roots. The hero Philotas is clearly adolescent in his fantastic images of war and fame, his narcissism and puerile father fixation. The tent in which he is held prisoner and which is the drama’s sole setting represents a ‘scene’ (the Greek word ‘skene’ means ‘tent’) in a literal and emphatic sense: the scene of a play within the play in which the misled youth stages his personal tragedy against the sympathetic remonstrance of the father figures around him. Before he turns these father substitutes into helpless witnesses of his suicide, Philotas is his own finest spectator. ‘You standing there, Philotas’, the hero addresses his imagined mirror image (‘indem er sich selbst betrachtet’): ‘Alas, this must be a superb, a sublime sight, a youth struck to the ground with the sword in his breast!’ (‘Der du itzt da stehest, Philotas […] Ha! es muß ein trefflicher, ein großer Anblick sein: ein Jüngling gestreckt auf den Boden, das Schwerd [sic] in der Brust!’)4 The ironic effect Lessing produced by the play within the play in Philotas becomes evident at the moment when the hero, struck by the sudden awareness that he lacks the sword to carry out his suicide, is thrown from the height of his imaginary self-glorification. Much of the drama’s plot consists in the protagonist’s effort to procure the tool for the tragic action, as if tragedy were reduced to the facilitation of its theatrical execution. (When he finally gets hold of a sword, Philotas will lose himself in a rapture that again emphasizes its association with ‘play’: ‘Dear sword! What a beautiful thing a sword is, for play and for use. I have never played with anything else’.5 Yet apart from this parodistic subversion of the tragic ideal (for which the text offers numerous examples), one important aspect of Philotas’ heroic ‘play’ indeed makes it a tragedy. The youth’s death has a remarkable impact on his older and enlightened onlookers. For a brief but revealing moment, they regress to an earlier stage of their own psychic development; Philotas’ action awakens in them a dormant archaic fascination. Even the humane Aridäus, before he concludes the play as described, casts aside the barriers of civilized humanity and revels in thoughts of barbaric revenge. Philotas is the point of demarcation in Lessingian dramaturgy between the baroque Trauerspiel and the tragédie classique on the one hand, and bourgeois tragedy and the untragic Schauspiel on the other. Heroic tragedy, we might say, is played out ‘once more’ or even – symbolically – ‘for the last 4 5

Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Philotas], pp.118-119. P. 123. Similar to the dagger in Emilia Galotti, this is an example of these dramas’ coding of the tragic instrument of death as a ‘comedic’ object, i.e. a mere stage prop; cf. also Emilia’s hair pin. The guillotine in Büchner’s revolution drama takes this profanation of the tragic death to an extreme end (see below).

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time’ (followed by yet another last time, and so on), staged for spectators who are presumed to be intellectually beyond tragedy but who are emotionally still bound to it. Tragic heroism, anchored as it is in the history of the human psyche, both onto- and phylogenetically, outlives its principal, historicophilosophical end. The new tragedy offers its audience the opportunity to relive tragedy vicariously and therapeutically; it sacrifices, as it were, its predecessor and turns it into the object of dramaturgical compassion, Mitleid. The encompassing frame of this ‘enlightened’, or meta-tragedy contains (in both senses of the word) within itself the lure of an older theatre for an audience that is supposed to be emancipated from it. ‘Detaching tragedy from itself’ is therefore not an easy but rather a highly ambiguous process. 2. In his Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Hamlet or Hecuba: The Incursion of [Historical] Time into the Play) from 1956, Carl Schmitt argues that authentic tragedy (which he distinguishes from Trauerspiel) does not exhaust itself in the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic ‘play’, but draws its force from a contingent historical or mythical reality shared by its audience. To exemplify this ‘impossibility of doing away with the tragic by playing’ (‘Unverspielbarkeit des Tragischen’), he uses the play within the play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 6 The function of this most famous drama within a drama, Schmitt argues, is not to offer the spectator a self-reflexive view behind the stage and make him or her aware of the theatrical arrangement but to promote the dramatic action of which it is a direct part. Already the actor’s tears, shed while reciting Priamos’s death, have made Hamlet aware of his own lack of motivation vis-à-vis a real and non-fictional tragedy. Likewise, as a drama Hamlet shares with the theatre-viewing public a common historical and political background (the 1603 accession to the throne of the Stuart Jacob I, whose mother Mary was accused of the murder of his father) placing it beyond ‘mere fiction’. For Schmitt, to weep for the figure of Hamlet in the same manner as the actor-reciter weeps for Hecuba is to revel in a purely aesthetic enjoyment and to disregard any pragmatic interest; it means acknowledging the fact that ‘in the theatre we worship other Gods than in the forum or on the pulpit,’ 7 which runs fundamentally counter to the essence of true tragedy. There does not exist, Schmitt postulates, such a thing as ‘tragedy within the tragedy,’ for the inherent self-referential and artificial

6

7

Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Düsseldorf and Köln: Eugen Diederichs, 1956), p. 42. Schmitt, p. 45.

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character of the play within the play by definition dispels the sense of tragic seriousness. And this sense is indissolubly bound to the representation of some significant reality, not mere invention or aestheticization. Looking back at the brief discussion of Lessing’s two tragedies (Schmitt would label them Trauerspiel), I propose that these do indeed employ the play-within-the-play device as a performative act with respect to the contemporary audience. Philotas’s critical perspective on the ‘dangerous play of tragedy’ constitutes a direct polemical commentary on the ideologically charged atmosphere at the time of the Seven Years War. Twenty years later, Lessing, as he battled orthodox Lutheran theologians and was subjected to censorship, produced his last drama, Nathan (1779), using his ‘old pulpit’ of the theatre as forum for the religious and (at the time) highly political debate. The point here is not the promulgation of a dangerous message in a different medium, but the change of the medium itself as message. The metaphorical phrase of the stage as pulpit suggests more than the drama’s potential to disseminate a secular imperative of tolerance and universal brotherhood. Rather and crucially, Nathan the Wise enacts, in and through its very dramaturgy, the instatement of the aesthetic medium as a means for establishing a new social ethic for the modern, ‘autonomous’ individual, an individual to be liberated from the blind force and authority of genealogical – ethnic, religious, feudal, etc. – allegiances. This finds direct expression in the midpoint of the drama (III, 7) which contains the well-known Parable of the Rings. The Jewish protagonist is challenged by the Muslim sultan to tell him which of the three great religions – Judaism, Islam, Christianity – is the one and only ‘true’ faith. Instead of a straight answer to the monarch’s peremptory and calculated question, Nathan distracts him with his parable, the narration of which is distinctly marked as a play within the play. The essence of the story is the substitution for absolute truth – and, by inference, absolutist power – of a symbol used as pledge and encouragement for never-ending moral striving. An aesthetic artifact, the duplicated rings, takes the place of the lost metaphysical truth, while at the same time instilling into its recipients a zeal for fraternal bonding and ethical achievement. The action within the parable is doubled on the scenic level of the action between narrator and listener: Just as Nathan’s tale – also a ‘play for the king’! – stands in for a theoretically unattainable but morally realizable truth, its telling realizes the message when the wise Nathan and the powerful sultan, the Jew and the Muslim, unite in friendship. Thus the parable scene as a whole demonstrates the performative character of the aesthetic, which breaks the absolutism of dogmatic truth, political rule, and blood genealogy – the stuff tragedy is made of. This is not, then, the Schillerian

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aesthetic play attacked by Schmitt; it is not the non-committal state of aesthetic mediation and compromise. Rather, it is the play as pragmatic intervention: It is the theatre presenting indeed (in Schmitt’s words) other Gods than those of the pulpit and the marketplace, but only for the purpose of dethroning Gods altogether. When the bonding between Nathan and Saladin is taken up on a larger scale in the drama’s final scene (which brings the members of antagonistic ethnicities and religions together as members of one family, who in silent embrace form a ring echoing the protagonist’s story), this same embrace extends to the theatre audience. Schmitt, of course, is concerned with what he calls genuine tragedy, distinguished sharply from the modern Trauerspiel, including the historical drama of German classicism. My point with respect to Lessing (and his crucial dramaturgical reform) is that the new Schauspiel uses the distancing techniques of the play within the play as a direct cultural involvement. Nathan is much indebted to the comedic tradition; seen from this angle, the generic transformation could be dubbed as comedy shattering tragedy. This subversion lies at the heart of Lessing’s classic comedy proper, Minna von Barnhelm, which transforms the familiar motif of love’s triumph through wit and intrigue over social obstacles (father, the law) into a complex psychological negotiation.8 Here it is the internalized obstacle of the officer’s adherence to the honour code – the code of French tragedy – that is overcome by the heroine’s playful role reversal in the so-called ‘ring intrigue’. The aim is nothing less than the mutual recognition of man and woman on the basis of empathy and equality which extends the value system of Nathan to the level of gender. With her play within the play, Minna adopts an enunciating function, becoming the author of a ‘new’ comedy inside of the traditional comedy that turns a stock dramaturgical type into an individual character. With his solipsistic fixation on ‘lost honour’ and the habit of narcissistic self-deprecation, Tellheim falls at first glance within the comedic tradition of the stubborn eccentric; at the same time, the object of his fixation is precisely the value system of heroic tragedy. Through Minna’s role reversal, Tellheim comes to look at himself from the outside and shed the tragic and heroic posture (strongly recalling Philotas!) – with the consequence that the other characters and the audience come to see the ‘true’ nobility of his character. The ‘spectre of honour’ (‘Gespenst der Ehre’) 9 gives way to a new, interiorized

8

9

Cf. for the following my article: ‘Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm oder Das Soldatenglück’, in The New History of German Literature, ed. by David E. Wellbery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 371-376. Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Minna von Barnhelm], p. 679.

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moral seriousness. Comic role-play, consciously performed, frees the individual from externally imposed and alienating roles – genre roles as well as gender roles, tragic-heroic posture or comic stiffness as well as masculine illusions of superiority and self-sufficient integrity. Modern comedy thus gives birth to the emancipated individual. Minna von Barnhelm is a comedy that disarms (heroic) tragedy and its ethics altogether. The hero’s pathetic injury (his disabled right arm) graphically illustrates the demise of the warrior and the dawn of peaceful civility. That Lessing’s play was meant as a direct political intervention is apparent from the original cover page which cites its full title, Minna von Barnhelm or the Soldier’s Fortune (Minna von Barnhelm Oder das Soldatenglück), followed by a titbit of misinformation: ‘Written in the year 1763’ (‘Verfertiget im Jahre 1763’). By (inaccurately) predating his authorship, Lessing in fact rewrote a politically historic date as a marker of literary history. The year the peace of Hubertusburg ended the Seven Years War likewise terminates the age of heroic tragedy, of honour, and of the soldiers’ fortune, ushering in the emergent world of civility (and, indeed, femininity): a necessity and an achievement that is enacted through and made conscious by its play within the play. 3. In conclusion, I wish to take a brief look at Schmitt’s contention regarding the aestheticist character of the modern historical drama in contrast with, as he sees it, the political thrust of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. My thesis has been that it was the institutionalizing of the aesthetic in drama as performed through the play within the play (broadly understood as a doubling of the stage, be it literal or more indirect) which accounted for its political function. While the term ‘political’ here is, to be sure, taken in a broad sense, it is nonetheless a sense that transcends aesthetic self-sufficiency. In Lessing, to repeat once more, the function of the device was not to remove the audience into a self-enclosed fictitious realm but, on the contrary, to make it aware of aesthetic distancing as a method of negotiating and relativizing the absolutist positions of the past, especially those embodied in the tragic hero. The dramaturgical self-referentiality of the play within the play served a pragmatic aim. Historical drama is bound, within variable limits, to a referential reality and therefore appears less apt for the kind of self-reflexive distancing as here described. It is no coincidence that the greatest of German classical tragedy writers, Friedrich Schiller, devoted himself (with one exception) to wellknown historical subjects (Wallenstein, Jean d’Arc, Mary Stuart, Wilhelm

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Tell are the best known). On the other hand, there are historical dramas that rewrite the tragedy inherent in their subject matter; they exploit the tragic potential while at the same time superseding it with a turn toward the Schauspiel. Again it is the play-within-the-play device through which this turn is enacted. Goethe’s Egmont and Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg offer pertinent examples. Both dramas insert self-reflexive theatrical spectacles into the seemingly fatal course of events, thereby making historical factuality (as confirmed by the source material) and tragic necessity subject to interventions of the imaginary – interventions vacillating between subjective hallucinations and objective (stage) reality. Thus the Brabant Count Egmont’s imminent execution by the Spanish occupants is suspended, and with it, tragic death and sacrifice absorbed by the vision of a triumphant populace led by his beloved Klärchen, a vision that unites the dreaming hero onstage with the theatre audience in the communal experience of a liberated future. Similarly, Kleist’s Schauspiel (its original subtitle) frames itself for the audience as a spectacle originating in the protagonist’s mind: the spectacle of the hero’s self-generated coronation and premature aspirations to supreme triumph and power. The juvenile prince follows the path, already delineated by Lessing’s Philotas, from narcissist posturing according to the iconography of heroism to the final realization of a heroic death in the jaws of defeat. But contrary to his adolescent precursor, Homburg will be spared death at the last moment and even be rewarded with his dream come true. The plot’s motivation for this graceful ending is the prince’s insight into the transgressive nature of his action. Yet it can not be overlooked that he uses his eventual conversion and voluntary, even jubilant acceptance of the death sentence for the prospect of an even more elevated act of self-glorification. If the life of Kleist’s hero is spared and his overreaching fantasy fulfilled, this is due to the fact that the play as a whole assumes the vision and offers it to the audience as an invitation to share the theatrical dream. Whether this implies a critical intention must remain, however, an open question. A radically different case is Büchner’s revolutionary drama Danton’s Death, which represents history itself as theatre – not in the baroque sense of ‘all the world is a stage’ but in the perception of the historical protagonists themselves. These protagonists were still well-known to the play’s contemporary audience, as were many of their historical speeches and statements, from which Büchner quotes liberally. The drama represents the ‘heroes’ of the French Revolution as spectators rather than authors of their own political actions; the characters’ consistent splitting into actor and role creates throughout the play a double stage, also reflecting the audience’s own viewing posi-

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tion. This correspondence is crucial: Büchner’s play concentrates on the welldocumented conviction of many revolutionary leaders that they are but tools acting on behalf of a higher historical power, and uses it to achieve a self-reflexive perspective on its character as historical play. In contrast to Goethe’s prerevolutionary drama (to which Danton’s Death prominently alludes several times), it is the utter powerlessness of mere spectatorship vis-à-vis an almighty ‘history’ that unites the actors on the stage and the viewers in front of it. This correspondence can be made even more specific. It is precisely the dramaturgy of the ‘fourth wall’ with its assignment of a passive position to the theatre viewer that finds its reflection in an empty spectacle that condemns its would-be authors to the status of passive onlookers (and vice versa). The dramaturgy of the fourth wall was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century together with the bourgeois tragedy. It was intended to seal off the theatrical stage from the audience in the theatre, thus effectively separating a purely aesthetic world from the real community – exactly in the sense criticized by Schmitt. Yet this also created the condition for the kind of aesthetic intervention – intervention of the aesthetic – in the conventional realm of society that I hope to have illustrated with Lessing. Further, it provided a possibility for historical drama to open a space for a potential revision of history’s fatal (tragic) course. Egmont’s and Homburg’s visions make the fantasizing mind a (stage) reality visible to all, thus effectively fusing the subject with the community. Büchner takes this meta-dramatic dimension to a negative extreme in turning the theatre constellation into an awareness of political powerlessness. When at the play’s conclusion the otherwise empty stage displays the guillotine ready for the next strike, this instrument of death becomes no less than an allegory of the Rampe, the stage apron or curtain. Philotas’s sword, the stage prop Lessing had placed in the centre of a play within the play demonstrating at once the historical obsolescence and the emotional endurance of heroic tragedy, has now become a death machine signifying both a history devoid of meaning and a theatre slicing life into stills of empty heroic postures, served up to silent spectators. Tragedy is detached from itself only to return as a grotesque play of masks.

Gerhard Fischer

Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller)

The chapter discusses a number of plays by German authors who have chosen a play-within-aplay dramaturgy as a special way to deal with historical matters (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, H. Müller). These texts explore the dialectics of ‘historicity’ and ‘actuality’. The playwrights use various framing devices to set up contrasting, historical levels which mirror and comment on each other as well as on the actual historical time of the performance. In other instances, authors construct fictitious historical settings or conduct imaginary, anachronistic dialogues that cut across time and space. Apart from allowing a critical self-reflection and a self-referential take on their own historical position, these ‘dialogues with the dead’ allow for an appropriation of history which acts as an antidote against historical amnesia.

1. Historical Drama and the Play within the Play Within German dramatic literature of the modern age, there is a long tradition of playwrights who have used the convention of the Spiel im Spiel in their construction of historical dramas. The list would have to begin with Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Other names that could be mentioned include Schnitzler, Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Weiss, Grass and Heiner Müller. All of these playwrights are concerned with history, not as documentarists or as historicists who use the stage to create an illusion of the past as – supposedly – it really was. Rather, they use historical events, settings and developments in a playful, often fictitious way in order to do what historians also do, namely to comment on and to interpret history, to offer re-evaluations of the past and to critically reflect on the relationship between past and present. The particular structure of the play within the play has proven a very useful strategy to resurrect forgotten histories or to construct alternative historical visions, contrasting realities or thought provoking insights into social and societal processes. Typically, the playing with history, with historical memory or with the imaginative construction of historical alternatives, even utopian visions of the future, also reflect the playwrights’ own processes of intellectual and political identity formation. In the following, I should like to discuss some of the dramatic techniques employed by Büchner, Brecht, Weiss and Müller in their use of the historical

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play within the play. There is a clear line of influence that links plays such as Danton’s Death, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Marat/Sade and The Mission (i.e. Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag), notably with the focus on the treatment of revolution as a historical phenomenon. The analysis will reveal the great variety and versatility in the individual employment of the Spiel im Spiel convention by these four playwrights who have used it for their individual and very different purposes. In my own dramaturgical practice, issues concerning the historical play within the play have played a central role in the construction of two original theatrical productions with which I have been associated. As a last point in this chapter, I should like to briefly refer to these two works, both of which are historical plays which playfully incorporate other historical dramas. 2. Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death: History and Theatre as Stage Metaphor In Danton’s Death, which in many ways has set the standard for modern historical drama,1 Büchner does not use the play within the play in the traditional way, as he does for instance in Leonce and Lena. The play is notable, among other things, for its use of theatrical metaphors. In the crowd scenes in which the anonymous Parisians appear as an amorphous and anonymous mass, a collective hero who constitutes a new kind of historical subject, one single character, Simon, stands out, characteristically as an actor who plays a double role, even though his ‘acts’ are more static poses than scenic inventions. When Simon beats up his wife while invoking the heroic figures of Roman republicanism along with its classical rhetoric, he appears twice removed from the historical original. Simon is a prompter by profession; he knows his lines second-hand from the tragedies of the contemporary repertoire and the gestic re-enactements of the historic poses from the perspective of the prompter’s box. Simon thus offers an unwitting parody of the revolutionary tableaux of old Rome, in stark contrast to the tragedy of the Revolution that is being played out in the tribunals, the clubs and the streets of Paris, not to mention under the guillotine. Büchner uses the street scenes to comment on the discrepancy between the revolution’s promise of liberation and social justice and ist failure to improve the material conditions of ordinary Parisians whose lives are ‘murder through work’.2 Neither Robespierre’s rhetoric concerning revolutionary aus-

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2

Georg Büchner. ‘Dantons Tod’. Kritische Studienausgabe des Originals mit Quellen, Aufsätzen und Materialien, ed. by Peter von Becker (Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat, 1985). Georg Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose. Trans. and with an Introduction by Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 11.

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terity, virtue and discipline nor the desperate acts of self-revenge of the people who are ready to hang anybody who has not got ‘a hole in his jacket’ 3 will improve the situation of Simon and his family, or that of their neighbours. The hapless drunken prompter has to accept that his ‘virtuous’ wife will allow their daughter to prostitute herself to make sure that some bread will be on the family table. At the end of the scene, Simon quotes a few lines from Hamlet to signal his acquiescence. The private revolt he has staged has changed nothing, it was a futile act of rebellion fuelled by a drunken furor and dressed up in second-hand theatrics; it shows and proves only the impotence of the people who are – playfully – acting out history vis-à-vis a socioeconomic and political reality that remains beyond their control. The historical characters as actors, or as marionettes led by some anonymous force, is one of the key concepts in a string of theatre metaphors, of playing and acting, that runs throughout the whole play. It is the self-reflexiveness expressed in these rhetorical figures of speech which lends the play its thoroughly modern aura. The reflection on history and its course, the role of individuals who are thinking that they are in control of events and yet realise, ultimately, that they are only being pulled along, is expressed in terms and images of a theatrical consciousness. ‘We stand on the stage all our lives,’ says Danton, ‘even though in the end we are finally stabbed in earnest.’ 4 It is not the traditional Baroque metaphor of the world as theatre that suggests a deep philosophical uneasiness concerning the human perception of truth and illusion, of Sein and Schein, which Büchner is exploring in Danton’s Death. The world here is not an illusion behind which an ultimate, transcendant or metaphysical reality is hidden. Büchner’s interest is wholly human and secular, his focus is on the social endeavour to understand the forces that shape and determine mankind’s actions and interventions, its plans and projects to influence the ways of the world. Danton, as Büchner’s mouthpiece, appears as a theorist of history whose continuous reflections circle, time and again, around the same questions and issues: responsibility and guilt, the burden of memory, the cleavage between political intentions and actual outcomes. Danton’s realisation that we are ‘but puppets, manipulated on wires by unknown powers’5 is followed, in a final analysis, by yet another theatrical metaphor, namely that the play in which we are involved as actors, called History, is only the ‘parody’ or ‘travesty’ of an earlier play, or of something that has already once before ended in tragedy

3 4 5

Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 8. Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 28. Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 36.

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and that we are now condemned to experience as farce. Marx’s famous dictum sounds, indeed, as if it could have been lifted word for word out of Büchner’s text. 3. Brecht: Vorspiel and Vorspielen in The Caucasian Chalk Circle In Brecht’s theatre, the notion of playing with history applies perhaps most pointedly to his Caucasian Chalk Circle. The play is often seen as a kind of timeless fairy tale, set in an exotic, quasi-medieval Georgia, which tells a universal tale of ‘true motherhood’. This reading, supposedly supported by the view that Brecht intended his Chalk Circle as a kind of Broadway musical (he had, in fact, a contract for a production which, however, never materialised), holds that the play’s prologue, or Vorspiel, set on a collective farm in a remote region of the Soviet Union at the close of World War II and telling the story of two villages and their dispute over the use and ownership of a valley after the withdrawal of the Nazi troops, is merely an ideological, propagandistic addition that is essentially unrelated to the core drama. As a consequence of such an interpretation, the play’s Vorspiel is very often omitted in productions. The genesis of the text makes it very clear, however, that Brecht’s prologue is an integral part of a history play about war and revolution, indeed about the nature and course of history itself. Darko Suvin has rightly pointed out that at the heart of the play lies a concern with what he calls Brecht’s ‘historiosophy’.6 Already in the first notes that outline his plan for a new play that would be based on a thirteenth century Chinese song-play by Li Hsing-tao, Brecht employs a second historical time frame as a theatrical point of reference for the composition of his own drama. The original drafts date from 1938/39, during Brecht’s early years of exile in Scandinavia, where he uses an eleventh century episode in the history of Denmark (the murder of a Danish king, Knut the Holy, in Odense in 1086) as a setting for his own Chalk Circle.7 In a second phase of his work on the Chalk Circle-material (in Sweden, January 1940), the central historical conflict of the early modern period between feudalism and the rising bourgeoisie becomes the focal point of the setting for ‘The Augsburg Chalk Circle’, a short story set in the author’s native Bavaria

6

7

Darko Suvin, ‘Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Marxist Figuralism: Open Dramaturgy as Open History’, in Critical Essays on Bertolt Brecht, ed. by Siegfried Mews (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co, 1989), pp. 162-75, p. 163. See Jan Knopf, Brecht-Handbuch Theater. Eine Ästhethik der Widersprüche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980) p. 254. Knopf gives a detailed account of the genesis of the play, cf. pp. 25456.

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in which the Thirty Years War provides an historical counterpoint to the unfolding Second World War. Towards the end of WWII Brecht takes up the plan for a theatrical version yet again. This time – the first draft of the play is written in California between April and June 1944 – Brecht chooses a Caucasian setting and a latemedieval, feudalistic time frame for the chalk-circle story, while the prologue is set in the same place in 1934. In this first version, the decision over the use of the valley is not spelled out in the Vorspiel; it is rather left to the audience to decide at the end of the show. In other words, the performance of the inner play is meant as helping the audience to come to a conclusion about a question that is left open at the outset. In the second version of the play, written only a few weeks later, the author’s own contemporary historical reality is put on stage. In this version, the date of the prologue is moved to 1944 to coincide with the news of the defeat of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union, and the question of what will become of the valley is already decided at the beginning. What is decisive for Brecht’s historical dramaturgy is that the particular point in time chosen for the Vorspiel presents an exemplary junction of history with a potential for a new beginning after the devastation of the war. Whether the victory over fascism and the subsequent moment of a ‘Point Zero’ in 1944/45 did in fact create such an open situation (‘the most promising moment of modern history’ 8) can be debated, of course. What is clear beyond doubt, however, is that the optimistic Brecht of this period, inspite of all his reservation about the Stalinist nature of the Soviet regime, did believe that there was an opening in history that could be used for a new start towards building a democratic society based on socialist values: of production, art, social interaction, etc. His paradigmatic parable ‘Der Städtebauer’ (‘The City Builder’), published two days after the iconic date of 8 May 1945 (VE-Day) in the New York exile paper Austro-American Tribune, presents another and very similar example of Brecht’s historical optimism at this time. The second version of the play was also the first one to be published, perhaps not coincidentally at a similarly critical junction in post-war German history, namely in 1949, after the foundation of the FRG and the GDR, respectively. The timing again underlines the author’s intention of submitting his play as a contribution to the debate on how, at a historical crossroads, the development of German society after the defeat of fascism might proceed. In the published version of 1954, finally, which has become the final, authorised one, Brecht makes one final substantial change. The story of the two collec8

Suvin, p. 172.

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tive farms in 1944 is now no longer separated from the chalk-circle story as a Vorspiel; it is rather incorporated into the main body of the text as Act I (with its own title, ‘The Dispute over the Valley’). Brecht thus stresses once more his determination to link the two time frames historically and in close dialectical fashion, and to insist on their intrinsic linkage. In this final version, printed with the author’s authority, the chalk-circle story is a play within a play which serves as an historical exemplum both to the internal and the external audiences of the show as to how to conduct their social relations at a very specific point in history. The playing with different historical settings which Brecht thought of and contemplated in the various stages of his work on the adaptation of the old Chinese model makes it clear that his major concern lay in exploring the essential historical-philosophical dimensions inherent in the dramaturgical potential of the historical play within the play. This concern with history, and with learning the right lessons from its study, provides the continuing interest in the story of the play. Its main theme, as Suvin has convincingly argued, is indeed ‘the goal towards which class history is moving’; it is ‘the theme of a reasonable and humanized ultimate goal (telos) of history envisaged as a system of human actions and interactions.’9 The various linguistic connotations of Vorspiel, and vorspielen, need to be spelled out to explore the full dimensions of the complicated composition employed by Brecht within his Spiel im Spiel. The ‘dispute over the valley’ is clearly not a realistic portrayal of the political conditions of Soviet Russia in 1944; rather, it presents a fairly utopian picture of human relations that is nevertheless based on concrete historical experiences, notably that of the Soviet Union’s liberation from the forces of fascism. But in a strictly chronological sense, the first act is not a ‘foreplay’ at all, but rather a Nachspiel, or epilogue in a continuing historical development that is happening over a very long time span. A remark of one of the villagers in the first act, that the valley had ‘belonged’ to them ‘from all eternity’, is countered by a soldier who says that the old man in his youth ‘did not even belong to’ himself: ‘You belonged to the Kazbeki princes.’ 10 Subsequently, the appearance of a Kazbeki ‘fat prince’ as a character in the internal play establishes an historical link that bridges Vorspiel and main drama: the present-day Soviet villagers are the

9 10

Suvin, p. 165. Italics in the original. Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In: Bertolt Brecht. Parables for the Theatre. Translated and with an Introduction by Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 117.

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descendants and heirs of the protagonists of the characters portrayed in the chalk-circle story. In the play within the play, the farmers of 1944 thus present their own history. Their historical memory, which has been preserved in the art of the singer-storyteller, allows them to establish a legitimacy and a reference to a revolutionary precedent, based on the exemplary models of Grusha (along with Simon and Michael) and Azdak, models which are deeply rooted in family and local history. Keeping this memory alive and making it productive for their own contemporary reality, Brecht suggests, is as much a part of the social production of the villagers as the re-building of their farms and the construction of a new dam project that they are about to undertake. It is for this reason that the request of the state’s planning and control ‘specialist’, who has come from the capital to assist the villagers in their decision about the valley, to shorten the performance is met with a simple, yet decisive ‘no’.11 The verdict of the villagers and of Arkadi Tscheidse suggests that the planning of the future, the material re-building of society as well as decisions about cultural heritage and social justice, must be based on a thorough appropriation of the lessons of the past. The mixture of utopian and concrete historical elements is characteristic of Brecht’s dramaturgy in his Caucasian Chalk Circle. While the concrete historical situation demands that the urgent need for re-construction after the war requires quick decison making and a curtailing of the time allowed for political debate, a shortening of the performance time in which the whole village is involved in a collective artistic action of political identity formation is rejected. It is noteworthy that this rejection is maintained vis-à-vis the demand by the representative of the central bureaucratic state agency; it is the villagers who set the agenda for the day, not the ‘specialist’ from the capital. In an emancipated socialist society, Brecht insists, art and production are not separate. The first act thus anticipates or foreshadows, or vorspielt in German, a new kind of social reality, free from bureaucratic domination, in which internal conflicts are resolved in an exemplary democratic fashion and in which the arts, here the performing arts, play a fundamental role as a force of productive imagination in a liberated society. This Vorspiel of a peaceful, free, friendly and just society, in which decisions are made at a grass roots level in an atmosphere of neighbourly solidarity and in friendly competitive spirit for the common good, offers both a contrast to the old barbaric times of war and oppression but also a link to the brief moments of history where humanity was able to flourish, as in Grusha’s 11

P. 121.

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story, and where justice could reign, as in Azdak’s story, however fleetingly. Brecht’s image of what clearly amounts to a utopian situation is thus not based on an imaginary final stage in history, as a classless paradise that coincides with a static end of history, but rather it emphasises the tentative, hesitant, anticipatory and preliminary nature of the openness provided by the historical situation that has been achieved in 1944/45. The utopian character of the Vorspiel has of course been met with a great deal of criticism on all sorts of grounds, and it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary critics, both in the West but also in the Soviet Union and the GDR, found little in the play that they were willing to regard as ‘realistic’.12 Another meaning of the German vorspielen, which is central to Brecht’s Lehrstück theory, is also relevant in an analysis of the Caucasian Chalk Circle. As in Die Maßnahme, where the four agitators present their story (vorspielen) to the control chorus (the internal audience) in a series of replays, or re-enactments, the inner play in the Caucasian Chalk Circle is meant to engage both the fictitious players and the audience in its doubled form, i.e. the fictitious audience of villagers on stage and the actual audience of the show, in a learning process about what might be called the ‘lessons of history’. Within the setting that Brecht devises, the villagers of Galinsk, the goat-breeders, are protagonists in the frame play but play the internal audience of the interior play, while the other protagonists of the Vorspiel, the orchardists, in turn play the lay actors who act out the chalk-circle story under the guidance and direction of the singer. The chalk-circle play itself consists of two discrete stories or plots which are told consecutively. Only in the very last scene are the two fabula, that of Grusha and that of Azdak, joined together. It is Arkadi Tscheidse, the singer and story-teller, in his role of commentator and director of the play within who skillfully holds the entire complicated structure together. The significance of the role of the singer is thus obvious. His name already attests to the importance of the mixing of ‘old’ and ‘new wisdom’ of which he speaks in the Vorspiel or the first act, respectively.13 While his first name refers to the Arcadia of old, the time-honoured notion of utopian freedom, his last name recalls the role of the Georgian social democratic leader Tscheidse, ‘an early opponent of Stalin who was convinced that the development towards socialism was a long and laborious road.’ 14 The singer’s func12 13 14

Knopf, pp. 267-68. Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, p. 120. Barbara Buhl, Bilder der Zukunft: Traum und Plan. Utopie im Werk Bertolt Brechts (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1988). p. 231. According to Betty Nance Weber, Brecht’s playing with history involves yet another time frame, namely references to various stages in the history of

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tion in the Caucasian Chalk Circle is thus to keep alive the memory of the dialectic of history, while at the same time integrating the audience as a kind of ‘control chorus’. The de-illusionistic nature of Brecht’s epic theatre is indeed best served by a technique of vorspielen, i.e. by the doubling effect of the play within the play. The playful demonstration of different levels of historical perception is underlined by the singer in the Caucasian Chalk Circle time and again. Arkadi Tscheidse’s story of ‘olden times, in a bloody time’ 15 is set in the past and told in the past; yet the actors, supported by the epic commentary, play out the action in the immediate here and now of the performance, thus emphasising to the audience the distance that exists between the ‘now’ and ‘then’, but also suggesting and provoking an idea about a possible ‘tomorrow’ within the framework of the concrete historical experience that unites performers and spectators of the night. 4. Weiss’ Marat/Sade and the Battle of Ideologies The ‘as Performed by’ in the full title of Peter Weiss’ play already reveals its peculiar structure as Spiel im Spiel.16 It is theatre-on-theatre in its purest form: the curtain opens to reveal a stage, the transformed bathhouse of the asylum at Charenton, complete with actors and audience. As in Brecht’s Chalk Circle, there is a central character, in this case the inmate/director de Sade, who establishes the link between stage and auditorium and who holds the dramatic structure together. As in Brecht also, the spectators of Weiss’ show watch the

15 16

the Russian revolution, from 1905 to 1917 up to the situation depicted in the play, i.e. the victory over the German armies in 1945. However, Weber has argued, Brecht chose an ‘indirect way’ of incorporating the history of the Russian Revolution by ‘disguising’ his references, not only to his own period at the time of writing (between 1934 and 1944), but also by disguising the events of an earlier past. One might say that the play has thus become a kind of ‘key drama’, in analogy to the notion of roman à clé (Schlüsselroman), but in the typical Brechtian way of Verfremdung which functions here as a kind of Verschlüsselung (encoding). With regard to Brecht’s historical intentions, Weber speaks of the play as a critique of an ‘unhistorical’ Vorbildfetischismus in orthodox Soviet historiography, i.e. a fetishism of positive models which Brecht cautiously tried to correct. The act of Verschlüsselung serves as a challenge to readers and audiences to reflect anew upon the history of the revolution, a challenge to the power of historical imagination to think through, in a playful way, the ‘possible constellations and sequences of history’ as an alternative to the Stalinist way of development. See Betty Nance Weber, Brechts ‘Kreidekreis’, ein Revolutionsstück. Eine Interpretation von B.N. Weber. Mit Texten aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 108, 109. Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, p. 123. Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. English version by Geoffrey Skelton, Verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell (London: Calder and Boyhars, 1966).

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actors as audience watching a performance, including numerous interactions between the internal audience and the players who constantly fall out of, and back into, the roles they have been assigned to play within the fictitious historical setting of the house in which Marat, suffering from a skin disease, is sitting in his bath writing an address to the nation. What the title does not tell us are the precise dates represented on stage: 1793 (the 13th of July to be exact, the day of Marat’s murder), and 1808, the period of Napoleon’s Restoration, as seen from within the closed world of Charenton where its famous inmate, the ex-Marquis de Sade, during the fifth year of his incarceration, constructs fictitious dramatic encounters that suspend the conventional limits of time and space in acts of theatrical imagination. A third time frame, relating to the author’s at the time of his writing in the early 1960s, and a fourth one, that of the spectators at the actual time of performance (whenever that may be or may have been), need to be added to complete the complex and perplexing circle of historical allusions created by the author of the play. The characteristic feature of Marat/Sade is thus a complex historical perspective of time, place and action, as part of a surrealistic theatrical montage in which the multiple levels interlace, mirror and comment upon each other. As playwright, Peter Weiss owes as much to Büchner as he does to Brecht. As in Danton’s Death, there are grandiose speeches, a rhetorical battle to explore the historical characters’ response to the great political and philosophical concerns of the day, then and now. From Brecht, Weiss takes the device of the historical frame that constructs a second, contrasting time setting that presents a platform for a critique of contemporary developments. Yet, Weiss adds another variant to the historical play within the play. The central action of Marat/Sade is neither located in 1793 nor in 1808; rather, it is a battle of ideas conducted by the two protagonists that cuts across and links the two periods in an imaginary now of the stage. Weiss’ main dramatic strategy, the direct confrontation of the two central characters, is possible only because of the composition of the play within the play. The playing with history allows for the creation, as the very spine of the play, of a trans-historical philosophical dialogue in which the revolutionary leader is resurrected, as it were, to bring back the memory of an era that is in danger of being forgotten by the contemporary powers that be. The play links the two periods of conservative restoration, the post-revolutionary Napoleonic era and the post-war era of West German Wiederaufbau of the 1950s, and refers both of them back to the programmatic promise of the original time of Revolution. As Jürgen Habermas has pointed out after the Berlin premiere of the play in 1964, the net gain of this dramaturgy is an historical reflection that acts as a counter towards the suppression of undesirable

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historical memories. It ‘discloses’, in Habermas’ words, a ‘process of suppression’ (‘ein Verdrängungsprozess wird enthüllt’).17 That the French Revolution was unfinished business in 1808 as much as in 1960, that neither the lessons to be learned nor the Revolution’s potential of democracy and justice had been appreciated, let alone put into practice – this was the provocative message delivered by Weiss’ to his contemporary audience, and not all theatre-goers in the years of the conservative Adenauer era were willing to accept it. Weiss’ playing with history is also apparent in the absence of a linear historical narrative. The action constantly shifts back and forth between the two time levels of Marat and de Sade. There are frequent interruptions, most prominently in the scenes where Charlotte Corday appears to murder Marat: twice she is prevented by de Sade, and only in the third attempt the historical reconstruction is allowed to run its course. Towards the end of the play, the ghosts of Marat’s past make an appearance, and de Sade as fictional author presents a galloping survey of the developments between 1793 and 1808 in order to synchronise the historical actions in the furious finale. There is yet another aspect to Weiss’ playing with history that adds a variant to the dramaturgy of the play within the play. The peculiar structure of the script suggests that de Sade is not only the director, but also the author of the internal play, that it is his script which is responsible for Marat’s speeches as well as for his own. There is thus a strong, single consciousness and perspective which lie at the heart of the historical matter. De Sade, who argues with the benefit of historical hindsight, can agree with certain premises of Marat, even if he finally rejects his conclusions. Of course, it is possible to see in de Sade a dramatic self-portrait of the real author, Peter Weiss himself, and of his political-aesthetic convictions which exhibit sympathies with both historical models, the extreme liberal individualist on the one hand and the radical socialist activist on the other. The play then is also a drama of self-reflection and self-discovery, even if the author does not, in an overt way, put himself on stage or into the picture. i.e. even if he does not break the boundaries imposed by the historical theatrical setting. The writing of the play, as Weiss’ himself has confirmed, played an important role in the process of his development to a ‘socialist’ author.18 It is mirrored in the battle of 17

18

Jürgen Habermas, ‘Ein Verdrängungsprozeß wird enthüllt’, in Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’ (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 120-124 (p. 120). In his progammatic statement ‘Ten Working Theses of an Author in a Divided World’ (‘10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt’), which was formulated in part as a result of his reflections regarding the reception of the different productions of his play in East and West, Weiss writes that the ‘guidelines (Richtlinien) of socialism contain the valid truth’

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theses and antitheses that are enacted in the play as an exercise in political identity formation. 5. Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag in Post-revolutionary Europe In Der Auftrag, Heiner Müller also tells a story set simultaneously at the time of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. However, there is no unifying outer frame, and Müller also dispenses with the epic story-tellers present in both Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and in Weiss’ Marat/Sade. The play’s structure features a surrealistic montage of seemingly unrelated scenes and prose passages, and Müller goes a considerable step further than both Brecht and Weiss in his postmodern dissociation of a linear plot in which the time/space continuum is shattered. While the play contains numerous boxed-in scenes, Müller refuses to subject his dramatic material to the stringent formal dramaturgical requirements of the classical play within a play. Most notably, in comparison to Brecht and Weiss, Der Auftrag does not feature a central controlling character who ties the different dramatic strands together. Rather, Müller seems to be going back to the Büchner model of presenting history as an abstract, autonomous and contingent force. The aspect of total theatre in Der Auftrag certainly recalls Artaud’s theatre of cruelty by way of a detour to Weiss’ Marat/Sade, but the end result is a performance phantasmagoria that is an example of Müller’s own unmistakably postmodernist theatre. The most extensive layer of the script, at the core of the dramatic scenario, is the story told by Anna Seghers in her ‘Caribbean novella’, Licht unter dem Galgen (A Light under the Gallows). In 1794, three emissaries of the revolutionary French Republic are sent to the island of Jamaica, a British colony at the time, to incite the slaves to revolt in order to found a Negro Republic. Their mission is in the name of the universal message of the Droits des Hommes, part of which is the recent decree that proclaims the equality of (skin) colour: egalité des couleurs. Two of the emissaries are white, Debuisson, son of colonial plantation owners and slave holders who has become a revolutionary while studying in France, and Galloudec, an emancipated peasant from Brittany. The third is black, Sasportas, a former slave who has been liberated by the Revolution. When, after years of clandestine struggle, they receive word that Napoleon has come to power in Europe in 1799 and that the revolution is over, Debuisson turns his back on his comrades. He betrays his revolutionary mission

(gültige Wahrheit) for him. Cf. Peter Weiss, ‘10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt’, in Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’, p. 119.

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and returns to his previous role as a colonial master of slaves. Sasportas is caught and hanged, while Galloudec dies on his way home to France. The message of their failed mission, the voice of the dead, finally reaches the person who had sent them off in the first place. Antoine, a former official of the revolutionary National Assembly, is living in hiding after the Eighteenth Brumaire. He is anxious to conceal his past and fearful of Napoleon’s secret police. But in 1808, while the French armies are fighting in Russia, Galloudec’s letter arrives, and the memories and the ghosts of history return to haunt Antoine. The story of the Antoine of 1808 is the second layer of Müller’s text; it is set in the post-revolutionary period of restoration and Napoleon’s dictatorship. A distinct third part, set abruptly and unconnected within the previous text, provides a historical link to the present tense of Müller’s writing. The ‘Man in the Elevator’ is a five-page long piece of uninterrupted, stream-ofconsciousness prose which offers a new take on the play within the play. The first person narrator of the boxed-in piece remains anonymous, but it is clear that the persona embedded in the prose text is intimately related to that of the author, as Heiner Müller himself has confirmed in his autobiography War without Battle. The self-referential, quintessentially postmodernist soliloquy recalls memories of a visit to East German party chief, Erich Honecker, and of a dream recalling a walk in a Third World landscape that has its source in a trip by Müller to Mexico.19 Thus, the author incorporates his own story, or at least aspects of his biographical self, into the dramatis personae and into the dramatic narrative of his show. Told in a non-chronological and nonsequential order, the text delivers a reflection on the role of the left-wing European intellectuals who have lost their ideological bearings in a postrevolutionary, post-Marxist political environment. Müller’s debt to his predecessors is quite apparent. There is the dialogue between Danton and Robespierre, enacted as a farcical battle, which recalls Büchner. It is followed by an anarchistic mimicry of the Revolution by the Jamaican slaves who kick around the severed heads of the revolutionary European heroes, in stark contrast to the tragic dimension of Danton’s Death. Brecht’s Lehrstück is similarly recalled when the three emissaries begin their work after their arrival on the island by putting on masks to conceal their true identities and by rehearsing the undercover roles they had previously decided upon. In this scene, Müller does not resort to parody; he retains and shows off the Brechtian concept of vorspielen and ‘learning by acting’ in a demon-

19

See Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in Zwei Diktaturen. Eine Autobiographie (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992), pp. 297-98.

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strative and even, one might say, earnest Brechtian manner. And yet: the outcome of the play, the utter failure of the mission at the end, confirms Müller’s distance to Brecht and his scepticism regarding his predecessor’s optimistic belief in an open course of history. What Müller takes from Weiss, finally, is the juxtaposition of the two historical frames, revolution and counterrevolution, and the dialogue that cuts across time and space. Like Marat/Sade, Der Auftrag is also a play in which ideological positions are developed in a grandiose rhetorical style: solid chunks of seemingly endless soliloquy which appear like enormous granite blocks of text, are set against nightmarish passages of Kafkaesque prose and disturbing scenes of sado-masochistic role playing. As in Weiss’ play, the use of fictional historical settings to comment on the politics of the present is a recurring feature in Der Auftrag. In Müller’s text, Napoleon also reads as Stalin. The play, ‘a circular essay on defeat’ to quote Black Australian author Mudrooroo,20 reflects upon the history of revolution and counter-revolution in Europe over the last 200 years. It also anticipates and predicts the end of the grand socialist experiment in Europe, i.e. of the Eastern European regimes, by at least a decade. Even more forcefully than Marat/Sade, Müller’s script emphasises the evocation of the past as a dialogue with the dead in a determined, if not desperate effort to counter historical amnesia and to keep alive a utopian dream that was once the privilege of the European left-wing intelligentsia. Both Antoine, who conjures up the vision of his former comrades for whose death he feels responsible, and Debuisson, who is plagued by pangs of conscience when confronted by his own self as traitor, engage in a painful process of self-discovery and self-reflection by remembering and imagining the past. But it is the author himself, in the persona of the Man in the Elevator, who most forcefully underlines the theme of the ‘Memory of a Revolution’, as the play’s subtitle has it. In an anachronistic soliloquy that cuts across time and space, he recalls his role as an intellectual who has lost his historical mission in the doomed republic of Realsozialismus. In the selfreflective recollection of the events of his own contemporary political situation and of the original failed mission civilisatrice of the bourgeois colonial enterprise in the fading age of European enlightenment, the lonely figure of the Man in the Elevator appears as the last representative in an ever repeating cycle of utopian projection and post-revoutionary failure.

20

The Mudrooroo/Müller Project. A Theatrical Casebook, ed. by Gerhard Fischer (Kensington [Sydney]: New South Wales University Press, 1993), p. 21.

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6. Recent Variations: GRIPS and Müller/Mudrooroo My own involvement in the theatrical practice of the historical play within the play was very much shaped by both Brecht and Müller. It came about as part of a working process dating back to more than twenty years ago, to the German theatre season of 1983/84. At that time I was involved, as a guest dramaturg with the GRIPS Theatre of Berlin, in the creation of a new play which, like almost all GRIPS productions, was conceived in-house, in this case on the basis of a dramaturgical concept by the writer, novelist Leonie Ossowski, in close co-operation with members of the ensemble. The script, eventually entitled Voll auf der Rolle (suggesting an actor who perfectly fits his or her role), takes place on two historical levels at once. It is set in Berlin in 1984 and tells a story about young people in Germany who are caught up in a rising wave of right-wing extremism. It deals with the topical issues of racism and hostility against foreigners, notably German residents of Turkish origin, and with the threat of an emerging Neo-Nazi movement forty years after WWII. Simultaneously, in a play within, the show tells the story of a group of teenagers during the last days of the NS-Regime, a story of resistance as well as of Nazi indoctrination and fanaticism, and of the persecution and destruction of European Jewry. In Voll auf der Rolle, the interior play invokes the Brechtian tradition of the Lehrstück.21 The intention of the framing device is to use the process of a theatrical production to demonstrate an hypothesis: students of the 1980s who show little interest in their prescribed history project, i.e. the Third Reich, will perceive the relevance of history upon discovering the connections with their own historical situation, and this discovery will lead them to explore new modes of social interaction. The play within instructs by being played, precisely as Brecht had formulated in his notes on the ‘Theory of the Lehrstück’.22 In 1988, in Sydney, I began to think about another theatre project which again featured, as its core, a Spiel im Spiel on several historical levels. The point of departure here was the experience of 1788/1988, the celebration of the Bicentenary of the British settlement (or invasion) of Australia, and in 1789/1989, the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. The near simultaneity of the two events, and their commemorative re-enactments in Sydney and Paris, neatly exposed the two sides of the dialectic of European enlightenment: while the British sent a fleet of soldiers and con21

22

For a more detailed account see Gerhard Fischer, ‘The Lehrstück Experience on the Contemporary Stage. On Brecht and the GRIPS Theater’s Voll auf der Rolle’, Modern Drama, XXX1, 3 (Nov. 1988), 371-379. See Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Zeugnisse, Diskussion, Erfahrungen, ed. by Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 164.

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victs to the Fifth Continent to take possession of what they considered to be terra nullius, as well as to civilise and, in the process, almost exterminate the indigenous population, the French disposed of feudalism and royalty and proclaimed the universal message of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The bicentennial re-enactment of the landing of the First Fleet, met by protests of Aboriginal demonstrators, made me think of another mission and another landing, the one described by Heiner Müller in Der Auftrag in which the experience of the French Revolution and the export of its ideas and its message to the Third World feature as a central concern. Thus, a theatrical project was born, namely to aboriginalize Heiner Müller by constructing a show in which Müller’s text was to be used, adapted and performed by Aboriginal actors. A long process of intercultural collaboration followed, involving Aboriginal performers and theatre practitioners, notably the Aboriginal director Brian Syron and the Black Australian writer Mudrooroo. Eventually, a frame play was written by Mudrooroo around Müller’s script, based on a dramaturgical concept by myself.23 Der Auftrag here becomes a kind of Brechtian Lehrstück, but within a frame text that constitutes a historical counter projection to Müller’s play, criticizing its historical pessimism by placing it into a very different social context characterised by an ongoing, and open, process of political emancipation, and by finally rejecting Der Auftrag as a Eurocentric construct that does not fit the local Aboriginal mould. In the fictitious plot, the Aboriginal performers finally decide to abandon Müller’s play (ironically, after they have presented it in full, and thus having appropriated it for themselves at the end of the rehearsal process which the frame play describes). But the playing with history in this play goes further. Mudrooroo’s frame play takes up Müller’s notion of history as dialogue with the dead by recalling the history of the Aboriginal presence in Australia and its fight for survival vis-à-vis the European colonizing project; at the same time, the play presents an alternative scenario in anticipation of a near future. Set in the fictitious year 2001, i.e. six years into the future, the script formulates a demand for Aboriginal sovereignty and for Aboriginal political participation within the democratic system of the country in response to the calls for an Australian republic, thus linking again the historical project of the French Revolution with an as yet unfinished Australian project of (post)modernity. The play was premiered on 11 January

23

Cf. also my article on Mudrooroo’s ‘Aboriginalisation’ of Müller’s text, in Gerhard Fischer, ‘“Twoccing“ Der Auftrag to Black Australia. Heiner Müller “Aboriginalised“ by Mudrooroo’, in Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and HISTORY, ed. by Gerhard Fischer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995), pp. 141-164.

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1995, 12 days after Heiner Müller’s death. The title of the play tells the story of this theatrical-historical project, and how it has since then been overtaken by history. Quoted in full, it reads: The Aboriginal Protesters Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with a Production of ‘The Commission’ by Heiner Müller.24

24

The text of the play, which contains Müller’s Auftrag in full, is published, along with other material relating to the genesis of the project and to the writings of Mudrooroo and Müller, in The Mudrooroo/Müller Project.

Birgit Haas

Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie

Since the 1970s, the pastiche has become the most popular theatrical form in Germany. In the 1990s, the postmodern wave gradually petered out, and became the object of critical analysis, not only by means of literary criticsm, but also through the plays themselves. In 1993, Rainald Goetz published his trilogy Fortress (Festung), a harsh criticism of the media, which is composed of a multitude of plays within the play, thus exposing the absurdity of the postmodern TV culture. In his play The Making of B-Movie (1999), Albert Ostermaier picks up on postmodernism by presenting the making of the would-be writer Brom and his ghost-writer Silber as a play against the backdrop of a kitsch movie. This chapter will examine the structure of both plays, analysing the different approaches to postmodernism in a consumerist society.

Introduction The term ‘postmodernist drama’, which Barbara Kruger labelled ‘that vaporous buzzword’, remains highly contentious.1 Despite their reserve towards postmodern plays, however, researchers agree that postmodern drama has developed its own set of conventions: the elision of fiction and autobiography, performer and subject, the monologue, and the emphasis on the body as an expression of structural subjugation. Radical postmodern plays are largely devoid of most of the features by which drama has traditionally been recognised – dialogue, plot, character.2 In this sense, Goetz’s play, Fortress, can be regarded as a typically postmodern drama which promotes Baudrillard’s claim that the media imitation of ‘reality’ (simulacrum) has completely replaced the real. He focuses on the detrimental effect of the media society, dramatising the dominance of the mass media in postmodern culture. Fortress heralds the dissolution of neatly separated catagories, such 1

2

Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 4. See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. by Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 59. Pavis’s definition of a postmodern theatre was that postmodern drama denies the ‘existence of rules and regulations governing dialogue, character, dramatic structure, etc.’, the banishment of the narrative as well as ‘conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange’.

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as genres, since it is not strictly speaking dramatic. As a result, the plays within the play Fortress are multiplied like an infinite number of Russian dolls, although this metaphor is not quite correct, since the pieces do not fit neatly into one an-other. By contrast, Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie merely quotes the ‘anti-features’ of postmodern art within the framework of a dialogically structured narrative action. Through his more traditional approach, Ostermaier examines the creative process of playwriting. He happily marries Brecht and Bogart in order to expose the mechanisms behind the scenes of mass culture. The play can be seen as a ‘drama about drama’.3 However, it fits neither of Richard Hornby’s structuralist categories, because Ostermaier blurs the boundaries between the so-called ‘inset’ type, where the inner play is secondary, and the ‘framed’ type, where the inner play is primary and the outer play merely a framing device. Speaking of a postmodern play in terms of a playtext might seem paradoxical at first, since the finalised, written version of a script contradicts the infinite openness of the postmodern text. Viewed against the backdrop of fluxes and Neo-Dada performances of the 1960s and 1970s, the two plays in question do not fall into the category of postmodernism. As far as the formal aspects are concerned, both examples can rather be seen as a return to modernism. It is therefore the aim of this chapter to show the various ways in which Ostermaier and Goetz refer to postmodernism, bearing in mind that neither author subscribes to postmodernism as such; clearly, they retain the concept of authorship, as well as the concept of a basic ‘narrative’, i.e. the critique of postmodern performance. It must also be noted that both believe in Schiller’s idea of the theatre as a place of enlightenment. However radically dissolved the play-within-the-play structure seems to be, we should bear in mind that, after all, both playwrights adhere to a more conservative vision of theatre. The postmodern context is, therefore, parodied and criticised by means of two plays which follow a modernist pattern. In my argument, I will focus on the conflict lines between modernism and postmodernism. The pivotal point of this essay is the question of how mass culture is represented through the formal structure of a modernist metadrama: despite the ‘blasting’ of the formal structures and the use of montage, the plays do not dissolve the category of the metadrama. Although both examples play with typical postmodern features, such as Kristevan ‘intertextuality’, the message is different;

3

See Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 33.

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both authors refer back to the Frankfurt School, and the belief in the need to educate and enlighten the individual. Fortress (Festung) Few contemporary German artists have entered as fully as Rainald Goetz into the problematic of memory work (Erinnerungsarbeit), the German identity crisis and and the media, represented by the decidedly superficial reproduction of television images. In the second part of his trilogy, Fortress (Festung, 1993), he depicts the entertainment business as intrinsically ‘fascist’, accusing the media of repressing the truth about the Holocaust, thus paving the way for a new totalitarian state. Throughout the play, the numerous figures remind the audience in a self-referential manner that they ‘are at an abstract place called the ramp’ and that they sit ‘in the abstraction of gas’ (wir sitzen am abstrakten Ort der Rampe / wir sitzen im abstrakten Gas).4 While Rampe is the German word for the fourth wall of the stage, it equally recalls, indeed has become synonymous for the selection process conducted at the Auschwitz train station, i.e. the Holocaust. Through this, the scenes have a strong metadramatic effect because they comment on and criticise media culture as such, since the 47 short scenes of Fortress are framed within the imaginary borders of a live-show on television. The pre-titles sequence that starts the second part of the trilogy can be seen as an induction, framing the inner plays of the talk shows, which are intertwined through a simulation of switching between channels. The title, announced by the talk-show host, ‘Hape Kerkeling’, says: Times Table-talk Documents Criticism in Germany Monologues and Memories Legends Disco Reality and People Sources Characters5

The title, in itself a collage of loosely connected associations, points to the tension between memory and the seductions of mass culture. This opposition emerges in decidedly unsubtle fashion, as criticism is not lurking in the subtext of the scenarios, but is blurted out over and over again; in a scene entitled ‘German’ (Deutsch), a character called ‘Hatred’ (Hass) openly announces his disgust in view of the ‘eternal mythological fascism’ and the ‘dishonest fascism of the memory’.6 4 5 6

Rainald Goetz, Festung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 228. My translation. Goetz, p. 102. The original text is in English. Goetz, p. 215. In the original text: ‘der ewige Mythenfaschismus; der verlogene Erinnerungsfaschismus’.

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In the play, TV reigns supreme, any prospect of a better society is swept away by the media industry, and the statement by the presenter, ‘Katja Ebstein’, is typical: ‘my favourite role now / forget forget forget’. 7 This message is delivered by a vast number of figures, which are named after TV-presenters, philosophers, artists, or simply celebrities. Nobody is immune to the media virus, to the effect that all are eager to please the audience with superficial small-talk and cheap jokes: TANJA SCHILDKNECHT HANS-JÜRGEN KRAHL

WOLFGANG POHRT

HOMELESS PERSON

profession or person de burb de burb the perpetrator investigates shall we let them in yes ladies and gentlemen see for yourselves this game is history this is fabulous people are standing up do you have a light mister fireman8

Appropriating tactics from stand-up comedy in a typical postmodern manner,9 Goetz mixes game-shows with carnival rites in Cologne, and quotes from Max Frisch’s famous parable play on the rise of fascism, Biedermann und die Brandstifter (The Fire-raisers). Through this, the illusion of televised happiness is constantly destroyed, because the characters step in and out of their roles in order to call into question the delusions of the mediatised world. The characters who present the programme simultaneously intrude on the talk show and raise pseudo-philosophical issues related to collective memory, the Holocaust and the ‘fascist’ nature of present-day Germany. In fact, one could argue that the text does not consist of actual dialogues onstage. It is rather a sequence of intertwined inner monologues, which unveil the hypocrisy and 7 8

9

Goetz, p. 241: ‘meine liebste Rolle jetzt / Vergessen vergessen vergessen’. Goetz, p. 103. The original reads as follows: TANJA SCHILDKNECHT Beruf / oder Person HANS-J ÜRGEN KRAHL da tä da tä / der Täter ermittelt / wollen wir sie hi nein [sic!] lassen WOLFGANG POHRT jawohl meine / Damen und Herren / Sie sehen es selbst / dieses Spiel hier ist / Geschichte / das ist sagenhaft / die Leute stehen auf hier OBDACHLOSE haben Sie eben mal Feuer / Herr Wachtmeister Stephen Watt, Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 39.

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false nature of the speakers. The fact that the lines are often cited out of context disrupts the flow of the dialogues and heightens the critical effect. Goetz provides numerous inset pieces in the form of lines and parodies from television shows: HAPE K ERKELING [...] and so we have reached the end of our big live video conference ladies and gentlemen, one day we will all stand in front of heaven’s door nake- nake- knacking on heaven’s door and I am calling RAINALD Delta I am calling Delta answer hey you ALFI SWOZIL Delta here Delta here [...] RAINALD see anything? ALFI SVOZIL naw RAINALD hear anything? ALFI SVOZIL naw RAINALD ‘right then seeya Svoboda over.10

This parody of a closing sequence, which blends seemlessly into a two-way radio talk between two none-too-intelligent security guards, highlights both the confusion and the shallowness of entertainment. The example shows that there are several layers of inset plays which overlap each other. In doing so, the playwright creates a maze of inset plays which are bizarre, nightmarish and confusing. The outer frame is only vaguely defined; the spectator can never be exactly sure whether he is witnessing a documentary, a talk-show, a feature film, or, indeed, a talk-show about a talk show, etc. Goetz is more interested in creating a dream-like quality which allows him to present his10

Goetz, pp. 152-53. The original text reads as follows: HAPE KERKELING [...] und damit sind wir am Schluss / unserer großen Konferenzliveschaltung / stehen eines Tages meine Damen / und Herren wie wir alle / nack nack nackig an der Himmelstür nack nack / nackig an der Himmelstür und ich / rufe jetzt ich rufe RAINALD Dora / ich rufe / Dora melden / Sie sich Ihnen ALFI SWOZIL hier Dora / hier Dora [...] RAINALD siechst was? ALFI SWOZIL naa RAINALD hörst was? ALFI SWOZIL naa RAINALD dann is gut / servas Swoboda / Ende.

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tory and the presentation of history in terms of an experience which cannot be rationalised. In fact, the dream is more of a nightmare, because the disturbing quality of the play, the overall negation of logic, provides no loophole for escape. This is emphasised by the lack of a central figure, to whom we can attribute the negative experience of watching and being watched. Goetz amalgamates the plays within the play to create the impression that the media have complete control of the mind both of the spectator and the performer. The characters, such as talk-show hosts, are both framed and performed in their own programme, making the boundary between the inner and outer world fluid. In doing so, Goetz negates the existence of the grand histoires, of overarching narrative structures, which help to organise the world around us; he denies the possibility of explaining what is happening to us. In Fortress, it is impossible to say whether the inner or the outer play is the main one. As a result, the media-controlled world becomes an irrational beast which is about to devour humanity and humankind, leaving chaos and destruction in its wake. Since memory work is the thematic focus of Festung, the postmodern deconstruction of the boundaries between inner and outer play accuse the media of destroying any sensible interaction between people. Along with the strong political thrust of Goetz’s play, there is a great deal of propaganda in it. However, critics have observed that blatant sermonising about Germany being ‘fascist’ to the core, is ineffective.11 The assault on the spectators’ ability to think logically, the attack on the ingrained ways in which people think about and perceive television, only convinces those who are already convinced. Goetz’s play leaves no room for the audience to re-examine their views; the lack of subtext results in a nonetoo-subtle play which tells the audience what to think. At the same time, in its penchant for absolute distinctions between high art and mass culture, Fortress is resolutely anti-postmodern, in the ways outlined by Andreas Huyssen.12 In Goetz’s dramatic text, chance pretends to rule supreme, aided by ever-growing networks of electronic media and the spectacle of images they create. The only answer to this seems to be a drama which borrows ideas from the narrative form of the ‘hype’, which Meaghan Morris describes as 11

12

Franz Wille, ‘Zeitgeistshows: Sinn oder Stuss? Rainald Goetz Festung und Katarakt in Frankfurt, Volker Brauns Iphigenie in Freiheit in Frankfurt und Cottbus’, Theater Heute, 2 (1993), 15: ‘Weil kaum eine Beobachtung richtig stimmt, verflüchtigen sich Goetz’ Tiraden zu leeren Behauptungen’ (‘Because hardly a claim is properly correct, Goetz’ diatribes pale into empty claims’). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 192.

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‘the frenzy of attributes outbidding each other in an ecstasy of one-upping. Hype is always and blatantly falser than false [...] Hype is never realistic.’ 13 In recreating such an environmental ‘hype’, Fortress comes close to Richard Foreman’s manifestos for the so-called ‘Ontological-Hysterical Theatre’.14 In his writings, Foreman endorses a dramatic scheme which is ruled neither by logic nor by pure chance, but lies in between logic and accident. To sum up, Goetz’s drama can be understood as a paradox in itself, as it foregrounds the need for high art by means of disrupted postmodern structure. At the same time, it mirrors and criticises a mass culture of instant consumability. As a consequence, its postmodern content clashes with a formally scripted text. Hence Goetz adopts the position of the Frankfurt School which explicitly condemns mass culture, thus retaining the crucial opposition between art and mass culture. In short, Fortress can be seen to resonate with the words of Adorno: ‘The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art.’ 15 Although Goetz employs postmodern devices, his aim is effectively a modern one; he highlights the fact that, in our age of mass consumption, high culture and art are needed more than ever in order to educate the individual. The Making of B-Movie As Hornby argues, the notion of the play within the play does not only refer to form, but has to include the ways in which existing texts are incorporated and adapted within the framework of a new play in order to ‘dislocate the perception’.16 As The Making of B-Movie was commissioned for the BrechtYear in 1998, it is hardly surprising that Ostermaier wove allusions to Brecht into his play. But Brecht’s Baal (1919) and Drums in the Night (1922) are by no means the only intertextual references, since the dramatist also draws on the film Casablanca, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and, finally, mocks his colleague, Rainald Goetz. The play consists of the following components: at first, the framework seems to be the shooting of a film which is set in Africa. Andrée, a poet who suffers from writer’s block, is rescued by Silber, an agent; this is vaguely reminiscent of Brecht’s character, Andreas Kragler, a disillusioned legionary returning from Africa. Silber takes Andrée to a training camp for mercenaries, then changes Andrée’s image by giving him a new 13 14

15 16

The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), p. 209. Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, ed. by Kate Davy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 68. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (1975), 12. Drama, Metadrama and Perception, p. 32.

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name, Brom. Named after the stinking and poisonous gas, the new, roughedup Brom behaves like a sociopath; modelled on Brecht’s Baal, Brom uses and abuses everyone around him. However, now as then he is unable to produce even a single sentence. Brom has to rely heavily on his ghostwriter, Silber, in order to impress the public and sell radically postmodern plays. Only as a team can they perform their glitzy public appearances, like the chemical substance silver bromide used in photographic flashes. Because Silber lacks the necessary media presence, he employs Brom, who acts as the angry young man in order to promote Silber’s violent plays. Everything goes according to plan; the critics are enthralled by Brom’s rudeness, BromSilber’s postmodern play is hugely successful. Their drama is devoid of any deeper meaning, yet, in the typical postmodern fashion, contains naked women wading through blood and gore. In the end, when Silber comes onstage to reveal the true author of the piece, nobody believes him, and during the premiere party, Brom stabs him in the back, to much applause by the guests. As the technical side of this filmic staging turned out to be more difficult to realise than Ostermaier envisaged, the premiere at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich in May 1999 was received with some apprehension.17 The director Minke took the idea of the play within a play a little too seriously. This resulted in a confusing mixture of simultaneous projections, a ‘media salad’ (Mediensalat), which made it difficult to follow the plot. 18 By contrast, the production at the Kölner Schauspiel in November 1999, which was directed by Volker Hesse, was celebrated for honing in on the filmic aspect of the play and its brilliant acting.19 In his introductory remarks, Ostermaier emphasises that the two layers of action, the play and the shooting of the film, should run as parallels strands throughout the performance: In doing so, he harks back to the ‘making-of’ films of the 1980s and 1990s which emphasised and, at the same time, deconstructed the act of shooting a film. Ostermaier explicitely refers to Brecht’s gestus, and demands that the film should produce a clash between what is actually happening on stage and its mediatised version, which is to be

17

18

19

Petra Hallmayer, ‘Das Stück vom Film vom Dichter’, Berliner Zeitung, 3 June 1999; no author, ‘Herr Baal ballert Bilder’, Der Spiegel, 31 May 1999. Jürgen Berger, ‘Wenn der Schwanz mit dem Hund wedelt. Albert Ostermaiers erstes Dialogstück The Making of B-Movie im Münchner Residenztheater’, Theater Heute, 7 (1999), 3233. Jürgen Becker, ‘Die Dürftigkeit des medialen Scheins. Albert Ostermaiers The Making of BMovie, nachgespielt in Köln’, Theater Heute, 1 (2000), 46-47; Roland Koberg, ‘Danke, gestorben’, Berliner Zeitung, 29 November 1999.

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projected simultaneously on a screen at the back of the stage. Any production should emphasise the difference between the two modes of perception: ‘The camera movements become the second eye of the spectator, with the intention to create a conflict between the sensual experience of the action on stage and the manipulative effect of the mediatised transformation.’ 20 In emphasising the technical side of both the producing and receiving end of a performance, Ostermaier indirectly refers to Walter Benjamin, specifically to his reflections on the impact of the technical innovations on film. In line with modernist thinking, Benjamin compared the spectator’s view to the eye of the camera, thereby stating that the effect on the actual performer would be alike. Although he does not mention Benjamin’s essay, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), these reflections are certainly important for the filmic framing of the play. Following in Benjamins’s footsteps, Ostermaier tries to retain a Marxist and revolutionary element which Benjamin believed to be at the heart of modern film-making. In this sense, he did not reject the defamiliarising effect of film and photography, but embraced it. Film cannot only reproduce reality, it can offer a multitude of views, thus heightening our sense of what is real. It is up to the spectator to reassemble the narrative which is lost by the cutting and montage of the film-strips. The view through the camera lens thus wilfully alienates the spectator.21 Since actors in films are ultimately detached from any real contact with their audience, they are alienated from their audience through technology. Thus the actor becomes an object, a commodity which can be consumed by an anonymous viewer. In presenting the action as a play within a film, a bad (Brecht) movie, Ostermaier achieves not only a defamiliarisation effect in the Brechtian sense. Moreover, he foregrounds the impact of technology on all three sides of the classic semiotic triangle, the actor (= sender), the spectator (= receiver), and the medium (= the work of art). In doing so, Ostermaier heightens our critical awareness of the artificiality of the postmodern consumerist spectacle which is parodied onstage. As a result, the play not only breaks up the B-movie narrative, but also destroys the unity of the actors who step in and out of the various layers of representation. Thus Ostermaier hones in on the consumption of drama as a cultural product, especially film, which plays a crucial part in the deconstruction of the entity of the 20 21

The Making of B-Movie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 15. My translation. See ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1969), p. 162: ‘Das Eigentümliche der Aufnahme im Filmatelier aber besteht darin, dass sie an die Stelle des Publikums die Apparatur setzt.’

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posthumanist ‘subject’, Brom-Silber. Still, it needs to be emphasised that the play clearly adheres to a very modernist structure in the sense that it is far from a postmodern dissociation of the dramatic medium itself. The Making of B-Movie pays tribute to both Brecht and Benjamin (who might also be included in the abbreviation ‘B’); the intertwining of technical and actorbased alienation effects. The means of the epic theatre, which culminated in the parabolic style of Brecht’s models for contemporary society, are combined with a calculated use of the film medium, thus adding Benjamin’s alienation effect on top of Brecht. Seen from this perspective, Ostermaier’s play is a far cry from being the postmodern deconstruction which it contemplates in its content. The play is, by contrast, a very modernist piece, harking back to the questions that were at the centre of the debates of the early twentieth century: What happens to the individuality of the human being within a culture of mass consumption and mass production? In the case of Brom and Silber, the result is a flashy appearance, with nothing behind it but two ruined lives. In offering both a mediatised take on the characters as well as an insight into their personalities, Ostermaier resists the temptation to simply replicate the postmodern viewpoint. Although he presents us with a multitude of angles, he never uses them to deconstruct the inherent narrative, which might be a self-reflexive critique of the creation of a postmodern spectacle. The kitschy Casablanca-type setting is juxtaposed to the ‘inset’ play, the making of the celebrity Brom aka Andrée; the film setting recurs in scene 14 (Bild XIV), entitled Afrika II, where a soldier (played by the actor who also impersonates Silber) gleefully exposes the meaninglessness of Brom-Silber’s poems. Here, we find both Brom and Silber moving between inner and outer play, with the result that the boundaries between inner and outer world become blurred. As a consequence, Ostermaier creates deliberate confusion as to whether the inner or outer play is the main or real one; towards the end of the play, Brom announces his future project, the shooting of a film called B-Movie. It remains unclear whether the play frames the shooting of the film, or vice versa. Blending the metadramatic levels into one another, Ostermaier creates a play with no framing reality. This is diametrically opposed to Hornby’s definition of metadrama, who insists on ‘two sharply distinguished layers of performance’.22 As regards the weighting of the various dramatic layers of the play, the main focus of The Making of B-Movie is the rise of Brom’s prominence as a writer. The inset play draws heavily on the literary context, both past and 22

Drama, Metadrama and Perception, p. 35.

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present, referring to Brecht, Artaud and Goetz. The number of direct quotations from Brecht aside, the importance of gestus is clearly visible in the way the main characters are structured; both Brom and Silber step in and out of their roles, depending on the situation. In addition, the odd couple BromSilber can be regarded as a means of splitting the personality of the writer in two. The concept of the ‘author-god’ – pronounced dead by Roland – is presented as an efficient work arrangement. In other words, Ostermaier dissolves the ‘entity’ of the poet, thereby offering the audience room for thought and criticism. In a poem recital, this split is cleverly heightened. While Silber reads ‘Brom’s’ poems, which glorify war and violence, Brom behaves as rudely as possible in order to attract the attention of the critics: he assaults a young man and conspicuously invites women back to his flat. The critics are riveted, and compare Brom to Antonin Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty was intended to physically torment the audience: MÜLLER-SCHUPPEN I am going to write a portrait of you: A poet colder than death. When are you free for an interview? This is going to be the sensation of the year: Former legionary troops onstage: ‘The words are my weapons now.’ Send me your manuscripts and you are a made man. YOUNG MAN The authenticity and power of your verse is unrivalled in contemporary poetry. A feast of slaughter, full of bleeding poetry and desperate love. It is almost as if Artaud had inspired his speech.23

Like Artaud, the aggressive Brom seems to be fascinated by poetry which is inspired by the experience of war. Despite Brom’s xenophobic and misanthropist ravings, the audience on stage loves him, and one critic even praises the ‘breathtaking’ unity of the artist and his work.24 In the passage cited above, a German audience might also recognise the allusions to Fassbinder’s first feature film ‘Liebe ist kälter als der Tod’ (‘Love colder than death’) and to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who announced that the poetry he writes about in Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer (‘My poem is my knife’) was the

23

24

Ostermaier, p. 48. The original reads as follows: MÜLLER-SCHUPPEN Ich werde ein Porträt über Sie schreiben: Ein Dichter kälter als der Tod. Wann hätten Sie Zeit für ein Interview? Das wird die Sensation des Jahres: Ehemaliger Legionär stürmt die Bühne. ‘Die Worte sind meine Waffen jetzt.’ Schicken Sie mir Ihre Manuskripte und Sie sind ein gemachter Mann. JUNGER MANN Diese authentische Kraft Ihrer Verse ist einzigartig in der zeitgenössischen Lyrik. Ein Schlachtfest voll blutender Poesie und verzweifelter Liebe. Man könnte meinen, Artaud hätte ihm die Zunge geführt. [...] Ostermaier, p. 49.

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knife with which he would cut open the foul body of society.25 However, both writers are mocked, since Brom-Silber’s empty bubble of gore and blood is a far cry from the politically engaged literature of the 1970s. During Brom’s appearance on television, he emphasises his commitment to his work through an act of public self-harming: he cuts himself with a knife. This is a clear stab at Rainald Goetz, who, during a reading of his texts in Klagenfurt, cut his forehead, and continued his performance with blood dripping onto his manuscript. In Ostermaier’s version, the theatricality of this act is unmasked as pathetic. As soon as the cameras are switched off, Brom removes the stage blood, much to the disappointment of the critics present. This episode laughs at one of the ‘conventions’ of postmodern art, the ‘foregrounding of the body as a site of institutional oppression’,26 unveiling it as sheer acting. The ingeniousness of Ostermaier’s approach is to combine a modernised adventure of Brecht’s characters Baal and Kragler – an outrageous poet and a pseudo-revolutionary, who are moulded into Brom – with the frame of a kitsch B-movie; ‘B’ meaning either Brom or Bogart (or Brecht), thus intertwining the African setting of Casablanca with the ravings of an untalented, misbehaved poet with writer’s block, presented in an alienated manner. Andrée aka Brom is deception personified; he fails to be a mercenary, cannot write, and is a sociopath. Strictly speaking, Andrée-Brom does not exist, he is quite literally a projection, both within the context of the film shooting, and in the sense that he is merely what the other characters around him want him to be. Ostermaier blurs the differences between high and low art, the notion which lies at the heart of postmodernism. However, his play marks a return to the well-made play, since it contains characters, a narrative and dialogue. Nevertheless, the artist is radical in the sense that, like Brecht, he challenges tradition by making traditions seem unfamiliar, or ‘alienated’. But what happens if a dramatist defamiliarises what has already been transformed into a radical work of art? In Ostermaier’s case, we find that he draws heavily on the Brechtian tradition, both by quoting from Brecht’s plays and by further distancing himself by using a very Brechtian ‘alienation effect’. In typical postmodern fashion he uses pieces from already written texts and inserts them into his play. However, the result is not a seemingly random collage of fragments, but a play which mirrors radical art, both modern and postmodern. Instead of the postmodern pastiche Ostermaier uses a conventionally

25

26

‘Scherenschleifer und Poeten’, in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (Munich: Paul List, 1961), pp. 144-48. Watt, p. 39.

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structured play which merely cites what have become the markers of twentieth-century art: in presenting the creative process of playwriting from behind the scenes, as it were, Ostermaier tears down the media-constructed facade of pseudo-radical postmodern art. In the play, Brom and Silber primarily focus on their marketing strategy and are less concerned with the actual product of their co-operation. In his attack on the conventions of postmodern drama, Ostermaier criticises the postmodern culture industry by holding it up for examination: The dissociation of the consumer with regards to his ability to listen or watch attentively ultimately dissolves both the texts and the perceiving apparatus. In order to counter this trend, I insist on a highly condensed language which might even overburden people’s abilities. Theatre exists through language. The textual construction which the author creates must be stringent and logical, so that a director should be unable to adapt it to the demands of our quickly-changing consumer society; both the aesthetic and the political attacks on this society should remain inherent to any staging.27

In order to oppose the negative trends within a mediatised world, Ostermaier returns to the concept of high art. The purpose of theatre is to enlighten the spectators by challenging them intellectually through a very sophisticated language. As a consequence, the dissolution of the play-within-the-play structure does not mirror the prevailing postmodern theatrical style of the time, but offers a parody. The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture merely serves to criticise the effects of postmodernism by means of modern, mostly Brechtian, devices. Conclusion According to Andreas Huyssen, the major difference that distinguishes postmodernism from high modernism is the end of the ‘modernist belief that high and low culture have to be categorically kept apart.’28 From this point of view, both plays corroborate Huyssen’s claim, because their articulation with popular and mass culture remains crucial. The playwrights’ uncompromising stance is that high art and humanism have been swallowed by capitalism, and 27

28

Frank Raddatz, ‘Sprache muss sein. Interview with Albert Ostermaier’, Stück-Werk 1 (Berlin: Internationales Theaterinstitut, 1997), 86. The German text reads: ‘Die Emanzipation der Konsumentenhaltung gegenüber dem genauen Hören oder der Präzision von Bildern löst die Texte oder den Wahrnehmungsapparat letztlich auf. Gegen diesen Trend muss einfach eine hohe Konzentration von Sprache behauptet werden, die auch überfordern kann. Theater existiert eben auch durch Sprache. Das Textgebäude, das man als Autor herstellt, muss in sich konsequent und stringent gearbeitet sein, um es dem Regisseur bzw. dem schnellebigen Kulturbetrieb zu verunmöglichen, die ästhetischen und politischen Spitzen zu kappen.’ After the Great Divide, p. 192.

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they express their concern through a radical juxtaposition of various art forms. Each dramatist approaches the consumer society from a different angle, the main difference being that while Goetz takes postmodernism seriously, Ostermaier mocks it. In Goetz’s play high and low art clash loudly, whilst Ostermaier subtly dissolves the boundaries between the two. Underneath the dramatic form, or rather, in Goetz’s case, anti-form, the message is the same: the plays show that the achievements of a cultured society are at stake. Fortress and The Making of B-Movie mirror the basic conception of postmodernity: the conviction that images will proliferate, that reality has been effaced by simulation, that sudden cultural catastrophes are unpredictable and unavoidable. The writers borrow from the experiments of former playwrights and dramas, film and television culture, thus reacting against the conventions attached to them. Their ways of borrowing are not the same; significant differences exist between Goetz’s attempt to show the intertextuality of media spectacles and Ostermaier, who combines the reflexions of Brecht and Benjamin for what ultimately becomes a modernist piece. To sum up, none of the formally conventional dramas are subject to the ‘unreadability’ of postmodern culture, which, as far as Stephen Watt is concerned, would be the major shortcoming of postmodern drama.29 As the seemingly unfinished textuality of both plays is in fact an illusion, the plays are more than mere ‘skeletons’ for a performance, to use the term coined by Bernard Beckerman.30 In the plays discussed here, the dominant reading of the text is countered by so-called negotiated readings, which means that an active audience ‘decodes’ the dramas in more ways than one. Having said that, I would like to emphasise that this does not result in a continual deferral of meaning in the Derridean sense. In both cases, the writers are far from negating the educational power of their writing. Although they imitate deconstructive and subjective impulses, they retain a strong belief in the communicative power of drama. These two ‘postmodern’ plays serve a clear-cut purpose. Both authors create an awareness of the meta-dramatic structure, they call into question of established dramatic signs and help to pave the way for a critical theatre which questions traditional modes of interpretation. Our critical attention is challenged by the parody of the subversion of linear theatre with the effect that our awareness of this loss is heightened. It is clear that both authors are ultimately conservative. The alleged collapsing of the meta-dramatic structure – an effect which is undercut by the formally

29 30

Postmodern/Drama, p. 34. Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 3.

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scripted text – is meant to make us rethink our consumerist attitude towards present-day society.

IV The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation

Lada Cale Feldman

The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique

The discussion will suggest that particular corpuses of playwriting that are called for to typify the-play-within-the-play procedure may introduce specificities that challenge extant modes of formulating its supposedly universally valid mechanism and its various possible functions. As the post-WWII Croatian play-within-the-play strategies rely heavily on cultural and historical specificities of the theatrical production and reception, emphasizing ‘the context within’, they invite an approach which would not only rely on semiotic explanations of the procedure, but would also include theatre anthropology, system theory and postcolonial critique.

My aim in the present chapter is to discuss certain methodological issues concerning the theoretical definition of the play-within-the-play procedure as it appears within playwriting, as opposed to actual theatrical performance. While acknowledging the need to formulate the invariant structure of this repeatedly deployed device, the discussion will suggest that particular corpuses of playwriting that are called for to typify the offered formulas of this procedure may introduce specificities that challenge extant modes of formulating its mechanism and its various possible functions, especially if these modes in turn serve to propound broader conclusions regarding the role of the play within the play within the historical development of the genre of drama as such. I derive my conclusions from my long-standing interest in the playwithin-the-play strategies in Croatian playwriting, where, until the advent of modernity, plays manifesting this structure are rather scarce. The only exception to this rule, and an outstanding one, is the work of the Dubrovnik Renaissance playwright Marin Drzic (1608-1567), a striking example of ‘Shakespearean anticipation’, as Croatian scholars often insist, puzzled by the number of concordances among the two opuses – particularly among the multiple frames of his play The Story about how Venus fell in Love with Adonis put in Comedy and Shakespeare’s interweaving of dream, theatre and Athenian ‘reality’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and prudent in their conclusions regarding their possible source in ‘the common atmosphere’, that is, the philo-

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sophical, literary and artistic cultural background shared by European Renaissance intellectuals. The Croatian theatrical baroque abandoned Drzic’s aesthetic and critical ambitions with respect to the relations between artistic theatre, popular culture and the theatricality of state power: in this period, pseudo-historical plays and mythological-allegorical melodramas predominated and they mostly served as flattering mirrors to the foundational myths of aristocratic oligarchy ruling the Dubrovnik republic. The eighteenth century knew no development of a bourgeois comedy, so that the comic repertoire relied instead on farcical re-configurations of the commedia dell’arte scenarios, while upper levels of society took pleasure in the so-called ‘francesarie’, dialectal adaptations of comedies by Molière, still then performed by amateur enthusiasts. When professional theatre was finally founded in the Croatian capital Zagreb in the nineteenth century, it offered a repertoire relying mostly on romantic historical tragedies supporting and stirring the outbursts of national feelings, having other, constitutional priorities which prevented it from reaching the luxury of self-reflection: the fight for the national, linguistic and cultural autonomy and unity of a country continuously under foreign rule, as well as for its own institutional and financial security. Hence, the two major periods in the history of Croatian drama that present a richer picture with respect to this form of theatrical self-consciousness are twentieth-century high-modernism and postmodernism. In both of these periods authors displayed a tendency to complicate metatheatrical devices by combining them with intertextual allusions or direct quotations from either European or autochtonous drama, as well as with documentary, historical references. The most important, largely implicit, inspiration for the modernists was Luigi Pirandello’s famous trilogy, Ivo Vojnovic (1857-1929), Milan Begovic (1876-1948), and Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981), who, though belonging to different avant-garde poetics (symbolism, aestheticism, expressionism), all made use of the structure of internal bifurcation of ontological levels, did it widely in the form of auto-quotation, for comparable purposes of subverting the inherited patterns of representation and finding new forms in which to write for theatre, a medium shown to be overlapping not only with deadening constructs of social convention, but also with imaginative outlets of unconsciousness and new artistic forms such as film. Postmodern drama, however, besides its obvious intention to participate in what Linda Hutcheon calls a ‘poetics of postmodernism’ 1 – said to rejoice

1

A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

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in thematizing, questioning and confusing the frames distinguishing various diegetic levels in fiction – shows marks of particular, politically invested interests in the exploration of the play within the play’s various articulations, aims and interpretative outcomes, engaging in explicit intercultural framings and demonstrating the discontinuities and incongruities of different, privileged and underprivileged, strands of the European drama and theatre traditions when it comes to the forging of one’s individual or of collective identity. That is why, when I attempted to define – within the context of a larger project on the play within the play 2 – the dramaturgical logic governing the use of the device, the first distinction which I tried to establish was the one pertaining to the difference between the narrative and the dramatic use of internal framings, bearing in mind that narrative metafiction cannot escape the limits of its own medium – language, while a play implies its double existence as both word and virtual body, a written text to be read and a virtual act to be performed, a virtual experience to be lived. According to Anne Ubersfeld, the play is characterized by its double referentiality.3 At the same time, it is responsible for inducing in our imagination a possible world – the time, the space and the agents of the dialogue, that is, the features of the fictional story, and of suggesting the time, the space and the agents of the stage, that is, the virtual performance of this story. The play functions at the same time not only as an arrangement of linguistic signs comparable as such to any other product of literary fiction, but also as a textual ‘matrix of representability’,4 or, in Marco De Marinis’s words, as ‘instructions for use’ to theatre practitioners,5 since it is ‘defined and established in such a way as to be transferable into the mode of perception (of the stage)’.6 As analyses of the pragmatics of dramaturgical enunciation, by Cesare Segre7 and Ursula Jung8 demonstrated, the double function of the play automatically involves two different but superposed enunciatory situations, two intertwined contexts of production and reception, one literary and the other theatrical. This, in turn, makes every dramatic text a holder of a double ontology, issuing from two overlapping media, pertaining to two different institu2

3

4 5 6 7 8

Lada Cale Feldman, Teatar u teatru u hrvatskom teatru (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska i Naklada MD, 1997). Ecole du spectateur (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1981), pp. 34-36. See also Ubersfeld’s Lire le théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1982), pp. 42-43. Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre, p. 80. Marco De Marinis, Semiótica del teatro (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), pp. 48-59. Käte Hamburger, Logika knji evnosti (Beograd: Nolit, 1976), p. 115. After De Marinis, pp. 46-47. L’Enonciation au théâtre: une approche pragmatique de l'autotexte théâtral (Tübingen: Narr, 1994).

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tions – that of the fictional possible world induced solely by the verbal text, and that of a virtually embodied, concrete performance, which, to a degree that characterizes no other art, shares its iconicity and materiality with the extra-theatrical world, due to the fact that it does not have an existence independent of its producers, live actors, and must always occur as a collective public event.9 This referential, ontological, contextual, and institutional doubleness of any play has certain conceptual consequences for the explication of the metadramatic version of the general phenomenon of textual self-referentiality. If we define self-referentiality in general as the realized capacity of any text – text in the semiotic sense – to refer to all the enunciatory components of its own textuality, inevitably thus including its own context of production and reception, then meta-dramatic, self-referential effects can be produced on a double scale, as precisely happens in the various devices of the play within the play. The double ontology of the dramatic text, implied by its virtual performance, can unpredictably multiply (especially if the procedure is combined with explicit mise en abyme and intertextual relations), each frame claiming its respective ontological doubleness and accompanying contexts of production and reception, with all their imaginable, puzzling interpenetrations and discordances: literary characters meeting the actors who are about to embody them, as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; boundaries between the (‘real’) context and the (performative) text being blurred through rotation of ‘actual’ roles, as in Genet’s The Maids; fiction concretized through the reading of a play (Shakespeare’s Coriolanus) becoming partly incongruent with the fiction imagined by its performance (Brecht’s adaptation), but fairly well enacted in the ‘outer reality’, as in Günther Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising; a ‘real’ royal public turning into a fictional one, as in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; playwrights conversing with embodiments of their own characters of malicious critics, as in Ionesco’s Improvisation at Alma; and actors in flesh and blood feeling previously ‘swallowed’ by dramatic texts, as happens in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In an attempt to methodologically overcome the way in which some historical overviews, by Robert Nelson 10 and Manfred Schmeling 11 for instance, or various other studies on this procedure in separate plays and playwrights’ opuses, assume the evidence of the play within the play as a structural device, 9 10

11

De Marinis, pp. 61-64. Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art, from Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Das Spiel im Spiel. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Literaturkritik (VVA Gütersloh: Schäuble, 1977) and Métathéâtre et intertexte: aspects du théâtre dans le théâtre (Paris: Minard, 1982).

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often reducing it to the catch-phrase of an ‘interplay between illusion and reality’, I endeavoured to return to the question of how the theatrical frame itself is established, in order to be able then to trace the fictional counterpart to this process. This problem inevitably led me ‘outside of theatre’, that is, out of the culturally and historically determined conventions of what is considered to be a ‘proper’ theatrical performance: the enactment of a previously written text, occurring in a specialized building and markedly, institutionally detached from its extra-theatrical context. Bearing in mind that play-withinthe-play procedures often rely on a notion of performance encompassing a broad spectrum of activities, from psychodramas and embodied dreams to festive occasions to ‘pure’ theatrical ones, my search for the strategies of performative ontological layering turned to the disciplines of theatre anthropology and sociology as discussed by Anglo-American anthropologists Erving Goffman, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner or by Jean Duvignaud in France. These scholars sought structural similarities between, on the one hand, drama and theatrical events and, on the other, features of social life – ritual representations in preindustrial societies (Turner 12), ancient social dramatizations or Medieval and Renaissance street festivities (Duvignaud13), contemporary political rituals and street performances (Schechner14) or everyday presentations of self and face-to-face interactions (Goffman 15). Their findings questioned the sharp distinctions between theatre and life, or, to be more precise, made these distinctions dependent upon different historical, cultural and geographical settings, interactional contracts, and even methodological optics. They also strongly disagreed – Schechner, in particular – with the still firmly established philological study of dramatic texts, and claimed that it was the performative event that should constitute the object of study and not the literary qualities of plays, which were, after all, written to be performed and not read. I, by contrast, was still intrigued by playwriting, and tried to go ‘backwards’, applying the insights of Turner, Schechner and Goffman concerning

12

13

14

15

From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982). Les Ombres collectives; sociologie du théâtre, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973). Performance Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). See also Schechner’s The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

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the ways in which theatre and life were mutually informative to the study of the play-within-the-play procedures. Schechner’s distinctions between drama, script, theatre and performance, imagined as mutually implicating concentric circles increasing in size but decreasing in determination, proved useful in altering the imprecise namings of the play-within-the-play procedures in various national traditions – play within the play in English, das Spiel im Spiel in German or le théâtre dans le théâtre in French – imprecise in the sense of escaping the contradictions often arising in the production of conflicting, textual and performative, institutionalised or non-institutionalised frames of reference. Thus, in Schechner’s terms, my interest in these procedures in playwriting could best be described as an interest in scripts of performances, sometimes presented as if occurring as/in theatre, inserted within the drama as a virtual performance, and in all the possible internal permutations of these various textual and performative ontologies, media, and institutions – especially since drama, the smallest circle, is here suggested to create a frame that surrounds circles conceptually larger than itself – script, theatre, and performance. Starting from the already mentioned assumption that performances can take place even outside of theatre buildings, I searched for textual signals of what Goffman calls ‘the theatrical frame’,16 the precarious and permeable border between fictional and non-fictional social interactions, themselves observable through this sociologist’s insightful methodological lenses of the theatrical metaphor. Goffman’s theory itself could be called a kind of a theatrically inspired mise en abyme social theory, particularly suitable to explain how the creation of inner fictional frames can result in plays reaching outside of their textual borders, in implicating, by analogy, empirical audiences, in both fictionalizing the context of their own reception and de-fictionalising their own ‘stories’ or ‘possible worlds’. Only years later, and after having already written my own book, did I read Dieter Schwanitz, the German proponent of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory in literary criticism, who, in his Systemtheorie und Literatur (System Theory and Literature) devoted a chapter to the system theory of drama.17 Schwanitz dealt with it not only insofar as it could observe drama as a genre, but also insofar as it is, in a way, already contained within the self-observational, selfreferential potential of drama. What he had in mind was the capacity of this particular ‘literary’ form to apply within its own observation of the world

16 17

Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). It took ten years for the Croatian translation to appear, as Teorija sistema i književnost (Zagreb: Naklada MD, 2000).

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precisely the procedures of its repeated, historically contingent and constantly re-arrangeable differentiation from other social systems, particularly the structurally homologous system of communication in social interaction. Schwanitz used Goffman in order to demonstrate how the intentional ontological confusions between inner and outer frames in plays within plays serve precisely the opposite, explicatory cause: the re-affirmation of a continuously renewing border to the ‘outside’ of the system, a progressive, vertiginous autopoiesis of drama as a genre, its increasing sophistication in recursively applying the very differentiating process within what was previously already socially differentiated as a system of drama. Fascinating as I found its emphasis on the paradoxical autonomy of drama as a particularly intriguing artistic genre – paradoxical since it was shown to draw its historical vigour, after the modernist crisis of representation, precisely from the loss of its capacities to significantly observe the world for the sake of self-observation – Schwanitz’s analysis still appeared to me to rely exclusively on the canonical plays of the Western European tradition. Indeed, he acknowledges as much in the final part of his chapter on drama, where Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Ionesco are made to discuss drama’s prospects in the twentieth century. These, it would seem, are both gloomy and humorous, since Dr Godit (Godot) can promise, paradoxically again, no other substance than the form itself. One assumption, however, seemed to me to have been disregarded: the possibility of this tautological spiraling circularity to re-install social, political, ethical and other representative aims of drama precisely through the mediation of its supreme metadramatic form, play within the play, in an intermittent, oscillating, double move of both hetero- and auto-referentiality, which would feed on the remnants of substance glued to the form undergoing reduplication. What I thought was missing in his analysis was not only the more differentiated treatment of drama as a genre (in the sense I have tried to explain above), but also the eventually resulting awareness of the varying ideological statuses of literature and theatre as social institutions and, even more, of specific representative cultural texts, treated as such either because they are considered to be highly relevant to the culture in question and therefore are respected as archetypal scripts, consecrated identity-texts, or because they are held to reproduce in miniature not only the dominant features of social interaction, but also the specific ideological and cultural frameworks of that interaction. To put it another way, self-referentiality does not have to be treated simply as a tautological game of self-observation with consequences for the internal autopoiesis of a given system. Instead, it can address the issue of how particular instances of the system’s autopoiesis of interactional ‘pro-

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grams’ and ‘codes’ not only structurally but also meaningfully and ideologically contaminate and are contaminated by various contexts, or, as Schwanitz would put it, environments – die Umwelten – from which drama is said to be repeatedly differentiated to constitute a separate entity. Conceiving of the play-within-the-play procedures in the Croatian postWWII playwriting as of ways of explicit treatment of relationships between theatre and the context of its production and reception, I found out that this strategy not only used the theatrical imagery as the inherited and universally shared ontological, ethical and epistemological metaphor, but also emphasized that theatre is an inherently culturally embedded political institution, metonymic of broader ideological practices, that it is the central inner stage of a symbolic action, inevitably implicated in specific outer historical re-orderings. To this purpose, a complex interplay of a spectrum of referential modalities was used, combining fictional, pseudo-historical and historical references, anachronisms, auto-references pointing to diverse aspects of the theatrical process as historically and culturally grounded forms, like the choice of the text or script, its adaptation for the stage, the strict obeying of its commands or the granted liberty to improvise, the distribution of the roles, the rehearsals, the presence or absence of the director, the finality and the repetitive character of any performance. The most striking examples in the context of this discussion, however, are meta-theatrical procedures that use intertextual references, because they not only testify to the reliance of the play-within-the-play strategy upon the aforementioned referential, ontological and contextual doubleness of drama, but also manifest most incisively the critical function of intercultural framings to which play-within-the-play devices in Croatian playwriting gave birth. In contrast to the pre-WWII Croatian drama, which had cosmopolitan ambitions, but, even more significantly, in contrast to the comparable Western European examples of intertextually informed plays within plays by Stoppard, Grass, Ionesco or Heiner Müller, that were mentioned earlier, in which already existent plays (most often Shakespeare’s) or polemically addressed poetics (Brecht’s, for instance) are quoted, alluded to or represented as belonging to the common European archive of cultural memory, the post WWII Croatian drama treats foreign intertexts primarily as venerable reminders of a process of cultural alienation which cruelly divides Europe in the productive center and its receptive periphery. When these quoted or paraphrased intertexts function as imaginative preservers of moral values, archetypes celebrating Western-European versions of individualism and humanism, as Shakespeare’s tragedies do in Ivo Bresan’s (b. 1936) opus (The Performance of Hamlet in the Village of

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Mrdusa Donja, 1971; Julius Caesar, 1990), they prove incapable of adaptation to the cultural and historical context in which they are to be enacted. In the first play, it is the context of inherited rural mentality and forcibly inaugurated communist collectivism in which Hamlet is put to offer the ‘mirror up to nature’. Explicitly serving as a pretext for grotesque cultural and ideological competition between capitalism and socialist progress, having turned into a challenge made by the local governor to an amateur village-production about to take place in the fifties in Croatia, the text inevitably needs to be rewritten to suit both the old folklore metric patterns with their vividly expressed crude morality, and the recently established poetical rules of socialist realism. Julius Caesar, a play that deals with the inception of the post-communist period in Croatia, gathers newly made democratic politicians in the guise of mediocre professional actors, eager to bury the cult of the Leader for the sake of their own petty ambitions. Just like Hamlet in the earlier play, Julius Caesar fails to be performed in the inner frame, but its basic structure and ‘message’ succeed in being actualized in the outer one – thus proving that its mythical moral impact has the capacity to perform the revenge on its own, to overflow cultural and historical differences of the context of its framed and framing desecration, while at the same time demonstrating the widening gap between the textual model and its performative copy. Slobodan Snajder’s (b. 1948) version of Hamlet, entitled Gamllet (1987), expressively transforms the English title in Russian in order to emphasise the newly produced intercultural hybridity, as well as to allude to the identification of its double protagonist, the fictional avenger, directing the Murder of Gonzago on the inner stage, and his ‘empirical’ counterpart, Branko Gavella, belonging to the outer frame, who is directing Hamlet. Combining documentary references and fictional, both textual and performative frames, the play presents an actually started and failed work by the Croatian director on the performance of Hamlet during the Second World War. The mirror is now not only disfigured and literally broken by the destruction going on outside its borders, but also splits its main agent in two: the young actor intended for the role of Hamlet is constrained to abandon the realm of imagination, cross the theatrical frame and take the repugnant sword of action in his hands, while the director is left to muse on the senselessness of artistic intervention. As opposed to this critical reflection on the crudity of local dilemmas, Luko Paljetak’s (b. 1943) transposition, entitled Hamlet aftermath (1993), exalts the position of Croatian culture as the culturally ignored Other: imagining what happens to Denmark on the arrival of Fortinbras, the playwright suggests a vision of a morally destitute Europe, which witnesses a growing deliberate destruction of Hamlet’s legacy in the hands of contemporary political rulers

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of its very maternal cultural context - bureaucrats without any conscience (let alone one like Claudius’s), indifferent towards the actual recent war devastation of one of Hamlet’s environmental festive stages, the ramparts of Dubrovnik. But these numinous, constantly radiating classical European texts also function as, or allude to, the service of art to retrograde ideological doctrines, as the unquestioned national glory of Goethe’s Faust, and the historically verified performance of this play in Croatia during the Ustashi regime, do in Slobodan Snajder’s The Croatian Faust (1985). The doubled performance of Faust both on the inner stage of the National Theatre and, implicitly, on the outer stage of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, indicate the base servility and national treason of the Croatian central theatre and Nazi puppet state alike, designed so in a ‘literal’ manner, since the legend of Faust indeed, in its theatrical history, was the script for puppet theatre performances. The protagonist of the play is the actor Vjekoslav Afric, caught up in the midst of the hallucinatory hell staged by the new rulers of his theatre: realizing that to play the part of Faust means to sell his soul as Faust once did, and as his theatre does on the stage of the state-world, he leaves the performance in order to search for an ethical alternative, but when the new, communist power arrives, the order of the day remains the same, Faust is to be performed anew. A comparable, very recent example of such producing of trans-historical parallels is Boris Senker’s (b. 1947) Gloriana (2004), which constructs a triply-layered play within the play, with Ferdinand Bruckner’s Elisabeth von England, a play undergoing the process of rehearsal, occupying the third internal frame, as if announcing the endlessly repeatable, inevitable decapitation of modern Croatian embodiments of the role of Essex, on and off the stage, whether those participating in the anti-communist uprising during the seventies or, by inference, in any other, present or future instances of such ambitions. Essex reappears in all those who, whether inhabiting theatrical or extra-theatrical worlds, both fall in love with the fiction of the national glory – as if it were a fatally appealing, imperial woman-as-actress, a body to be possessed and manipulated – and who, though humble actors themselves, believe they are chosen for the role of promising directors, the ones who will reform either the states or the (theatrical) institutions ruled by such a principle of political desire. The parallels of outcome in the third and the second plane of being dissolves in the first, the outer frame of theatre pure and simple, exempt of its contextual references, where anonymous Actor, Actress and Playwright have the last, playful word. Hence, the structure of internal mirrors does not confirm the mythically determining, anticipatory perspicacity of the borrowed text: its exemplary historical content was already framed

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as fiction by the former author, Bruckner, as it is twice so in the contemporary Croatian version, and therefore can do nothing but signal the congruent vanity of political and theatrical words, moves and gestures, the hollowness of their repetitive performance, reaching its absurd, de-substantiated, vanishing point. The youngest generation of playwrights, engaged in post-dramatic experimentation that would comply with the demands of new theatrical genres such as, for instance, feminist solo-performance, portray the growing cultural, political and economic imbalance produced by the globalised world, even if their meta-dramatic commentary seem only to focus on such abstract issues as the lost centrality of the Word, dead authors-as-gods, and on anachronistic, disturbed and confusing relationships between texts and their enactments.18 Archetype Medea: Notes taken during a Performance (2004) by a female playwright Ivana Sajko (b. 1975) is a strange combination of the self-explicated authorial voice – appearing in the stage directions as it were ‘after the fact’, in the role of narrator, prompter, co-performer and note-taker – and a monologue of a protagonist who disclaims her identity as drama-character, renouncing the features that coagulated on the surface of the name ‘Medea’. She is actress first and foremost, but without a name ‘of her own’, forced to perform anew the archetypal role assigned her by the age-old patriarchal vision of an ever-threatening femininity. At the same time, however, she is not acting in a de-contextualised secular teatrum mundi in the role of an undefined ‘woman’ constructed by the inherited scripts of Western-European civilization, but in a transitional landscape of Croatian post-communist political chaos, where she feels prompted to assume the ultimate responsibility implied by the prison-house of the Euripides’s text, and to destroy her posterity in a terrorist act that would blow the entire globe, with all its transnational utopian promises, to pieces. Far from being just a parallel national chapter in the ever more spiraling autopoiesis of the artistic system of drama, the post-WWII Croatian playwithin-the-play strategies rely heavily on cultural and historical specificities of theatrical production and reception, undercutting as if in advance any ambition to prove that their aesthetic impact could measure up to universal standards. In their case, the context within, inhabiting the outer frame of the playwithin-the-play device, reveals itself to be profoundly affecting the possibility to take pleasure in any play, let alone in its cunning reduplications in the plays within plays of recursive self-differentiation. The asymmetry at issue here is not only the one in structural complexity that delineates the theatrical 18

See Hans Thies Lehmann, Postdramsko kazalište (Zagreb: CDU, 2004).

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frame – the asymmetry that, according to Schwanitz, needs to be established between the inevitably reductive system of drama and its more complex social background – but also the one in authority and the power to produce universally valid patterns of meaning, the one that draws a subtle line of division between the globally pertinent cultural and ideological discourses, and their local enactments and performances (including, ironically and self-referentially, postcolonial criticism itself).

Maurice Blackman

Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête

Aimé Césaire’s play Une Tempête was written for a company of African actors based in France and first performed in 1969. The third in a trilogy of political plays about colonialism and black liberation, it is a radical reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in terms of Black Power politics of the 1960s. The chapter examines the political reworking of the Shakespeare text and analyses the complex meanings produced by the play of intertextuality and, more particularly, by the intercultural framing devices adopted by Césaire. Among other things, it aims to show how the ‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare’s original can be seen as an act of cultural rehabilitation and self-liberation, and how Césaire’s appropriation of the text parallels the theme of language as power expressed in the central relationship of his play.

Background Aimé Césaire was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1913 into a poor, lower middle-class family descended from African slaves that were imported in the seventeenth century to work the sugar plantations. (Slavery was not abolished in the French colonies until 1848, and the memory of it would still have been widespread in Césaire’s childhood.) He grew up in a racially structured colonial society, with the Negro at the bottom of the heap, the mixed-blood mulattoes and Creoles above them, and the whites at the top. Alienated from the values of the society around him, Césaire was a bright student, who devoured books and finally won a scholarship to continue his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Arriving in Paris in 1932, he befriended two Senegalese fellow-students, who were also preparing for the École Normale, Ousmane Socé and Léopold Senghor, and both of whom would later become important writers and political figures. It was in Paris that Césaire discovered African culture and developed his philosophy of negritude. This was a militant and strongly politicised doctrine founded on an absolute respect for the cultural values of Black Africa, and denouncing the capitalist values of both the colonial plantocracy and the coloured Creole bourgeoisie that supported it. Inspired by Marxist ideas, it supported the cause of social and political change in the French Antilles and called for solidarity with the black proletariat across the world.

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Césaire began to develop as both a poet and a political writer during his years in Paris: he published his first article in 1934 and began work on a long poem-essay, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, which was published in 1938. He returned to Martinique in 1939 as a fully-fledged professeur de lycée who would have a profound influence on the generation of students that he taught there, including Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, the leading militant black writers of the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1940s Césaire became actively involved in Martinique politics, and in 1946 was elected as the island’s representative to the French Assemblée Nationale; he also pursued his career as a writer, publishing a number of political essays and poems in the 1940s and 1950s. During all this time he maintained his political activity as a deputy in the French Assemblée Nationale, and by the 1960s he was regarded, along with Senghor, as one of the leading francophone black activists and writers. It was during the 1960s that he turned to the theatre and wrote a trio of political plays – indeed, they can be seen as a kind of trilogy – in which he explores dramatically the history and the problems of black liberation. The first of these, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1964), is a study of the forces that led to the failure of the first black independent state, Haiti. This was followed in 1965 by Une Saison au Congo, a study of the forces that brought down Patrice Lumumba and a contemporary black independent state. Finally, Une Tempête (1969) presents an analysis of the colonial mentality and its persistence in contemporary black politics. These plays were all written for a company of black actors directed by Jean-Marie Serreau, a leading French director of the time. They were first performed in various French and European festivals and cities, and then in Africa and the French Antilles. It is interesting to note that, while they achieved some critical success in their European performances, their real popular success came from their performances to non-European audiences. (This is especially true of Une Tempête, which had only a mediocre success in Paris in 1969, but was well received in both Africa and the Antilles, where it has been revived a number of times.) Comparison of The Tempest and Une Tempête Une Tempête 1 is an appropriation and a rewriting by Césaire of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The principal effect of Césaire’s rewriting, to highlight the problem of colonialism, is achieved by reworking the characters of Caliban and Prospero: Caliban is transformed into a black militant, rebelling against the authority of a much less benign Prospero, presented as a stubborn

1

All subsequent textual references are to the following edition, Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969). Page numbers will be given in the text after the quotations.

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colonial despot. On the surface, the points of reference in the play are clearly to the situation of 1960s black politics in the United States: thus Ariel represents the position of the non-violent campaign for civil rights associated with Martin Luther King, while Caliban represents the more aggressive and militant position of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers (these links are clearly referenced in the text). But, at the same time, through this struggle between master and slave set on a Caribbean island, the play returns to the theme of colonial slavery in general, and Caribbean slavery in particular. Caliban’s bitter lines reflect equally the frustrations and anger of the powerless and oppressed blacks in the US, and those of the poet-politician struggling against the French government’s refusal to grant real autonomy to Martinique and its other former colonies. Césaire’s Caliban is the archetype of the oppressed slave, deprived of his land and possessions, his dignity, even his name and identity. Prospero, the arrogant and small-minded coloniser, does not acknowledge in Caliban the slightest ability to take charge of his own life, and does not recognise any value in the culture, identity, or even the language of his slave. This point is brought out as soon as Caliban enters and is reproached by Prospero (I.2): [Y]ou might at least bless me for having taught you to speak. A barbarian! A wild beast that I educated, trained, that I dragged up from the level of the animals […]. (p. 25)2

and also in Caliban’s first revolt against his master: I tell you that from now on I will no longer answer to the name of Caliban. […] It is the nickname that you endowed me with in your hatred, and each repetition of it is an insult to me. […] Call me X. That will be better. As if I was the man without a name. More exactly, the man whose name has been stolen. […] Each time you call me, that will remind me of the fundamental fact, that you have stolen everything from me, even my identity! (p. 28)

Caliban is thus struggling as much against cultural domination as physical exploitation. His goal, as he says near the end of the play, is ‘Reprendre mon île et reconquérir ma liberté’ (To take back my island and reconquer my freedom: p. 87): it is the goal of all Césaire’s heroes, who seek to overcome racial and social alienation and thus liberate themselves from the domination of others. If we compare Césaire’s Tempête to Shakespeare’s original, we can quickly see that he has kept the overall shape of the action, and has even kept a certain amount of the original dialogue, although Césaire’s play is much

2

All translations are my own.

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more compact and reduces the original five acts to three. The most obvious differences are in the characters and the altered ending. Let us examine first the characters. Césaire gives the following list of dramatis personae at the beginning of his text: Characters : Those of Shakespeare. Two additional precisions: ARIEL slave, ethnically a mulatto CALIBAN Negro slave One additional character: ESHU Negro devil-god (p. 7)

In fact, although it is not mentioned here, Césaire introduces another additional character, who is admittedly fairly minor: the priest of the Holy Office, who appears in a sort of brief flashback evoking Prospero’s summoning before the Inquisition (I.2: p. 21). He also introduces another unmentioned figure, the ‘Meneur de jeu’, or, as we might call him, the leader of the role-play. This figure delivers an important prologue, which will be discussed below. Césaire’s list of characters draws attention to the thematic reworking of his adaptation. Instead of an ‘airy spirit’, Ariel becomes a half-caste slave and, if Caliban was also a slave in Shakespeare’s original, he is neither ‘savage’ nor ‘deformed’ nor a ‘monster’ in Césaire’s play. Finally, to Shakespeare’s Greco-Roman gods, Césaire adds Eshu, a traditional Black African divinity who is half-god and half-demon, an important figure in Caribbean and Brazilian mythology. Césaire’s rewriting thus stresses three important thematic elements: ethnicity, social condition, and traditional religion. He also signals that the thematic concerns of the play will turn on the masterslave relationship and the nature of colonialism. The prefatory note also contains the following indication – Atmosphere of psychodrama. The actors enter one after another and each one chooses a mask to his liking. (p. 7)

– which signals another important difference in Césaire’s adaptation, relating to the play’s performance aspects. I shall return to this after commenting on the textual differences. To sum up, we can say that Une Tempête eliminates much of Shakespeare’s original detail and condenses the action into three acts; Césaire suppresses the original epilogue and adds a prologue delivered by the ‘Meneur de jeu’. After the added prologue, the first act of Césaire’s version closely follows Shakespeare’s exposition in his Act I, although it is more succinct.

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Césaire’s Act II, however, moves markedly away from the original: his scene 1 has no equivalent in Shakespeare and develops the political message inherent in the relationships between Caliban, Ariel and Prospero. However, his scene 2 is clearly related to the sequence in Shakespeare in which Gonzalo discovers the virtues of the island and Prospero teases Antonio, Sebastian and Alonzo with tables of food that mysteriously appear and disappear (The Tempest, III.3). Césaire’s scene 3 picks up the scene in Shakespeare in which Antonio tempts Sebastian to assassinate Alonzo and usurp the throne (The Tempest, II.1). Césaire’s third and final act is a condensation of the action in the final three acts of The Tempest, which respects the overall order of events but omits much of the detail. The most striking difference is Césaire’s addition of a completely new ending, which reverses the reconciliatory conclusion of The Tempest: instead of freeing Caliban and sailing back to Naples with the other Europeans, Prospero stays on the island to continue his colonial confrontation with Caliban. For Césaire, Prospero and Caliban cannot separate, their destiny is to remain together: CALIBAN

[…] You make me laugh with your ‘mission’, your ‘vocation’! Your vocation is to aggravate me! And that’s why you will stay, like all those guys who have settled in the colonies and cannot now live anywhere else. (p. 89)

Their destinies are linked, but their relationship evolves over time and they become more equal, as is suggested in Prospero’s final speech: Well, my old friend Caliban, there are only two of us left on this island, only you and me. You and me! You-me! Me-you! (p. 92)

The implication is that Prospero’s magical powers and colonial authority gradually ebb away and are finally overcome by the forces of nature and history: the last word of the play is Caliban’s distant song of liberty. This drastically changed ending, together with the changes made to Prospero’s character and the textual references to contemporary Black Liberation politics, fundamentally alter the meaning of the play. After his two earlier plays treating the problems of black liberation in nineteenth-century Haiti and twentieth-century Africa, Césaire here turns to the contemporary situation in the US and ponders the nature of the exploitation of blacks by whites in more general terms. The psychological and symbolic dimensions of this relationship are brought out both in the adaptation of the allegorical original and in the choice of the representational mode of the psychodrama. I should add, of course, that all these dimensions are further underlined in performance by the fact that the adaptation was written for a company of black actors.

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The play within the play As will already be apparent from this rapid presentation of Césaire’s adaptation of The Tempest, the doubling device of play-within-play dramaturgy can be seen to function on a number of levels of both the text and the performance of Une Tempête. I want to try now to enumerate and comment on these multiple framing or doubling devices before moving on to a more thorough interpretation of them. Starting from the basic fact of Une Tempête being an adaptation – or better, an intercultural appropriation – of a prestigious Shakespearean original, we need to bear in mind that, on the performance level, what we see onstage is constantly framed for us by the representational strategies chosen by Césaire: the play is performed as a psychodrama or elaborate role-play by a group of black actors who don masks to perform both white and black characters, masters and slaves. This performance aspect is foregrounded in the text by the prologue, in which Césaire has the ‘Meneur de jeu’ call for volunteers or select players for each role. This outer framing device (reminiscent of Genet’s use of a similar device in The Blacks) has the effect of turning the inner play from an allegory into a symbolic drama embodying the performance styles of traditional African theatre: this performance style is carried through Césaire’s text as he introduces elements of black idiolect and of African music and dance, all of which are designed to bring out the Negro values embedded in Césaire’s rewriting – the mythical recreation of the world through music and dance; the expression of essential realities through images which often have a sexual or animistic basis outside European cultural norms. Shakespeare’s Tempest, of course, contains a few well-known songs, but Césaire develops and extends the role of music in his adaptation. He keeps elements of Shakespeare’s original songs for Ariel and some of the other characters, but in particular he introduces some songs for Caliban (who has none in Shakespeare): Caliban sings his gods each time he feels threatened by Prospero, and his songs are a kind of survival tactic – indeed, the last word of the play is the chorus of Caliban’s song of freedom. Césaire’s appropriation is thus a political act, both in its content – he ‘Africanises’ Shakespeare’s iconic play and brings out a latent political message – and in its performance: the psychodrama will stage a series of dramatic scenes with the aim of liberating the audience (whether black or white) from its complexes through a consciousness-raising exercise. On the level of the text itself, The Tempest is one of the best-known examples of Shakespeare’s playful exploitation of the metaphor of theatrical illusion, with its complex interplay of theatre within theatre. At the first degree, the play presents a spectacle in which Prospero is one of the characters;

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at the second degree, the play presents spectacles of which Prospero is both the director and one of the performers; and at the third degree, the play contains a masque performed by the gods and arranged by Prospero in honour of Miranda and Ferdinand. The whole complex system delights in creating the theatrical illusion and simultaneously reminding the spectator that he or she is watching the performance of a piece of theatre. Césaire wholeheartedly embraces the Shakespearean game of theatrical illusion in his rewriting, and as we have seen, foregrounds it in a particularly political way in his added prologue. His Prospero, too, is a kind of magus or alchemist, crossed with a theatrical director whose magical powers can impose illusions on the other characters in the play and create spectacles which dazzle both us and the characters. Une Tempête recapitulates all of the levels of the play within the play that are already present in The Tempest – the initial dramatic spectacle of the tempest itself, called up by Prospero; the trial imposed on Ferdinand before he can win the hand of Miranda; the magical illusions and distractions imposed on the other characters; the celebratory masque (whose decorum is interrupted by the priapic Eshu in Césaire’s version) – and even adds a flashback scene to the exposition in Act I in which we see a priest of the Holy Office summoning Prospero before the Inquisition. Césaire’s concluding scene is also overtly theatrical, with the passing of time symbolised by the partial lowering and raising of the curtain, and with Prospero visibly aging before our eyes. But the most striking element of the play within the play, as we have noted above, is the representational strategy of the psychodrama and the masked black actors: these are a constant reminder to the spectator of the theatrical illusion created in Une Tempête, presented as the performance of a performance. Interpretations Césaire’s adaptation and extension of the play-within-the-play devices of the original thus have a primary political function: he refocuses the play’s action on Caliban’s relations with Prospero, adds some African and Caribbean cultural references to the text, and most importantly, repositions the play in a new outer frame which foregrounds a specifically African style of performance. This deliberate ‘Africanisation’ or ‘negrification’ of an iconic text from the dominant culture is a political gesture in itself, which can be read as a post-colonial act of self-liberation through the reconquering of black history, in a sort of parallel to Caliban’s effort to reconquer his island from the European usurper.

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The outer framing device also represents an act of self-liberation on a personal level, both through the retelling of the story from the black point of view, and from the raised consciousness brought about by the analysis of the colonial relationship expressed in the text. On the one hand, Césaire reveals the ‘Prospero complex’ 3 – that is, the dilemma of the white coloniser who has to exert his power and exploit the black, but who at the same time resents the fact that he is ultimately dependent on the black in order to continue to be the dominant power. As Prospero says in the final scene (III.5): Well I hate you too! For you are the one through whom, for the first time, I have come to doubt myself. […] And now, Caliban, it is me against you! What I have to say to you will be brief: ten times, a hundred times, I have tried to save you, first of all from yourself. But you have always responded with rage and venom, like the opossum which hoists itself up on the rigging of its own tail in order to bite the better the hand that is dragging it out of the darkness of its ignorance! Well, my boy, I will do violence to my normally indulgent nature, and henceforth to your violence I will respond with violence! (pp. 90-91)

On the other hand, Césaire shows Caliban throwing off the colonised black mentality which finally accepts the mythical image of itself imposed by white authority: he refuses Prospero’s mystification and imposition of a cultural pattern which makes the black an historically inferior being.4 The point is made in Caliban’s final tirade: You must understand me, Prospero: for years I have bowed my head, for years I have accepted, accepted everything : your insults, your ingratitude, and worse, more degrading than all the rest, your condescension. But now it’s finished! Finished, you hear! Naturally, for the time being, you are still the stronger one. But I don’t give a damn for your strength, nor for your dogs, for that matter, nor for your police, nor your other inventions! And you know why I don’t give a damn? Do you want to know? It’s because I know that I will have you. Impaled! And on a stake that you yourself have sharpened! Impaled on yourself! Prospero, you are a great illusionist: you know all about lies. And you have lied to me so much, lied about the world, lied to me about myself, that you have ended up imposing on me an image of myself: an underdeveloped man, as you say, an incapable man, that’s how you have obliged me to see myself, and it is an image that I hate! And it is false! But now I know all about you, you cancer, and I know myself as well! (pp. 90-91)

On another level, the ‘negrification’ of Shakespeare’s Tempest can be seen as a direct expression of an important theme in Césaire’s doctrine of negritude – 3

4

This term was first defined by Octave Mannoni in his Psychologie de la colonization (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1950). See also Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955) and Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisateur, suivi du portrait du colonisé (Paris: Payot, 1973) for further analysis of this mentality.

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the theme of liberation through cultural expression.5 Césaire believes that a reaffirmation and adaptation of Negro culture to the modern world, and the abandonment of a servile imitation of dominant white culture, are necessary conditions for the full rehabilitation and liberation of the Negro. His intercultural appropriation of an iconic text about the colonisation of the Caribbean thus represents an act of black cultural rehabilitation that frames the central theme of self-liberation. In turn, Césaire’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s text has fascinating parallels with the theme of language as power expressed in the central relationship in his play. Prospero’s power comes ultimately from his superior knowledge, his secret books, his control over language. He is the one who named Caliban, and, as he reminds Caliban in Act I scene 2, who taught him to speak and who educated him out of his animal-like state. Caliban’s first utterance in the play is ‘Uhuru!’, the Swahili word for ‘freedom’, just as his final utterance at the end of the play is the word ‘freedom’ itself, and his first act of defiance is his verbal assault on Prospero when he greets him in Act I scene 2: Good day. But a good day filled as much as possible with wasps, toads, pustules and shit. May today hasten by ten years the day when the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth gorge themselves on your rotting flesh! (p. 24)

This is the beginning of Caliban’s self-liberation, as he rejects the prison of language and the name imposed on him by Prospero and gives himself the possibility of expressing himself in his own terms. Although he initially opposes Ariel’s politics of patience in Act II scene 1 – What I want is (He shouts) ‘Freedom now!’ (p. 36)

– Caliban finally renounces violence in his confrontation with Prospero and instead affirms through song his cultural independence and self-liberation (III.5: p. 89). On the other hand, Prospero’s power over language gradually deserts him in his final speech: the stylised process of aging in the final moments of the play is mirrored in his regressive speech patterns, as he passes from declamatory blank verse to non-standard idiomatic speech, and finally to an almost childish babble (III.5: pp. 91-92). Aimé Césaire’s multi-level exploitation of the possibilities of the play-inplay device thus gives masterful expression in this text to his political mili5

For an analysis of this element of negritude, see Clément Mbom, Le Théâtre d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1979), especially chapter 7, and Albert Owusu-Sarpong, Le Temps historique dans l’œuvre théâtrale d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).

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tantism and ideological concerns. The very act of appropriating and ‘negrifying’ Shakespeare’s text and refashioning it into a psychodrama of self-liberation from the false consciousness of the colonial mentality and its associated complexes provides an outer frame, in both formal and thematic terms, to the drama that unfolds within it, and represents a highly original use of the device of the play within the play which has both cultural and political ramifications.

Kyriaki Frantzi

Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth: Another Night: Medea

A deconstructed theatrical version of the Medea myth was staged by Opera Project’s Australian director Nigel Kellaway and his collaborating performers under the title Another Night: Medea at Sydney’s Performance Space in May/June 2003. In the following chapter, which is divided into three parts, I shall first discuss background information both about Medea performances in general and this performance. I shall then try to describe what is particular about Another Night: Medea, and what makes it a multi-dimensional play within an absent but all-present play. Finally, I shall present a brief argument on its core issue as a multiple resonance of one of the major archetypes. I shall approach the play from the point of view of a spectator coming to and reflecting on the performance with her own selected memories. These memories were enriched by material relating to the performance itself, by my discussions with the director and by the extensive references to the many interpretations of the myth of Medea which can be found in Western theatre bibliography.

1. Medea was first portrayed in Euripides’s version in ancient Greece, then in Rome in Seneca’s version; and it was sung in Egypt by Canopus and taken up by St Augustine in Medieval Europe. Over the last 450 years, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century and extending into the third millennium, more than 500 adaptations of the myth have been recorded. Though he wrote his version of the myth to be read rather than enacted onstage, Seneca was responsible for bringing to light all the horror of the original tale. 1 Throughout the centuries, the character of Medea has become a vehicle for stardom for actresses in film and theatre, prima donnas, prima ballerinas, singers, musicians and mime artists – Adelaide Ristori, Sarah Bernhardt, Sybil Thorndike, Judith Anderson, Maria Callas, Diana Rigg, Fiona Shaw, Melina Merkouri, Alla Demidova and Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few. Medea appeared in Etienne Jodelle’s sixteenth-century ballet, Les Argonautes; in the very popu1

This is explained by Heiner Müller, excerpts from whose plays are featured in the Sydney production. See Waterfront Wasteland, Medeamaterial, Landscape with Argonauts, in Heiner Müller, Theatremachine, trans. and ed. by Marc von Henning (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 46.

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lar eighteenth-century ballet-pantomime, Médée et Jason, by Jean-Georges Noverre, ‘the father of modern ballet’, and in the twentieth century she was choreographed in Cave of the Heart by Martha Graham with music by Samuel Barber. In the second half of the twentieth century, Medea’s mythic narrative has been reworked for the cinema screen by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carl Dreyer/Lars von Trier and Jules Dassin. She has turned up in a diverse range of plays, operas and novels that includes Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma, Christa Wolf’s Medea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.2 And in 1996, at the University of California, John Fischer turned the tragedy into a zany, gay Medea: The Musical.3 Different ages and countries emphasise different aspects of Medea’s persona. Starting with Euripides and ending with recent adaptations, she has been presented as a great performer and dea ex machina; a witch and sorceress who, with bloody hands and arms, performs her onstage ritual sacrifices and communes with the dead; as the spirit of the revolution itself; the unwilling infanticide, or not infanticide; the betrayed and abandoned wife; the femme fatale; with the rise of women’s suffrage, as the proto-feminist; and, during the interwar period, as the Asian and Afro-American outsider. In the second part of the twentieth century, she was portrayed by Jean Anouilh as a displaced gypsy; by Robinson Jeffers as a victim of the American dream who loses her husband for a young model; by Heiner Müller as the infanticide and the earth exacting its terrifying revenge after years of abuse; and, by – respectively – Yukio Ninagawa and Andrei Serban, the latter a production in which Jason and Medea spoke different languages. In the 1980s and 1990s she appeared in Europe as a feminist; she was wrongly accused of infanticide in Tony Harrison’s Medea: A Sex-War Opera; and in South Africa she became Demea, combining questions of gender and ethnicity. She has also been portrayed in the Turkish Byzantine church of St Sofia in Constantinople by the Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos, and used to explore Jewish and Irish oppression and the concept of otherness after the collapse of the Soviet regime.4 2

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See Diane Purkiss, ‘Medea in the English Renaissance’, in Medea in Performance, 15002000, ed. by Edith Hall and others (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 41, 43, 47. Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, ed. by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 4. See also Fiona Macintosh, ‘Introduction: The Performer in Performance’, in Medea in Performance, pp. 3-5. Medea in Performance, pp. 19, 23-27 and 200. See also Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre: History, Methodology and Comments (Athens: Agra, 2000), pp. 207-08. In addition, she has been depicted as the founder of the cities Tomoi and Cyrene, and more frequently as a freedom fighter. Generally, she became an ideal vehicle for exploring sexual,

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In the Australian production I wish to discuss Medea is the protagonist in three recognizable versions of her persona in the Western theatre and opera; she is presented mainly as the outsider, the sorceress, and as the potential murderess of her rival and as potential infanticide. Even though the director, Nigel Kellaway, insists that the play is simple and was performed ‘for fun’,5 it is clearly a more complex show than this implies, and it revisits many of the adaptations previously mentioned. The production is characteristic of the work of the Opera Project, an association whose mission is to examine contemporary theatrical form and structures, especially those structures concerning our notions of opera. More specifically, the Opera Project views opera primarily as opus, that is work and process, and its dominant concerns are the impact of musical form on theatrical articulacy, the relationship between small opera and ‘Opera’, and the study of the human voice in relation to the body.6 The Opera Project Inc. was launched in 1997 with The Berlioz – our vampires ourselves; it continued with Kellaway’s solo performance, This Most Wicked Body, in 1998, the play, Choux Choux Baguette Remembers, in 1998, The Romantic Trilogy (Berlioz, The Terror of Tosca and Tristan) in 1999, El Inocente in 2001, and Entertaining Paradise in 2002 (inspired by the material and structure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now). Its most recent production was The Audience and Other Psychopaths, staged in February 2004. The productions of the Opera Project combine opera, burlesque, multimedia and high-camp farce; they tackle subjects such as the infamous English Moors Murders of the mid-1960s, infanticide and neoNazism, as well as the fascism of everyday life. Nigel Kellaway’s theatrical presence is associated with postmodern performance. In Australia this was not considered apolitical, at least not to the same extent as in Europe and in USA during the 1980s, when its proponents were accused of rejecting history and politics for the postmodern pleasures of surface and form. On the contrary, it was claimed that Australian postmodernism was predominantly a rejection of colonial history by the consciously political theatres and groups devoted to formal experimentation. Their work used the heightened self-consciousness provided by post modernity to link

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6

political, ethnical and racial oppression, and the problem of ‘self and other’ encapsulated within a single theatrical figure. See Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays, pp. 8 and 15. David Williams, ‘Are you gonna kill the kids tonight, honey?’, RealTime 54 (April-May 2003), 39. Another Night: Medea, program notes. This is also based on an informal interview conducted by the author with Nigel Kellaway in December 2004.

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comment and commentary on the inner working of the performance and the external world, the societal and often the global environment. They also aimed to ‘travel in the audience’s mind and this travelling is not being presented, or laid out on the stage so much’.7 2. With regard to the play itself and the plays within it, Medea: Another Night interweaves a number of theatre and musical works, including Heiner Müller’s three Medea Texts, Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts (1983), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and, finally, a sixteenth century solo cantata, presented in toto, composed by Louis-Nicholas Clérambault, Médée (ca.1710; librettist unknown). Eight artists, mostly musicians, took part, including Regina Heilmann as Medea and Nigel Kellaway as Jason, and the Indonesian performer and countertenor, Peretta Anggerek, as a second Medea. Müller’s trilogy is set in modern times amongst the rubbish of civilization and war. It is drawn from the writer’s life and his encounters with several different women, and it ends with the voyagers’ extermination and with Medea cradling the murdered brother. Müller’s Euripidean characters and setting already transfer the Medea myth from the scene of early Greek colonization to that of the twentieth century, dramatically illustrating the consequences of colonization in every period. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? presents, literally, another long and horrible night. Apart from vividly depicting the power struggles of a modern Western couple, played out before two young guests, the play ends in a way symbolically similar to that of Medea: with the revelation and killing – by the man this time – of the couple’s imaginary child which, throughout their childless mariage, has been their intimate and well-kept secret. This particular play serves as a psychoanalytical tool for the protagonists in Another Night: Medea. ‘In researching many interpretations of the myth,’ Kellaway has said, ‘we noted that Medea and Jason’s relationship supposedly lasted ten or more years, the beginning and the ending of which have been spectacularly chronicled, but nothing has been said regarding their middle years.’ Consequently, Kellaway and his team ‘draw upon Albee’s play to sketch this absent middle ground, to articulate the intimate violence of the

7

A. J. Guthrie, ‘Conclusion’, ‘When the Way Out Was In: Avant-Garde Theatre in Australia, 1965-1985’ (PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1996), available at <users.bigpond.net.au/aguthrie/phdindex.htm>.

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long-term relationship and to view the mythic figures of Medea and Jason as a savagely middle-aged dysfunctional couple’.8 Interestingly enough, this complex play was triggered by a (non-operatic) musical text, Clérambault’s rarely performed cantata, given here in French with English subtitles in an operatic way. The cantata treats the story as a psychologically complex inner monologue that either urges Medea furiously to hasten vengeance or tenderly inhibits it. Finally, ‘the spell is cast, the cruel Furies leave their gloomy abode’ and Medea sends the flying demons to lay waste to the palace with flames of Hell and to kill her rival. The anonymous librettist of the cantata, ‘perhaps aware of contemporary morality’, does not show Medea’s infanticide.9 This particular Medea is played and sung by a half-naked, bodybuilding, tattooed Indonesian countertenor. This is Medea the bisexual, the lover, the Oriental foreigner and the enchantress, since ‘there is something of the sorcerer in the countertenor’s voice’, the director notes, ‘particularly in modern culture. It has magical powers.’ 10 For Medea to be portrayed by a male performer is not new. Medea is a man-made theatrical character. She was conceived as a male (castrato) role in the Italian opera and was performed by male stars both in nineteenth-century British burlesque and in Ninagawa’s 1980s Japanese production. In the 1990s, in a gay theatrical version in the USA, the conflict between genders in the myth took on a more extreme ambiguity, with the character of Medea being played by a man and Jason by a woman.11 Moreover, Medea as a character has always been the woman who displays male qualities (sense of autonomy, coldness of feeling, aggression, ruthlessness) when she decides to define her identity and assert herself. ‘Medea nunc sum,’ she declares, liberated when she kills Creon and Creousa, in Seneca. And again in Heiner Müller’s text, ‘Oh, I am clever I am Medea It’s all quiet now The screams of Colchis have died down Nothing left.’ Since Clérambault allows the interpreter to be either male or female, the narrator of Médée, although slightly disguised in the Opera Project production, is clearly shown to be male. He/she functions as an historical ‘double’ or psychological ‘other’ for the more recognizable Müller’s Medea in the

8 9

10 11

See Williams, p. 39. All quotations from Another Night: Medea are from the script used by Opera Project at Performance Space. Williams, p. 39. Johnston, ‘Introduction’ and Mae Smethurst, ‘The Japanese Presence in Ninagawa’s Medea’, in Medea: Essays, pp. 4-5 and 195. See also Helene P. Foley, ‘Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy’, available at .

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play. There is also a third Medea, Martha, and a fourth, Reggie (Heilmann, the actress), as well as three Jasons in one: Jason, George and Nigel (Kellaway). This, as the director explains, is because ‘with the Opera Project we are celebrating a history of culture; and this comes from our background as artists of at least twenty-five years’ postmodern practice and theatrical deconstruction’. Within this framework, Another Night: Medea can be seen as an interweaving of art history (theatre, opera, music) with personal and actors’ histories. ‘There are three couples involved in the play that deal with the issue of sharing power in different ways. The relationship between Medea and Jason has become an obviously unequal one; Martha behaves horribly to George who has proved a failure; while Reggie and Nigel have established an ongoing partnership in which power is shared equally.’ 12 The play starts in darkness with the grand piano downstage left and Regina Heilmann / Medea lying centre stage on a golden sofa. The performers introduce themselves and the material they are working with. A black screen swings up to reveal a trio of harpsichord, baroque violin and viola da gamba, while upstage a cascade of scarlet drapes descending from the ceiling creates acting areas on several levels. Above these, Peretta Anggerek, the pierced bodybuilder singer, appears as the ballerina in the jewellery box; he sings the cantata dressed in golden silk, revolving awkwardly to the sounds of music.

Jason’s lover, on the shore of Colchis, learns that a new marriage is the sweetest desire of her fickle bridegroom. ‘Ye gods’, she cries, ‘to what grief have you condemned me, if I lose Jason forever!’

12

From interviews conducted by the author with Kellaway in June 2004 and December 2004.

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His innocent narrative is repeatedly interrupted by the ‘Games that the Lovers Play’ on and around the sofa. These are dramatic heroic solos and dialogues between Jason and Medea from Medeamaterial, bitter jabs from Martha and George from Albee’s play with the pianist playing the role of their imaginary son, as well as campy exchanges between Nigel and Regina.

MEDEA JASON

The ashes of your kisses on my lips…. Coffee?

The interplay of sung and spoken text works effectively. Brief extracts, just sentences from Müller’s Landscape are ‘transformed into a visual and aural duet between Anggerek/Médée singing the cantata on the top level of the stage with Kellaway/Jason/George standing immediately below him, spitting out the text in the music pauses’.13 ‘Jason is slain by his boat’, and: ‘The vehicle of colonisation strikes the coloniser dead,’ as Heiner Müller writes. His trilogy ultimately refers not only to political colonisation, but also to the colonization of women’s bodies. 13

Laura Ginters, ‘A virago took my baby!’ RealTime, 55 (June-July 2003), 39.

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So, may I speak of ME? I ... Who ... Of whom they are speaking, when they do speak of me, I, JASON, I, scum of man, I, scum of a woman Platitude piled on platitude I, called by my accidental name I, fear of my accidental name!!!... Jason? No! Nigel!!

Meanwhile, before and during the performance the audience are treated as guests. They are there to hear, to be asked questions, to serve as silent witnesses, to be entertained or to ‘be gotten’ in the couple’s games. Soon afterwards, the bodybuilder/(narrator of) Médée, having finished his song, re-appears downstairs, without his make up and striking eighteenthcentury half-gown, as though a different character. He sings to Medea near the piano for a while, and ends up sitting with her on the sofa. Is he one of the children? Is he now one of the guests? Is he the second Medea seducing, comforting and turning her back on Medea? He is also, like the audience, used as witness to the fights of the self-obsessed couple.

And there on the sofa, where Medea/Martha nostalgically recalls her son’s childhood while Nigel/Jason/George plays Schubert’s ‘Fantasia’ on the

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piano, it is the bodybuilder guest again who will witness her plan to undo her rival bringing the disaster on herself. MEDEA

(In front of an imaginary mirror, wearing Glauche’s bride gown) And now see the whore She strucks before the mirror And suddenly the Colchis gold A forest of knives in her flesh (She falls down, her clothes on fire.) She-burns! Jason! I’ll go virgin bride in your first night And it will be all mine (she falls down and burns)14

At the end the screen descends once more, again cutting the musicians off from the performers, and Kellaway sends ‘the children’ (the musicians) off to bed before wandering off himself, leaving Medea on the golden sofa – not a chariot – promising her that they will meet again another night. The next night, when they will perform again. From what I have discussed so far, it is obvious that the play is a container for multiple plays, one of them being the one that the actors, either as thespians or as real persons, play between themselves. In addition to that, Another Night: Medea, 1. by interweaving three versions of the Medea myth, serves as a witness for the ways it has been transformed in the artistic canon of earlier centuries; 2. brings onstage a dialogue between different styles and performance demands (opera / live music / theatre / cinema subtitles / modern Western theatre / Baroque music theatre / Greek tragedy / mime), and it comments on their relationship; 3. launches Medea as the bisexual who, on the one hand, parodies the artificiality of opera while, on the other, tells a different tale from the one that has repeatedly been told about her. This Medea has a triple role to play: the narrator of her story, the bodybuilder guest who flirts with Medea, and finally, one of the children to be devoured. He/she is a crosssexual and, like the other protagonists, a cross-cultural and cross-character presence in the play, and 4. brings together different languages and cultures (ancient Greek, French-Indonesian, German, and American), all on an equal basis in an Australian performance. Or, as Kellaway puts it in the programme, ‘What 14

Heiner Müller, Medea Material, in The Opera Project 2003.

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are we to present? Ovid? Euripides? Müller? Clérambault? Albee? They are all profound readings of the myth.’ 3. However, the most striking way in which this performance differs from other readings of the myth is that it canvasses the position of the theatre as a psychoanalytical forum. It does so not only by casting light on the bloody end of the drama by fleshing out a ten year gap in the original plot of the myth. There is a constant unmasking and researching of what lies behind the personae, either of the actors or the characters. Later material is used to analyse primal material. Signs and symbols of sex and performance practice are renegotiated or hint at many different meanings. The audience is called on to participate in what is or what they consider familiar and to detach themselves from it. What is cracked in the outside world is also cracked inside. Projections directed to others ricochet back. Moreover, without questioning Medea’s role as the ultimate protagonist, the play transfers the focus from the individual to the couple and to shadowy aspects of long-term relationships. This leads me to suggest that behind the interplay of multiple roles stands not just the original myth but an archetype, namely that of the couple and their relationship, which is absent in the actual performance yet ever-present as the backdrop of the archetypal conflict story being told. Left alone, Medea in her multiple guises travels through the centuries, not only as an astounding theatrical character, but also as a representative of the archetype of the dislocated feminine, which, precisely because of its dislocation and rejection, becomes terrifying and shadowy. There is a long list of figures representing this archetype in ancient mythology – for example, Kali in India, Hecate in Greece (for whom Medea was considered a priestess), Lilith in the Near East, Morgain (who, like Medea, escapes in a chariot) in Britain, Hel in Scandinavia, Medusa and Circe the seductress (who was considered Medea’s aunt) again in ancient Greece; it is also referred to as Mother Holle and the Dark or Terrible Mother.15 Medea, pamfarmakos yinee – woman of every medicine and poison – according to Pindar,16 an expert in poisons according to Müller, stands on the dark/negative side of the polarity of the female/maternal archetype, as described by Erich Neumann with key words such as siren, gorgon, harpy, witch, snake, dragon, sickness, depres-

15

16

Demetra George, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 29, 44, 46, 142-43, 219, 175-78. Emily A. McDermott, Euripides’ ‘Medea’: The Incarnation of Disorder (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).

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sion and poison.17 These qualities are not always considered bad or wicked among Orientals. Aware of this, the fifth-century Athenians presented Medea as an oriental figure that had nothing to do with their own women. As such she was allowed to kill her children, that is to perform the ultimate act of disorder for a woman, to escape triumphant in a golden chariot and, after her death, to rest married with Achilles in the blessed Elysian Plain where only privileged souls are allowed to rest.18 The shadowy presence of the archetypal couple which is emphasized in the background of the performance appears, as a life experience common to all beings, in different versions in mythology throughout the world. This couple appears as Lilith and Adam in ancient Sumeria, Zeus and Hera in ancient Greece, Tennyo and the Fisherman in ancient Japan, a rich Mexican Hidalgo and La Llorona, the weeping woman, in an old tale of the Aztecs, as well as Odin and Fricka in Teutonic myth.19 There is always an unfaithful lover or husband or father in most of the relevant legends; there is friction and rivalry around the issue of sharing power, or the breaking of a fundamental rule which mostly results in a killing either of the children, the rival woman, the woman herself or – rarely – the man. In the Greek myth, a child born from this conflict later becomes the one who kills. This was Ares, the god of war, born from the rage stored in Hera’s body because of Zeus’s infidelity. The shadow aspects of the archetypal couple are supposed to emerge during the mid-life period and they are described as the erupting of the opposite sex or anima/animus component in the partners’ consciousness. These components are also defined by Jung as eros and as logos.20 What would be considered functional, or familiar or mutually agreed before, is no longer, and something different is sought, usually outside through a new quest or another partner. Medea thus rediscovers her younger self and is forced by circumstances beyond her control to reclaim her power and position as an individual. Jason seeks this renewal through social status and a younger woman. The conflicts that inevitably arise can be creative or totally destructive. In the case 17

18 19

20

The Great Mother, trans. by Ralph Manheim, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 147-77. See McDermott, and Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays, p. 5. George, pp. 175-78. See also ‘Frigg (Frigg, Frige, Frija, Frigga, Fricka, and Frea)’ in Hlidskjalf: The Gods of Old Norse Mythology, available at and Clarissa Pincola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (South Australia: Griffin Paperbacks, 1992), p. 302. Peter O’Connor, Understanding Jung, Understanding Yourself (Ryde, NSW: Methuen Australia, 1985).

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of Medea they led to a terrifying ultimate union, like the one suggested by the Greek psychoanalyst and translator of ancient tragedy, Giorgos Chimonas: The origin of eros is barbarian […] Now she goes away deeper and deeper into the darkness that eros is -eros must have darkness in order to hide the fact that the Other is absent, Medea’s barbarian eros must have had a lot of darkness since Jason was never with her; he is not now with her, and consequently he never had been. But she was there from the beginning, she never came out from her darkness and her ultimate erotic act towards Jason is to force him to meet her through his pain for his murdered children […]. Because eros’s aim is definitely union and its barbarity the use of any means to achieve it.21

However, notwithstanding the fact that it points to all sorts of peculiar meetings and unions, the play that is presented here is Australian, not Greek. It has no glorious finale (like Albee’s Martha, Medea is still ‘discontent’ at the end of the play). Without underestimating issues of gender, class, race or political issues, it gives equal shares to the characters in the story, showing that they wouldn’t have existed without each other. They both love each other in a co-dependent way, and they are unable to find a way to extricate themselves. They are both betrayed and betray others and themselves. They use the children and the guests as objects and they kill them. Eventually, they both have past histories, nightmares and crimes to redeem, thus being equally responsible for the tragedy that will follow.

21

Euripides’ Medea, trans. by Giorgos Chimonas (Athens: Kastanioti, 1989), pp. 12-13.

V The Play within the Play as Agency of Intermedial Transformation 1. The Play within the Play and Opera

Yvonne Noble

John Gay and the Frame Play

John Gay’s burlesque plays The What D’Ye Call It and The Beggar’s Opera demonstrate the capacity of the frame structure within the comic mode to widen meaning so as to encompass not merely abundance but mutually exclusive opposites. Furthermore, as comedy endorses fertility and ongoing creativity, in these plays the frame structure is paralleled in imagination by equally encompassing language and equally encompassing human bodies. Yet the degree of cultural efficacy of the artist, his ability to achieve social justice, is determined by the penetrability of the inner plays and frames.

A pair of dramatic works by the early eighteenth-century playwright John Gay demonstrates the capacity of the frame structure within the comic mode to widen meaning so as to encompass not merely abundance but mutually exclusive opposites. Furthermore, as comedy endorses fertility and ongoing creativity, in these plays the frame structure is paralleled in imagination by equally encompassing language and equally encompassing human bodies. The plays are two burlesques, an afterpiece of 1715 entitled The What D’Ye Call It, and the famous ballad opera of 1728, The Beggar’s Opera.1 Other essays in this volume explore plays where interest is centered in the layered experience of the actor, or the character, or the spectator, but here in Gay’s pieces the interest is centered in the power – or powerlessness – of the artistic creator to overcome social injustice. Many readers of this volume will think of The Beggar’s Opera primarily as the inspiration for Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper – the origin of Macheath, Jenny Diver, and other characters, the origin of the paralleling, then fusion, of criminal underworld with governing-class elite, the origin of the lavish interpolation of street-song to enhance the spoken drama. In English-speaking countries, this ‘source’ retains a major place in the theatrical repertoire as 1

The What D’Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (London: Bernard Lintot, [1715]), printed also in Gay’s Poems on Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson and B. Lintot, 1720); The Beggar’s Opera (London: John Watts, 1728). The modern scholarly edition of Gay’s Dramatic Works is by John Fuller, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) and of his Poetry and Prose by Vinton A. Dearing, with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

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well as in classroom study of literature. John Gay continues to be recognized as a significant poet of the first part of the eighteenth century, famous not only as a playwright but writer of fables, lyrics and ballads, and modern mock renditions of the verse forms of antiquity. He was a close friend of, and collaborator with, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot. Working with the two latter, he is given principal credit for the libretto of Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea (1718). Gay lived at a time of perceptible and confusing social change, when divine-right rule was being supplanted by limited monarchy under parliment, when feudal aristocratic values were giving way to those of trade, empire, and consumption, when a new royal dynasty from Hanover, installed to support these interests, was unsettling the cultural world with new tastes. Gay was a penniless writer who tried for many years to secure his career in the old way, by seeking royal patronage: like La Fontaine, for example, he composed a book of verse Fables (1727) to dedicate to a royal prince. But such gestures were no longer very effective, as Gay discovered that very year when the list of appointments for the new court of George II was announced, and he found that he would be expected to serve as attendant to a two-year-old princess. This is just the period when it begins to be possible for an author to make a living by selling to the public. Indeed, the first person in England to do so was Gay’s close friend Alexander Pope, himself at the same time a fervent supporter of the aristocratic and monarchical values that were passing away. The conflicting and unresolved attitudes of these friends to the old and new aspects of their age caused them to write best in ironic modes. Mock forms could draw upon the expression of full commitment while through irony distancing the writer from endorsing that full commitment. The literary riches this circle produced in this mode include Swift’s mock travel memoir Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pope’s mock epics The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728), Gay’s mock eclogues The Shepherd’s Week (1714), and his mock georgic Trivia, or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). Gay differs from his friends in having a temperament that is essentially comic, rather than satiric – that is, for him affection trumps outrage, delight in the ordinary trumps insistence on hierarchy and ‘decorum’. For him, therefore, mock forms in burlesque mode were most congenial and most successful – The Shepherd’s Week and Trivia are such as poetry, as are The What D’Ye Call It and The Beggar’s Opera as theatre. It is striking that when the mock mode is imagined as theatre its duple nature endows it with a frame. The What D’Ye Call It takes place in the manor-hall of a country squire who has ordered his steward to create a theatrical entertainment for his guests, his two neighbouring squires. The cast is to be made up of the serv-

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ants and tenants on the squire’s estate. The squires also will have a few lines as in their life-roles as local magistrates. Because these guests have had no experience of London theatre, the host wishes that they should be offered all of its modes, that the one performance should be a comedy, a tragedy, a pastoral, an opera, and a farce – hence the title Gay gives the piece. Using rustic characters, the inner play mainly burlesques famous scenes from the heroic tragedies of Otway, Dryden, and others in the Restoration repertoire. The setting is contemporary – Gay is writing near the close of the War of the Spanish Succession – and the situations arise from the impact of the war on the common country folk. The characters and their tone spring from The Shepherd’s Week, a burlesque of Theocritus’s and Virgil’s pastorals written the previous year, and the theme may also have been suggested by Virgil, whose shepherds also suffer injustice from the impact of war. Gay stresses, however, that, wartime or peacetime, it is the social system that oppresses, of which the conduit to each country worker is the local landowner, who governs employment and who also administers the law. The What D’Ye Call It was written by a man still thinking of himself as part of a circle of wits at the highest seat of influence in the nation – as the Scriblerus Club, he and Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope had dined once or twice a week with several of Queen Anne’s highest ministers of state. In the very year of that play the Queen died, and a new dynasty came in to Britain from Hanover, overturning their world entirely. The friends fell from influence and were scattered. Court patronage turned from British culture, especially English-language literature, to Italian opera, which even before George I arrived was being written and produced in London by the Hanoverian’s court composer, Handel. King George’s new prime minister, Robert Walpole, seemed financially rapacious and politically corrupt, boorish and ignoble. He was building himself a vast mansion fitted out with a huge number of old master paintings (later bought by Catherine the Great as the basis of the Hermitage collection). Nobody knew where the money had come from for these expenditures. Opposition writers compared him often to a notorious criminal of the period, Jonathan Wild, who ran property-seizing criminals of many kinds in gangs – highwaymen, pickpockets, burglars – who then received and disposed of the goods, and who also as a state informer turned in many of these very individuals, pocketing the cash reward when they were convicted and hanged. Wild’s practices were discovered; he was caught and executed in 1725, but Walpole went on and on. The hopes of Gay and his friends and the Opposition were fixed upon the ensuing reign. But change did not happen: in 1727 George I died, but somehow Walpole managed to remain in power. We have already noticed Gay’s disappointment with the civil list.

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Judging service of a two-year-old as undignified for a man of his age and the expectation that he might do so as an insult, he refused the offer, gave up his hopes from the court, and released himself from more than a decade’s subservience and constraint. From this new context sprang The Beggar’s Opera. This wonderful, highly original work fizzes with the exuberance of Gay’s release. The hero, Macheath, is an emblem of the poet’s imagination freed. In its frame of The Beggar’s Opera a playwright, a Beggar – ‘If Poverty be a Title to Poetry’, he says, ‘I am sure No-body can dispute mine’ – establishes that he is attempting to find success by following the new trend, by accommodating to the taste of the Hanoverian court. Apart from its having no recitative, his is ‘an Opera, in all its forms’, he declares, pointing out its prison scenes, its arias based on similes of ‘The Swallow, the Moth, the Bee, the Ship, the Flower, &.’, and even its pair of prima donnas like those whose onstage fisticuffs had enlivened the Haymarket performances the previous season.2 But, of course, the Beggar has entirely missed the point of his genre, not only by naturalizing the opera’s antique heroic personages into London felons, but also by following so carefully the whole panoply of conventions while entirely overlooking the splendid newly-composed music in dazzling performance they had been devised to serve. The Beggar’s cast are street singers – Gay’s are playhouse actors – and the tunes of his ‘airs’ (not ‘arias’) are reused from the canon of ballads and playhouse tunes everybody English knew, tunes like ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Chevy Chase’, and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. As elsewhere, Italian operas in London in the 1720s were written or revised to showcase each season’s company. This would comprise only six or seven singers. The arias, in standard da capo (a-b-a) form, ideally contrasted strong emotions to display the voice – the alternating despair and resolve, for example, of a prisoner or a scorned lover. For libretti, therefore, plots with tragic trajectories were favoured, as generating the greatest series of dilemmas and intense scenes. For decorum the characters had to be of high station and of heroic character; they were generally drawn from ancient history, the principal men being generals or rulers, but with the plots firmly concentrating not on public affairs but on the characters’ private loves and sorrows. Complicated rules concerned the assignment and distribution of arias and governed when characters must be onstage and offstage. There were five classes 2

Rivalry between Faustina and Cuzzoni and their claques culminated in ‘Catcalls and other great Indecencies’ and a physical scuffle of some kind between the singers onstage during a performance of Astianatte on 6 June 1727 (British Journal, no. 246 [10 June 1727]); for a summary of the entire feud, see The Craftsman, no. 113 (31 August 1728).

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of aria (all da capo in structure), and none could follow another of the same class in immediate succession. The opera was to be performed in three acts. Every member of the ensemble was to sing at least one aria in each act. No one was to sing two arias in immediate succession. Each singer was to leave the scene after performing his or her aria. The most important arias were to come at the end of Acts I and II. In Acts II and III both the hero and the heroine were to have a separate grand scena, consisting of accompanied recitative, followed by aria d’agilita, the greatest display of the vocalist’s abilities. Act III would end with a chorus (that is, of the ensemble), perhaps with a dance. Given these constraints, frequently the librettist would fail to achieve a plausible plot. The tragic trajectory generating the intense, conflicting emotions favoured for the arias pointed to the death of the principals as its fitting conclusion. But the convention of the final chorus required that all the singers survive to form the ensemble. Just before this chorus, therefore, the librettist would often introduce an unexplained change of heart in the villain-tormenter, who would suddenly pardon those who had been imprisoned and threatened with death or who would suddenly foster the love-union that had been thwarted. In literary terms such plotting is absurd – an absurdity often complained about – but the purpose of such rules can be understood if we grasp that the evenings were primarily recitals, with each performer retiring offstage after his or her round of applause.3 Beyond the unconvincing plots and the foreign tongue the most bizarre aspect of these operas for the English, however, was that the principal male roles were to be assigned to castrati.4 It was not the high register of the castrato voice itself that was discomfiting – for the English were used to male altos and countertenors – but the foreignness of these Italian singers, and the unsettling challenge to norms of sexuality that they embodied. We are familiar in our time with sexual difference being focused upon as the index of moral difference; so does the castrato become such an index in England in the eighteenth century. As Swift writes in 1728 in Intelligencer, No. 3: An old Gentleman said to me, that many Years ago, when the Practice of an unnatural Vice grew frequent in London, and many were prosecuted for it, he was sure it would be the Fore-

3

4

‘Opera’, in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd edn, ed. by H.C. Colles, 5 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Edward J. Dent, ‘The Operas’, in Handel: A Symposium, ed. by Gerald Abraham (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 23; Richard A. Streatfield, ‘Handel, Rolli, and Italian Opera in London in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 3 (1917), 433. On castrati, see Yvonne Noble, ‘Castrati, Balzac, and BartheS/Z’, Comparative Drama, 31 (1997/98), 28-41.

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runner of Italian Opera’s and Singers; and then we should want nothing but Stabbing, or Poisoning, to make us perfect Italians.

In both of John Gay’s pieces major figures are as flagrantly sexually embodied as a castrato, but to the opposite degree, emphatically contrasting native English wholesomeness to ‘outlandish’ sterility. This figure in The Beggar’s Opera is its polyphiloprogenitive hero, Macheath. It is not his activities as a highwayman that cast him into prison and imperil his life, but the enmity he attracts by his private relationships with women (in this way, as in others, his story follows that of an opera libretto). Though just having eloped with Polly Peachum, Macheath cannot resist the company of the Covent Garden whores: ‘I love the Sex’, he confides, ‘And a Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman’ (II.3). He has got the jailer’s daughter, Lucy Lockit, pregnant, and he obliquely justifies himself by singing to the tune of Bonny Dundee (III.Air 16), associating himself not only with the Jacobite hero after whom the tune is named, but also with a third beleaguered Scot. The latter Macheath’s (and Gay’s) London auditors would know through the verses entitled ‘Jockey’s Escape from Dundee; and the Parson’s Daughter whom he had Mow’d’ that they themselves had probably sung to the tune: ‘Why should I be in prison’, says Jockey, For I have neither robbed nor stole, Nor have I done any Injury; But I have gotten a Fair Maid with Child, The Minister’s Daughter of bonny Dundee: [. . .] For she’ll be a Mammy before it is long: And have a young Lad or Lass of my breed, I think I have done her a generous deed Then open the Gates and let me go free, [. . .] And so bid adieu to bonny Dundee.5

Sprung from the philosophy he has shared with Jockey, four more children of Macheath’s, with their corresponding four mothers, turn up to say goodbye to him as he is about to be hanged. At the interface of inner play and frame, however, this vigorous masculinity is doubled over with the figure of the castrato who in a ‘real’ opera would be embodying the hero’s part. The ghost of 5

Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy; being A Collection of the best Merry Ballads and Songs, Old and New [ed. by Thomas D’Urfey], 6 vols (London: W. Pearson, for J. Tonson, 1719-20), V, 17-19. This is the last of a series of revised editions from 1699; this song appears in the four editions between 1707 and 1719.

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the castrato hovers throughout the whole performance, glinting every time the opera analogue is reawakened by the interruption of the spoken text by song – and this is often, for The Beggar’s Opera has sixty-nine airs. Even more interestingly, in The What D’Ye Call It the embodied sexuality represents the crux of the plot. Sir Roger’s steward, besides devising the multi-mode performance his master has ordered, must also solve a personal problem, for his daughter Kitty has been impregnated by the old man’s heir. He addresses the matter in his casting: ‘Chear up, daughter, and make Kitty Carrot the shining part: Squire Thomas is to be in love with you to night, girlie.’ ‘Ay, I have felt Squire Thomas’s love to my cost’, she replies, adding in a comic aside, ‘I have little stomach to play, in the condition he hath put me into.’ The young squire is assigned the role of Thomas Filbert, a country lad who is being impressed into the army, because a young woman in the community, Dorcas, who is with child, has accused him of being its father. Dramatically opposed to the character Dorcas is that of Filbert’s sweetheart, Kitty Carrot, who exemplifies the modesty, innocence, and piety that Dorcas lacks. She beseeches the three justices to spare him: ‘Behold how low you have reduc’d a maid, / Thus to your Worships on my knees I sue’, adding parenthetically, ‘(A Posture never known but in the pew)’, lines that a good comic actress can enhance by overlaying the grace of a lithe young girl in descending with the awkwardness of someone unaccustomed to her new weight and shape. In performance we are to enjoy the spectacle of the two figures playing against each other – Dorcas, big-bellied in the inner plot, and Kitty virginal, yet big-bellied from the frame, emblem at once of purity and fruitfulness. The embodiment of the duple Kitty ensures that the audience’s awareness of the frame-world will not recede during the course of the inner play. The Filbert-Carrot plot is finally resolved when Dorcas confesses that her child has actually been fathered by her own (inner-plot) squire. Now Thomas need no longer go off to war, and he and Kitty can be united, in concord with the principles of comedy: ‘To wed’, says she; ‘To Bed’, says he, and ‘Exeunt all the actors’ from Sir Roger’s Hall, as off to the imaginary church they go. But Sir Roger wants his play to be more complete than a London piece; in his production he insists upon full representation of the ceremony. Here the play reaches toward the puritan anxieties concerning the dangers of feigning, that illusion might harden into unpalatable reality: ‘So comes a reck’ning when the banquet’s o’er, / The dreadful reck’ning, and men smile no more’, warns Sir Roger’s steward. It emerges that the local curate has refused to lend his gown to the countryman cast to play the role of parson, and the curate has come in person, armed with ‘two and twenty good Reasons against it from

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the [Church] Fathers’, to explain why. It was for these reasons that Cromwell’s government had closed the theatres in the previous century and why Jeremy Collier was continuing to rail against the playhouses in Gay’s time. Confronted with this challenge to his wishes, Sir Roger reflects that it is he, after all, who appoints the clergymen in his parish; he exerts his authority and orders the curate, then, to perform the part himself. The curate agrees to do so, but in an adjoining chamber; he will not ‘enter into your Worship’s Hall; for he calleth it a Stage pro tempore’. Sir Roger accedes to this scruple if the doors remain wide open, and he admires the verisimilitude of the action: ‘the Ring, i’faith’ and ‘To have and to hold!’ Yet he is enraged to discover that he has been tricked – that by means of his own vanity and the steward’s wiles the inner play has been made to intrude into the frame to solve Kitty’s predicament: ‘Married! how married! Can the Marriage of Filbert and Carrot have any thing to do with my Son?’ ‘But the marriage of Thomas and Katherine may, Sir Roger’. And it is, as his friend Justice Statute declares, ‘Good in Law, good in Law’. As they are Thomas and Kitty at both degrees of reality, the steward’s ingenuity, capitalizing upon the squire’s rapacity, inattention, and immersion into the inner fiction, has solved his daughter’s predicament, has made of her, as we used to say, ‘an honest woman’. In The Beggar’s Opera the dilemma is for Macheath – what Macheath represents – what one might call the comic spirit – vigour, abundance, amplitude – to escape being negated by becoming delimited or confined. His association with Polly Peachum has brought him the enmity of her father, Gay’s dramatic surrogate for the fence and thief-taker Jonathan Wild I have mentioned above. Peachum aims to turn in Macheath, leader of a gang of highwaymen, to the authorities, who will convict and hang him and who will then pay Peachum the informer’s fee. As Peachum has remarked to his wife about another character, ‘[H]e spends his Life among Women, and as soon as his Money is gone, one or other of the Ladies will hang him for the Reward, and there’s forty Pound lost to us for-ever’ (I.4). Transformationally, Peachum wishes to convert Macheath into an inert pile of gold. Polly, and also the jailer’s daughter, Lucy Lockit, each in turn encircling Macheath with her arms, want exclusive possession of him as her spouse. The women’s aspirations correspond symbolically to his physical imprisonment at Newgate, and their embraces to the circling of the hangman’s noose. ‘Where is my dear Husband?’, says Polly, ‘Was a Rope ever intended for this Neck! – O let me throw my Arms about it, and throttle thee with love!’ (III.13). ‘Really, Polly’, Macheath says later in the same scene, ‘whenever you are talking of Marriage, I am thinking of Hanging.’ Polly and he seem to have been through some sort of clandestine marriage ceremony together, but she cannot be sure

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of its validity – the parson may have been bogus, and furthermore, as her parents observe, Macheath may have ‘two or three Wives already’ (I.6). When Lucy Lockit – in whom Gay revives his earlier play's successful bigbellied comic role – expresses astonishment when her seducer speaks of himself as her husband, Macheath explains that he is so ‘In ev’ry respect but the Form and that, my Dear, may be said over us at any time. – Friends should not insist upon Ceremonies. From a Man of honour, his Word is as good as his Bond’ (II.9). ‘Marriage’, for Macheath, encompasses the whole range of relationships between men and women of consorting age; as long as the status is not allowed to be restrictive, the term can encompass opposites. So, as Lucy is wife in all but the form, and corresponds to Dorcas in the inner play of The What D’Ye Call It, so, I would argue, Polly can be thought of the stillvirginal wife in the form only, corresponding to Kitty Carrot. Speaking to each privately (and this is true even in the very last lines of the play), Macheath assures her that she is really his wife. And she is that, truly, according to his usage. And this usage is not his alone, for Polly is asked, ‘Do you think your Mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?’ by the consort of the character known to us only as ‘Mrs. Peachum’. But when acknowledging one spouse means denying another, Macheath refuses to speak: How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear Charmer away! But while you thus teaze me together, To neither a Word will I say. (II. Air 17)

When the jailer brings ‘Four women more, Captain, with a child a-piece’, Macheath exclaims, ‘What – four wives more!’ – and demands that he be taken off immediately to be hanged. That is, he accedes to extinction, which must be acknowledged by his persecutors, rather than delimitation. In Peachum’s world this is the real ending for felons, and in Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s world – audiences recognised Walpole in Peachum, Macheath, and several other characters – this is the real ending for gaiety and generosity of spirit. Macheath’s death is the ending that follows from the trajectory of plot: ‘To make the Piece perfect’, the Beggar explains, ‘I was for doing strict poetical Justice – Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other Personages of the Drama, the Audience must suppose they were all either hang’d or transported. [. . . This way] the Play […] would have carried a most excellent Moral’ (III.16). The comic tone of the burlesque, however, demands that Macheath, like his counterpart Tom Jones two decades later, not be extinguished. His death

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would constitute moral denial of the life-gusto the audience has been experiencing and sharing with the characters in the overlap of their existential environments, as particularly insisted upon in The Beggar’s Opera by the everrecurring canon of song. Whereas in The What D’Ye Call It the dilemma lay in the outer plot, and its solution through the intrusion into it of the inner play, here the dilemma lies in the inner play and its solution from the intrusion in the opposite direction of the frame. In both cases, conventions of genre provide and enforce the solution. There, a comedy must end with a marriage; here, the implausible reversals of opera libretti: ‘[T]his is a downright deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must end happily’, objects the Player. ‘Your Objection, Sir, is very just; and is easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, ’tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about. – So – you Rabble there – run and cry a Reprieve – let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.’ The operatic model, set forth in the framing Prologue, and sustained by the sixtynine airs interrupting the dialogue and by the hovering spectre of the castrato twinned with Macheath, erupts not only to save our hero, but to glorify him in the vivid ending enacted before us in ensemble chorus and dance: Thus I stand like the Turk, with his Doxies around; From all Sides their Glances his Passion confound; For black, brown, and fair, his Inconstancy burns, And the different Beauties subdue him by turns: Each calls forth her Charms, to provoke his Desires: Though willing to all, with but one he retires. But think of this Maxim, and put off your Sorrow, The Wretch of To-day, may be happy To-morrow (III. Air 69).

Macheath finds an extra-European model of marriage to celebrate that is able to accommodate all his claims. It may seem odd that a playwright progresses from endorsing marriage as a happy solution to endorsing escape from marriage as another. Gay remained a bachelor all of his life and, while he is much recorded and remembered as a favourite companion to both literary and aristocratic friends, hardly a trace remains to suggest personal romances or liaisons. What we do see clearly is an imagination at work that works best in finding forms that encompass and reconcile what in general seem to be unyielding opposites. For the stage, the frame structure enabled him to achieve this, and the marriage at the end of a comedy is, of course, the understood reconciliation of personal and social, moral and sexual. In the earlier play the distressed subordinate is Kitty, her salvation in overcoming the will of the squire who has all the power in her social system. Her marriage represents the idea of social justice for

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abuses of many kinds. An array of these are presented in the entr’acte of The What D’Ye Call It, where a series of ghosts appear to accuse the three squire/justices – two countrymen, dead in war, who were impressed by them, and the lover of one of them who hanged herself at his loss, a woman who miscarried because she was beaten in punishment for having conceived outside marriage, and the embryo she lost. The presentation is comic, but the theme of social oppression enforced by squires is serious nonetheless. Though his lowly characters serve to burlesque the lofty protagonists of heroic drama, Gay has sincere affection for them in themselves, that is, for the country people they represent. The action of the whole inner play sets out the pains that fall upon such people when grander parties decide upon war, when justice is decided and meted out by those who have the power, the land, and the wealth. Class injustice is treated more savagely by Gay in his poem ‘The Birth of the Squire’, which perhaps recalls social arrangements in the countryside of Devon where he grew up. It can give great satisfaction for a poor outsider to be able to find a way to foil such power by wit. While Kitty in one way represents the socially oppressed, in another way she represents Gay as an artist. That the creation of a work of art is like having a baby is a commonplace, of course,6 but with Gay the idea seems so explicit that it had to be embodied over and over again. The joke – I am sure it is Gay’s contribution – runs throughout the play he wrote in 1717 with Pope and Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, where mockery is made in terms of this metaphor of the female playwright’s obsession with her writing, which is paralleled by the haplessness of the old man who has tried to marry for an heir. While the principles of comedy dictate that age must be thwarted, that the feisty young woman he has chosen should traduce and discard him, Gay does give him the baby he wanted (though not of his own begetting) and ensures that it be brought onstage and put into his arms before our eyes. That is, despite genre, imagination – wit – finds a way to redeem the senex, who would normally be excluded and ridiculed, and instead, as the play ends, to place him centre stage as a symbol of the successful union of opposites. Similarly, in his poem of 1720, the ‘Epistle to Burlington’, recounting a journey by horseback to Exeter, Gay takes particular notice of the babies who have been left to wet-nurse at one of the villages at which he and his men

6

For examples in England from this period of the male brain-womb and writings as children, see Raymond Stephenson, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 98-99; Stephenson also studies images of writing as masculine sexual performance but almost entirely as problematized, in prostitution or impotence (pp. 139-59). He does not treat John Gay.

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stop. The poor creatures have been dispatched off into oblivion to protect their mothers’ reputations: Here unown’d Infants find their daily Food; For should the maiden Mother nurse her Son, ’Twould spoil her Match when her good Name is gone. (ll. 40-42)

Characteristically, Gay has sympathy for both sides, and, by playing the Christian sense of ‘virgin’ to mean ‘sexually unpenetrated’ against the Roman sense ‘unmarried young woman’, he offers his peculiar reconciling faculty to the women: Be just, ye Prudes, wipe off the long Arrear; Be Virgins still in town, but Mothers here. (ll. 45-46)

During the second decade of the eighteenth century, when Three Hours after Marriage, The What D’Ye Call It, and the poems I have mentioned were written, Gay was building a successful reputation, and his Poems on Several Occasions of 1720 brought in good earnings. But he lost the money in the South Sea Bubble the same year and must have felt uncertain, anxious, and constrained in the next decade as he grew older without security and with worries about his health. We have seen how his aspirations were fixed on getting patronage from a court that was actually culturally uncongenial to his style and tastes. Breaking with this expectation was a breaking from oppression, and it released his creativity, as the marvelous originality of The Beggar’s Opera proclaims. In terms of his imagination, he had found his creative masculinity, he was first the first time in his life fully himself – ‘Sometimes I laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man’, wrote Pliny the Younger.7 The character Macheath becomes his symbolic expression of this new untrammeled artistic imagination. In The What D’Ye Call It art and artifice triumph; in The Beggar’s Opera art, as Beggar-poet, must yield, but art, as John Gaypoet, can free the hero to the fullness of life, while at the same time making something coherent and splendid out of conventions that had seemed absurd. Still, the evasiveness of burlesque, its ambiguity, liminality, and duality casts into question what force the happy resolutions can exert upon life outside the performance. Gay’s epilogue to The What D’Ye Call It (I quote it in full), when all is said and done, throws interpretation back onto the audience: Our Stage Play has a Moral – and no doubt. You all have Sense enough to find it out.

7

Quoted by Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Picador, 1984), p. 131.

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In another epigrammatic couplet of this kind Gay wrote his own epitaph – Pope and the Duke of Queensberry managed to get it onto his tomb in Westminster Abbey:8 Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once; but now I know it.

The layering is ambiguous in precisely the same way as in the frame plays. Existing in the frame of eternity, does the speaker see the comic vision fulfilled, with vitality, abundance, and joy flowing from God, its source and author? Or does the speaker lie in ashes in his tomb, confirming that our time on earth is a transient and meaningless diversion? Sir Roger’s entertainment in The What D’Ye Call It, we may notice, was a Christmastide entertainment, and we are well aware that at Twelfth Night for a brief instant the world is allowed to be turned upside down and the oppressed are allowed to make the world as they would wish it to be. The jest – the steward’s, Macheath’s, Gay’s comedy – is that instant of justice and joy. But its glory is also its brevity. As Umberto Eco points out, carnival is really complicit with the oppressors; it has meaning only in the context of the iron rules that must be accepted for the rest of the year.9 In this sense Gay’s frames actualize the barrier between the happiness of ‘jest’ in its glory and the unsatisfactory world to which the audience must return. Gay as Beggar may wish to extirpate Walpole-as-Macheath, but, as in the frustrated Beggar-playwright’s ending, the art that can achieve justice lies beyond the frame.

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When in the 1930s a medieval wall-painting was discovered behind it, the monument was moved into storage in the triforium and has since been generally inaccessible; photographs of it are reproduced in Margaret Whinney’s Sculpture in Britain: 1530 to 1830, Pelican History of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), pl. 67B, and in M. I. Webb’s Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor (London: Country Life Limited, 1954), pl. 31. ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’, in Umberto Eco, V.V. Ivanov and Monica Rector, Carnival!, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 6.

Donald Bewley

Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude

Opera within opera is neither recent nor uncommon. An unusual example is Metastasio’s L’impresario delle isole Canarie in eighteenth century London. Comedies by this master dramatist of opera seria were rare. But in a variety of theatrical forms – as an intermezzo satirising its companion opera, an ‘afterpiece’ accompanying different plays, or burlesque ‘rehearsal’ framed by an independent satire – L’impresario toured the principal London theatres. First presented in Italian as composed originally, then in English set successively by two London composers, it served rival poets as a vehicle for satire. It left untouched Metastasio’s London reputation as worthy poet, dramatist and moral philosopher.

Evolution of operatic comedy A single work is all we usually expect for an evening at the opera, unless the company presents Puccini’s triptych or pairs two short operas such as I pagliacci with Cavalleria rusticana. In opera’s early days, however, more was commonly expected and provided, one result being that opera expanded its range and styles. Opera’s roots were in late Renaissance attempts to reconstruct the drama of classical Greece. In the earliest operas, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, for instance, mythic characters performed and sang their familiar tales, while on the same stage their actions were overseen and discussed by moralising muses. Opera began to diversify when such serious traditional works were challenged by iconoclastic strands of comedy. Monteverdi himself recognised that if opera was to entertain, especially in public theatres, there should be some comic characters, lowly born servants or peasants, for contrast and humour. They either interacted with the principals or played out a sub-plot, a contrascena – bringing a lighter, perhaps raucous, even obscene, element into an otherwise high-minded drama.1 In time some sub-plots were played independently, between the acts of the main opera, as interludes or intermezzi, perhaps burlesquing the main drama or providing commentary on it. An evening at the opera in the eighteenth century often included two or three distinct music 1

See Part IV (‘The Tradition of Comedy’) in David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 281-387.

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dramas, whether contained within a principal opera, or simply sharing the programme with it, just as in the spoken theatre the main play might have plot and sub-plot yet still share the evening with an ‘afterpiece’, some acrobats or a brief ballet. Eventually comic episodes ceased to be a subsidiary, as opera within opera. New genres of opera giocosa and opera buffa evolved, some as a whole evening’s entertainment, some as companion pieces and context for another opera. Opera within opera The tradition of an opera within an opera has not been lost. Today’s opera repertory includes a few that are regularly presented; others occur occasionally or experimentally. The most frequently performed is Leoncavallo’s popular verismo opera I pagliacci (1892): its plot tells how a commedia dell’arte touring company is riven by the Clown’s jealousy of his wife, the soubrette; his aria ‘Vestii la giubba’ (‘On with the motley’) tells of the paradox of his comic role and his personal misery. But during the play jealousy proves too much – ‘No pagliaccio non son’ (‘I’m a clown no more’) – and there on stage he kills his wife and her lover.2 Having debated in Capriccio the question whether the priority in opera is in poetry or music, Richard Strauss in Ariadne auf Naxos (composed 1911-12 to a libretto by Hofmannsthal) compared the virtues of two rival genres of the eighteenth century theatre, opera seria and commedia dell’arte, by including episodes of each within the framework of his opera.3 Shakespeare has been the source of many opera libretti. Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream each contain a play within a play and their operatic settings yield an opera within an opera. Of more than thirty operatic Hamlets, it is Thomas’s French version from 1868 that remains in the regular repertory.4 Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) is the most commonly heard and recorded of two dozen operatic settings.5 As we shall see later, eighteenth century London enjoyed the Pyramus and Thisbe episode, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a separate ‘afterpiece’ in 1745 by J.F. Lampe, in a performance ‘burlesquing’ opera.6 In the last two decades of the twentieth century the concept of an opera within an opera resulted in at least three major works, representative of the 2

3 4 5 6

Matthew Boyden, Opera: The Rough Guide (London: The Rough Guides / Penguin, 1997), pp. 327-330; on CD: EMI CMS57 63967. Boyden, pp. 384-386; CD: EMI CM57 64 159-2. Boyden , pp. 259-260; CD: EMI CDS7 54820-2. Boyden, pp. 542-543; CD: LONDON 425 663-2LH2. CD and booklet: HYPERION CDA66759.

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diversity within the concept. In Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984), which is perhaps closer to some analytical themes of recent spoken drama, a theatre producer recalls and reflects on dramas that have mattered in his life.7 Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987, with its composer as librettist) interposes a Chinese opera in Act 2 within a western version of a Chinese historical tale.8 In John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), which was commissioned for the centenary of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, Marie Antoinette and her court attend Beaumarchais’s third play in his Almaviva trilogy but the composer presents that performance as if alternating before and after the Queen’s execution.9 Metastasio’s L’Impresario delle isole Canarie From the eighteenth century comes a relatively minor opera comic libretto, Metastasio’s L’impresario delle isole Canarie, which illustrates how an opera’s relationship to other opera could change according to its different theatrical contexts and purposes.10 The poet-librettist Metastasio (1698-1782) was the dominant librettist of eighteenth century opera seria: his three dozen poetic dramas11 were set to music about eight hundred times – the composers including Handel, Haydn, Mozart and many more; and aria texts from his operas and his other poetry gave rise to hundreds of songs – by Haydn and Mozart again, Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and many others.12 Metastasio wrote his earliest operas in Naples in the early 1720s. The second of these, the tragedy Didone abbandonata, was originally set to music by the now little-known Neapolitan composer Sarro; it was re-set throughout the next century by more than fifty other composers.13 Between the acts of the original tragedy Metastasio, and his composer, inserted his comic Interlude, L’impresario delle isole Canarie, satirising current opera.14 It had just two 7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14

Boyden, p. 508; CD: ORF WWE 200005 (not listed in Boyden). Boyden, pp. 565-566 (no CD listed in Boyden). Boyden, pp. 582-583; Video DGG 072 430-3. Donald Bewley, ‘English disguises for a Metastasian Intermezzo’, Research Chronicle of the New Zealand Musicological Society, 6, 1999, 21-52, examines in detail the origins and career of Metastasio’s Interludes, their various London productions; it provides a comparative text of the various London English-language performance editions. Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, ed. by B.Brunelli, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1943). The University of Western Ontario’s Metastasio website includes a discography based on the present author’s collection . Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, pp. 1-54. Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, pp. 55-66.

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characters, Nibbio, an over-eager opera impresario (from the Canary Islands, no less!) recruiting for his theatre (and for himself) Dorinna, a suitably-hesitant but not-unwilling diva. At one point, opera seria’s characteristic device, the ‘simile aria’, is mocked. Dorinna sings for Nibbio but he complains that her aria lacks its proper simile and then treats her to his own composition, with not one but two similes, butterfly and battle-ship: La farfalla che allo scuro Va ronzando intorno al muro, Sai che dice a chi l’intende? ‘Chi una fiaccola m’accende, Chi mi scotta per pieta?’ Il vascello e la tartana Fra scirocco e tramontana, Con le tavole schiodate Va sbalzando, va sparando, Cannonate in quantita. Bum! Bum! Bu! Bu!15 (So the poor Butterfly by Night, Awak’d by Chance, in Dread Affright, Lost in its gloomy Flight, Flutt’ring, flutt’ring, Inly mutt’ring, Seems to ask the aid of Light. Or so some Vessel on the Seas, Tost by the North or Southern Breeze, Knowing the wreck that must ensue, For swift redress Fires off her Cannons of Distress; Bum! Bum! Bu! Bu!16 )

L’impresario began life in Naples as a pair of satirical interludes inserted between the acts of an opera seria about the death of Dido: tragedy and satire had the same librettist and same composer. Later managements separated L’impresario from its companion tragedy to fit other programmes; other composers set it as an independent comedy. It first appeared in England a dozen years later, in Italian as originally composed, but by now independent of its companion tragedy (it was never presented jointly with that particular tragedy in England); it instead shared an evening with another separate intermezzo, as that separate genre of operatic comedy became further established.

15 16

Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, p. 65. Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, p. 65.

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Then in an English translation it appeared again as an interlude, but between the acts of an English opera. That version was then separated from the context of that opera to be performed in the same programme as a Shakespearian play. Next the same translation was edited with its music re-composed by another composer to become a ‘rehearsal episode’ in an ‘afterpiece’, one that satirised and parodied poet Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, his attack on Grub Street hack writers. Later it was separated off again and presented at one of London’s entertainment gardens as a burlesque alongside another burlesque. Its final London performance was as a comic episode in an evening of songs, glees and catches. In these various guises it appeared in six of London’s mid-eighteenth century theatres. L‘impresario’s English versions, its settings by London-based composers and its journeying around London theatres – as ‘interlude’, burlesque, ‘afterpiece’, ‘rehearsal’ inset in a ‘frame’ parody, as concert item and comic turn – took this little known opera into the whirlpool of a literary controversy, where it served various purposes and entertained its audiences, but achieved no lasting fame. L’Impresario’s original context What elements – supportive or contradictory – might have related these two operas, Didone abbandonata and L’impresario delle isole Canarie (also known for its characters as Dorinna e Nibbio) when they were first presented in Naples in 1724? There may be only the fact that they were played together coincidentally. This was the time of Marcello’s Il teatro a la moda, a popular satire on Naples’s favourite entertainment and the young poet Metastasio may simply have set out to amuse the audience between the acts of his tragedy. One usually very perceptive English scholar, Vernon Lee imagined more relationship when she wrote ‘Metastasio had no true comic talent, yet these interludes are droll enough – caricatures of the very tragedy that they relieve.’ 17 Originally Didone abbandonata was intended both to star and to delight the dramatic singer, Maria Bulgarelli, La Romanina, the ‘Little Roman’, as she was known. But is it she, his Dido, who re-appears (played by another singer) in Metastasio’s skit? It seems paradoxical that he should target her because, despite his religious status as Abbé, Metastasio’s friendship with the singer was such that when the next year La Romanina returned to Rome, Metastasio followed, so that he and his parents and siblings (Rome was also his birthplace) could share a home with her family. This arrangement continued until his growing fame led to an invitation in 1730 to Vienna as Imperial

17

Vernon Lee (aka V. Paget), Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 2nd edn (Chicago: McClurg, 1908), p. 264.

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Court Poet. Subsequently, although sending her affectionate letters, he never invited her to join him in Vienna; and a little later she died – the romantics say suicide or a broken heart – leaving him her fortune, which he declined, returning it to her husband.18 Was Metastasio naïve enough to imagine that his audience would not link his skit with the main work, or the flighty soprano Dorinna with the diva singing Dido? Was it only after performances that he realised these implications – for the rest of his life the several editions of his works which he scrutinised before publication did not include L’impresario? Whatever we believe, both operas continued on their way, Didone abbandonata to many later settings (soon without the baggage of L’impresario) while L’impresario developed its own independence, attracting fresh settings by Albinoni (still accompanying Didone in 1725), then separately by Leo (1742) and even Father G.B. Martini (1744), the famous Bolognese teacher – and, as we shall see, by Galliard (1741) and Thomas Arne (1745) in London. L’Impresario in London It is extraordinary that L’impresario, a work of such minor significance, should survive for almost two decades; and then appear for three more decades around the principal London theatres that then existed. Opera – sung in a foreign language by overpaid singers of doubtful gender, and moreover competing with English spoken drama for London’s wealthy theatre patrons – was a regular target for London’s literary derision among many talented practitioners, especially playwrights, of that abusive art. This skit on opera, L’impresario, in Italian but more so in English, served well those who practised gibes, scurrility, mockery, satire, parody, burlesque, those whose literary ethic was somewhere along the line where ‘satire condemns, burlesque condones’. In 1737, L’impresario reached London, with Sarro’s original music but by now separate from Didone abbandonata in a programme of two such intermezzi performed at The King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, London’s eighteenth century home for Italian opera, by a touring Italian company. As was customary, the booklet printed the texts, the Italian original in which the opera was sung, side-by-side with a literal English translation entitled The Master of the Opera: an Interlude. It is not recorded who made that translation. In 1741 there appeared another English version in which the verses could be sung, translated by Lewis Theobald, a notable Shakespeare editor 18

Further details in Charles Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio in which are incorporated Translations of his Principal Letters (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1796).

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and hack librettist. It returned to its earlier status of ‘interludes’ between the acts, but now those of Theobald’s English opera, The Happy Captive, set to music by the German-born London-based composer Galliard, with whom Theobald regularly collaborated. The Happy Captive and its Interludes had three performances at The Little Theatre in the Haymarket. A few nights later, as was customary, the composer Galliard had a benefit performance for both works, but at the management’s other theatre, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Then it was the turn of the librettist for a benefit. This was a so-called ‘command performance’ by the Prince of Wales – thereby publicly indicating his approval, although he may not have attended – at Drury Lane Theatre. The Interludes had created considerable amusement, so was requested independently of The Happy Captive, but it still had Galliard’s music. Instead of their opera, The Happy Captive, another drama by Theobald, Double Falshood (sic) was performed, his version of a play Cardenio, a ‘lost’ drama by Shakespeare and Fletcher which Theobald claimed to have found, (but which was later lost again).19 Clearly the only common ground between Cardenio and the separate two-act ‘afterpiece’, now called Capocchio and Dorinna, was its English author. Theobald had claimed to be the originator of the Capocchio and Dorinna interludes, with no mention of Metastasio. He was a controversial figure, his editions of Shakespearian text still today command acceptance and respect, but his criticisms of a rival editor, Alexander Pope, so offended that magnificently satirical poet that he made Theobald (as ‘Tibbald’) the main target of his first Dunciad, his bitter poetic attack on ‘Grub Street hacks’, authors whose pens served whosoever would pay them fees. In 1745, L’impresario/Capocchio and Dorinna appeared, this time at Covent Garden Theatre, in an edited form, as an ‘opera in rehearsal’ within a frame play with songs – one theatre piece physically within another. The frame was a skilled but gentle parody of Pope’s revised Dunciad and the whole was called The Temple of Dullness, (the title echoing Pope’s early ‘allegorical Poem’, as he called it, The Temple of Fame). Pope had shifted the target of his later editions of The Dunciad to Colley Cibber, both playwright (of plays more successful than Pope’s or his Scriblerian colleagues) and theatre manager who had recently been appointed, to Pope’s chagrin, as PoetLaureate. This play was Cibber’s reply, somewhat belated (and possibly written by other hands) because both Pope and Theobald had died the previous year. As John Lacy, Manager of Drury Lane Theatre wrote in his pre-

19

See the the Appendix on Cardenio and Double Falshood in Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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fatory note to the copy of The Temple of Dullness which he sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval and/or censorship: Mr Pope in his last Dunciad, makes the Goddess of Dullness preside over Italian operas, from whence her Character is taken. The Allegory of her being in Love with Merit, but scorn’d and avoided by him, and of his being betrayed by Negligence into the Temple of Dullness is obvious. – The Characters of Capochio and Dorinna are a translation from a favourite Italian Intermezzo, that was written to banter one of their Directors and Singers. – Merit is supposed a Gentleman of good sense and sound judgement and being introduced, chiefly to give his Opinion of what musical Performances ought to be, does not speak in a Recitative. – When the goddess of Dullness finds herself totally slighted and abandoned by Merit, she is glad to take Puppibello, and declares, that henceforward, she and he will be inseparable.’20

There follows Lacy’s brief summary of the Capochio and Dorinna plot, which as an opera in rehearsal had its text much pruned, was relocated in London and adjusted to satirise the London literary and operatic scene, but was otherwise intended to raise the same laughs about opera as always. Both frame play and interludes were given new music (and perhaps some text) by the distinguished English composer of theatre pieces and songs, Thomas Arne. He incorporated into the frame play some settings of songs which he had set for Fielding’s play, Miss Lucy in Town, which the singers of his troupe had performed the previous year in Dublin.21 Pope’s attack, a superbly fluent mixture of arrogance, jealousy and spleen, had been three-pronged. He railed against the lack of literary integrity, his meaning for ‘Dulness’, among Grub Street hack writers, his ‘Dunces’. He targeted his main rivals among them, Theobald, then Cibber. It was his third target, the cult of opera, spoken drama’s rival, introduced in an earlier Dunciad and elaborated in the final version that prompted The Temple of Dullness. Pope had written: Already Opera prepares the way, The sure fore-runner of her [Dulness’s] gentle sway. 22 […] When lo! A Harlot form soft sliding by, With mincing step, small voice and languid eye; Foreign her air, her robe’s discordant pride 20 21

22

Bewley, p. 39. Brian Boydell, A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700-1760 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1988), p. 88 n.1, p. 96. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968) p. 420.

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In patchwork flutt’ring, and her head aside. By singing Peers up-held on either hand, She tripp’d and laugh’d, too pretty much to stand; Cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look, Then thus in quaint Recitative spoke: O Cara ! Cara ! Silence all that train: Joy to great Chaos ! Let Division reign Chromatic tortures shall soon drive them hence, Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense: One trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage, Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage; To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore, And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.23

The Temple of Dullness begins with a ‘Symphony’ which does little to disturb the slumbers of the goddess of Dullness and her attendants; but when it is finished her first words are: Cease, O ye Trebles, double Basses cease: unless your Harmony could lull my sorrows: The drowsy Hum of one invites to sleep The sprightly Squeak of t’others keeps me awake.24

The tone is set; the audience is to enjoy gentle burlesque, an acceptance of the roles as Pope would have them, but with amused resignation in place of venom. When the goddess of Dullness has Merit, induced by Negligence (Pope’s harlot Opera) to visit her she says: The Goddess Dullness I, who for thy Love Would gladly clarify my clouded Brain And for a smile lose Immortality. But that can never be, while witless Bards Presume to write, and in their Garret vile Translate Italian Operas, for Bread. 25

This is perhaps a touchingly realistic and sympathetic reference to Theobald, and incidently a gibe at wealthy dilettanti who criticised colleagues in poverty. Merit, as such, personifies Pope and his Scriblerian coterie. Merit rejects Dullness, who finds consolation with Pupibello, the epitome of the usually reviled Italian castrato singer. But while Merit, typically an English literary

23 24 25

The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 769. Bewley, p. 40. Bewley, p. 41.

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snob, is reading lines from Shakespeare, Negligence appears and he recalls ‘Times misspent with Negligence […] this handmaid has alluring Charms that often lead me from the path to Honour,’26 a comment probably not lost on the audience who knew from Cibber’s memoirs, part of his response to Pope’s attack, the anecdote of his taking the poet, while inebriated, to a convenient prostitute and leaving the little man struggling, an exploit that had not escaped the notice of some scurrilous cartoonists. There were other more kindly references to the local literary and theatrical scene, there were other moments of fun. But ultimately as a response to the The Dunciad, The Temple of Dullness proved to be a damp squib. This frame-plus-rehearsal opera-within-an-opera combination served Drury Lane Theatre as an ‘afterpiece’ several times throughout January 1745, alongside several different ‘main’ spoken dramas, some by Shakespeare, but not specifically related to any of them. Its theatre career ended before the end of that first month when challenged at nearby Covent Garden Theatre by another skit on opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, setting Shakespeare’s skit on spoken drama from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Arne’s brother-in-law, John Frederick Lampe. One can only speculate about what theatrical contexts were in the audience’s minds, prompted by Arne and Lampe: Italian opera seria at another more-aristocratic theatre, a consciousness of the heritage of Shakespeare’s plays, the other dramas at other theatres performed that evening – whatever dramatic or personal context would have helped each member of the audience to respond to the current performance. Capocchio and Dorinna, again with Arne’s music but re-edited from Theobald’s earlier text, re-surfaced in 1768 in Marylebone Gardens, in a programme of two short operatic burlesques intended to show-case two of Arne’s singing pupils. There was no link, except their burlesque form, between the two works in that programme. In 1770, back at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, (by then known as Foote’s after its manager), and in its Marylebone Gardens form, with Arne’s music, L’impresario/Capocchio and Dorinna reached its London nadir and end, performed as a comic item at a concert of glees and catches, while bibulous gentlemen took a break from their singing.27 Despite this variety of performances around London’s theatrical venues, no music for L’impresario by either London composer, Galliard or Arne, has survived, unlike some of the earlier Italian versions. Nor have the settings of the songs taken from the Fielding play and inserted into

26 27

Bewley, p. 47. Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). See in particular illustration 36a, Hogarth’s engraving (1732) ‘Chorus of Singers’.

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the frame play in The Happy Captive, survived. One can only hope that somewhere, some of this music will re-emerge. Satirists and Metastasio There was a persistent flow of derisive and satirical comment in eighteenth century London about its Italian opera, from Spectator articles by Addison and Steele28 in the first decades of the century almost to its end. Was Metastasio subjected to such criticism? There is irony in the fact that The Happy Captive and The Temple of Dullness, neither of which was attributed to him, contributed to that derision. Apart from one polemical pamphlet that named and targeted him,29 the librettist escaped London’s general derision reserved for its Italian and German singers, impresarios and composers. Metastasio was recognized, in London as elsewhere, as a major European dramatist, but as a writer about serious matters, not humour. About thirty of his opera seria texts had London performances during the eighteenth century, starting with three by Handel, then by a variety of composers, although for performance the texts were subjected to quite perverse editing. Most were performed in Italian except Arne’s Artaxerxes and Rolt’s The Royal Shepherd. The original texts circulated in printed collected editions, approved by the author, and his dramas and other poetry commanded positive respect among London literati; some were translated and became the source of spoken dramas.30 Around Dr Johnson were several pro-Metastasians. Arthur Murphy adapted L’isola disabitata as a play for Drury Lane Theatre (and Garrick wrote and spoke a Prologue for it). Anna Williams, Johnson’s housekeeper and protégée, was helped to include a translation (by John Hoole, another Johnson protégé) of that same L’isola disabitata when she published her Miscellanies. Hoole’s translations of Metastasio filled five volumes; and two of them, his Cyrus and his Timanthes (from Demofoonte) reached the stage as plays not operas. Dr Johnson himself however contributed only some minor Metastasian verse translation in playful competition with Mrs Thrale (eventually Mrs Piozzi). Apart from the Johnson circle there were other enthusiasts. In 1798 Dr Charles Burney, the major English musicologist of the time, published a 28 29

30

The Spectator, ed. by D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), I, pp. 22-23; V, p. 401. Polly Farmer (pseudonym), The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers and her Associates for Sorcery, Witchcraft and Enchantment at the Assizes held in the Moon for the County of Gelding before the Rt.Hon. Sir Francis Lash (London: 1778) [British Library 6461e24 (11)]. Michael Burden, ‘Metastasio on the London Stage’, in Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario (Metastasio at Home and Abroad), No. 16, 1999, 111-134.

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three-volume biography of Metastasio, including translations of numerous letters and some poetry (but not mentioning L’impresario).31 Metastasio’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry was translated into English by an English civil servant, Hastings Elwin, whose enthusiasm for Metastasio seems to have dated from the late eighteenth century but who published his translation only in 1838 in Sydney, New South Wales, near the end of his working life.32 Metastasio was appreciated in England, as he was throughout Europe, as a guide on religious and moral matters.33 His religious dramas were edited and published in Chelsea in 1801 by London’s then leading teacher of Italian, Gaetano Polidori as a guide for youth.34 Within the next year or two, three of those sacred dramas, Giuseppe riconosciuto (Joseph and his Brethren), La morte d’Abele (The Death of Abel) and Isacco figura del Redentore (Abraham) were translated by a distinguished woman of high society, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were intended, it seems, not as oratorio texts for musical setting but to be read and performed at home among the children of her extended family.35 The eighteenth century ended with Metastasio’s reputation at a peak in London, although his style of opera seria, in England as elsewhere in Europe, was rapidly going out of fashion. It is only in recent years, after years of neglect and disparagement, and when there is renewed interest in hearing orchestral and vocal sound as it might have been in the eighteenth century, that there is more care in the scholarly appraisal of eighteenth century opera and its sources in the dramatic writings of Metastasio and his contemporaries. This in turn has prompted more precise research into text, its greater dominance in its relationship with the music of opera and some parallels that existed and still exist between spoken drama and those dramas that eventuate as opera.

31 32

33

34 35

Burney, see note 18. Hastings Elwin, Observations on the Poetics of Aristotle by Metastasio rendered into English with a biographical Notice of the Author (Sydney, NSW: Kemp and Fairfax, 1842). Don Neville, ‘Opera or oratorio? Metastasio’s sacred opere serie’, Early Music xxvi, 4 (November 1998) [Metastasio, 1698-1782], pp. 596-607. Gaetano Polidori, Cinque drammi sacri – Scelti per uso della gioventu (Chelsea,1801). Her as yet unpublished translations (1801-6?) of three of Metastasio’s sacred dramas, Abraham, The Death of Abel (unfinished) and Joseph and his Brethren can be found, together with her own plays (until recently thought lost) The Hungarian and The Hebrew Mother, in The Huntington Library, San Marino K-D 571.

Theresia Birkenhauer

Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera, Ariadne auf Naxos

As a play within a play, the opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, is both conventional and deficient. This perspective changes when one considers the dramaturgical construct as a performative mode: on stage the ‘play within the play’ may also signify the ‘image within the image’, and hence a particular form of visuality. The composition of the mise en abyme enables Hofmannsthal and Strauss, through the reflection of different pictorial qualities – metaphorical intensification, symbolic references, quotations from art history, iconographical series – to constitute the theatrical space, not as an action space, but as a pictorial space, a system of wide-ranging relationships, the meaning of which is fulfilled solely in the act of perception by the spectator. It is not the reflective modes of the interruption, disillusionment and distancing that are foregrounded here, but processes involving the reflection (i.e. mirroring) and superimposition of different theatrical pictorial qualities, capable of dissolving rigid symbolic code, of dynamising and transforming canonical cultural attributions.

Using current innovations in theatre as its point of departure, this chapter will analyse the function of the play within a play in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. It argues that, if one reads this dramaturgical construct not in terms of plot, but in terms of staging – that is, in the performative sense – then another aesthetic potential emerges. Rather than foregrounding the reflexive modes of alienation, disillusionment and distance, a performative view places the processes of mirroring and superimposing different theatrical images into relief. We are currently witnessing how the new audiovisual media are changing the pictorial representation of theatre. One rarely experiences theatre performances today that do not use live cameras, video screens or mobile imaging. Virtual bodies are taking over the stage; the laws of gravity, the boundaries of time and space, are dissolving in favour of digital and acoustic arrangements that duplicate the scenes the actors play. I am interested in asking how these new audiovisual techniques of pictorial representation have changed the theatre, and, specifically, how these processes have changed the spectator. How does breaking up the linear direction

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of the production, in which old and new pictorial forms mix, overlap, and confront each other, affect reception of the performance? In an attempt to answer these questions, let me take an historical step backwards and engage with a work from the canon of music theatre, Ariadne auf Naxos, by Hofmannsthal and Strauss. The opera premiered in its first version in 1912; the second and significantly revised version was conceived in 1916 – in the middle of World War One. This was a period of upheaval in media history as well. The possibilities of technical reproduction allowed for an accessibility of pictures never before experienced. At the same time, film, too, became a competitor to be reckoned with. Furthermore, I contend that Ariadne auf Naxos was a response to the disruption of traditional conceptions of the pictorial image as a result of mass-production. Hofmannsthal and Strauss conceived of their opera as an aesthetic experiment that sought consciously to inscribe and reflect upon these contemporaneous, radical changes in the media: a massive flood of pictorial images and decors that threatened to stifle any kind of original perception. Revisions of the Myth: Ariadne auf Naxos around 1900 Ariadne auf Naxos is an opera that continues to polarise both viewers and critics alike. It is considered difficult, and polemical critiques have accompanied the work from the outset. Hofmannsthal himself describes his piece as a ‘most tricky construction’.1 It is this trickiness that I would like to explore here. To begin with, the theme itself is odd: why did Hofmannsthal choose Ariadne auf Naxos in 1911? And why did he write a work with this title that stands in complete contrast to its tradition within genre history? The Ariadne myth is, after all, intimately connected with the history of opera. The earliest known Baroque opera is Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Arianna (1608). And in Europe during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there may well have been in excess of a hundred operatic treatments of the myth.2 Moreover, in the history of the myth, the title Ariadne auf Naxos has always been connected with the emergence of a new genre, the melodrama. It was

1

2

Letter to Strauss (18 December 1911). Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, Gesamtausgabe [1952], ed. by Franz and Alice Strauss, rev. by Willi Schuh, enlarged edition (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1954), p. 129. All translations are my own. See also Silke Köhn, Ariadne auf Naxos. Rezeption und Motivgeschichte von der Antike bis 1600 (Munich: Utz Wissenschaft, 1999) and Paul Nicolai, Der Ariadne-Stoff in der Entwicklungsgeschichte der deutschen Oper. Eine musikkritische Betrachtung nebst einer Zusammenstellung von sämtlichen musikalischen Ariadne-Werken der Welt (Viersen: J.H. Meyer, 1919).

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Johann Christian Brandes’s extremely popular melodrama, with music by Georg Benda, first staged in 1775 and thereafter throughout Germany, that gave rise to countless dramatic and lyrical versions of the legend.3 The actual scandal of the Ariadne myth – the question of why Theseus abandons the woman who has helped him conquer the Minotaur (discussed anew from Ovid to Plutarch) – has completely lost importance in Brandes’s melodrama. Theseus is seen on stage only briefly as he leaves his sleeping lover. The waking Ariadne is at the centre of this drama as she slowly realises that she has indeed been abandoned. In radically shifting moods from disappointment to angst, from fury to lament, from blind trust to deep despair, she experiences the entire gamut of human emotions, until she finally jumps from a cliff and plunges into the sea. This ending is not a part of the original myth: in most versions, the mourning Ariadne is redeemed by Dionysus and becomes his wife. Herder, who in 1802 wrote an Ariadne-Libera as well, expresses his scepticism about this new genre: ‘To hear nothing but the sorrows of an abandoned woman, to see someone in such complete despair that she must finally jump to her death from a cliff – is this a drama? It’s a melodrama.’ 4 What Herder criticises – that an empathetic audience, through the dramatic performance of an actress, experiences nothing but the lamentations of the heroine – determined the very success of this form. In a type of ‘melodramatic primal scene’, the heroine, entirely overpowered by her sense of abandonment, showcases primarily this: a theatre of affect.5 The absence from the drama of Ariadne’s redeemer, the god Dionysus, is precisely what characterises the modernity of this melodramatic form. As such, it deals with a decidedly unheroic and profane experience: the awakening of the female protagonist from her illusion of love and her ensuing desperation, which assumes the quality of a theatrical spectacle in the actress’s performance. This spectacle is now put centre stage, replacing the baroque apotheosis of the divine couple. Hofmannsthal seems to revoke this very corrective from his theatrical representation of the myth. While he entitles his libretto Ariadne auf Naxos, like Brandes’s melodrama, he nonetheless reinscribes the second part of the myth: instead of ending with the melodramatic death of the heroine, the new opera concludes like the old one, with the allegory of Ariadne’s redemption 3 4

5

Ariadne auf Naxos. Ein Duodrama mit Musick (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1777). Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Ariadne-Libera. Ein Melodram’, in Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913), XXVIII (1884), pp. 309-10. See Hermann Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2004).

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through Bacchus (i.e. Dionysus). This is all the more surprising since the melodramatic form became especially popular in musical theatre around the turn of the century, when the lyrical potential of the abandoned woman found renewed melodramatic expression – for example, in Schönberg’s Erwartung (1906). In the twentieth century, on the other hand, the divine couple, Dionysus and Ariadne, was discussed in rather smug or anecdotal terms. André Gide, for instance, offers the following rationalization: ‘The island was Naxos. One says that some time after we (i.e. Theseus and the returning Greeks) left her there, Dionysus came looking for her and married her, which could mean that she found comfort in wine’.6 Nietzsche is an exception: he gives us a new but in no way derogatory interpretation of the Ariadne-Dionysus relationship. Once abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne, no longer humbled into a heroic negation of life, reaffirms her own self and finds in Dionysus a sparring partner in hedonistic philosophizing.7 But Hofmannsthal does not adopt Nietzsche’s reading. What motivated him to make his revision? The Poetic Experiment One answer lies in its scenic conception: its theatrical experiment with form. While Hofmannsthal places the second half of the myth in the centre of the opera – Theseus only appears in Ariadne’s dreams and memory – he nonetheless places the opera Ariadne auf Naxos itself in a type of doubled refraction: on the one hand, as a play within a play, as theatre within theatre, and on the other, as intersected by the actions of a troupe of masked players. The play within a play was already a part of the opera in its initial drafts. Hofmannsthal primarily wanted to give the work a ‘frame of his own invention’;8 then he conceived a reworking of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, in which the opera Ariadne auf Naxos would replace Molière’s Turkish ceremony as a ‘divertissement’, and in which characters from opera seria (serious opera) appear alongside commedia dell’arte characters. This conception of connecting play and opera, which enjoyed only moderate success

6

7

8

André Gide, ‘Theseus [1946]’, in Gesammelte Werke. ed. by Raimund Theis and others, 12 vols (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1989-2000), IV: Erzählende Werke, ed. by Peter Schnyder, trans. by Ernst Robert Curtius (1997), p. 296. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Mystère d’Ariane selon Nietzsche’, in Critique et clinique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993), pp. 126-34. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Dionysos-Dithyramben’, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols (Munich: Deutscher Tschenbuch Verlag; Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), VI, pp. 397-401. Letter to Strauss (13 February 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 184.

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in 1912 under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Stuttgart, was revised due to difficulties experienced in the stage production. The Molière framework fell away and Hofmannsthal composed a ‘frame of his own invention’, in which he expanded an open costume scene of the first version into a prologue. This version, which premiered in Vienna in 1916, is the one usually performed today. In the revised version, Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain is replaced by an anonymous patron – ‘the richest man in Vienna’ – who has assigned a young composer the task of creating an opera seria, Ariadne auf Naxos, for an evening social. At the last minute, however, through a master of ceremonies, he orders the players to ‘serve’, as he says, the heroic opera and a dance masquerade simultaneously. The action within this new frame emphasizes the social realm of art much more poignantly: the arbitrary will that the master of the house displays is less an example of bourgeois taste than of the power that money exercises over art. The forced conflation of the serious and the comic leads to a disrespectful view of the exalted tradition of opera, for example, when Zerbinetta summarizes the opera in the prologue: ‘The play goes like this: a princess is jilted by her groom and her next suitor hasn’t yet arrived. The stage portrays a desert island.’ 9 Are we dealing here with a travesty of the serious genre? This is certainly possible, considering the tradition of the Italian commedia, especially the tradition of literary comedy.10 And so it came to be that Ariadne auf Naxos has often been performed in this way, that is, as a blending of high and low art. Or perhaps we are dealing here with a parody of the myth itself? Around 1900, the couple Ariadne and Dionysus was often the butt of satire. Franz Blei chose such a construction in 1909, using the commedia dell’arte figures for his ‘humorous opera’, Scaramuccia auf Naxos. There the impoverished theatre director of the impromptu comics travels to Naxos in order to engage the scandal-ridden Ariadne as a star. But he arrives too late. Dionysus has beaten him to it: Ariadne, far from becoming the spectacle of extreme desperation, rediscovers the passion of love in the arms of an older Dionysus.11

9

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11

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos, Oper in einem Aufzuge nebst einem Vorspiel’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Rudolf Hirsch and others (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1975-), XXIV: Operndichtungen 2, ed. by Manfred Hoppe (1985), p. 22. See Philippe Monnier, Venise au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1907), especially chapter 8, which deals with the parodic tradition of the commedia erudita. Hofmannsthal was reading Monnier whilst working on Ariadne. ‘Scaramuccia auf Naxos. Eine heitere Oper [1909]’, in Vermischte Schriften, 6 vols (Munich & Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1911), IV, p. 345.

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Hofmannsthal and Strauss, however, had more in mind with their experimental form than just connecting two genres by way of parodically mirroring the serious through the comic. The simultaneity of opera seria and opera buffa, prescribed by the patron in order to relax the sternness of the tragedy and enliven the stage design, manifests itself for the audience, in every staging, as a mirrored reflection of a different kind. Mirrorings The part of the opera that we see shows us nothing of the mixture announced in the prologue. There is neither the chaotic confusion, nor the comic inversion, nor the improvised montage of serious opera and commedia dell’arte; rather, we find their suspended synchronicity. This has been repeatedly criticized as an aesthetic simplification: the social bite of the prologue finds no continuation in the second part and is drowned out by operatic bliss.12 That the frame narrative of the new version is never closed thus seems seriously inconsistent and has prompted the invention of many a closure in order to remedy the apparent problem. This perspective changes if we view the dramaturgic construction of the theatre within the theatre in terms of its actual staging, as performative mode. The play within a play always already implies an ‘image within an image’ and, with it, a certain type of visualization. In fact, the connection between the prologue and the opera section is not grounded in the action. Rather than a collision between heroic opera and commedia dell’arte, the audience witnesses a theatre of well-defined contrast; that is, a theatre which presents a suspended simultaneity of figures, styles, and forms. The transformative power of theatre resides precisely in the discontinuity between prologue and opera. The plot of the opera is simple: Ariadne is at the centre of the action, while three nymphs, with an air alternately of indifference and involvement, expound on Ariadne’s mourning. Vis-à-vis this group we have the commedia troupe, which performs its art in vain. Harlequin sings a song of consolation; all four men perform a dance routine, finally Zerbinetta sings an aria about infidelity and love – but all to no avail. Only Dionysus is capable of liberating Ariadne from her grief and mourning. What this narrative simplicity enables is the development of a performative simultaneity as poetic and theatrical principle. The scenic action – extremely meagre, as Strauss himself re-

12

See Volker Klotz, ‘Soziale Komik bei Hofmannsthal/Strauss: Zum Rosenkavalier mit Stichworten zur Ariadne’, in Hofmannsthal und das Theater, ed. by Wolfram Mauser, Hofmannsthal-Forschungen (Vienna: Karl M. Halosar, 1981), VI, pp. 65-80.

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peatedly criticized – is no more than a foil for the presentation (mise en scène) of symbolic, mythical, and histrionic relationships. The stage is not constituted as a space for representational action, but as a pictorial space – a structure of multivalent relationships, whose meaning is realized solely in the perception of the spectators. Seen from this perspective, the function of the prologue in the new version of 1916 becomes understandable. It does not serve the prologue’s conventional purpose of preparing the way for an understanding of the story of the mythological opera, nor is it a replacement for the old frame narrative. It functions much more as its own frame, explicitly displaying the pictorial character of the scenic action and defining the representational mode of the stage as a space for pictorial allegory. This happens by way of the composition, whereby two levels manifest themselves here as well. The prologue, with its backstage scenario of the two unequal acting groups preparing for their appearance in the house of the richest man in Vienna, allows for the exhibition of a dramatic microcosm of social, aesthetic, and existential contrasts. This is a scherzo about dependence, power and desire to show off, opportunism and competition, for the representatives of both high and low art. We are shown a contrast of generations, of mentalities, of conceptions of love between, as well as across, social groups; we are shown rigorous rivalries on the one side, light-hearted peer pressure on the other, enthusiasm and conformity, economic scheming, and exalted ideologies of art. The prologue, placed as such before the opera, produces the viewpoint necessary for the spectator’s perception of the opera section: an awareness of the reflective mode of representation, namely of mirroring, of ironic disjunctions and correspondences. In this sense, the play within a play does not function as a framing narrative; its principal function is to produce a specific vision for the spectator – the perception of the stage as a space for the presentation of pictorial forms. Opening the Theatrical Space: the Stage as Pictorial Realm The staging of mirror reflections and superimpositions manifests itself especially at the level of different pictorial qualities and forms: metaphorical condensation, symbolic allusions, references to art history, iconographic sequences, and allegorical word images. In the juxtaposition of these various pictorial forms the stage itself is transformed into a performative model; in it, historically distinguishable forms of representing myth are combined into a synchronic theatrical image. A few examples will illustrate this. From the beginning, Hofmannsthal ties the opposition between tragic and comic theatre to cultural-historical

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stratifications. With Ariadne auf Naxos, Greek myth and antiquity are seen through the lens of Molière’s era – Ariadne appears in hoop skirts – as well as through that of the Gründerjahre (Germany’s industrial boom era following the foundation of the Wilhelminian Empire 1871-73) by way of the plaster ornaments characterizing that age.13 With the commedia dell’arte, we see both Gozzi’s Venice and the world of Callot’s engravings, and at the same time, the theatrical experimentations of Craig and Reinhardt at the turn of the century. By the superimposition of different historical projections – both of antiquity and of the commedia dell’arte – these different pictorial levels become mutually transparent. Clear symbolic contours dissolve, allegorical signifiers become dynamic. Hence, the play-within-a-play construction does not serve to represent dramatic action as a doubling of the theatre on stage; it serves much more as a theatrical form layering different historical media images of myth and of theatre. The composition of the scenic space amplifies and supplements these symbolic references. Hofmannsthal’s ‘construction’ works with the visuality of the stage:14 his libretto is always a scenic – and that means especially a visual – design. The dramaturgical plans include numerous sketches and stage directions. They are a constituent element of the composition and not at all the expression of a dilettantish theatre lover. As Hofmannsthal relates to Strauss regarding their division of labour, ‘Everything scenic, including the artistic and stylistic elements, the dances, etc. is my duty’.15 Many of the stage directions refer to iconographic traditions. The chorus of the three nymphs, for example, alludes to the threesome figuration of feminine figures whose iconic tradition reaches from Botticelli’s Three Graces to the dance figures of the Wiesenthal sisters, and continues further still. The sleeping Ariadne alludes to an image that begins with the Vatican’s Ariadne and reaches to de Chirico’s Ariadne, from the pre-Raphaelite de Morgan’s Ariadne in Naxos to Henri Moore’s Reclining Figure, thereby constituting a picture type all its own. Other stage directions implicate metaphorical condensation. Ariadne’s cave alludes to the topos of mourning-turned-to-stone that especially Ovid connects with her. At the same time Hofmannsthal, who places the cave 13

14 15

Hofmannsthal in a letter to Strauss (23 July 1911): ‘Ariadne, von Theseus verlassen, vom Bacchus getröstet, kurz Ariadne auf Naxos, das ist wie Amor und Psyche etwas, das jeder vor sich sieht, und wäre es auch als gipserne Ofenfigur’ (‘Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, consoled by Bacchus, that is like Amor and Psyche something that everyone can see everywhere, if only as a plaster of Paris statue on the mantelpiece’), in Briefwechsel, p. 120. Letter to Strauss (13 February 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 184. Letter to Strauss (25 May 1911), in Briefwechsel, p. 105.

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centre stage in a sketch, alludes to the structural composition of Böcklin’s Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead). The verbal image of the desert island is thus transported into an art historical context, which – no differently from the caves, and the canopy that takes up Ariadne and Dionysus at the end – serves as an interior space, an inner landscape. The list of referenced pictures and iconographies can be continued: the image of the star into which Ariadne is transformed in the song of Bacchus, for instance, alludes to a famous motif from baroque painting: Bacchus’s and Ariadne’s triumphal march.16 All of these pictorial layers are gleaned from the theatre and from the plastic arts. Hofmannsthal makes clear that the theatrical space is one of spectres, a confrontation with past generations. These references are, however, always represented as such, as cultural and art historical correspondences from the iconographical tradition of the myth. This accentuates their pictorial and set-like quality, never intended as credible symbols. The stage becomes a landscape of art and the theatre a space in which historically determined transformations of myth meet simultaneously. These different projections are held together through a perspective that Hofmannsthal invokes as his model: ‘In Poussin’s style’,17 as the stage direction states. This does not refer to a specific theme of Poussin’s, but to the composition of his paintings. As in Poussin’s antique landscapes, the theatrical stage should open up a perspective that ‘presents’ – in the sense of literally ‘making present’ for the audience – the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous and incongruous.18 Superimpositions On this theatrical stage the worlds of the two genres meet. And just as the personages of the heroic opera – Dionysus and four women (Ariadne with the three nymphs) – are symmetrically counterbalanced by the actors of the commedia – Zerbinetta and four men – so too do their worlds, identities, and feelings mirror one another in ways that call into question their firm alliances. For the spectator, this involves becoming aware of correspondences and references that contradict conventional attributions; for example, when Harlequin is deeply touched by the grieving Ariadne and the mythological figure, turned to plaster, suddenly gains life through the performance of the actress; or when Zerbinetta, in her aria of consolation for Ariadne, becomes so emotionally involved in the raging fluctuations of her own life that finally she herself needs consolation. This multivalent structure of correspondences – 16 17 18

See, for example, Jacopo Tintoretto’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1576/77). Hofmannsthal, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’, p. 109. On Poussin and Hofmannsthal, see Ursula Renner, ‘Die Zauberschrift der Bilder’: Bildende Kunst in Hofmannsthals Texten (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), pp. 468-69.

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Hofmannsthal’s recourse to allegorical images – has been viewed predominantly in terms of an intellectually saturated nineteenth century and its historical love of the arts, a collection of references steeped in tradition that secure a guaranteed meaning and immunize the work against a dreaded nihilism. However, this view overlooks the changing modes of aesthetic perception that unfold within the work. In contrast to the Poussin model, the spectator’s gaze no longer melds into a harmonious whole, but superimposes different projections, from the trivial to the sublime, onto the myth. The stage no longer falls into line with the allegorical space of Baroque opera, but is clearly transformed into one of modernity. A holistic interpretation of the myth gives way to a reading of its superimposed historical variants. This binds Hofmannsthal to the concept of theatre as form, that is, to a theatre in which the spectator’s own production of meaning becomes central. In contrast to the pictorial space of Baroque theatre, that of modernity cannot be re-translated. The referenced pictures, mirrorings and superimpositions can no longer be read in terms of their coded mythological meanings. Hofmannsthal’s construction is aimed at spectators who are capable of weaning themselves from definite referential meanings, from the notion of an original, immutable sense, and who are instead called upon to discover the multiplicity of symbolic allusions and hence their instability. The audience is thus called upon to discover unexpected correspondences and surprising similarities. As such, the performative mode implies as well a transformation of the spectator who re-enacts the realm of his or her own cultural portraits. What Hofmannsthal says summarily about the theatre of Reinhardt: ‘He has changed the act of listening’ and has used all the histrionic methods of expression ‘in order to dissolve (aufheben) the usual relationship between spectator and actor’ 19 – can be applied just as well to the type of theatre that Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss conceived with Ariadne auf Naxos. The reception of this theatre remains difficult to this very day. When Hofmannsthal speaks of the ‘playfully artistic conception’ of the opera Ariadne, while at the same time of ‘its unpopular and aristocratic nature’,20 he does so because of its challenges for the spectator. This type of theatre relies on a spectator whose attention is not focused on a dramatic plot but on the ‘alter-

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Vorrede’, in Reinhardt und seine Bühne: Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen Theaters, ed. by Ernst Stern and Heinz Herald (Berlin: Dr. Eysler, 1920), pp. 5-6. Letter to Strauss (4 March 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 187.

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nating play of effects,’ 21 the symbolic allusions and allegorical references, the layers and mirror reflections of the pictorial forms of the myth. This spectator is no longer simply impressed; his or her posture is that of a reader who stands analytically vis-à-vis the pictorial material. The play-within-a-play construction has the function of producing precisely this type of expectation on the part of the spectator. Even today the pictorial qualities of the theatre continue to change. Doublings, mirror reflections, superimpositions, and projections have become common terms for technical procedures. However, the images are thereby robbed of their pictorial quality; they are inserted as swiftly readable signs for conveying information. Hofmannsthal’s theatre counters such static picture codes. His theatre places its trust in the imaginative potential of the spectator to place these images in correspondences with one another and thus to make them move. It probes different possibilities of an aesthetic awareness that is capable of responding to the simultaneity of unbounded cultural and historical experiences.

21

Hofmannsthal insists vehemently on the part of the spectator: ‘Damit ein Theaterstück zu seiner letzten, vollständigsten Wirkung komme, muß der Dichter dem Regisseur freien Raum lassen, der Regisseur dem Schauspieler, der Schauspieler aber dem Zuschauer: In dessen Gemüt erst darf sich das Wechselspiel der Wirkungen vollenden’ (‘In order for a theatre play to reach ist utmost, most complete effect, the poet has to give free space to the director, the director to the actor, and the actor to the spectator. The alternating play of effects can only reach fulfillment in the spectator’s mind’). Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Max Reinhardt’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1979-), Reden und Aufsätze II, 1914-1924 (1979), p. 316.

2. The Play within the Play and Film

Erika Greber

Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene Onegin

A structural and imagological critique of recent film and classical opera adaptations of Eugene Onegin shows that this ironic double-layered novel is misrepresented in the supposedly typical Russian psychological realism. But a congenial adaptation should use illusion-breaking cinematography. The intermedial comparison is used for a kind of ‘media analysis in reverse’: a look at the literary text with regard to its potential for performance. The cinematic point of view reveals that the novel is full of theatre/opera motifs and stage scenes and, more general, that its discourse is shaped by meta-theatical qualities. Pushkin’s self-reflexive novel with its permanent shifts between ‘life’ and ‘literature’ is well suited to be staged in the mode of Shakespeare in Love. To be added is the garrulous narrator-author in an off-off-stage position, as if sitting in the box and watching the performances, talking to other spectators, himself stepping on stage. Arguably the opera-house idea offers a new type of the play within the play and an option for the cinematic adaptation of a novel with a self-conscious narrator.

I. The formula of the play within the play, when borrowed from theatre and applied to narrative epic, seems to shift its meaning from the specific ‘theatre play’ to a more general notion of ‘play’, which is to say playfulness and ludism. Yet in the case of Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, the theatrical concept of play is still valid to a certain extent because this type of narrative ludism can be conceived of as having a special relation to the performing arts. Thus in approaching a novel from the perspective of theatrical performance, I will not be dealing with the normal narrative forms of reduplication known as mise en abyme, but rather with a meta-reflexive narration that emerges from an interaction between drama and novel; i.e., with certain types of metare-flexivity that can be produced by linking both discourses. The common point of reference will be film: film as a medium and genre, with subgenres such as the dramatic film and the narrative film – and two films in

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particular, namely the new British adaptation of Eugene Onegin 1 and the American production Shakespeare in Love.2 In commenting on the movies, I wish to use the transmedial perspective to develop a new methodological approach – a kind of ‘media analysis in reverse’: not to examine the film from a literary point of view, but to look at the novel from a cinematic point of view. This means uncovering its audiovisual and theatrical aspects as well as its meta-dramatic potential. 2. Movie adaptations always depart significantly from the original and therefore tend to be disappointing for those who know the original text. But bashing the ‘literary film’ in that way would be all too easy. The point in question should not be one of literal faithfulness to an original but rather one of respecting its poetics. On such a basis, one should judge the merits of the film medium by its own standards. In this respect the Onegin film is quite demanding, and some reviewers even found it too ‘arty’.3 However, its artfulness is of another kind, one that does not correspond to the poetics of play. This deviation was all the more noticeable as the Onegin film happened to come out shortly after Shakespeare in Love – an incidental but very instructive parallel. In both films, the title role is played by one of the famous Fiennes brothers, and seeing Joseph Fiennes acting as Romeo and Shakespeare made one hope for a similar double role for Ralph Fiennes as Onegin and Pushkin. But in the Onegin film there was no trace of the double-layered structure of the original text. For a hypothetical comparison, one should imagine an adaptation of Tristram Shandy in which the self-conscious garrulous narrator were missing – something that could no longer be called Sternian in any real sense. The same applies to Pushkin’s work whose adaptation is very non-Pushkinian. Yet the other film has a distinct Shakespearean touch. If only Pushkin had been half as well recreated as Shakespeare was created. The crucial point in both cases relates to the idea of play within the play. While Shakespeare in Love is a witty artificial compilation of Shakespearean 1

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Onegin. Directed by Martha Fiennes. Written by Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui. Music by Magnus Fiennes. With Ralph Fiennes, Liv Tyler, Martin Donoyan, Lena Headey, Toby Stephens. Great Britain 1999. Shakespeare in Love. Directed by John Madden. Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Music by Stephen Warbeck. With Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush. USA 1998. Jeffrey Gantz, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Boston Phoenix, April 3, 2000 ; Nicholas Dawson, ‘Onegin (Review)’, IOFILM: FILM: REVIEW .

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material into a quintessential metafictional play within the play, the Onegin film lacks the metafictional dimension. Whereas for Shakespeare this meant overstating the idea, for Pushkin this meant understating and underexposing it. The main device for the Shakespeare film was the added meta-theatrical frame and resulting redoublement.4 Yet Pushkin’s work could have been transposed into film even without artificial additions, since the text already is a metapoetic narrative on just that topic: ‘Pushkin in Love’. To be specific: The fictional Pushkin – a poet-novelist and friend of Onegin – is in love with his Muse, an allegory that turns into flesh and is eventually transformed into the heroine Tatyana. Throughout the novel there are permanent shifts between the two worlds, between ‘life’ and ‘literature’. By leaving out this ludic oscillation, the film downgrades the original. No wonder everyone wonders why the author of such a seemingly conventional piece5 should be a national poet and why the Russians adore this work and know its lines by heart. However, as soon as you restore the metapoetic level, you get the genuine pleasure of the work – even in translation, as evident in the last stanza of the first chapter: I’ve drawn a plan and a projection, the hero’s name decided too. Meanwhile my novel’s opening section is finished, and I’ve looked it through meticulously; in my fiction there’s far too much of contradiction, but I refuse to chop or change. The censor’s tribute, I’ll arrange;

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The play-within-the-play structure resembles the technique used for turning Don Quijote into the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha (1965) and the eponymous musical film (1972) where the novelistic plot is performed in a prison when Miguel Cervantes and his fellow prisoners await a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition. Surprisingly, Man of La Mancha is not mentioned at all in Robert Stam’s study on reflexive narrative and cinematic techniques; he uses the novel Don Quijote solely as a reference for narrative self-reflection. Cf. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature. From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). In chapter 3, Stam discusses the inadequacy of cinematic adaptations of three self-conscious novels: Fielding’s Tom Jones (by Tony Richardson), Nabokov’s Lolita (by Stanley Kubrick), and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (by Karel Reisz). ‘The danger with western audiences may be that they will wonder what all the Russian fuss is about, finding the story of love spurned and love lost melodramatic and predictable, and the wit only occasionally approaching the level sustained in recent film adaptations of Jane Austen.’ (Julian Graffy, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Sight and Sound, December 1999 issue ).

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I’ll feed the journalists for dinner fruits of my labour and my ink... So now be off to Neva’s brink, you newborn work, and like a winner earn for me the rewards of fame – misunderstanding, noise, and blame! (1.60)6

Quotes from Pushkin’s novel are presented here in various translations, all versified and rhymed like the original ‘Onegin stanza’.7 For each quoted stanza, the best imitation is chosen from among three translators: the famous classical 1977 translation by Charles Johnston,8 the bright new 1995 translation by James E. Falen,9 and the interesting 1999 recreation by Douglas Hofstadter, a scholar visibly in love with Pushkin.10 3. Both films are of quite different status and different style. Though Shakespeare in Love is not a genuine ‘literary film’, it provides an insightful contrast to the Pushkin adaptation. The drama film can highlight the conditions of a screenplay and film that has to be derived from a narrative text. Shakespeare in Love is structured throughout by the idea of the play within the play, with multiple level shifts, and with all those scenes of mistaken identity, transvestitism and ambivalence well known from Elizabethan theatre. The internal play (namely Romeo and Juliet) is produced step-bystep in every sense; we see it being written, rehearsed and staged – a kind of meta-theatrical cinema resembling the pattern that has come to be called ‘The Making of …’. Whereas documentary ‘making-of’ films normally present a fragmented series of backstage scenes, here they are combined to form a perfect illusionist story. The act of loving and the act of writing become mutual

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8 9

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Canto and stanza numbers are indicated in brackets, refererring to any possible Onegin edition. The quoted translation is by Charles Johnston; cf. note 8. For a discussion of the combinatory rhyme scheme of this specific sonnet stanza, cf. Erika Greber, ‘Reconceptualizing the Sonnet from a Postmodern Perspective’ (in print for Poetics Today). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by Charles Johnston (London: Penguin, 1979). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by Douglas R. Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Cf. Hofstadter’s introduction to the translation – finished in Pushkin’s own cabinet on the 200th anniversary of his birth – and his great book on the art of translation (among others, on translating sonnets and Onegin): Le Ton beau de Marot. In Praise of the Music of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a discussion of the translation’s quality, cf. Adrian Wanner, ‘Review of Douglas Hofstadter’s Translation of Eugene Onegin’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37 (2000), 83-86.

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metaphors (the making of ~ making love). The catch to this double-edged production is that play and reality may switch at any time. This is even emphasised in the script by special stage commentaries. This calculated ambivalence is best demonstrated by the rehearsal phase of the famous balcony scene. The role of Juliet is (in accordance with Elizabethan practice) played by a young boy, while Romeo is here played by a woman pretending to be a man, namely Lady Viola. At the same time, in private ‘real’ life, Viola is conducting a secret love affair with the young author Will Shakespeare. (The couple is played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes.) INT. DE LESSEPSES’ HOUSE. VIOLA’S BEDROOM. EVENING. Will and Viola. Viola dressed as Thomas. He has a present for her – a neatly written manuscript of his play, on sheets folded to octavo size. WILL.

WILL. VIOLA. WILL

VIOLA

WILL.

The play. All written out for you. I had the clerk at Bridewell do it, he has a good fist for lettering. She wants to accept the present with joy, but something in his mood restrains her. (Cont’d). There’s a new scene … He turns the pages and shows her. Will you read it for me? (he knows it). ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale and not the lark That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.’ (reading). ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’ The words of the scene become Will’s and Viola’s, their way of saying the farewells they cannot utter. ‘Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I. It is some meteor that the sun exhales To be to thee this night a torchbearer …’

INT. THE ROSE THEATRE. BACKSTAGE. DAY. But the scene is continuing with Viola dressed as ‘Thomas.’ Somewhere behind and up above the stage, in a deserted corner among rigging, bits of scenery, etc., they speak the lines and we hardly know ourselves whether it is rehearsal or

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lovemaking. But after a few moments it is definitely lovemaking. Their clothes start coming away, their words interrupted by kisses.11

Another comment in the screenplay refers to a scene during the première where the lovers’ words fit both play and life: We cannot tell whether this is the play or their life. The audience, and the rest of the world, might as well not exist. Will turns from her and begins to descend from the ‘balcony.’12

The shifting play is emphasised by smooth transitions between onstage and offstage and backstage. What is even more important is the ambiguity that is imparted to Shakespeare’s original verse lines (sometimes intensifying the erotic, sometimes the literary aspect). In comparison, the Onegin film lacks such metafictional wit. But rather than demonstrate its conventional side (e.g., the kitschy duel), I wish to emphasise a certain deconstructive play which sets this British film apart from mainstream Hollywood cinema: e.g., its interesting musical score and the deliberate slowness and coldness which create a certain narrative distance. The acknowledged highlights of both the film and the novel are the two letter scenes. The letters are the only passages where the film uses rhyme and metre (overall the film’s language is prose, dismissing the complex Onegin stanza). In terms of media aesthetics, the two letter scenes are even the best film sequences. This results from temporal dissociation by parallel montage: the letters are already being delivered while Tatyana or Onegin are still writing. And the contents are revealed only much later, during Onegin’s belated nostalgic reminiscence about Tatyana’s love, with her imaginary voice reading the letter aloud. Such nonrealistic dissociations and refractions correspond to the original poetics of nonlinearity and digression. However, here they serve to produce psychological illusion instead of ironic remoteness. This is especially true for Tatyana’s letter scene with its specifically Russian undertones. (Tatyana is played by Liv Tyler; Onegin by Ralph Fiennes.) What image is being constructed here? Nothing could be further from Pushkin’s text than an attitude of empathic sentimentality. And yet this paradigm has come to determine virtually all Onegin adaptations. The duplicity of Romantic irony is scaled down to an intimate psycho-drama. In addition, this style is deemed ‘genuinely Russian’. The movie makes no attempt to explicitly problematise Russianness itself, as is the case in the

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Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 115. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, p. 140.

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novel. There, the Russian aristocracy speaks French and the narrator ironises foreign cultural influence and his own foreign and loan vocabulary. Onegin is a Byronic dandy with an English spleen, Lensky is a German idealist, and Tatyana idolises French novels; though upholding Russian folk tradition, she can't write Russian herself, so the narrator has to translate her letter for the reader. In contrast, the monolingual Tatyana of the film doesn’t display any multicultural refractions, and there is no trace of heteroglossia (in the Bakhtinian sense),13 no sense of Russia’s cultural ambivalence and irresolute selfpositioning between East and West. A film production that leaves out precisely these aspects ignorantly fosters idyllisation and mythologisation. 4. In view of the contrasting representation of the two classics in present-day cinema, one may ask: How can a film adaptation (Pushkin’s case) be more remote from its model than a mere invention (Shakespeare’s case)? In part, this is due to differing production concepts. The screenplay for Shakespeare in Love was written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, a playwright well known for his witty postmodern reworking of Shakespearean plays. The expert consultant for the film production was Stephen Greenblatt, the renowned Renaissance and Shakespeare specialist. As for Onegin, its production team (scriptwriters Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui) did not have comparably close ties to Pushkin criticism and Russian Studies. But the difference lies not only in professional literary knowledge; it has much to do with the differing cultural contexts and with images. In an English context, Shakespeare naturally fares much better than Pushkin, who has to be adapted as well as translated, not just linguistically but also culturally – something that raises doubly complicated intermedial and intercultural questions. Thus another explanation for the distortion of Pushkin’s work must be sought in the international image of Russian literature, which is almost exclusively associated with realism and not with meta-literary play. Therefore in a movie that is supposed to represent a genuine Russian classic, there is no place for the sparkling irony and the wit of Pushkin’s narrator. Indeed, all adaptations of Pushkin’s verse novel for foreign audiences – in opera, ballet, television, and cinema14 – have turned the multilayered romantic text into a 13

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The only bilingual passage, the episode with the French teacher, has a merely comical function. This is especially true for foreign-language productions, but also for the Russian libretto and those opera stagings which stick to the opera’s simple plot structure. In some instances, the rearrangement of stage productions for TV or video tape has more sophistication. Furthermore, the video medium established at least a simple heterodiegetic plane by retaining the

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plain realistic melodrama of unfulfilled love topped off by a dashing duel. Pushkin is, as it were, recast in a Tolstoyan or Chekhovian mold and smoothed down into a popular, familiar Russian style.15 Thus in the performing arts and visual media and on an international scale, Pushkin’s masterpiece is consistently misrepresented; the Russian national poet’s image is strangely distorted into something like a pale forerunner and not-yet-true master of the Russian soul. This explains the inevitable ambivalence of all the Onegin adaptations. On the whole, the Onegin film was praised for its soulful and beautiful representation of nineteenth-century Russian society. Some film critics found it insufficiently psychological,16 while more informed reviewers have a faint idea that the audience might deliberately be left without ‘enough information to psychologize why [the characters act as they act]’.17 In either case, the yardstick is psychological realism – something totally inadequate to a work like Eugene Onegin, which epitomises Romantic irony.18 The problematic preference of Realism over Romanticism also holds true for the Russians themselves and their national literary historiography, which in a way mirrors the international image. Because Russia entered world literature by way of Realism, the realistic paradigm has come to dominance within Russia as well. This has strongly affected the Onegin representations in popular media, beginning with Tchaikovsky’s great opera (1878). Thus it was a Russian who first reduced the work to mere plot.19 Yet the Russians do

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narrator’s voice. Research about the history of Onegin stagings and their filmed versions is still lacking. There is only one German article on intermedia comparison: Rainer Grübel, ‘Mediale Transformationen des Erzählens. Tat’janas Liebesbrief in Puschkins Versroman Evgenij Onegin, Petr Čajkovskijs gleichnamiger Oper und Martha Fiennes’ Verfilmung’, in Analysieren als Deuten. Wolf Schmid zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Lazar Fleishman, Christine Gölz, and Aage A. Hansen-Löve (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2004), pp. 631-64. As one film critic remarks, there is an ‘abundance of lampoon-ready Russian-lit signifiers: a horse-carriage rumbling across snowy tundra, a fatal duel on a misty morning.’ (Dennis Lim, ‘Fiennes and Hawke Get the Cold Shoulder’, Village Voice, (1999), Dec. 22-28). ‘While we can identify the causes and symptoms, we can’t identify with the subjects.’ (Abbie Bernstein, ‘Beautifully Crafted, yet Cold. Onegin rates B-’, ifmagazine, 12 (2000) 2/4). Nick Davis, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Nick Davis’ Movie Archives . Monika Greenleaf, ‘The Sense of Not Ending: Romantic Irony in Eugene Onegin’, in her Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 205-286. A recent study on Tchaikovsky’s opera argues that there are nevertheless subtle musical ways of echoing Romantic irony, cf. Jennifer Butler, Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Opera (Ph. Diss. University of New South Wales, Australia, 2004).

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have the original, while outside of Russia, Tchaikovsky’s opera has come to substitute for the novel. And now, in the era of cinema and DVD, the Onegin film will no doubt reinforce that pattern. Proceeding from such a structural and conceptual critique of common Pushkin adaptations, I want to argue that rather than modeling Eugene Onegin on supposedly typical Russian psychological realism, something that is essentially post-Pushkinian and entirely alien to the poetics of Romantic irony, one should shape it in the tradition of English satire and mock-heroic epic, in the spirit of Sterne and Byron, who (not without reason) were Pushkin’s own intertextual sources.20 As an ideal team for devising a congenial screenplay, one could think of Douglas Hofstadter and Vikram Seth, who are well versed in the Onegin stanza and in the deconstructive techniques of Romantic irony.21 Interestingly enough, Pushkin himself anticipated the selective reception of his multifaceted text, as evidenced in his self-ironic comment where he addresses the reader in one of the last stanzas of the novel: Whatever, reader, your reaction, And whether you be foe or friend, I hope we part in satisfaction... As comrades now. Whatever end You may have sought in these reflections – Tumultuous, fond recollections, Relief from labours for a time, Live images, or wit in rhyme, Or maybe merely faulty grammar – God grant that in my careless art, For fun, for dreaming, for the heart... For raising journalistic clamour, You've found at least a crumb or two. And so let’s part, farewell to you! (8.49)22

Most likely, Pushkin would have enjoyed the Onegin film – he did not condemn one-sided appropriations and expressed tolerance for all kinds of biased responses. However, this ironic tolerance in effect undermines itself, for the

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Viktor Shklovskij, ‘Evgeny Onegin (Pushkin and Sterne)’ [1923], in Twentieth Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. by Victor Erlich (New Haven 1975), pp. 63-80; Monika Greenleaf, ‘Pushkin’s Byronic Apprenticeship: A Problem in Cultural Syncretism’, Russian Review, 53 (1994), 382-98. While Hofstadter translated Onegin (cf. note 10), Seth recreated it in a novel of his own written in Onegin stanzas (The Golden Gate, New York: Vintage International, 1986). Translation by James E. Falen (cf. note 9), with minor changes.

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very words that allow for such freedom are necessarily absent from plot-centered, free adaptations of the ironic original. The question therefore is how to preserve the original double mode with its meta-level of the ironic garrulous narrator. 5. In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists suggested a system of so-called ‘resounding surtitles’: lines of the poem in Pushkin’s handwriting should appear briefly on screen while being simultaneously spoken by a narrator.23 However, this would have looked too stiff, quite contrary to Pushkin’s style; furthermore, because the media of script and performance are categorically different there was no possibility of playing with boundaries and boundary transgressions. This leads to the conclusion that full metafictional ambivalence could be better achieved by transposing both narrative levels into the same medium, that is, an audiovisual performance. As in the verbal narrative, this makes a flexible change of levels possible. As a consequence, one should make use of play-within-a-play structures. I want to suggest that an effective – and at the same time more ‘true’! – cinematic transposition of Eugene Onegin should rely on theatrical mise en scène and meta-theatre. And here is where Shakespeare comes into play again, both his own theatre work as well as the fictionalised film theatre. The meta-literary/meta-theatrical quality of Shakespeare in Love is a suitable exemplar of an adequate contemporary representation of the venerable classics in a popular medium. And when it comes to stage productions of Eugene Onegin (be it opera, theatre, or cinema), one has to look back to Shakespearean theatre – not least because it was the source of innovation for Pushkin the playwright. During his eight years of work on Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote his best dramas: Boris Godunov (1825/1831) and the four ‘Little Tragedies’ The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and The Feast During the Plague (1830), with their characteristic mixture of the comic and the tragic and their subtle use of mise en abyme constructions.24 A look at the novel from a stage perspective, against the background of Elizabethan theatre and modern theatre film, reveals that Pushkin’s verse

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Osip Brik and O. Leonidov, ‘Kėkranizatsii Evgenija Onegina’ [1937], Kinovedčeskie zapiski, No. 42 (1999), 246-51 and 251-54. Cf. also Roman Jakobson’s comment on cinematicvisual aspects: ‘Marginal Notes on Eugene Onegin’ [1937], in Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1979) V, pp. 287-93. Cf. Erika Greber, ‘Dramatische Miniaturen. Rhetorik der Kürze in Puschkins Kleinen Tragödien’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 73 (1999), 611-42.

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novel is more than just an epic narrative; indeed, it displays basic theatrical qualities. This pertains to theme and plot as well as to structure and verbal form, so that both narrative levels are interlaced, as is the case in play-withina-play figurations. The first chapter is already full of theatre motifs and stage scenes: Onegin regularly attends opera and ballet and his friend, the narrator-writer, is an admirer of ballerinas. The world of the stage is presented as ‘volshebnyj kraj’, an ‘enchanted land’. This is always a double show, as not only the actors and dancers but also the audience are showing themselves off (cf. especially stanza 1.17). Theatre affects life and life is wholly theatrical. This applies not only to the actual theatre settings, but also to everyday life. Identity and character are something that is stylised and staged. Onegin’s dandyism is quite literally a self-fashioning, as is told in the delightful sequence of ‘fashion stanzas’ (1.23-25) ending with the narrator’s self-reflexive comment on fashion vocabulary (1.26) – a presentation that exposes the mechanisms of selfconstruction as verbal and performative. The theatrical character of the entire narrative is underlined by the frequent motif of the latest visual technology, the lorgnette and the opera glass. The plot’s theatricality is reinforced by the verbal discourse: the epic is replete with concepts of showing, looking, viewing, and staging. The narrator uses visual and kinetic terms, presenting the events and his comments very concretely to a participating reader. An unusually frequent word is vot (look, look here). The narrator pretends to move together with the reader through the theatre world: But let’s abandon idle chatter And hasten rather to forestall Our hero’s headlong, dashing clatter In hired coach towards the ball. (1.27, lines 1-4) [...] But look, Onegin’s at the gateway; He’s past the porter, up the stair, Through marble entry rushes straightway, Then runs his fingers through his hair, And steps inside. The crush increases [...] (1.28, lines 1-5) 25

As this quotation and numerous other passages demonstrate, the narration is often a ‘showing’ in the material sense of visual demonstration to a voyeur’s eye – a fact that allows for investing the classic narratological term (cf.

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Translation by James E. Falen (cf. note 9).

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Lubbock’s showing/telling opposition) with a media-related technological (‘media-technological’) meaning. In the last canto, this sort of ostentation appears in a kind of allegoric meta-reflexive configuration: the narrator-novelist watches his Muse watching a social gathering (8.6-8). It is with her gaze, later on with anonymous gazes, that the reader virtually ‘sees’ how the party guests look at each other, how Onegin emerges in the picture, how the hostess appears, how Onegin looks at her through his lorgnette and suddenly recognises Tatyana. Elsewhere, the narrator asks the reader to ‘eavesdrop’ on his talk with the hero (3.4). His entire narrative is so concrete, corporeal, scenic and plastic that it virtually suggests an audiovisual realisation on stage. The narrator is a real person (in fact, the main character!), the friend of Onegin, the preserver of Lensky’s literary legacy, and the translator of Tatyana; at the very beginning of the novel, he even shakes hands with the reader. Hence in a film version he should not be reduced to a voice or to script, but must be a personage in a full role – sometimes on the same story level as the others (intra-/ homodiegetic), sometimes on a higher narrative level (extra-/heterodiegetic). To cut a long argument short, one could transpose the novel into a film scenario in an opera house or theatre hall, where the narrator sits in the box and watches the performances, sometimes gossiping with other theatregoers, sometimes addressing the real moviegoer by speaking directly to the camera, sometimes stepping on stage himself. Within such a design, there are flexible possibilities for the narrator to switch between hetero- and homodiegetic positions, just as in the novel. Technical means like opera glass and lorgnette could be used to regulate narratorial focalisation. Altogether, this scenario guarantees both narrative distance and performative involvement. 6. A theoretical résumé of the play-within-the-play figuration (or rather figurations) reveals that none of the standard formulas would be applicable. Normally there is a stable relationship and reliable distinction between the interior play and the exterior playing. In the modern self-reflexive type (such as in Shakespeare in Love), these distinctions become fluid for a moment before they are stabilised again, whereby phases of deliberate ambiguity are created. In both types, the characters belong to the fictional world, be it first or second level (onstage or offstage). But a narrator may be outside both worlds, out-side both fictions, and this is why for Eugene Onegin one needs still another, additional ontological sphere (off-off-stage, so to speak) where complex meta-fictional operations may take place. This is why I suggest the scenario of an opera house where the narrator-actor can sometimes merely

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accompany the stage action, talking to his partner, the reader/viewer. Of course, the recipient him-/herself 26 can’t be shown in the film but is always extradiegetic. However, there already exist new ideas for realizing such positions in audio-visual media, ranging from the direct look to the camera (as used in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain, 2001) or the radi-cally ‘dialogic’ camera of the Eremitage film by Alexander Sokurov (Russian Arch, 2003) to the device of ego-shooters in virtual adventure games. In effect, the opera-house scenario 27 establishes a new type of playwithin-a-play figuration with expanded artistic communication. Thus the opera-house idea is an option for the cinematic adaptation of a novel with a self-conscious narrator addressing an audience. And it can even, as I have argued in the case of Eugene Onegin, be in perfect accord with a novelistic pretext whose narration is characterised by theatricality and performativity. Another option emerges with a cinema scenario: the narrator as cinemagoer, watching movies – films which he authored and films in which he is starring. This scenario would allow for witty meta-cinematic sequences. But probably the division between the levels would on the whole be too strict because of the media difference (live presence vs. prefabricated film); unless, of course, one decides for a radical solution and presents the whole thing as ‘The Making of Eugene Onegin’. In this cinematographic context, it is noteworthy that the earliest form of metacinema with metalepsis (strange loop) was created in Russia: Long before Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, the Russian avant-garde poet, playwright, script writer, film actor and film director Vladimir Mayakovsky had a woman descend from a stage poster into life (in the short film with the punning title Captivated by Film / Zakovannaja fil’moj, 1918). The essential point here is that the media are being reflected by a foregrounding of devices – for example, by the demonstrative use of a white tablecloth as a kind of screen (pictorial space, photo poster) with the ballerina posing before it. The illusion, in other words, is presented as artful construction. Such clear selfconsciousness on the part of Mayakovsky may well have its roots in Pushkin. It is certainly no coincidence that the original prologue to Eugene Onegin, namely the highly amusing metapoetic poem Conversation between Poet and Bookseller, found its counterpart in Mayakovksky’s equally witty metapoetic Conversation between Poet and Tax Inspector. (Incidentally, the actor who 26 27

In the novel, the reader’s gender is clearly male. The above use of the expression ‘opera house’ doesn’t mean that the plot must necessarily be staged in opera form, but indicates the type of building and communicative relations; the word ‘theatre’ would be too inspecific.

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played the ballerina was Lilya Brik, the wife of the formalist scholar who would later work on the above-mentioned film script for Eugene Onegin). The intense self-consciousness of the Russian avant-garde and their early use of metalepsis may well be related to the fact that Russia’s best loved literary work is a self-conscious metafiction. This brief digression on avant-garde cinema highlights the problem of illusion, the basic issue of the concluding section. 7. The play within the play, as it has been realised in metafictional films up to now, relies on mimetic illusion in both spheres. Each action level is consistent in itself (according to recent metafiction theory: ‘primary and secondary illusion’ 28): the real world and the world of naturalistic theatre, with the intersection of life and play being realistically motivated by the loving couple as theatre actors. Illusion-breaking effects are minimised or incorporated insofar as the ingenuity lies precisely in the amazing correspondence between the two levels. Depending on whether the trick must deceive the internal audience or the external cinema audience, one finds different degrees of illusion in various films, from Shakespeare in Love to Man of La Mancha and The French Lieutenant’s Woman or The Purple Rose of Cairo. In contrast to such tamed illusion, where duplicity and theatrical stageability is based on the motif of concrete role-acting, Pushkin’s case belongs to the paradigm of Romantic irony and is thus fundamentally non- or antiillusive. A short cogent example: The duel is not melodramatic at all (as it is presented in all the adaptations), but the narrator narrates and comments on it in a defamiliarising way. This passage might be congenially filmed as a threefold funeral (of the same person!) in changing styles with different funeral ceremonies or by showing one photo album with alternative biographies of the same person. Pushkin’s narrator and reader can freely move within the various worlds. The shifts between frames (metalepses) are not a consequence of theatrical role-play, but of the play of imagination and reminiscence. Thus there may arise quite capricious metaleptic jumps and strange loops (among them the probably most ingenious metalepsis of world literature29). This constitutes a 28

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Werner Wolf, ‘Illusion and Illusion Breaking in Twentieth-Century Fiction’, in Aesthetic Illusion. Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 284-97. The double-voiced presentation of Lensky’s last elegy (stanzas 6.21-6.22, beginning only at the third line): the character’s poem is converted into the narrator’s discourse – the Onegin stanza – and is thus made to posthumously rhyme with another’s rhymes from an alien die-

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major difference between a dramatic and an epic film, and it is most visible in the contrast between naturalist poetics and non-illusionist poetics. In Eugene Onegin, these jumps must be visible, in accordance with the spirit of Romantic irony: as construction, as defamiliarisation, as a twinkle of imagination, as aporia. The idea of metalepsis and strange loop, when understood as a scenictheatrical and meta-dramatic mode, makes some peculiar passages in Pushkin’s novel suddenly understandable and stageable. Here we get right to the scenario of ‘Pushkin in Love’. The most important aspect is the figure of the Muse: she first appears in the classical allegorical function, but in the end this rhetorical figure is transformed into a concrete character of flesh and blood; the invoked Muse becomes the author’s beloved and somehow also – rather illogically – metamorphoses into the heroine Tatyana. This obscure transformative figuration attains theatrical palpability through the model of metalepsis. The series of seven subsequent stanzas begins with the parodic invocation of the Muse (which comes only in the 7th canto instead of at the novel’s beginning): I praise a youthful friend and cousin. I sing his life, full many a quirk, And pray that to my drawn-out work, You’ll render, epic muse, your blessing. A trusty staff you’ve tendered me: May I not blunder aimlessly. Enough: no longer’s duty pressing! To classic style I’ve tipped my hat. Though late, my foreword’s done: that’s that! (7.55, line 6-14)30

Of course, Pushkin alludes here to the mock-heroic invocations familiar from Sterne, Wieland,31 and Byron. In the next canto, the mythological Muse enters real life, an exciting love life with the young author; and in the aforementioned party scene, she somehow seems to coincide with the heroine Tatyana. This innovative sequence of invocation–evocation–embodiment–transformation creates a kind of realised metaphor by means of performance. It is a figuration of deliberate ambivalence derived from Romantic irony. The cin-

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gesis. Cf. Erika Greber, ‘A. S. Puschkin: Evgenij Onegin’, in Der russische Roman, ed. by Bodo Zelinsky (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2006), pp. 1-26. Translation by Douglas Hofstadter (cf. note 10), original italics. On the Russian reception of Wieland, cf. K. Günther, ‘Wieland und Rußland. Die WielandRezeption in Rußland’, Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 13 (1968), 496-511 and 695-712; Gerda Warning, Die Funktion des Erzählers in Wielands ‘Oberon’ und Puschkins ‘Ruslan und Ludmila’ (Diss. University of Basel, 1975).

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ematographic production might be sketched as follows: we see an antique statue of the Muse on a high pedestal, the author at her feet recites Virgil’s canonic invocation ‘Arma virumque cano’ with an ironic gesture; the Muse descends, shows him her modern backside, then goes off with him to literary cafés where they have a rousing good time. Fragmentary evocations would do, and the story of ‘Pushkin in Love’ would, like its pretext, be cut off at the most suspenseful moment. To sum up, the poetics of Eugene Onegin calls for totally different devices than have been used to date. In particular, it displays a greater variety of metaleptic shifts, including ‘impossible’ strange loops. Instead of smooth narrative cinema with a one-sided plot, an illusion-breaking, double-sided brand of cinematography would be most suitable for a truly congenial Onegin film. In terms of film technique, the tricks and devices of cartoon films and the latest digital techniques (such as morphing) correspond to the old literary devices of Romantic irony.

Alessandro Abbate

The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: MultiLayered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

Two of the most controversial films produced during the last decade of the twentieth century, a time of huge revival of Shakespeare on screen, are Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet. Both directors present a Shakespeare for the young generation, adopting a mise-en-scène abundant in references to pop culture and mass media and playing with various intertextual practices of postmodernism. Although radically different in style, the two films share a similar intention to incorporate different layers of representation, so that the Shakespearean device of the play within the play becomes the film, the rock video, the advertisement, the television news within the film, and, more generally, the screen within the screen.

Almereyda reads Hamlet as a contemporary tragedy of technological and media-driven solipsism, in which ‘life has become a matter of negotiation between essence and simulation; where reality and façade, being and performing, have blurred into one; and where human relationships have become a disembodied dial-up network.’1 Hamlet is a young filmmaker addicted to video technology. It is not surprise, therefore, that The Mousetrap, the thing wherein he will catch the conscience of the king, becomes a film within the film. The way in which Hamlet prepares his video exemplifies the state of solitude and isolation in which he lives, one related to the vanishing of embodied persons: alone in his room, surrounded by monitors, speakers, and a variety of electronic recording devices, Hamlet sits silently editing, mesmerized by the flickering lights on the various screens. As one reviewer has put it, Almereyda’s hero ‘is not a collaborative artist and has no such love of community projects.’2 Shakespeare’s hero has an authentic passion for the theatre, one he enjoys sharing with the strolling players who come to Elsinore. Indeed, the players, it seems, are the

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Alessandro Abbate, ‘”To Be or Inter-Be”: Almereyda’s end-of-millennium Hamlet’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 32 (2004), 82-89 (p. 82). Jaime N. Christley, ‘Hamlet (2000) and Hamlet (1996)’, Film Written Magazine, 11 June 2000 (accessed 24 June 2001).

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only human beings Hamlet trusts, the only ones he considers worthy of respect. There is none of this in the film: Shakespeare’s players become no more than video files and film clips to be assembled on Hamlet’s PC. Technological progress has made live performance obsolete, and these ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ are merely downloaded into a hard-drive memory.3 The shift from theatrical ‘in person’ to cinematic ‘by a camera’ performance illustrates Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the mechanical reproducibility of art.4 As John Storey argues, the loss of the aura ‘opens to a plurality of reinterpretation; freeing [cultural text or practice] to be used in other contexts, for other purposes.’ 5 In Almereyda’s film, when Hamlet edits his nonaural version of The Mousetrap as a multimedia short film, John Gielgud appears on the monitor, playing the Prince in the graveyard scene [Figure 1].

Figure 1. John Gielgud on the screen.

The image of Gielgud is not only a decontextualized sign of ironic self-referential, inter- and hyper-textuality (as we have one filmic Hamlet looking at another one); Gielgud’s performance also alludes to the pulverization of Benjamin’s aural authenticity, authority and distance into seemingly unrelated excerpts – something typical of postmodern linguistic collation. This is the language Almereyda’s Hamlet uses in The Mousetrap, as it is one of ‘the rigorously non-fictive languages of video’.6 It is an all-recycling, anti-linear, non-representational syntax of the kind that Fredric Jameson discusses in his essay ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’, and which he understands as paradigmatic of the postmodern dismissal of 3

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Hamlet, II. 2. 545-46, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W.J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 884. Further quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition. See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1970), pp. 211-44. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 108. Fredric Jameson, ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’, in The Linguistic of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 206.

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any narrative and interpretative consistency. In order to substantiate his point, Jameson analyses a 1979 Chicago School of Art video production, called AlienNATION (by Edward Rankus, John Manning and Barbara Latham), [a] furiously thick collage which […] includes science fiction footage […], reproduction of classical paintings, a woman lying down under hypnosis, ultra-modern hotel lobbies with escalators moving busily, close-ups of children’s building blocks, Beethoven sonatas, flying saucers over the Chicago skyline, advertisements for 1950s kitchens and much more.7

The assimilatory and recombining frenzy of AlienNATION matches perfectly the chaotic composition and pace of The Mousetrap, which consists of computer-generated animations of blossoming and withering flowers, extracts from silent, historical and porn movies, shots of happy family life from 1950s education programs, various television and film clips, and other colour and black-and-white multimedia material (and the score is Tchaikovsky’s 1888 symphonic poem, Hamlet) [Figure 2].

Figure 2. Postmodernism and the video-text: clips from The Mousetrap.

Interestingly, when Jameson eventually retracts his thesis about the purely chaotic nature of the video-text by identifying a factual message in it, a crime 7

Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 165.

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emerges as the oblique connotation of AlienNATION’s mosaic: the 1978 murder of a San Francisco city supervisor is the ‘real meaning’ hidden in a flow of disconnected and masked clues. As he concludes, ‘Here, then, at last the referent is disclosed; the brute fact, the historical event, the real toad in this particular imaginary garden.’ 8 Similarly, in The Mousetrap, moving through this ‘imaginary garden’, we finally reach the real orchard where Old Hamlet was assassinated by his brother, and the toad is the serpent that ‘now wears his crown’ (Hamlet, I. 5. 40). The screening scene in the private theatre of the Hotel Elsinore also reinforces this situation of Hamlet’s by-technology detachment and isolation. The accusatory revelation is not realized by means of a process of ‘co-presence’,9 so evident in the original play. This is not just the result of the move from theatre to cinema, from bodies to shadows – that is to say, of the fact that The Mousetrap is no longer a pièce de théâtre, but an art-house video clip. It is also the symptom of an introversion produced by the monopoly of technology-based communications. Almereyda’s Hamlet attends the screening of his (silent) film in silence, without making any comment, without inciting responses or prompting the suspicions of Claudius and Gertrude. As the young man uses his editing suite to filter the immediacy of reality, so the young auteur seems to have deliberately chosen not to intervene ‘live’ in his creation. The word, the communication in loco, abdicates in favour of the silent image, and the real space of interaction is replaced by the virtual site of a QuickTime file. Moreover, if it is the case, in Shakespeare’ play, that ‘Hamlet is subject to external forces at work in his life, which is to say that he does not control the creation of himself as a person within the play,’ 10 it is noteworthy that in Almereyda’s film this condition of lack of autonomy extends to the video language of its protagonist. The credits of The Mousetrap are in fact identical in every detail to those Almereyda uses for his film, so that Hamlet’s cinematic production appears as a replica from the very outset [Figure 3]. The name ‘Hamlet’ – in bold white lettering on a red background – travels from the status of subject of the framing representation to being author of the framed one, according to a recycling process that invests the film within the film with a self-referential allusion to the limits of postmodern creativity. 8 9

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‘Reading without Interpretation’, p. 220. David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring everyday life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), p. 15. Lucy Potter, ‘Ophelia Centre Stage’, in Extensions: Essays in English Studies from Shakespeare to the Spice Girls, ed. by Sue Hosking and Dianne Schwerdt (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 1999), p. 28.

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Figure 3. The opening credits of The Mousetrap.

The Mousetrap is a silent movie. For Hamlet, silence is not only the final answer to his existential dilemmas: it is also an emblem of his intertextual practice. He inserts in his film shots of flowers which resemble those in the video clip of the song ‘Enjoy the Silence’ by British pop band, Depeche Mode, a video which, coincidentally, has a strong Hamletic subtext. It shows a young prince wandering from place to place and carrying a deck-chair with him, an odd throne on which he sometimes sits, looking at the ‘infinite space’ before him [Figure 4].

Figure 4. A young prince in Enjoy the Silence (Dir. Anton Corbijn. Mute/Warner. 1990).

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‘Enjoy[ing] the Silence’ is also an appropriate description of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. He is a film student, she an amateur photographer. Their love originated in a shared fascination with reproduced images, and their affinity is based upon the rejection of words as a vehicle of communication and knowledge. These two young lovers, who have replaced dialogue with photographic development and digital post-production, barely use words when communicating with one another. Ophelia uses a drawing when she wants to make an appointment with Hamlet. They both make love to each other’s photographs, for which no words are needed. When Hamlet goes to Ophelia’s flat, not to fake an antic disposition, but in search of some relief from his true depression, they silently embrace each other. They ‘enjoy the silence’ and the intimacy of the dark room, translating into action the lyrics of the chorus of Depeche Mode’s song: ‘All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here, in my arms. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm.’ 11 2. Romeo + Juliet has often been dismissed as ‘MTV Shakespeare’. Dan Hulbert, for example, argues that Luhrmann ‘may indeed have the worst idea of all time. The idea is to move Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play from Verona, Italy, to “Verona Beach”, a city suggesting contemporary Miami […] with a noisy bombardment of rock music and fashion statements.”12 As a matter of fact, rock music and fashion not only make Romeo + Juliet’s intertextuality worth considering, but also account for much of the film’s success in targeting a young audience. Claire Danes, Luhrmann’s Juliet, was given the Best Female Performance at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards. Moreover, the film was nominated for such awards as Best Male Performance (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Movie, Best Movie Song (‘Crush’, by Garbage), Best OnScreen Duo and Best Kiss! The film soundtrack features songs by such famous rock bands as Garbage, The Cardigans, Radiohead and The Wannadies; soon after being commercially released, it became a blockbuster hit, and went multiplatinum. The aural association with the MTV culture is matched by an equally palpable visual one. With its fragmented montage, extreme camera angles and frenetic camerawork – for example, ‘out-of-control’ close-ups or ‘super ma11 12

Violator. Sire/Reprise. 1990. CD 26081-1. ‘Beware: Bard’s Armed, Dangerous’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1 November 1996, p. 14. Similarly, Jay Carr writes that ‘Shakespeare goes out the window pretty quickly in Baz Luhrmann’s new updating, and MTV comes in the door’ in ‘Modern “Romeo” Murders Shakespeare’, Boston Globe, 1 November 1996, p. 22. See also Gary Taylor, ‘Wherefore Art Thou, Will?’, Guardian, 24 April 1999, ‘Saturday Review’, p. 4

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cro slam’ zooms –, Luhrmann’s film articulates its narrative according to the syntax of the music video clip. As a pervasive semiotic reference targeting a specific audience, MTV can be understood in terms of Umberto Eco’s ‘intertextual archetype’. Without necessitating any ‘universal’ quality, this archetype works ‘as a topos or standard situation that manages to be particularly appealing to a given cultural area or a historical period.’13 In Romeo + Juliet, it is a privileged meaning-maker for members of the X-generation at the end of the millennium, the perfect interlocutor for the film’s hyperkinetic and topof-the-pops discourse. Stephen Buhler notes that ‘the visual assault of religious icons that pervades the film is drawn from Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”.’ 14 The similarities between rock video and film are numerous, and they relate not only to the profusion of holy icons. There is a clear relationship between the shots of Madonna against a background of burning crosses in the video and the shots of Romeo against a background of neon crosses in the film; Madonna reaches for a dagger (the weapon in Shakespeare’s play, and every other film adaptation, with which Juliet kills herself), in the same way as Luhrmann’s Juliet reaches for Romeo’s gun; the police cars and spotlight on the presumed black criminal in the video match the police cars and helicopter’s spotlight as Captain Prince’s corps chase Romeo when he comes rushing back from Mantua; there is a gospel choir, with Afro-American children, in both the video and the film [Figure 5]. Moreover, both mises en scène adopt a similar mediumwithin-a-medium strategy: Luhrmann’s film is presented as a television program, while Madonna’s video finally turns into a theatre production, with a red curtain falling on the stage.

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Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986), pp. 200-01. Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 91.

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Figure 5. Like a Prayer (Dir. Mary Lambert. Warner. 1989) on the left and Romeo + Juliet on the right.

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Juliet wears an angel costume at the party thrown by her father [Figure 6]. The literal visual presentation of Juliet as a ‘bright angel’ (Romeo and Juliet, II. 2. 26) is another example of Luhrmann’s pop-culture-oriented film lexicon. Claire Danes featured in the 1995 video Just Like Anyone by the American rock band, Soul Asylum, playing a deformed teenager who finally undergoes an ‘angelic’ metamorphosis and flies away from her school prom on wings.

Figure 6. Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet (left) and in Just Like Anyone (Dir. P. J. Hogan. Spidercom/Columbia. 1995) (right).

In Buhler’s words, ‘The video, in turn, had capitalized on Danes’s appearances as Angela Chase in the recently cancelled television series, My So-Called Life. Luhrmann trumps all the previous appropriations, absorbing them all into the hypertext of his Romeo + Juliet.’ 15 In Just Like Anyone, the sense of estrangement of the hump-backed girl from her malicious schoolmates corresponds with Juliet’s being ‘apart from the decadent opulence of the Capulet mansion’ and the corrupt milieu in which she lives.16 Luhrmann introduces Lady Capulet in a way that reminds us of Chanel’s 1990 advertising campaign for the perfume Egoiste [Figure 7].

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Shakespeare in the Cinema, p. 92. Robert Kole, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 15 (1997), 32-34 (p. 34).

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Figure 7. Egoiste (Dir. Jean-Paul Goude. Chanel. 1990) on the left and Romeo + Juliet on the right.

The commercial and the film make identical use of close-ups, long shots, location and fast motion. Both have an orchestral score: in Romeo + Juliet, it is the First Movement, Allegro con brio, from Mozart’s 1773 Symphony no. 25 in G Minor, whereas, remarkably, the Chanel advertisement uses the First Movement, ‘The Montagues and Capulets’, from Prokofiev’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet, Suite no. 2, Op. 64.17 As the Chanel models cry ‘Egoiste!’ to some off-screen male character, so Lady Capulet hysterically calls out her daughter’s name to Juliet, who is in the sheltering water of her bathtub.18 It is also worth noting that the Chanel video is, in its turn, derivative, having been inspired by one of the American photographer Ormond Gigli’s most famous works, Girls in Windows (1960). The polysemy inherent in this parodic mise en scène relates to both the figure of Lady Capulet and the film itself. It establishes a sense of glamorous futility that characterizes Luhrmann’s treatment of Juliet’s mother, hinting at what James B. Twitchell calls ‘Adcult’, a ‘culture […] carried on through the boom-box and strobe lights of commercialism’.19 At the same time, the aes-

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I am grateful to Frank Zipfel (University of Mainz), for calling my attention to the music used in the advertisement. Interestingly, Max Stirner writes, ‘Now, if in an individual the egoistic impulse has not force enough, he complies and makes a marriage which suits the claims of the family, takes a rank which harmonizes with its position, etc.; in short, he “does honor to the family.” If, on the contrary, the egoistic blood flows fierily enough in his veins, he prefers to become a “criminal’ against the family and to throw off its laws. […] It happens so with Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet”.’ See The Ego and His Own (New York: Tucker, 1907), pp. 289-90. Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 1.

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thetic appropriation from advertisement to film resonates with the ‘flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’, which Fredric Jameson considers to be the prime postmodern state of the art.20 This representative combination extends to a wider hyper-diegetic cinematic discourse. In Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare’s text is used for advertising slogans and in the neon-lit signs of Verona Beach’s night clubs, fragmenting into pseudo-texts disseminated throughout the film, which intermingle cultural authority and ephemeral consumerism. ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’ (Tempest, IV. 1. 156-57) becomes the motto used to publicize a drink called ‘Prospero’; ‘Shoot forth thunder’ (2 Henry VI, IV. 1. 104) is used for a bullets advertisement; King Edward IV’s ‘Add more fuel to your fire’ (3 Henry VI, V. 4. 70) is the slogan of a gas company; the motto of the ‘Capulet Industry’ is ‘Experience is by industry achieved’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. 3. 22) [Figure 8]. Luhrmann reminds us that ‘advertising is what we know, what we share, what we believe in. It is who we are. It is us.’ 21 also, advertising is Shakespeare’s poetry.

Figure 8. ‘Adcult’ in Verona Beach

3. The intertextual mise-en-scène in Hamlet and Romeo + Juliet is invested with social criticism. Both Manhattan and Verona Beach, worlds saturated with media and engulfed in a self-perpetuating regime of appearances, are 20

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‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-92 (p. 60). It is interesting to note that, late in 2003, Baz Luhrmann directed Nicole Kidman in the new advertisement for Chanel No. 5, and that his set recreated the red staircase scene from the film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Dir. Howard Hawks. 20th Century Fox. 1953), thus turning the strategy of an advertisement-within-the-film into a film-within-the-advertisement. Twitchell, p. 4.

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‘Societies of Spectacle’. As Guy Debord claims, ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.’ 22 A mechanism of mediation is essential to both Almereyda’s and Luhrmann’s multi-textual narratives: as Stephen Heath has argued, narrative does not refer only to the story, but also to the process of telling that makes the story intelligible to an audience.23 There are many examples in which Almereyda uses a screen-within-thescreen strategy in order to highlight some of the play’s essential motifs, with a view to being relevant to hi-tech end-of-millennium society [Figure 9].

Figure 9. Hamlet: the screens within the screen.

Hamlet gets the idea to test Claudius’ guilt not from the Player’s touching demonstration-piece, but from a film on television, Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden, and particularly from a scene in which James Dean is arguing with his father. As Hamlet sits staring at digital footage of Ophelia on his palm monitor, from the TV set in his room, Thich Nhat Hanh, a celebrated Buddhist teacher-monk, philosophizes on the monadic life, the life of social disconnection in which Hamlet is engulfed: ‘We have the word “to be”, but what I pro-

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The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994), p. 12. See Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981).

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pose is the word “to inter-be”. Because it’s not possible to be alone, to be by yourself. You need other people in order to be.’ 24 Kenneth J. Gergen claims that ‘under postmodern conditions, persons exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction.’25 In Almereyda’s film, Hamlet performs this process of self-revision as cinematic montage. Alone in his hotel suite, he stares at himself on a TV screen, as he holds a gun to his head and utters the opening line of the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue. He lets the tape run, then stops it, rewinds it, and starts again. His editing skill enables the real Hamlet to manoeuvre the loop image of his video duplicate, so that the original metaphysical dilemma becomes a question of authorial choice. Video and computer technology provide Hamlet with a disembodying faculty that gives him the illusion of a manipulative and demiurgic power. He can actually see the ‘too too solid flesh’ (Hamlet I. 2. 129) melting into the ethereal dimension of the monitor, as he is ‘running and rerunning footage of his dead father and mother together, reliving moments of a happy family life that are now gone.’ 26 In Almereyda’s film, the traditional windy platform high on the battlements has been replaced by a hi-tech surveillance desk. Standing in the lobby of the Hotel Elsinore, Horatio, Marcella and Bernardo notice the dead king’s silhouette flickering on the screen – ‘the figure exits one monitor – then enters another, fluttering in the video haze.’ 27 Through the black-and-white low resolution of a closed-circuit television monitor we also see part of the fishmonger scene, when Polonius tries to understand the reason for Hamlet’s melancholic state; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death sentence appears on the screen of Hamlet’s Mac laptop, as he is flying to England on a jumbo. The monitors in the Blockbuster store where Hamlet delivers the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy show clips from the 1996 film, The Crow: City of Angels (Dir. Tim Pope. Bad Bird/Miramax). As Courtney Lehmann notes, Like Hamlet’s own status as a ‘sequel’ to his father, this sequel to The Crow (Alex Proyas 1994) relentlessly invokes the father-film which, significantly, is not only about revenge but also about the capacity of postmodern technology to restore a dead actor to virtual life.28

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Michael Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A screenplay adaptation (London: Faber, 2000), p. 37. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic, 1991), p. 7. Abbate, p. 84. Almereyda, p. 6. Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 97.

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Here, therefore, the screen within the screen addresses both Hamlet’s existential dilemma about life and death and his obsession with digital footage of his dead father. Luhrmann’s diegetic use of media cross-references entails an osmotic modality that not only affects the filmic narrative, but also refers to the sociocultural scenario where the events take place. The world of Verona Beach is one in which ‘the television set appears in every conceivable environment, and television events come to saturate the texture of everyday experience.’ 29 A portable TV set appears on the beach of Sycamore Grove, among carousels and snack bars, with two Latin American women watching an afternoon news update. Benvolio and Romeo pass by: the former looks at himself – at his hypertextual video image – holding a gun in the middle of a shooting, and the latter learns about the recent brawl via television replica [Figure 10]. In this way, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy undergoes the disruption of a mediated telling, as the social import of juvenile criminality fades in the spectacular vacuum of the video haze.

Figure 10. Romeo + Juliet: Television ubiquity and the video-self.

Importantly, a screen within the screen that links Luhrmann’s and Almereyda’s films is the framing screen of a television news broadcast. In both Romeo + Juliet and Hamlet the tragedy is irrevocably banalized by presentation of the epilogue as a bulletin [Figure 11]. The young lovers’ deaths result in neither peace nor in consolation. As James Loehlin argues: ‘They become merely another lurid image for a media-besotted culture, body-bagged victims in a grainy news video, as the film returns to the newscast framework of the opening.’ 30 Luhr29

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David Morley, ‘Television: Not so much a visual medium, more a visible object’, in Visual Culture, ed. by Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 183. ‘”These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (New York: St Martin’s, 2000), p. 130.

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mann imagines his film as a long and detailed television news story. Similarly, Almereyda has Robert MacNeil, a ‘real’ anchorman from the American PBS Jim Lehrer NewsHour, closing the film by delivering some of the First Player’s lines and Fortinbras’ words commenting on the final havoc. In Romeo + Juliet, ‘the chronicle dimension deletes from the modern world any possible glimmer of heroic dignity.’ 31 Likewise, Almereyda himself has stated that ‘transposing Fortinbras’s lines to another corporate mouthpiece, a newscaster, [makes] Hamlet’s replacement more cruelly anonymous.’32

Figure 11. Framing bulletins: Romeo + Juliet (left) and Hamlet (right).

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Guido Bulla, ‘”Un qualcosa di simile alla morte”: Romeo + Giulietta di William Shakespeare di Baz Luhrmann’, in Shakespeare al cinema, ed. by Isabella Imperiali (Roma: Bulzoni, 2000), p. 181. Hamlet: A screenplay adaptation, p. 143.

Ken Woodgate

‘Gotta Dance’ (in the Dark): Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre

This chapter investigates Lars von Trier’s critique of the musical in his film Dancer in the Dark (2000) both through various aspects of the outer musical itself and through the obvious references to the classic Broadway/Hollywood musicals 42nd Street and The Sound of Music. Particularly important is the cross-cultural perspective: the outer musical presents a European’s view of America which is counterposed to an Americanised view of Europe. The outer musical serves to discredit the inner ones, and hence the film argues against the musical genre. Nevertheless, a metacritical reading of the film will identify the limits of von Trier’s dismissive critique.

Of all genres of performance, the musical must be the most self-referential. Putting on a show is, along with falling in love, the musical’s favorite theme. Actors who spontaneously burst into song gain some kind of credibility if they are seen to be mounting their own song-and-dance show. But the ease with which the musical mirrors itself might well be seen, from a rationalistic point of view, as a form of theatrical narcissism, or even syllogism. Does the classic musical say anything, apart from the fact that it is fun to sing and dance? And given that the vast majority of people in the modern industrialised world choose to avoid public performances of dancing and absolutely all performances of singing, it could easily be argued that the musical’s promise of fun is simply an illusion of an illusion, an indulgent celebration of theatrical posturing. It is strange, to say the least, for a realist director to make a film with song and dance numbers in it. But this is precisely what Lars von Trier did in his film Dancer in the Dark (2000). Along with Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier co-wrote Dogme 95, that controversial manifesto calling for a return to rigorous realism in filmmaking: To DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can

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wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind. 1

Dogme 95 can be seen as a recent manifestation of the anti-Hollywood, antiillusionist tendencies that previously occurred in such movements as Russian Constructivism, Italian Neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. The most obvious hallmarks of Dogme films are a disregard for continuity editing, the avoidance, as much as possible, of post-synchronised sound (point 2 of Dogme’s ‘Vow of Chastity’), and the extensive use of the hand-held camera (point 3), which results in a highly characteristic swish-pan movement from frame to frame. Given that the musical has never been and can never be successfully or seriously integrated into a realist program, von Trier’s approach implies from the outset a critical compromise between two quite distinct generically determined codes. Von Trier has never actually called Dancer in the Dark a Dogme film; indeed, he stated in 1998 that he had moved on from the strictures of the program.2 Nevertheless, the hallmarks previously mentioned are abundantly evident in Dancer in the Dark. The film is set in semi-rural Washington State in 1964, and Selma, a Czech immigrant, works in a metal-stamping factory, trying to support herself and her son Eugene. Together they live in a small bungalow at the back of a property belonging to the local policeman Bill and his spendthrift wife Linda. Selma has an hereditary eye problem and is slowly going blind. She is trying to save enough money to enable her son to undergo an operation that will make sure that he does suffer the same fate as she. In the free time that is left to her, Selma goes to the cinema to watch musicals and participates in the local amateur theatrical group’s production of The Sound of Music, in which she has been given role of Maria. One evening, Bill reveals to Selma that he is in desperate financial trouble and unable to support his wife’s lifestyle. Selma also reveals a secret: she is stashing away her money for her son’s operation. Bill takes the money some time later, and tells his wife that Selma has been making advances in his di-

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Dogme 95: The Official Dogme 95 Website at (accessed 18 July 2006). ‘The manifesto itself was without any value, but it states a couple of limitations which can be useful to work from. I have always thought that the most important rule was that picture and sound should be recorded simultaneously. It excludes manipulation – you cannot cheat afterwards in the editing room. I am still using it as a principle when shooting.’ Jørn Rossing Jensen, ‘Dogme Is Dead! Long Live Song and Dance!’, in Lars von Trier: Interviews, ed. by Jan Lumholdt (Jackson: U. P. of Mississippi, 2003), p. 130.

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rection. Selma is asked to leave the bungalow. When she discovers that the money is stolen, she goes and confronts the policeman. The ensuing conversation reveals how hopeless the situation is for both of them. Bill takes out a gun, but in a scuffle Selma wounds him. He pleads for her to kill him, which she does. She is apprehended, tried and, after an abortive appeal, hanged. The film can be seen as a criticism of American culture from a European point of view. Here we see a country with practically no social security. Decent people can lose the roof over their head because of financial problems, and others must save all their money to afford medical procedures. Von Trier also criticises the American tradition of virulent anti-communism: Selma came to America from Czechoslovakia because the country is medically more advanced, not because she is some kind of political refugee. Her lack of political awareness leads to her being branded a communist at her trial. And, finally, Lars von Trier takes the US to task for its stance on capital punishment. On the level of genre, as well, we see a European critique of America. Although the mounting of a musical is one of the significant plotlines of the film, and although the film contains original song and dance numbers, its story does not really conform to that of the classic musical. While musicals generally have plots that belong to modern genres, primarily romantic comedy, but also melodrama, von Trier’s story belongs to the pre-modern genre of the tragedy. Von Trier has discussed the story in terms of opera,3 an oldworld form of performance that easily embraces the tragic. Our heroine Selma clearly has one fatal flaw: she is too good-hearted, or, to use von Trier’s own term, golden-hearted.4 Her single act of trusting the policeman results in her downfall, and all aspects of Selma’s world conspire to hasten her demise. Nevertheless, despite the tragic and operatic nature of the story, the film has the outer trappings of a musical. So, what is Lars von Trier saying about this genre? There are three levels to this line of inquiry: there is Selma’s story with its musical sections; there is the musical in the musical, in the form of snippets from the screening of 42nd Street in the local cinema and of rehearsals for the amateur production of The Sound of Music, and there is the significance of these two classic musicals themselves. First, let us examine the significance of the songs in Selma’s story. Throughout the film, Selma imagines her world transformed into one of the

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Elayne Taylor, ‘Dancing in Denmark’, Creative Screenwriting , 8. 1 (2001), p. 35. Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves (1996) and Idioterne (The Idiots, 1998) form what von Trier calls his ‘Golden Heart Trilogy’. The term refers to the heroism and compassion displayed by the central female characters in these films.

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musical. This invariably occurs at times when Selma is experiencing stress and tension. The first time this happens is in the factory. The sound of the machinery becomes more rhythmical, the actions of the workers more smooth and nimble, and suddenly the whole factory is singing and dancing. In classic musical tradition, the world becomes harmonised through the addition of song and dance: the scene becomes more colourful, hand-held camerawork gives way to fixed camera shots. The scenario conforms entirely to the dictates of the genre, even if it contains certain elements of Dogme realism, such as the idiosyncratic music and vocals of Björk and a certain disregard for perfect co-ordination. What is lacking in choreography is made up for in cinematographic excess, as von Trier uses 100 video cameras to shoot these song and dance numbers.5 What does not conform to the dictates of the genre is what happens after the numbers, indeed, as a consequence of these numbers. At the end of the factory scene, Selma is rudely awakened from her fantasy by the malfunctioning stamping machine. The consequence of her lack of attention is an industrial accident that will cost her her job. It is not so much the negative outcome that makes this song so different from those in other musicals – there are many musicals that end unhappily – as the way it fits into the film’s diegesis. In a normal musical, the filmic world is enhanced through singing and dancing. What we see may be conceived of as a transformation or idealisation of the world, but it is nevertheless an extension of that world. In fact, the world of the musical is a world that is always on the brink of bursting into song and dance, on the brink of transfiguration into something larger than life. Selma’s musical numbers start off the same way, with the filmic world gradually becoming a musical one. The conclusion, however, is different. The transfigured world is suddenly interrupted by the world of mundane reality. Rather than being contiguous, the two realms are antagonistic. The numbers cannot be read as part of the film’s diegesis, but as figments of Selma’s imagination. They are daydreams that impose on real time and have real consequences. The other musical numbers follow the same structure: if they do not always advance the plot’s tragic end, they do nothing to prevent it. Selma dreams of a musical number on a goods train, and is almost run over by one. Not only does she narrowly avoid losing her life, it is at this point that her potential boyfriend realises that she is going blind. In each case, Selma imagines these song and dance numbers when her life becomes particularly difficult. They are thus escape mechanisms that make 5

Stig Björkman, ‘Juggling in the Dark’, Sight and Sound, 9. 12 (1999), p. 8.

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her life seem more bearable. But, in conformity with the dictates of tragedy, there is no escape, and hence Selma’s daydreams are to be seen as manifestations of false consciousness. This is most pointedly expressed in the courtroom scene, where Selma imagines herself being serenaded by a certain Adrich Novy, a Czech screen idol from Selma’s youth. Novy reassuringly sings, ‘I’ll always catch you when you fall.’ She is sentenced to death by hanging, and no-one catches her when she falls. Selma herself is conscious of the antagonism between the world of the musical and the reality of her life in America. Early on in the film she confesses her love of musicals to Bill, and explains to him how she extends the pleasure of the fantasy: SELMA BILL SELMA

But isn’t it annoying when they do the last song in the films, though? Why? Because, you just know when it goes really big and the camera goes Like … out of the roof, and you just know it’s going to end. I hate that, I really hate that. I used to cheat on that when I was a little girl back in Czechoslovakia. I would leave the cinema just after the next-to-last song and … the film would just go on for ever.

Selma’s tactic involves a denial of reality on a number of levels apart from a simple immersion in the musical’s diegesis. To leave the film just after the penultimate song denies the reality that all films, all stories, must come to an end. But it also implies that Selma knows where the last and next-to-last songs occur in the film. In other words, Selma knows the film’s ending – she has probably already seen it – and chooses to feign ignorance. The same issue is raised at the end of the film, when, in the form of a title across the screen, a quote from one of Selma’s own songs is inserted over the scene where Selma has just been hanged: They say it’s the last song, They don’t know us, you see It’s only the last song If we let it be.

The quote conveys a sentiment of the heroic and the infinite, as if Selma’s soul goes singing on. But, in terms of the film’s realist techniques and arguments, this moment of transcendence rings hollow. The audience has just viewed Selma singing her last song, and its finality has been underscored even more vividly by the activation of the gallows mid-line. The quote also sits uneasily with regard to one of the featured musicals within the musical, namely 42nd Street (dir. Bacon, 1933). Generally considered the paradigmatic backstage musical, the film portrays the trials and

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tribulations of a theatrical company trying to put on a show. After the female lead breaks her ankle, the understudy steps into the breach, performs on opening night and hence becomes a star. Peculiar to this musical is the fact that the plot is presented with only incidental music: all the production numbers are reserved for the performance at the end. Thus, to leave before the final song might be construed in this case to mean leaving before the film has even proved itself to be a musical. The short scenes featuring 42nd Street highlight the discrepancy between Selma’s illusions and the reality around her. Because of her poor eyesight, her friend Cathy explains what is happening on screen, only to be hushed and rebuked by another audience member. The feeling of elation that Selma repeatedly professes is certainly not shared by all viewers. Moreover, it is not clear whether Selma is truly able to engage with what is presented on the screen or whether she is merely entertaining her own illusions. Even more crucial to von Trier’s critique of the musical are the rehearsals of The Sound of Music (Rogers & Hammerstein, 1959; dir. Wise, 1965). The film opens with one such rehearsal, with Selma singing ‘My Favorite Things’ and Cathy supplying the objects referred to in the song by way of illustration. ‘My Favorite Things’ is a catalogue song, one of the set pieces of the musical genre. Catalogue songs can never be illustrated realistically with props and gestures: there are simply too many objects involved. ‘My Favorite Things’ covers eighteen different items in a song with a total of sixteen lines. Needless to say, the performance dissolves into chaos, but one wonders why any theatrical director would choose to use such a mode of illustration in a production. The whole scene looks ridiculous, and while it does provide a little humour, it doesn’t really fit in with any of the genres with which the film seriously engages. It is a moment of absurdity which is closer to slapstick comedy than anything else. It might well be argued that von Trier is highlighting the absurdity of the musical genre itself, yet he is creating a paper tiger in doing so, as musicals never look like this. A similar use of absurd humour comes a little later in the film, when Selma is learning her lines: SELMA GENE SELMA GENE SELMA

You keep reading. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu. To yieu and yieu … What does that mean? Yieu? It’s your dumb musical. It’s German. Do you think?

Von Trier is highlighting what must be one of the weaker rhymes in the history of musical comedy, but it is hardly representative. Also, the reactions

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of Selma and her son are a little too ingenuous. They can pronounce auf Wiedersehn reasonably accurately and recognise it as German, and they can pronounce adieu, but do not recognise it as French, yet their ear for pronunciation does not allow them to make the connection between yieu and you. Von Trier has scrambled levels of linguistic and cultural competence in a rather unconvincing manner. All these cheap shots aside, the amateur production of The Sound of Music serves a more serious function within the plot, as the theatrical group is seen as the place where deception resides. Towards the end of the initial rehearsal scene, the director exclaims, ‘Everybody’s doing a great job’, which is clearly not the case. Other members of the group have their misgivings about Selma’s abilities, but these are never dealt with openly. Cathy helps Selma conceal her sight impairment by stepping into the breach whenever there is a problem on stage. When Selma’s eyesight becomes too weak for her to perform at all, she herself engages in deception, telling the director that she does not want to continue because her heart is not in it. By leaving the role to the understudy, Selma is adhering to the plot of 42nd Street, though the outcome radically inverts that musical’s optimism. For when Selma revisits the theatre after having killed Bill, she is distracted and placated by the group members while the director calls the police. The sanctuary and consolation that Selma has sought in the theatre proves illusory, as police storm the building and haul her away. So what significance is to be attached to the selection of the Sound of Music as the primary musical within the musical? The Sound of Music is itself a strange hybrid of a musical in that it starts off as a typical romantic comedy revolving around a novice falling for a widowed Navy admiral in the late 1930s. Basing a musical on marrying off a nun may be in rather dubious taste, but not quite as much as the second half of the piece, which revolves around the German annexation of Austria and the newly-founded family’s escape from the Nazis over the alps to Switzerland. This is strange, as the family’s home is in Salzburg, near the border of Germany, not Switzerland. The film is also of questionable historical accuracy and political correctness. Despite much post-war propaganda, it is quite clear that Austria was not the first victim of Nazi Germany, but rather embraced the Anschluss with enthusiasm. The fact that the admiral should style himself von Trapp, thus illegally maintaining an aristocratic title, indicates a pro-imperial, anti-republican stance. Nevertheless, these problems are glossed over as the hero, his seven children and Maria are painted as purely good and politically correct, and the Nazi takeover a completely unjustified violation. As Gerald Mast says,

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The use of singing as a political, not just a spiritual, metaphor is nonsense: if the Nazis would only sing, the film implies, if they would hear and make the sound of music as the Trapps do, they would cease to be Nazis. Bob Fosse’s 1972 film of Cabaret answered the chimera with the revelation that the Nazis did sing; political values can be defined, not by whether people sing, but by what and why they sing.6

It is perhaps because of all these inaccuracies that The Sound of Music has found little resonance in Europe, and absolutely none in Austria, where Sound of Music tours cater almost exclusively for English-speaking tourists. This is despite the fact that many good Broadway and Hollywood musicals have enjoyed success in German-speaking countries, e.g. My Fair Lady (Lerner & Loewe, 1956; dir. Cukor, 1964). Above all, this is an American view of Europe and European history, which is why von Trier incorporates it into his musical. Von Trier takes his revenge on the commodification of the European by giving a European critique of America. Whereas The Sound of Music chose to revive a sorry episode of European history a good decade after the issue had disappeared, Dancer in the Dark presents, within an historical framework, issues that pertain to America to this very day. And on an aesthetic level, the film also responds antagonistically to the precedent established by The Sound of Music. For although aficionados of the musical may be divided about its thematic quality, The Sound of Music has the most magnificent cinematography, for which it took out an Academy Award. The Sound of Music is a cinematographer’s musical. Von Trier responds not only by infusing his film with the messiness of Dogme realism, he even refuses to shoot on location, preferring to make the whole film in the Swedish countryside and Danish interiors.7 On all levels, von Trier sets up a dialectic between musical and nonmusical worlds, between theatre and reality. This is the typical strategy of the play-in-play structure – a way of reflecting critically on matters of fictionality and reality, of the constructed nature of the dramatic work and the mediated nature of its relationship to the world outside. But this is not the strategy of the musical. For the classic musical, whatever its obsession with constantly reflecting itself as a song and dance performance within song and dance performance, is distinguished from other self-referential artefacts by the general absence of a critical moment. Classic Hollywood musicals do not, ultimately, encourage the audience to reflect on the artificiality of performance and the non-reality of what is presented, nor do they problematise the difficult situa-

6

7

Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock: Overlook, 1987), p. 218. Gavin Smith, ‘Dance in the Dark’, in Lars Von Trier: Interviews, p. 146.

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tions that the characters must go through. Rather they seek to make audience identification with the performers as seamless as possible, while providing reassurance that no matter how tough things get, everything will end happily. Both the Hollywood musical and modernist cinema use dual worlds to mirror within the film the relationship of the spectator to the film. Multiple diegesis in this sense parallels the use of the internal audience. Yet, as with the use of the distancing techniques [...] the musical and Godard are worlds apart in their goals. In a Godard film, multiple diegesis may call attention to the discrepancy between fiction and reality, or fiction and history. In the Hollywood musical, heterogeneous levels are created so that they may be homogenized in the end through the union of the romantic couple. In the Hollywood musical, different levels are recognized in order that difference may be overcome, dual levels synthesized back into one.8

Jane Feuer sees the homogenising moment of the Hollywood musical as residing in its thematics, which are intentionally aimed at popularity or, in her own phrase, ‘folk relations’.9 Audience identification smooths over the gaps between the inner play and the outer play. Such thematics may indeed aid in the process, but I believe that the main thrust of the musical’s homogenising gesture lies elsewhere. The classic musical is primarily a set of song and dance numbers and only secondarily a play. Mast correctly observes that ‘the numbers could survive without the script and do – as record albums, popular songs, and excerpts in compilation films. The script could not and does not survive without the numbers.’ 10 The musical’s impetus, therefore, does not lie in the discursive unfolding of a plot, but in the presentation of non-discursive, ecstatic states produced by the effect of music upon actors. Thus, the musical within the musical is a conflation of the ecstatic moment rather than juxtaposition of discursive levels. Homogenation must occur, because the presentation is essentially beyond discourse. This is the point that Lars von Trier fails to grasp – or render – in his film. Dancer in the Dark is a critique of the musical – a discursive act applied to a genre that celebrates the non-discursive. His social, political and historical arguments have validity, but his arguments about the musical do not. Singing and dancing may not effect change the material world, but the question is: is the human being only justified through effecting change? Most of us have at one time or another felt the joy of rhythm and music, be it simply through listening, through vocalisation, or through rhythmical movement. These activities have no direct bearing on the material world, but they make us feel happy, or at least better. And this feeling is not simply some vague impres8 9 10

The Hollywood Musical, 2nd edn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993), p. 68. Feuer, p. 49. Mast, p. 2.

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sion, but a set of physiological and psychological changes that have been observed in countless scientific investigations. By dismissing the musical as an undesirable delusion, by punishing his characters for indulging in singing and dancing, von Trier is denying human beings one of their fundamental sources of joy, one of their fundamental ways of living in the world.

3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction

Tim Mehigan

The Game of the Narrative: Kleist’s Fiction from a GameTheoretical Perspective

In recent times, the theory of games has received application in many areas of economics and some areas of the political and social sciences. It has shown itself to be a useful tool in modelling outcomes that assume a level of rational motivation among actors in a variable context of contingency. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the utility of game theory for a special class of literary works. These will be literary texts, such as the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, which, renouncing the omniscience of the author as a structuring device up front, model outcomes according to an underlying ‘game situation’. In these texts rationality does not suffice on its own to ensure an optimal outcome for participants in the non-cooperative games Kleist discusses. Rather, a mixed strategy of rational and non-rational behaviour is called for in navigating towards the ‘Nash equilibrium’ event in the story, that is, that outcome by which the story’s main players achieve maximal pay-offs for their behavioural choices in the game. Heinrich von Kleist can be seen as an early game theorist avant la lettre. His stories are cast against the background of late eighteenth century Enlightenment. At the same time they go beyond the simple predictive rationalism of much of the Enlightenment tradition, arguing for a more sophisticated understand-ing of human behaviour in a context of openness and radical contingency – an awareness that marks Kleist as one of the most important thinkers of the immediate post-Kantian period at the beginning of modernity.

Game theory may properly be considered an invention of the twentieth century. It cannot usefully be separated from statistical analysis and probability theory, which arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the industrialization of the European societies whose study they aimed to promote. Game theory, therefore, takes its place alongside other theories of behaviour and society that are pre-eminently modern, if the defining attribute of modernity is taken to be contingency, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and others have argued.1 Contingency, according to Luhmann, is anything that is ‘neither necessary nor impossible’,2 that is, anything that is governed by the idea that an outcome could always be other than it is. Contingent views about self and society can be traced back to the paradigm shift 1

2

See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. by William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 44ff. Observations on Modernity, p. 45.

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in human understanding suddenly felt across a range of areas of human thinking and endeavour at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The older paradigm that lost relevance in what Luhmann calls ‘old European’ society was conditioned by essentialist views based on an assumption about the coincidence of thought and being in the world. Such a coincidence had long given grounds for views of a religious nature that assumed a divine presence in the world. Although the coming of contingent understanding which displaced these views has a long genesis in European thinking, it does not significantly predate the sixteenth century, and is closely associated with the important eighteenth-century thinkers, the Scottish sceptic David Hume and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant, acording to his own testimony, indeed, was awakened from a ‘dogmatic slumber’ as a result of Hume’s critique of rational precepts.3 Another similarly awakened, although not by Hume in the first instance,4 was the writer Heinrich von Kleist, who also went through a conceptual shift of a significant dimension in his early twenties after a protracted encounter with the philosophy of Kant.5 While it is not my purpose here to reconstruct in detail those epistemological aspects of game theory which are consonant with the rise of contingent awareness, I do mean to suggest the importance of the underlying paradigm shift that accompanies it and that has been popularly dated from 1800,6 if only because it impacted heavily on the thinking of Kleist, one of the first game theorists avant la lettre of the modern age,7 and perhaps the first of modern literature. A second aim of this chapter is to suggest the utility of game theory for the study of literature – a utility that, surprisingly, has rarely been remarked upon. 3

4

5

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7

As Kant said in the preface to the Prolegomena, ‘Ich gestehe frei: die Erinnerung des David Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst den dogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen auf dem Felde der spekulativen Philosophie eine andere Richtung gab.’ Kants Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe, 9 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), IV, p. 260. Although certainly indirectly, as I have argued in ‘“Betwixt a false reason and none at all”: Kleist, Kant, Hume, and the “Thing in Itself”’, in A Companion to the Works of Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 165-88. For a discussion of Kleist’s ‘Kant crisis’ and the views it has elicited in the critical literature, see my ‘Kleist, Kant und die Aufklärung’, in Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung, ed. by Tim Mehigan (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), pp. 3-21. Cf., among others, Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme, 1800-1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985). Ken Binmore’s application of game theory to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and other contractual theorists such as Rousseau, however, suggest that game theory is also encountered in the thinking of early political theorists of the modern age. Cf. Binmore’s Game Theory and the Social Contract (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

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1 In recent times, the theory of games has received application in many areas of economics, and some areas of the political and social sciences. It has proved to be a useful tool in modelling outcomes that assume a level of rational motivation among actors in a variable context of contingency. For this reason, the scenarios that game theory models are not objectively true or essentially real, although they arise from assumptions about real, living actors. Rather, they aim to predict the likely future behaviour of such actors under the limited conditions that hold for a given ‘game situation’. This game situation is necessarily formal and abstract in nature, although it is easily applied to ‘live’ contexts in which it is operative. These might have to do with stock-market speculation, gambling, voter behaviour or even procreation. At least as far as the latter is concerned, the statistical fact that males and females are encountered in roughly equal preponderance over the earth’s surface has been interpreted as a strategic response to a set of biological and environmental factors within the game situation of life itself. In this case, human beings are the players and nature is the underlying rationality that constrains them and informs their actions (the idea that nature is rationally directed was established in Western thinking during the Enlightenment). The great leap forward entailed in the thinking of Darwin, therefore, was to shift the focus of analysis in biology away from actors and subjects toward a new understanding of environment consonant with game-theoretical assumptions.8 A game can be defined as any situation in which participants are bound to one another in a context of strategic interdependence.9 Under such circumstances, the behaviour of one participant or player depends on decisions or moves made by the other players. These moves are accompanied by rewards or pay-offs; the pay-offs are part of the game and define its structure. A payoff is a condition of the game that helps manage the risk that the game, by its very nature, brings with it. One might say, therefore, that the pay-off attenuates contingent risk without ever being able to do away with it altogether. Despite the pay-offs, or, indeed, because of them, psychological uncertainty remains a given of the game situation. Uncertainty attaches above all to a lack of knowledge about the moves of other players. The promise of game theory is that the aspect of risk arising from the behaviour of players in a situation of strategic interdependence can be measured or mathematically quan8

9

Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufakis discuss the theory of natural selection in the context of game theory. See their Game Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 228, 230. Mary Ann Dimand and Robert W. Dimand, A History of Game Theory, Vol 1: From the Beginnings to 1945 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 2.

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tified at each stage of the game, thus making it possible for all players to commit to action based on an understanding of how the game is played. Such understanding is predicated on a certain level of rational motivation in the structure of the game. The rational motivation of players is defined as the tendency of individual players to act in their own enlightened self-interest10 or to favour the assumption of what has been called ‘common knowledge rationality’.11 Since the moves of participants in the game can be expressed as mathematical quantities, game theory in the social sciences is closely allied to, if not identical with, rational choice theory.12 The main aspects of a game situation are revealed in the prisoners’ dilemma, a classic illustration of game theory first discussed by the Rand 13 Corporation scientists Merrill Ford and Melvin Dresher in 1950.14 Like many games, the entire set of conditions governing the playing of the game is made clear to the players in advance of playing the game. For this reason the prisoners’ dilemma is referred to as a game of complete information. The game proceeds as follows: two suspects are arrested and charged with a crime (it doesn’t matter what crime). The police do not have sufficient evidence to convict the suspects, unless at least one of them confesses. The police take the suspects to separate cells and explain what consequences will follow the actions that they take. If neither confesses to the crime, then both will be convicted of a minor offence and sentenced to one month in jail. If both confess then both will be sent to jail for six months. If one confesses but the other does not, then the confessor will be released immediately, but the other will be sentenced to nine months in jail – six for the crime, three for obstructing the course of justice. A bi-matrix table is used to represent the strategies outlined in this game (see figure below).

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11 12

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The assumption that actors act out of ‘enlightened self-interest’ is basic to game theory. See, for example, Binmore, p. 17. This is a term used by Hargreaves Heap and Varoufakis, p. 23. As Behnegar points out, rational choice theory represents ‘the continuation of the tendency of modern social science following modern natural science to understand complex wholes in light of their simple elements’. Cf. Nasser Behnegar, Leo Strauß, Max Weber and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 24. As Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis explain, ‘Rand’ stands for ‘r[esearch] and d[evelopment]’, p. 50. Cf. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), pp. 8-9. As Poundstone argues, Ford and Dresher’s work was strongly influenced by Neumann and Morgenstern, who had published their Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944) six years earlier.

The Game of the Narrative

MUM -1, -1

FINK -9, 0

MUM 0, -9

FINK -6, -6

PLAYER 1

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PLAYER 2

Two strategies are available to each player: confess (or fink); not confess (or remain mum). Thus, if prisoner 1 chooses mum and prisoner 2 chooses fink, then prisoner 1 receives the pay-off -9 (representing nine months in jail) and prisoner 2 receives the pay-off 0 (representing immediate release). If, however, both decide to remain mum, then their pay-off is twice -1 (standing for one month in jail for both prisoners). Clearly, not all choices lead to optimal outcomes in the game. If, for example, one prisoner decides to play fink, then the other would prefer to play fink and so be in jail for six months (to remain mum would incur a pay-off of nine months). Similarly, if one prisoner plays mum, then the other would prefer to play fink and so be released immediately. Despite this overall strategic uncertainty, there is a best response possible in a given game. This response arises from a rational selection where none of the players will regret their choices.15 Such a response would be strategically stable or self-enforcing, and can be called a Nash equilibrium, after its discoverer, the American John Nash, who later shared in the award of a Nobel Prize for his achievement.16 As Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis point out, ‘Nash strategies are the only rationalisable ones which, if implemented, confirm the expectations on which they were based’.17 In the prisoners’ dilemma, the Nash equilibrium would be represented by the -1,-1 outcome, representing the decision of both prisoners to remain mum about the crime. To reiterate As long as […] conventions suggest to all parties what their role is to be [i.e. how they should play the game], and as long as parties obey conventions in their own self-interest as defined by the payoffs given by the game model, then conventional behaviour should be a Nash equilibrium. And analysing the situation using the notion of a Nash equilibrium will give an outer bound to the set of possibly ‘stable’ conventions.18

15 16

17 18

Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 50. The Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, discusses aspects of Nash’s life, including his contribution to game theory. Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 53. David M. Kreps, Game Theory and Economic Modelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 35.

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When players obey conventions in order to maximize the benefits for all players, the game is referred to as a co-operative game and is governed by co-operative game theory. In this case the unit of analysis is usually the group. When the individual player is concerned with doing as well as possible for her- or himself within the rules and possibilities provided for in the game, and when such individual behaviour constitutes the basic unit of analysis, the game is said to be governed by non-co-operative game theory.19 When the participants in the prisoners’ dilemma play the game non-co-operatively and do not disclose their choices to the other participant, no Nash equilibrium will necessarily result from the game. In this case, the risk element in the game rises and the pay-offs – and these can be of a negative nature – rise along with it. 2 Kleist’s stories have usually been seen as a fascinatingly opaque, even suggestively malevolent, portrayal of an internal world that has entirely lost its rational underpinnings.20 They therefore give evidence of the failure of Enlightenment values to sustain positions presupposing the self-evidence of reason, that is, the coincidence of reason and being in the world. While there may be some truth to such views, they imply or even openly state that Kleist abandoned the project of reason at the centre of the Enlightenment,21 and that, accordingly, rational positions no longer have any currency in the world. Such views would move Kleist in the direction of other views of his day, such as those espoused by the German Romantics, who were equally rationally sceptical in outlook, if not openly hostile to the Enlightenment project of reason. What I would prefer to suggest is that rationality remains an important constitutive element overall in Kleist’s works, but it has been transferred from the level of individuals, who no longer absolutely command it, to the overall game situation itself. Accordingly, the ‘critical deficit’ in the secondary literature on Kleist appears to be a general failure to define and account for the particular type of bounded rationality that, importantly, is still encoun-

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Kreps, p. 11. Denys Dyer’s discussion of Kleist’s stories is but one of many approaches that highlight the irrationality of the world Kleist portrays. See Dyer, The Stories of Kleist (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 151-69. Bernd Fischer speaks of the ‘Skepsis an der Ratio’ that has long dominated readings of Kleist in the secondary literature. See Fischer, Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1988), p. 13.

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tered in Kleist’s imaginative world.22 This critical deficit is in part made good in a set of contributions gathered together in a recent publication under the title of Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung. In the opinion of many of the contributors to that volume of research, Kleist, while by no means a rationalist, appears to be anything but a committed anti-rationalist either 23 – a point which I believe is made obvious by the application of game theory to his work. Early research demonstrated conclusively that the narrative model for Kleist’s stories is an unerhörte Begebenheit24 – an unheard-of, unanticipated, unprecedented, and even shocking event of a nature such as that which Goethe considered elemental to the form of the novella.25 This event erupts upon the settled world of human understanding in the stories and precipitates a new quality of strategic interdependence for the story’s participants. The unheardof event might be a ‘move’ of nature, as is the case with the earthquake in Das Erdbeben in Chili, or some form of intervention of a person who turns out to be a player, as in the example of the Junker Wenzel von Tronka in the story Michael Kohlhaas, who suddenly erects a tollgate (Schlagbaum) on his property and without warning levies a punitive tax on all those, including the trader Kohlhaas, who pass across his territory. What is important for the game-theoretical perspective is that the unheard-of event in each of the stories establishes a heightened level of risk for participants, and accordingly changes their behaviour. In fact, the unheard-of event both creates the game situation and recasts each story as a non-cooperative game of incomplete information, where each participant must negotiate her or his moves without any certainty about the motivation of other participants. Indeed, Kleist goes to great lengths to undermine the strategic links between participants that would otherwise lead to co-operative alliances among participants or, conceivably, to a Nash equilibrium, the stable outcome of the game situation. Despite such preponderant instability, the game itself retains a rational

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24 25

For this reason, approaches such as that of Fischer, p. 160, emphasizing the insoluble nature of the dilemmas that Kleist’s stories discuss, fail to give a complete account of Kleist’s critique of rational understanding. Cf. especially the contributions of Hans-Jochen Marquardt, ‘Heinrich von Kleist-die Geburt der Moderne aus dem Geiste “neuer Aufklärung’”, and David Roberts, ‘Kleists Kritik der Urteilskraft: Zum Erhabenen in Das Erdbeben in Chili”, in Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Tim Mehigan. Cf. Denys Dyer, pp. 150. Johann Peter Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Fritz Bergemann (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1981 [1955]), I, pp. 207-8.

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appearance, since there are still pay-offs for behaviour at every stage of the game and a rational outcome is still provided for in the structure of the game. 3 In Die Verlobung in St Domingo, a story based on actual historical events of 1803-4, civil war has broken out between the French colonisers of the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo and the island’s indigenous inhabitants. As a result of an uprising that has seen the appropriation of farms and territory and a slaughter of whites by blacks, a force of 30,000 black troops, under the command of the renegade Frenchman General Dessalines, is rapidly moving across the island in order to storm the capital, Port au Prince, the last bastion of French power on the island. The small party of Gustav von der Ried, an officer in the French army, who is Swiss by birth, must reach the capital before the arrival of General Dessalines’s troops in order to effect an escape from the island. Gustav, the leader of the party, leaves his twelve compatriots by a wooded pond at nightfall and makes for a nearby house, where he attempts to secure food and overnight lodgings for his party. What Gustav doesn’t know is that the house he happens upon belongs to the black man Congo Hoango, a former slave of the French plantation owner Guillaume de Villeneuve, who treacherously slew de Villeneuve after hostilities began, despite several acts of kindness shown to him by the benevolent plantation owner over many years. In the meantime, Congo Hoango has forcibly taken over the plantation and dedicated his life to the murder of all colonizers still left on the island. He has made the mulatto Babekan his concubine, and also taken in her daughter Toni, a mestiza, who, having been fathered by a Frenchman in Paris, is lighter-skinned. The game, the context of which is shaped by the murder of the plantation owner, the story’s unheard-of event, involves Gustav and his party on one side, and Congo Hoango, Babekan and Toni on the other. Survival is the pay-off at every stage of this cutthroat game of non-cooperation.26 The optimal strategy of one side is the killing, or at least neutralization, of the other, since this will guarantee the survival of one party. However, as we shall see, such neutralization would not be the Nash equilibrium position in the game.

26

Bebekan alludes to survival as a pay-off in the following way: ‘Beim Himmel, diese deine Erklärung rettet ihm für heute das Leben!’ (‘By heavens, your just saying that has saved him his life for today!’) See Heinrich von Kleist: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1983), II, 178 (hereafter cited in the text as, for example, simply II, 178), and for the translation Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O- and other Stories, Translated and with an Introduction by Martin Greenberg. Preface by Thomas Mann (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), p. 212 (hereafter cited in the text as, for example, Greenberg, 212).

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Two absences are apparent at the start of the game and condition its structure: Congo Hoango is away on a mission in support of the cause of General Dessalines, leaving Babekan (whose name means ‘fortress’) and her daughter Toni alone in the house; Gustav’s party is holed up in their hideaway in the forest by the pond, thus leaving Gustav as the vanguard and lone promoter of the Swiss party’s cause. Since neither side, by virtue of these absences, is able to exert dominance over the other, the game must be played on the assumption of dissimulation, very much like a game of poker. This point is made by Babekan at the outset, who indicates the need for ‘List und [der] ganze[n] Inbegriff jener Künste, die die Notwehr dem Schwachen in die Hände gibt’ (‘by every trick and skill that self-preservation teaches the weak’) (V, 165 and Greenberg, 199) It should be noted, in passing, that this statement about the importance of dissimulation is, in the context of the story, itself a dissimulation. The first consequence of this strategy of dissimulation is that neither side knows the real motivation of the other, nor, indeed, the true identity of the third player, the mestiza Toni, who starts the game on the black side. Since Toni has an African mother and a French father, she is at once black and white. She so becomes the crucial player in the game, whose choices can tip the balance of the game in favour of one side or the other. In fact, the game may be understood as a struggle to establish a durable alliance with this third player, whose ultimate allegiance becomes the real focus of the game. Interest in the allegiance of the third player is heightened still further by the question of racial identity. Since identity is linked to the moves the players make in the game, perceptions about racial origin assume importance for the players in assessing the strategy of the game. Indeed, for many interpreters of the story, like Susanne Zantop, these perceptions are what the story is really about. 27 Certainly, they help account for the story’s startlingly modern appearance. From the perspective of the African, the European is imperialistic and destructive of natural values in a way that no act of kindness can make up for. Congo Hoango’s murder of the plantation owner de Villeneuve is consonant with this idea. Black, therefore, must always oppose the moves of white in the game situation. From the reverse perspective, the African is heathen and treacherously dismissive of the humanistic values of tolerance and compassion at the heart of European civilization. Since tolerance is indicated in this position, we can only say that white does not directly oppose the moves of black, unless black is treacherous, in which case white must then 27

See her essay ‘Changing Color: Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St Domingo and the Discourses of Miscegenation’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 191-208.

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oppose black. Such is the case in the story related by Gustav about the young negress who, through dissimulation, infected a white planter, her former owner, with yellow fever. Gustav renders this perspective clear when doubts about Toni’s allegiance are raised at a critical moment in the story: Die Rache des Himmels, meinte er, indem er sich mit einem leidenschaftlichen Ausdruck erhob, würde dadurch entwaffnet: die Engel selbst, dadurch empört, stellten sich auf Seiten derer, die Unrecht hätten, und nähmen, zur Aufrechterhaltung menschlicher und göttlicher Ordnung, ihre Sache! (Heaven’s vengeance, he said, rising from the table with a passionate expression, would be disarmed by such a deed: the angels themselves in their outrage would side with the unrighteous and, to uphold the human and divine order, plead their cause.) (V, 171 and Greenberg, 204)

Such passages represented a problem for early research on Kleist, since they were understood literally and enlisted in support of an essentialist account of humanistic values28 or, alternatively, the Christian morality on which they were allegedly based.29 Later scholarship understood them as contributions to a complicated dialogue about the Enlightenment and historicized them.30 They are, however, completely subsumable under neither category. Rather, such passages are part of a discussion about contingency that has rendered all values precisely that – values or strategic positions to be taken up in a game situation where even the angels themselves can ‘take sides’. Die Verlobung in St Domingo can therefore be understood as a game with a bimatrix structure in which neutralization of the opponent is the preferred outcome of one side; survival is the pay-off at each stage of the game. The game reveals an underlying contingency in the sense that the critical player, Toni, is both white and black and so without any predictable or necessary al-

28

29

30

Among the many early adherents of this approach, Günter Blöcker’s may be considered representative. See his Heinrich von Kleist oder das absolute Ich (Berlin: Argon, 1960). Such is the nature of Gerhard Fricke’s existentialist approach, first published in 1929, which was highly influential for later Kleist scholarship. See his Gefühl und Schicksal bei Heinrich von Kleist (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). Fischer’s analysis, in Ironische Metaphysik, p. 12, is a good example of such approaches: ‘Kleists Erzählungen [können] durchaus historisch als Auseinandersetzung mit dem herrschenden Paradigma seiner Zeit (das vielleicht immer noch am treffendsten mit dem epochalen Schlagwort Idealismus gefaßt wird) begriffen werden, dessen Grenzen er im ironischen Experiment aufzuzeigen vermag, ohne sie freilich […] grundsätzlich überschreiten zu können.’ (‘Kleist’s stories could well be understood historically as a challenge to the ruling paradigm of his time [which we might identify perhaps most accurately with the epochal term, Idealismus] by showing off its limits in an ironic experiment without, however, being able to transcend them [...] in principle.’).

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legiance.31Allegiance, in her case, is pledged ‘decisionistically’, in response to the overall game situation. That Toni is the uncommitted third participant in the game does not gainsay the bimatrix structure of the game. Elsewhere, moves of such a third participant are normally ascribed in game theory to the position of ‘nature’. Since Toni’s true allegiance is a question of a decision not finally knowable to the other participants, the two sides of the bimatrix, those occupied by Gustav and Babekan, have no choice but to ‘trust’ or ‘distrust’ Toni. Whether they trust or exercise mistrust at a particular stage of the game will determine the moves they make in the game; however, only trust can ensure that the game proceeds to the next stage, and only mistrust can end it. Accordingly, the game moves ahead in a bifurcated pattern in which trust, the ‘1’ position in the game, continues the game, and mistrust, the ‘0’ position, might at any stage end it. This is made clear at the end of the game when Toni declares, ‘Du hättest mir nicht mißtrauen sollen!’ (‘You shouldn’t have mistrusted me!’) (V, 193 and Greenberg, 227). The only way that Toni’s decision, and, perhaps, her underlying motivation, can be known, is by way of ‘backwards induction’, that is, through a process of reasoning which assesses her choices from the end of the game back to its beginning.32 It is only by backwards induction, too, that any final assessment can be made about the level of rationality in the game. This, then, is Kleist’s ultimate coup: rational motivation is no longer an a priori question, based on a complete knowledge of the game situation before the fact of human experience, but can only be established a posteriori in the light of actual moves undertaken by players in the game. It is in this undoing of Kant’s Copernican project of reason – a project predicated on the idea that rational judgements can be made on the basis of assumptions that precede the fact of human experience – that we find Kleist’s true answer to Kant. Kleist’s answer to Kant involves relativization of the claims of cognitive reason to provide an a priori guide for human behaviour, and moves other aspects of the humanist project, such as those factors that underpin contingent agreements, to the forefront.33

31

32 33

Toni is only half as black as her mulatto mother Babekan. This has significance for Herbert Uerlings, who has argued that the lightness of Toni’s skin means that her blush can be decoded by the male as a cipher of sexual desire. Cf. Herbert Uerlings, Poetiken der Interkulturalität. Haiti bei Kleist, Seghers, Müller, Buch und Fichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), p. 43. Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, pp. 80-85, offer a useful discussion of ‘backwards induction’. It is, above all, Kleist’s interest in the principle of agreement that suggests the importance of Rousseau in his thinking. For a discussion of Kleist’s reception of Rousseau, see Oskar Ritter von Xylander, Heinrich von Kleist und J. J. Rousseau (Berlin: Ebering, 1937) and Christian Moser, Verfehlte Gefühle: Wissen-Darstellen-Begehren bei Kleist und Rousseau (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993). For a discussion of the motif of the contract in

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The game of trust at the heart of Die Verlobung in St Domingo moves ahead in distinct stages. The first stage begins with Gustav’s arrival at the house and his reception by Babekan and Toni, and extends to the point of his first close contact with Toni. In this part of the story, the rules of the game are described, including the game’s reliance on dissimulation. That there are no durable values that can serve the players as a guide to action is suggested in the difficulty of assessing origins: Toni is of mixed race, Babekan is a mulatto with a Cuban father (and therefore not unambiguously African); even Gustav himself, although white, is Swiss and as such not clearly in opposition to the moves of black. The game unfolds in response to assumptions that the players make about these origins, and what the origins ultimately stand for. 34 The second stage in the game is introduced by a substory related by Gustav, which is as a subgame expressing a Nash equilibrium.35 Since the equilibrium it specifies represents a best reply to the players of that subgame, it can also be termed a subgame perfect (Nash) equilibrium.36 In this subgame, Gustav’s former lover, Mariane Congreve, saved Gustav from the guillotine during events accompanying the French Revolution by denying knowledge of Gustav under duress. This move in the subgame of trust had the highest possible positive pay-off for Gustav, since it ensured his survival, and the highest possible negative pay-off for Mariane, since she thereby succumbed to the guillotine. (If it can be assumed that Mariane’s playing fink would have led to the death of both Gustav, as the exposed traitor of the revolutionary cause, and Mariane, as his accomplice, then Mariane’s denial of Gustav, which saves his life, was also one of two Nash equilibrium outcomes of the game – the other being Gustav’s death as a result of playing fink.) This subgame has instructional value for Toni since it exactly mirrors her position in the main trust game – a game that, similarly, must also be played on the basis of the dissimulated identity of one player. The direct effect of this interpolated subgame is that it precipitates a decisive move of Toni, who subsequently makes love to Gustav and so indicates her trust of him. An act of trust, therefore,

34

35

36

Kleist, see my Text as Contract: The Nature and Function of Narrative Discourse in the Erzählungen of Heinrich von Kleist (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1988). The fact that the names ‘Gustav’ and ‘August’ constitute two sides of the one identity as well as being near anagrams of each other (in the same manner as Nicolo is an anagram of Colino for Piachi’s wife in Der Findling) underscores how the story is manifestly a game of identity for Toni as well. A subgame is a subset of an extensive game that starts from a ‘node’ in the game and feeds information back into it a player’s ‘information partition’. On this see Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, pp. 82-83. Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 83.

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moves the game to the next stage, and has the direct pay-off of survival for all participants. At this next stage of the game a new story is related, also by Gustav. It introduces a second subgame that sets up a counter position to the story about Mariane Congreve. The story tells of the slave girl, who lures her former slave owner into a trap, where the decision to trust through an act of love, or, better, lovemaking, has the highest possible negative pay-off for the one who trusts, namely his death as a result of infection with yellow fever. Here, trust does not lead to a perfect Nash equilibrium outcome. This position could only have been reached as a result of a decision not to trust. This second subgame of complete information therefore relativizes the information of the first subgame, and adds an implicit level of risk to moves that assume trust without the factor of dissimulation. Toni’s next move in the game must take account of the sudden return of Congo Hoango and the suspicions of her mother, who now suspects that Toni has had intimate contact with Gustav. (Babekan, it should be noted, has not been a recipient of the information about dissimulated motives in the second subgame about the slave girl.) These events mean that she must practise a decisive act of dissimulation that both allays these suspicions in one direction, and in the other promotes the survival of Gustav, whom it is now clear she truly loves. She achieves this by tying up Gustav while he sleeps in his room, thus giving the appearance of collusion with the moves of black, while at the same time rushing out to meet Gustav’s party in the forest, intercepting a note issued by Babekan that would have lured the party into a trap. This enables Gustav’s party to arrive with stealth, overcome Hoango and Babekan, quell the resistance of Hoango’s encampment at the house and liberate Gustav. What it fails to forestall, however, is Gustav’s next move, which follows the logic not of the first subgame of trust, but of the second, on the presumption that Toni has treacherously betrayed him and ultimately proved to be a colluder on the black side. This move, which sees him murder Toni before he is in possession of complete information about her motives, is a decision irrevocably to mistrust that ends the game, and, in a postscript or coda to the game, ends his own life as well. 4 What, then, is to be said about Die Verlobung in St Domingo after this application of game-theoretical assumptions to the story? And beyond the example of Kleist, what might be the utility of game theory for literary analysis? The most obvious thing that arises from viewing the story from the perspective of game theory relates to its overriding context of contingency. The

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story is revealed not only as a non-essentialist account of a contingent world, but also as a world that has nevertheless not abandoned rationality in any sceptical turn from it. Rather, the rationality we observe in the story is embedded in the highly symmetrical nature of its game structure; it is not preeminently encountered in the motivation of the figures, who, under certain circumstances, indeed, must favour strategies of non-rational behaviour in seeking to maximize their pay-offs in the game. To this extent, therefore, a game-theoretical approach helps us evaluate, and perhaps see the purpose of, the disparity between form and content long held to be characteristic of Kleist’s fiction. The critic Hermann Davidts is but one of many commentators who was struck by the highly organized, formalistic nature of Kleist’s narratives on the one hand, and their subject matter on the other, where confusion, tragic misunderstandings and quirks of fate reign supreme.37 In fact, one of the insights to be drawn from this reading of Die Verlobung in St Domingo is the difficulty that attends action in the world, precisely because the rational construction of events by the characters on a formal level of thought is unable to brook the complex content of the world which such thought addresses. Kleist thereby relativizes the Enlightenment project of reason, which had insisted that the world could be known through the operation of a type of predictive cognitive schematism. Kleist does not conclude that rational action is impossible in the world. He does, however, draw attention to the issue of complexity and to the means by which it can be brokered beyond reversion to a transparent rationalism. This is underscored in the denouement of Die Verlobung, where the rationally minded European Gustav is unable to comprehend the strategies of the Afro-European Toni, though she never failed to have Gustav’s best interests at heart. Kleist’s point is to underscore the importance of following mixed strategies of both a rational and non-rational nature. While Nash equilibrium outcomes draw on the enlightened self-interest of players and require a ‘common knowledge rationality’ to sustain them, Kleist’s narratives also ‘load the dice’ against responses founded on a simple predictive rationality alone. His stories thus point to the value of more nuanced, longer term strategies in effecting equilibrium outcomes in the game situation. More generally, the application of game theory in literary analysis would appear to be justified for a certain class of texts. These would be texts that evince a self-evident play structure in broad consonance with postmodern notions of textuality. At the same time, they would be texts in which the play

37

See Hermann Davidts, Die novellistische Kunst Heinrichs von Kleist (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1973).

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structure of the narration stabilizes around a formal set of indicators constituting a clearly marked off ‘semantic field’ within the text. In this class of texts (of which, indeed, all Kleist’s stories might be cited as an example) the semantic field, which is characterized by an attenuated or bounded rationality, is summoned into view by what Goethe noted in reference to the short story as the narrative’s unerhörte Begebenheit. This ‘unheard-of event’ precipitates or retrospectively structures the game situation of the story. The game situation, in turn, is no longer conditioned by aesthetic considerations otherwise constitutive of imaginative writing, but is determined by contextual considerations ultimately linked to a practical or ethical content in the story (in game theoretical terms, the problem of how to achieve an optimal pay-off for all participants in the game). In a context of overriding contingency – the contingency of the situation of modernity – it is this movement from aesthetics to ethics, from play to game, which provides new goals for literary analysis.

Alexander Honold

French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting in Gottfried Keller’s Prose Fiction

The chapter analyzes the phenomena of narrated play in Gottfried Keller’s prose on at least two different levels of textual ‘playing’. First, the given play and its manifest representation, and secondly, the interaction between the represented characters and their textual actors. In contrast to dramatic versions of a play within a play, which often constitute a logical paradox, the narrated play is an effect between different genres, and therefore it doesn’t allude to a logical binarism but rather to an aesthetical embedding. Playing games is a second-degree acting conscious of itself, a kind of acting as-if. Somehow it corresponds to mimesis, but with an ironical consensus regarding the rules. We know that in Greek tragedy mimesis emerged from the ritual sphere of agon and sacrifice. Playing games signifies acting as-if within the great game of reality, when the rules are accepted and the stage is defined. To differentiate between playing and behaving seriously is just a matter of definition; one always needs to consider the actual level of stage and perspective. ‘Playing’ is a highly ambiguous concept. For ‘playing’ does not only mean ‘acting’ but also – and especially in its origin – it means ‘playing a game’. Playing games almost everywhere belongs to a dimension that involves an antagonistic structure, like a ‘he or me’-showdown. Keller’s Prose is full of such situations of antagonism. If theatre can be a model of literature as symbolic practice, playing games probably is the very master-type for the antagonistic mode of action that makes the drama. To combine both dimensions, one could say: Playing is a mode of symbolic acting that helps to express social relations or to determine them.

1. Narrated Acting Gottfried Keller was not a great playwright, but he is well known for his poetry and especially for his narrative fiction – two long novels and a series of stories and novellas. In Keller’s oeuvre, there is one finished play called Therese and a fragmentary project entitled Mythenstein, which (if finished) would have been a combination of music, theatre and a celebration of national history in the style of Richard Wagner. Both of these efforts failed, and it seems that Keller himself was more interested in popular spectacle and in staging live theatre than in the literary techniques of dramatic mise en scène. Nevertheless, plays and theatre do have an important impact on the education of the protagonist in Keller’s great novel, Der grüne Heinrich. In many ways, young Heinrich represents the childhood and youth of the author himself. Like his author, the novel’s protagonist is deeply impressed by theatrical experiences connected with two major works of the Weimar classical

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period, namely Faust and Wilhelm Tell. Goethe’s Faust – or, more precisely, the actress of the Gretchen-scene – marks the first moments of sexual awakening in the protagonist’s adolescence; some years later a public staging of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell echoes this initiation with the beginning of Heinrich’s shy love affair with Anna, also introducing the dimensions of national allegory and popular enactment of a collective memory. In Keller’s novel, both of these plays are are performed on an elementary level by passionate dilettanti and not presented as the untouchable climax of high culture. The inhabitants of a Swiss town, mostly dignitaries and persons of outstanding merit, proudly perform as the dramatis personae of Wilhelm Tell, a play they have known almost by heart since their school days. They enjoy their own acting and have no reason to conceal their pleasure. Theatre in Grüner Heinrich is far from any professional ambition of illusionism, and what we have is a kind of narrated acting that self-reflexively points to its own characteristic of being on stage at every moment of its performance. One could call this ‘epic theatre’, perhaps even in the Brechtian sense. In Keller’s prose, epic theatre describes a narrative discourse about what it means to play a role and about what it means to act as a protagonist. It would be worth analyzing more exhaustively all the phenomena of narrated play in their semiotic and poetic aspects, provided that the author in question manages to connect at least two different levels of textual ‘playing’: the given play and its manifest representation, and the interaction between characters and their textual actors. One also should not neglect the performative qualities of the act of narration, which can be considered a mise en scène of fictional protagonists acting as ‘real actors’ of fictional protagonists, and so on. In short, what I like to suggest here is that narratives about playacting have a structural tendency to be self-reflexive; their textual play opens an inner space of redoubling references that can be identified as the wellknown effect of mise en abyme. Differing from dramatic versions of the play within a play, which often constitute a logical paradox, the narrated play is an effect between different genres, and therefore it alludes to aesthetic embeddings and not to logical binarism. Since we have a framed performance, similar to the architecture of the stage itself, we are able to observe it as a representation on its two levels of plot and performance, which coincide on a third level, that of performance as a plot itself, as a subject of narration. In recent decades, theatre has become a metaphor for different forms of cultural representation and for symbolic acting in general. Inspired by the ‘performative turn’ in literary scholarship, some helpful articulations of the relations between narrative and dramatic discourse have been made in Germany. I mention only the two volumes of Szenographien and Inszenierte

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Welt, edited by Gerhard Neumann, Ethel Matala de Mazza and others.1 The contributors of these two volumes focus on Theatralität (theatricality) as a concept of literature and criticism. As various case studies demonstrate, concepts taken from the performing arts can be usefully applied to narrative. As the different genres reflect parallels and affinities, comparison also emphasizes differences. In prose, the most important performance is telling a story, and therefore language itself in its articulated linearity represents a basic mode of acting. A narrator’s voice is a special effect that does not translate easily into stage presentation. However, the narrated plot and its protagonists do constitute a play that is more or less transferable into a dramatic mode. And finally, within the narrated action there can be found, to some extent, brief inserts of second-degree acting, small reservoirs of playing in the full sense of the word. For ‘playing’ does not only mean ‘acting’ but also – especially in its origin – it means ‘playing a game’. If theatre can be a model of literature as symbolic practice, playing games probably is the very mastertype for the antagonistic mode of action that makes drama. 2. Agonistic Situations Playing games almost universally belongs to antagonisms, to a decisive structure as in a ‘he or me’ showdown. There is no third solution between win or lose, victory or defeat, success or catastrophe. Keller’s prose is full of such situations of antagonism. In the novel Der Grüne Heinrich we have two or three quite similar constellations in which the protagonist, as a ten- or twelveyear-old schoolboy, tries to compete with friends and rivals who are much stronger and cleverer than he is, and who belong to families much wealthier than his. As Heinrich lives alone with his mother, a widow who tries hard to maintain her family’s former standard of living with her limited revenue, the young boy very often gets the impression of not being able to compete with others in terms of social prestige and economic power. In the sequence of these agonistic situations, Heinrich is always condemned to play the underdog’s part, and the only thing that saves him from being defeated is his fantasy. In der Tat muß ich auf diese Kinderzeit meinen Hang und ein gewisses Geschick zurückführen, an die Vorkommnisse des Lebens erfundene Schicksale und verwickelte Geschich-

1

See Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann, Caroline Pross and Gerald Wildgruber (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), and Inszenierte Welt. Theatralität als Argument literarischer Texte, ed. by Ethel Matala de Mazza and Clemens Pornschlegel (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003).

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ten anzuknüpfen, und so im Fluge heitere und traurige Romane zu entwerfen, deren Mittelpunkt ich selbst oder die mir Nahestehenden ware. (Indeed I must trace back to my childhood a tendency of mine and a degree of skill to tie together events of my life with certain invented fates and other complicated stories, thus developing in a flight of fancy either cheerful or sad novels with myself or those close to me at the very centre.) (GH, 122).2

As the situation sometimes requires transcending the poverty of his daily life, Heinrich’s little stories emerge spontaneously. When necessary (and it often is), the ‘grüner Heinrich’ isn’t quite so green; he can tell blatant lies and adorn them so convincingly that despite adverse circumstances and diverse disadvantages, in many cases it is he who scores the point. Once a few older pupils are punished only because of Heinrich’s completely false allegations: ‘Noch nie hatte man in der Schule eine solche Beredsamkeit an mir bemerkt, wie bei dieser Erzählung’ (‘Never had I been noted in school for such eloquence as when I told this story’) (GH, 125). While the others are blamed and punished, he survives the affair as an innocent victim. But rivals always meet twice. A few years later, the whole class invades a teacher’s private rooms just to terrify him; an investigation exposes Heinrich as solely responsible and he is dismissed from school. A little and nasty victory in the first scene is echoed by a bitter and definite punishment in the second one, and this combination seems to be decisive in his future as a young artist and social dropout. It is his own imagination that takes him beyond the rules of his comrades, and again it is imagination that helps him withstand the shock of losing his place in school. Both times, techniques of playing are introduced on different levels. In order to rival his older or wealthier comrades, Heinrich has to pretend to be something different than he is; he is playing a role, and he is playing a game as well. Playing games is second-degree acting conscious of itself, a kind of acting as-if. Somehow it corresponds to mimesis, but with ironical consent to rules. We know that in Greek tragedy mimesis emerged from the ritual sphere of agon and sacrifice. Playing games signifies acting as-if within the great game of reality, when the rules are accepted and the stage is defined. Anyhow, to differentiate between playing and behaving seriously is just a matter of definition; one always needs to consider the actual level of stage and perspective. ‘Playing’ is a highly ambiguous concept, and that is the first reason for its attractiveness. But at this point in my argument, it is not suffi2

I am quoting from the novel’s first version in the following edition: Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich [Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2], ed. by Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985). This edition cited in the text as GH followed by page number. Translations by Gerhard Fischer.

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cient to exploit that ambiguity. I will say a few words about the theoretical status of games and playing. 3. Modes of Playing Modern thinking about the status of playing in anthropology starts with the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga and his famous book Homo ludens (1939).3 Huizinga introduced and established an understanding of playing that refers to Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education; that means, for Huizinga, the human sphere of playing belongs to the presupposed existence of an autonomous realm of art. In contrast, the French sociologist Roger Caillois established an anthropological approach to the practices of playing.4 With Caillois, four principal dimensions of play can be delineated, and only one of them – the concept of mimicry – derives from the artistic sphere of mimesis, while the others have much more to do with our colloquial understanding of playing a game. What kind of games do we play? Most of them are competitive, and most of them conclude with a decisive victory or defeat that can be achieved by chance or struggle or a combination of both. Caillois first analyzes all sorts of competition, of duel and fight, referring them to the Greek category of agon (which means rivalry). These consist of symmetrical relations between opponents or antagonists that can be solved by different sorts of competition. As a second element, these competitive games can also include a random system that Caillois terms hasard (coincidence). On that field, decisions are made by chance. The only rule of the game here is the statistical calculation of probability, such as in games of dice, in playing cards, or all kinds of lotteries. Finally, Caillois distinguishes another kind of games that are non-symmetrical and affect primarily the self – one could call them ‘vertigo’ games (vertige), games in which the body is exposed to high-pressure sensations, to drugs, or to velocity. But what seems most important to me in the context of this chapter are those games which connect one of these agonistic forms of playing a game with playing in the dramatic sense of playing a role, identified with the notions of mimesis or mimicry. 4. Substitutive Acting To combine both dimensions, one could say that playing is a mode of symbolic acting that helps express or determine social relations. To illustrate this point, let me return to my observations about narrated play in Keller’s prose. As I mentioned earlier, in Keller’s Grüner Heinrich the protagonist and his 3

4

Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994). Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

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girlfriend Anna fall in love with a little help from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, as they have to use the words of love Schiller prescribes for his protagonists Bertha and Rudenz. Of course it is Heinrich who has arranged the whole scene, while Anna doesn’t know the play very well and stands completely surprised and embarrassed when it comes to performing the decisive scene. Anna fragte, was denn das wäre mit der Jagdszene […], und während mein Brauner und ihr Schimmel behaglich sich beschnupperten, ich aber wie auf Kohlen saß, las sie, das Buch auf dem rechten Knie haltend, aufmerksam die Szene, wo Rudenz und Bertha ihr schönes Bündnis schließen, von Anfang bis zu Ende, mehr und mehr errötend. Die Schlinge kam nun an den Tag, welche ich ihr so harmlos gelegt. (Anna asked what it was about this hunting scene […], and while our horses were tenderly sniffing each other, I was like sitting on hot coals as she, the book on her right knee, attentively read the scene in which Rudenz and Bertha conclude their happy union, from begining to end, blushing more and more. Thus the trap came to light that I had so harmlessly set for her.) (GH, 425).

When Anna realizes that they have to perform a love scene, she refuses to continue the play – and shows thereby that she understands the message very well. Leaving behind Schiller’s play, Heinrich and Anna learn to act and to feel being in love; they learn to be conscientious actors. But when the play is over, the magic is gone. There always has to be a kind of alibi or pretext that ‘authorizes’ them to overcome their shyness and fear. To be precise, their problem is not psychology but communication. Literature offers to them a language of love that serves as a platform for their encounter. If the question for the couple is how to produce emotions with words, the answer can be to adopt and adapt literature for their own purpose; but very soon the point is reached where playing a role isn’t enough for Heinrich and Anna, and they understand that it is time for them to act without quotation marks. It is the narration itself that opens an alternative playground when switching the focus from the two persons to their horses, tenderly sniffing each other. When acting comes to a dead end, changing the playground or refining the rules of the game can be the solution. The horses enact what can neither be said nor done by Anna and Heinrich. The animals introduce a parallel play to the main plot, a drama in nuce that anticipates and accelerates relations between Heinrich and Anna. In this sense of a play within the play, we could now discuss similar scenes in other novels, for example the famous horse races in Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, or in Zola’s Nana. Both scenes are symptomatic and decisive for their plots, and both of them serve as an explicit interpretation of the hidden conflicts and love affairs between the main protagonists. In these two cases, the horserace is clearly a substitute for decisions that cannot be made otherwise.

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5. Kitchen Games In his Grüner Heinrich, Keller also arranges such a model of symbolic acting when Heinrich and Anna are together for the very first time. Their love affair starts in the kitchen, where the housework has to be done. There is a large pile of French beans between them on the table, and now the game is to diminish it from both sides without touching each other’s hands; desire and taboo converge: Anna hatte eine mächtige Wanne voll grüner Bohnen der Schwänzchen und Fäden zu entledigen und an lange Fäden zu reihen, um sie zum Dörren vorzubereiten. […] wir setzten uns einander gegenüber, bis zur Mittagsstunde arbeitend und von unseren gegenseitigen Lebensläufen, Eltern und Familien erzählend. (Anna had to prepare a sizeable tub full of green beans, to remove their little tails and threads and to string them up on long lines in preparation for drying. […] we sat facing each other, working until lunchtime and telling of our mutual lives, our parents and families.) (GH 291)

While the day passes, the supply of French beans doesn’t come to an end, and they are still sitting in the kitchen late in the evening, accompanied by an old wife called Katharine serving as a housekeeper. So saßen wir bis um ein Uhr um den grünen Bohnenberg herum und trugen ihn allmählig ab, indem jedes einen tiefen Schacht vor sich hineingrub und die Alte den ganzen Vorrat ihrer Sagen und Schwänke heraufbeschwor und uns beide, die wir wach und munter blieben, […] so lachen machte, daß uns die Tränen über die Wangen liefen. (Thus we were sitting around the mountain of green beans which was slowly being levelled, until one o’clock in the morning, each one of us digging a deep shaft into the beans while the old woman conjured up her whole treasure trove of old tales and funny stories, keeping us alert and awake […] and making us laugh until tears were running down our cheeks.) (GH 291)

Katherine, the old woman, entertains the couple with her fairy tales and popular wisdom; she performs the classical function of a matchmaker, as the continuation shows. While the two adolescents are sitting at the table quite innocently, their hands come closer and closer. They only can find out what the beans could mean to them by digging in, again and again. Anna, welche mir gegenüber saß, baute ihren Hohlweg in die Bohnen hinein mit vieler Kunst, eine Bohne nach der andern herausnehmend, und grub unvermerkt einen unterirdischen Stollen, so daß plötzlich ihr kleines Händchen in meiner Höhle zutage trat, […] und von meinen Bohnen wegschleppte in die grauliche Finsternis hinein. (Anna, sitting opposite me, was burrowing into the mountain of beans with great artfulness, plucking out one bean after another, until all of a sudden she had managed to complete a

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subterranean tunnel out of which her little hand emerged into my cave […] and began to spirit away my supply of beans into the horrible darkness.) (GH 291)

Anna starts playing seriously. What separates her from Heinrich and what connects her to him is one and the same thing. Labour turns into love, into the labour of love, and realistic and symbolic dimensions of the game with the French beans mutually interpret each other: Katherine belehrte mich, daß Anna der Sitte gemäß verpflichtet sei, mich zu küssen, wenn ich ihre Finger erwischen könne, jedoch dürfe der Berg darüber nicht zusammenfallen, und ich legte mich deshalb auf die Lauer. (Katherine advised me that custom required of Anna to give me a kiss if I could get hold of her fingers without the mountain collapsing, and I thus took up position to lie in wait for her hand.) (GH 291)

It is a game on different levels that we are witnessing here. In Roger Caillois’ terms, the scene is agonistic because it leads to a question of win or lose. If Heinrich manages to catch her fingers, Anna has to pay the price. Thus it is competition that serves as an alibi for the first kiss, while the children’s game of hide-and-seek promotes and pushes the erotic tension between them. But in the very centre, the game also has aspects of mimicry and mimesis because both of the players are alluding to roles from another game, that of territorial warfare. Anna is the thief or invader, and Heinrich the defender. And so their given gender-positions playfully cross each other. She represents aggression, while he shows control. They pretend to be involved in agonistic rivalry, but what they are hoping for is a win-win resolution called love. Nevertheless the author is good enough not to step into a simple romance; although Heinrich later will get the kiss that he deserves, their love fails when the game is over. Judging by the experiences that Heinrich will have to pass through in the rest of the novel, there is no such win-win situation, at least not for him. In its economic dimension, life is just a given amount of French beans, and it can simply be cooked and eaten. As a kind of side dish to this episode, Keller describes a parallel scene in his novella Pankraz der Schmoller (Pankraz the Sulker). The text tells the story of a poor household with two children struggling for their daily sustenance because there isn’t enough food on the table. While the French beans metaphorically allude to the roles of aggressor and defender, in Pankraz der Schmoller we have serious warfare complete with troops and trenches based on the playground of a bowl with mashed potatoes. The tasty food symbolizes both the agon itself and the winner’s prize, as I will demonstrate with a longer quotation.

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Die Mutter kochte nämlich jeden Mittag einen dicken Kartoffelbrei, über welchen sie eine fette Milch oder eine Brühe von schöner brauner Butter goß. Diesen Kartoffelbrei aßen sie Alle zusammen aus der Schüssel mit ihren Blechlöffeln, indem Jeder vor sich eine Vertiefung in das feste Kartoffelgebirge hinein grub. Das Söhnlein, welches bei aller Seltsamkeit in Eßangelegenheiten einen strengen Sinn für militärische Regelmäßigkeit beurkundete und streng darauf hielt, daß Jeder nicht mehr noch weniger nahm, als was ihm zukomme, sah stets darauf, daß die Milch oder die gelbe Butter, welche am Rande der Schüssel umherfloß, gleichmäßig in die abgeteilten Gruben laufe; das Schwesterchen hingegen, welches viel harmloser war, suchte, sobald ihre Quellen versiegt waren, durch allerhand künstliche Stollen und Abzugsgräben die wohlschmeckenden Bächlein auf ihre Seite zu leiten, und wie sehr sich auch der Bruder dem widersetzte und eben so künstliche Dämme aufbaute und überall verstopfte, wo sich ein verdächtiges Loch zeigen wollte, so wußte sie doch immer wieder eine geheime Ader des Breies zu eröffnen oder langte kurzweg im offenen Friedensbruch mit ihrem Löffel und mit lachenden Augen in des Bruders gefüllte Grube. Alsdann warf er den Löffel weg, lamentierte und schmollte, bis die gute Mutter die Schüssel zur Seite neigte und ihre eigene Brühe voll in das Labyrinth der Kanäle und Dämme ihrer Kinder strömen ließ. (Every day for lunch mother would cook a thick mash of potatoes, and she would pour some fat milk or a broth of nice brown butter over it. They would all eat this potato mash with their tin spoons out of a common dish, with everyone digging a little hollow into their side of the firm mountain of mashed potatoes. The little son, despite some peculiarity in matters of food, had a strong sense of military orderliness and strictly saw to it that no one took more or less than was their due, and he made sure that the milk or the yellow butter floating around the edge of the dish would run fairly into the individually excavated spaces; the little sister, on the other hand, much less designing, would try, as soon as her source had dried up, to direct the tasty little stream her way by constructing all sorts of artificial drains and ditches; and as much as her brother tried to resist and responded by equally building dams or plugging suspicious looking holes, she always found a way to open a secret vein of the mash or she would simply, in an open violation of the peace and with a laughing eye, dip her spoon into her brother’s well-filled quarry. Whereupon he would throw away his spoon, lamenting and sulking, until the good mother would tilt the dish to one side so that her own broth could run into the labyrinth of her children’s canals and dams.)5

This is a key scene for the whole novella, showing how Pankraz starts to be a Schmoller (sulker) and a spoilsport. Why is this war-game of family-life much more aggressive than the love-game between Heinrich and Anna? Following Keller’s narration, the gender antagonism is most dramatic between brother and sister because their weapons are so unequal. The boy is committed to the rules of discipline and economic justice, while the girl acts spontaneously and without any bad intentions. She plays her game smiling, with irony and grace. Because Pankraz cannot use his physical power to attain his interests, his only way out is to be easily offended and to sulk. This daily trouble with the mashed potatoes reaches a point when the game stops and 5

Gottfried Keller, Pankraz der Schmoller. Die Leute von Seldwyla [Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 4], ed. by Thomas Böning (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989).

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plunges into desperate consequences. Young Pankraz packs his few belongings and leaves home for a dozen years, travelling around the world as a soldier and adventurer. We have already seen that kind of desperate consequence in Der grüne Heinrich when the protagonist is forced to leave school, home and family. Sometimes it can take an entire lifetime to heal a wrong decision made during a silly children’s game. All these games have dramatic effects; that is what we learn by reading Gottfried Keller. The play within the play? In the case of Keller’s French beans and mashed potatoes, it’s just a play on the plate.

Ulrike Garde

Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and Barrie Kosky’s Interpretation for the Melbourne International Arts Festival

In his theatrical production The Lost Breath Barrie Kosky establishes a close connection to Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’. The main focus of this chapter is on the playful approach towards the staging of unstable meanings which the two texts have in common. The analysis applies Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance to the texts and focuses on the apparatus in order to reveal theatricality as the dynamic pattern that underlies their making and re-making of meaning. It is uncovered which elements of play and différance are inherent in Kafka’s text and how Kosky transfers them to the stage. Ultimately, the performance serves as an illustration of how Kafka’s ‘playing’ with meaning and the corresponding theatricality of making meaning can be successfully transported to the stage.

In 2003, Barrie Kosky staged The Lost Breath (Der Verlorne Atem) as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. This multi-framed and multi-layered performance combined three stories by Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’ (In der Strafkolonie), ‘Metamorphosis’ (Die Verwandlung) and ‘A Hunger Artist’ (Ein Hungerkünstler) with the dramatisation of aspects of the life of Harry Houdini and a performance of Schumann’s song cycle, ‘Dichterliebe’. It was the first part of this performance which aroused particular interest both in Australian critics and their colleagues who had seen the initial season of the show at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna.1 An analysis of Kafka’s text and Kosky’s performance will demonstrate that Kosky’s project was largely successful because of its emphasis on ‘play’ and because it used and developed elements of ‘play’ already present in Kafka’s text. Accordingly, the following analysis will fall into two parts, the first

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Cf., for example, Helen Thomson, Age, 16 October 2003; Thuy On, Australian, 16 October 2003 and, in Germany, Wolfgang Kralicek, Theater heute (May 2003). Kosky has been coartistic director of the Schauspielhaus since 2001.

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focussing on ‘In the Penal Colony’,2 examining which elements of ‘play’ are present in Kafka’s story, and the second on The Lost Breath, 3 analysing which of these elements Kosky has used and developed for the first part of his performance. Against the background of the great number of interpretations which have already been proposed for Kafka’s work and the endeavour to tease out the emphasis on ‘play’ in this particular analysis, the interpretation will be necessarily provisional and restricted, ‘in recognition of the interventionist and theoretically endless nature of the discourse [on Kafka’s and Kosky’s texts], the place of contexts and the provisional aspect of all findings’.4 As far as ‘play’ is concerned, the analysis will take into account a broad range of its meanings. Definitions in dictionaries refer to a ‘dramatic composition or piece’ while emphasising the aspects of creativity, freedom and fun.5 Accordingly, Brian Edwards, in his Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction, distinguishes between ‘play’ and ‘game’, defing the latter as ‘finite and rulegoverned’.6 The etymology of the German word Spiel also stresses the association with dance and movement,7 while the etymology of the French jeu points to the play with words. 8 When applying the concept of ‘play’ to Kafka’s and Kosky’s texts, these German and French etymological connotations relate to Derrida’s concept of différance. In their own ways, the first parts of The Penal Colony and The Lost Breath presuppose and explore a notion of language and meaning in which the signifier and the signified no

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For Kafka’s text, see ‘In der Strafkolonie’, in Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and G. Neumann (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994), pp. 203-48. All German quotations are from this edition. The English translations referred to in this chapter are by Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories (New York: Shocken Books, 1995), pp. 191-227, and by Ian Johnston, to be found at (accessed 7 January 2005). These translations will be referred to hereafter simply as ‘Muir’ and ‘Johnston’. Unless otherwise acknowledged, all other translations are my own. In what follows the short titles The Penal Colony and The Lost Breath will be used. Brian Edwards, Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction (New York: Garland, 1998), p. XII. Macquarie Dictionary, ed. by A. Delbridge and others (North Ryde, N.S.W: Macquarie Library, 2003), pp. 1462-63. Edwards, p. 12. Duden. Etymologie. Herkunftswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, ed. by Günter Drosdowski (Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1989), p. 690. In the sense of ‘badinage’, ‘plaisanterie’. This etymology can be traced back to the twelfth century. The meaning of ‘mouvement’ dates from 1677. See Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique, ed. by A. Rey and J. Rey-Devove (Paris: Le Robert, 2000), p. 1374.

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longer form an indivisible unit leading to a stable meaning.9 Instead, the making of meaning in these texts is deferred and continuously deconstructed by that which differs, or, in Derrida’s words, ‘[t]he one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other’.10 This process of making meaning creates a space between signifiers and signifieds which leaves room for movement and play. This would be aptly expressed by the German word Spielraum, which alludes to the concepts of scope, margin and free activity.11 In Derrida’s own writings, this movement often takes the shape of an ellipse, in which he puts an initial definition of a concept sous rature (under erasure),12 only to return to it later on in order to re-create one of its meanings. 13 The following analysis will show that similar movements in the staging of meaning can be found both in The Penal Colony and in The Lost Breath. At the same time, both texts explore the instability and dynamics of staging meaning as a Spielraum, in particular with reference to the object at the centre of their attention, the apparatus. They use the space available for a ‘playful’ approach to creating and re-creating meaning involving the reader and spectator in this process. Meaning is forever in flux 14 and its mise en scène is as ephemeral as a theatre performance. Accordingly Gerhard Neumann refers to ‘[t]heatricality […] as a praxis of making meaning’ and defines it as ‘a dynamic pattern inherent to language’.15 Here, three aspects of ‘play’ in Kafka’s and Kosky’s text come together, that is ‘play’ as a creative

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See Derrida’s analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theories in De la Grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 47. Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester 1982), pp. 19-20. Derrida himself speaks repeatedly of the ‘jeu de la différance’ (‘the play of différance’), e.g. in ‘Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse’, in Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides this translation, defining it as follows: ‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.’ See Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Translator’s introduction, p. XIV. Cf. Derrida’s description in ‘The Original Discussion of Différance (1968)’, in Derrida and Différance, ed. by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 83-95 (p. 85). For Derrida’s comments on trying to ‘leave’ ‘closure’ and his description of différance as marking a ‘generative activity’, ‘movement’ and ‘creativity’, see ‘The Original Discussion’, p. 85. ‘Theatralität [...] als eine Praxis der Bedeutungsproduktion [...], die als ein dynamisches Muster der Sprache selbst innewohnt’, in Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and others (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), p. 13.

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approach towards ephemeral stagings of meaning, with the underlying movements of these mises en scène resembling différance.16 As a result, the reader’s active role in staging meaning is emphasised. As Edwards remarks, ‘To observe is to be involved, in activity, discourse and change, in the play of the world’.17 If this general definition of ‘play’ is used as a ‘model for reading practice’,18 it invites a critical analysis which focuses on the movements and patterns that are part of the overall mise en scène of and ‘play’ with meanings.19 In line with these considerations, the following analysis will show how ‘play’ in various forms is characteristic both of The Penal Colony and of The Lost Breath and how a ‘play’ with meaning in the sense of différance involves theatricality in the processes of making meaning in Kafka’s and Kosky’s texts. Here, it is important to note that Kosky bases Part I of his performance only on the first third of The Penal Colony.20 By largely ignoring the execution, which illustrates the function of the apparatus,21 Kosky concentrates on the theoretical explanations of the apparatus in the first part of Kafka’s story. Consequently, the apparatus is at the centre of the ‘play’ with différance and of the making of meaning in both texts under consideration. As a result, both Kafka’s and Kosky’s initial mises en scène of what this apparatus could signify lead to a ‘play’ with readers and audiences who are trying to make ‘sense’ out of shifts and delays in meaning. Although Derrida links deferral and difference intrinsically in the above definition of différance, it is worthwhile to consider the two aspects separate-

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Edwards, p. 17, goes even further and calls ‘play’ an ‘attitude of mind, a perspective on life or on being in the world, together with actions manifesting this attitude. It affirms freedom and possibility against restriction, resignation and closure, thus blurring distinctions between observation and participation, and between spectators and collaborators.’ Edwards continues, p.17: ‘It is to participate in what Derrida describes as the Nietzschean affirmation’ and he quotes Derrida as follows: ‘[t]he joyous affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation’, from Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 292. Edwards, p. 17. Neumann, p. 13, points to ‘inszenatorischen Antriebs- und Bewegungsmuster[n]’ (patterns of directorial drive and movement) in literary texts. While Edwards does not make this connection explicitly, his choice of vocabulary seems to suggest it. ‘In der Strafkolonie’, pp. 203-20. The critical literature, however, concentrates largely on the execution itself. In this context, it is noteworthy that even in the later parts of The Penal Colony the meaning of the apparatus only becomes clear on a superficial level. Its possible metaphorical meanings have been much debated. For an attempt to summarize the various interpretations, see Axel Hecker, An der Rändern des Lesbaren. Dekonstruktive Lektüren zu Franz Kafka: ‘Die Verwandlung’, ‘In der Strafkolonie’ und ‘Das Urteil’ (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1998), pp. 115-18.

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ly in order to allow for a clear structure in the following analysis. Therefore, elements of deferral will be considered first. When Kafka makes the officer in The Penal Colony say ‘Und nun beginnt das Spiel’ (And now the play begins) 22 on the twelfth page of his story, this is misleading as far as the writing and reception processes are concerned; from the very beginning, Kafka has been ‘playing’ with his readers’ expectations and efforts to make meaning of the apparatus. At the same time, the fact that this self-reflexive remark appears late in the text is characteristic of the delays with which bits and pieces of meaning are provided in the text. For this purpose, it is useful to analyse the first paragraphs of The Penal Colony in detail, as they set a pattern for what follows. Thus, the very first sentence, ‘Es ist ein eigentümlicher Apparat’ (It is a remarkable, peculiar apparatus), 23 contains a gesture of showing, 24 which seems to involve the start of a definition for the object at the centre of attention. However, the explanation stops here and the narrator deviates from the central topic. Instead of providing more information on the apparatus, the officer’s explanation is interrupted after this introductory sentence and he proceeds to cast the most important roles for the theatre of meaning to come. One main role is that of the officer, who directs the performances, as the text states that he has the knowledge and expertise that enable him to give an ‘overview’ 25 of the nature and the function of the apparatus. Together with the explorer, the reader is attributed the role of the audience. Consequently, the reader’s initial curiosity regarding what makes the apparatus so ‘eigentümlich’ (peculiar, particular, remarkable and, possibly, fascinating) is not immediately satisfied. It is only in the next paragraph that the flow of the text seems to be redirected towards the apparatus, but, once again, the promised information is not provided. The reader learns about neither its make-up nor its function. In order to find out part of this information, he needs to persist for another three pages. This is despite the metalinguistic comments in the second paragraph which seem to prepare the reader for the information to be delivered immediately. For example, when the officer states ‘Ready now!’, the Apparat is not exactly parat or ready for description until four pages later and the first

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Kafka, p. 215; my translation. Muir’s translation, p. 200, which reads ‘And then the performance begins’, seems unsatisfactory because it concentrates only on the performative aspect of the execution. Kafka, p. 203. Muir’s translation, p. 191, is ‘remarkable’ , Johnston’s ‘peculiar’. In the sense of Brecht’s Gestus des Zeigens. The German original uses ‘überblickte’ in this context (p. 203), which expresses the notion of control, while stressing the connotation with the metaphor of seeing.

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attempt to stage an execution follows another thirteen pages later.26 Similarly, the officer’s invitation ‘Now just have a look at this machine’ 27 is not followed by an explanation of its function but by a description of possible malfunctions. In fact, each time the officer uses a metalinguistic introduction to his ‘explanation/s’ 28 of the apparatus, the actual information about it gets deferred only to return to it later. In The Penal Colony, the metalinguistic remarks could be interpreted as being sous rature,29 they are valid in the sense that explanations are eventually going to follow, but they are crossed out at the same time because the text which follows negates them by providing different information from what is expected.30 This results in what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called ‘the figure of determination in a circle’.31 As far as The Penal Colony is concerned, the circle keeps coming back to the same object, each time seemingly with the aim of providing information which then slips away again. Any attempt on part of the reader to construct ‘definite’ and reliable meaning keeps being deconstructed. Fittingly, Kafka makes his narrator introduce the metaphor of breakdowns or Störungen. Failing to provide yet again the expected information, the officer warns the explorer about possible breakdowns of the apparatus: ‘Of course, breakdowns do happen. I really hope none will occur today, but we must be prepared for it. […] But if any breakdowns do occur, they’ll only be very minor, and we’ll deal with them right away’.32 After the negations and relativisations in this explanation, it can be taken for granted that breakdowns will happen when the machine eventually performs the task of execution. As far as the story’s structure is concerned, it has been shown that these breakdowns and the circular figure are far from minor in importance. Kafka illustrates their significance once again when his text finally provides some information about the make-up of the apparatus in the next paragraph. Once

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Muir, p. 192. Kafka’s orginal German, p. 204, reads ‘Jetzt ist alles fertig!’ The actual description starts on p. 207, the execution on p. 220. Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, says, ‘Nun sehen Sie aber diesen Apparat.’ Variations of the original German ‘Erklärung/en’ and ‘erklären’ pervade this part of the text, occurring fourteen times in those first seventeen pages. In The Penal Colony, the metalinguistic remarks establish patterns of play rather then serve a hermeneutic-philosophical function. James Rolleston observes a ‘consistency with which Kafka pursues his aim of infusing each element with its own negation in order to achieve greater intensity’, Kafka’s Narrative Theater (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), p. 99. ‘Der buchstäbliche Körper. Zur Selbstinszenierung der Literatur bei Franz Kakfa’, in Der junge Kafka, ed. by Gerhard Kunz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 213-41 (p. 219). As explained earlier, one could also refer to the ellipse in this context. Johnston, p. 205. Here, Johnston’s translation as ‘breakdown’ is more appropriate than Muir’s ‘go wrong’.

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again, he employs a metalinguistic comment: ‘“But”, the officer interrupted himself, “I am rambling on, and here stands his [the Commandant’s] apparatus before us. It consists, as you see, of three parts” […].’33 At the end of this explanation, when the make-up of the apparatus has eventually been explained, the explorer, and with him the reader, is nevertheless still waiting to find out about the precise purpose of the apparatus. Until then, the officer ‘rambles on’ about all sorts of topics which, although thematically related to the apparatus, interrupt any straight line of explanation. In this respect, they resemble the condemned man’s chains which suggest vertical and horizontal connections. There is, in Johnston’s translation, ‘a heavy chain to which were connected the small chains [...] which were also linked to each other by connecting chains.’ 34 As a result of this ‘play’ with meaning and différance, the reader would have learnt not to take any information given in the text at face value. For a reader who is mainly interested in a straight storyline, these breakdowns in ‘distinctions between observation and participation’ 35 and the very active role in making meaning out of the text might be irritating; other readers, such as Kosky, would relish in those performances, delays and ‘plays’ with meaning and reader expectations.36 At this stage of the analysis, it is appropriate to abandon the artificial distinction between deferral and difference. The above metaphor of the chains already illustrates, in line with the definition of différance, that the deferral of meaning is continuously linked to shifts in meaning. And it is mainly adjectives that prove to be ‘untrustworthy’ to a reader in search of clear definitions, as already indicated in the above analysis of ‘minor’ breakdowns. Similarly, the story’s very first sentence contains the adjective eigentümlich (peculiar, remarkable),37 which creates the reader’s interest in the apparatus. Yet, not only are its particular characteristics revealed at a much later stage, but also the next mention of the apparatus seems to negate its initial characterisation. The second paragraph states that the explorer, for example, ‘did not much care about’ 38 it and then describes the maintenance work, ‘tasks that might

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Muir, p. 193. Cf. Kafka’s original, p. 206, which reads, ‘Aber’, unterbrach sich der Offizier, ‘ich schwätze, und sein Apparat steht hier vor uns. Er besteht, wie Sie sehen, aus drei Teilen’. Kafka, p. 203. Cf. Edwards, p. 17. The analysis will show that this kind of ‘play’ is emphasised in the first part of Kosky’s production. Kafka, p. 203. For Johnston’s and Muir’s translations, see note 24 above. Muir, p. 191. Kafka, p. 204, reads, ‘Der Reisende hatte wenig Sinn für den Apparat’.

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well have been left to a mechanic’.39 At this point, the apparatus is reduced to the technical aspects of a simple machine.40 Again, there is another slip in meaning in the following paragraph, where the machine is praised again, this time as an accomplished invention.41 The adjectives’ destabilising role in these mises en scène of meaning is particularly obvious in the first sentence, where two out of the three adjectives are qualified by an adverb and a modal particle, which reduce their power to provide a definite characterisation; thus the officer’s gaze contains a ‘certain’ admiration and he is ‘of course’ (Johnston) or ‘after all’ (Muir, p. 191) familiar with the apparatus. This translation of ‘mit einem gewissermaßen bewundernden Blick’ and ‘den ihm doch wohlbekannten Apparat’ 42 fails to reflect the flexibility in meaning of the German original. This is because ‘gewissermaßen’ contains the idea of ‘quasi’, ‘seemingly’, ‘one could call it that way’. The particle ‘doch’ could be interpreted in the sense of ‘wohl doch’, thus meaning ‘supposedly’, ‘one would assume’. These modifications convey yet again the idea of ‘as if’ and of staging meaning. It is reinforced by verbs, particularly in the first paragraph, which sets up a scene of pretending. Thus, ‘the explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant’s invitation’43 and ‘the condemned man looked so like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run free’.44 As a result, the readers are made to feel insecure as far as the ‘true’ setting of the initial situation is concerned. In this context, the phonetic closeness of apparare and apārēre (appear) is important. It conveys that there is no ultimate ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ to be revealed in Kafka’s story: everything that appears to be ‘true’ or ‘real’ is only so for the duration of its mise en scène.45 Kafka’s use of adjectives and verbs at the beginning of The Penal Colony is indicative of the important role of theatricality in the first third of the text. To some extent, this can be compared to what Gerald Wildgruber has called

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Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, reads, ‘Arbeiten, die man eigentlich einem Maschinisten hätte überlassen können’. Whenever the emphasis is on the mechanical aspect of the apparatus, Kafka uses the term ‘Maschine’. See, e.g., pp. 204 & 220. See Kafka, p. 205; Muir, p. 193. Kafka, p. 205. Muir, p. 191. Kafka, p. 203, reads, ‘Der Reisende schien nur aus Höflichkeit der Einladung des Kommandanten gefolgt zu sein.’ The emphases are mine. The original, pp. 203-04, reads, ‘Übrigens sah der Angeklagt so hündisch ergeben aus, daß es den Anschein hatte, als könnte man ihn frei auf den Abhängen herumlaufen lassen und müsse bei Beginn der Exekution nur pfeifen, damit er käme.’ Neumann, p. 12, describes the ‘performativer Gestus’ which is inherent to theatricality as ‘impliziter Habitus des Denkens, Sprechens, Schreibens und Phantasierens’.

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‘The scene breaking into the thinking and the text’ with reference to Mallarmé,46 because ‘the model of the theatre and of the scene’ pervades Kafka’s writing in The Penal Colony. As the analysis of différance has indicated, Kafka does not aim at the mimetic description of a penal colony, but at an overall mise en scène which stages a scene called ‘the penal colony’. The gesture of showing turns the officer’s explanation of the apparatus into a performance, and the entire first scene, which prepares the set for the execution, resembles that of a theatre production. As stated, the officer and the explorer are in the main roles, with the officer representing the protagonist as far as the action is concerned.47 The supporting roles are attributed to the soldier and to the condemned man, with the latter merely serving the purpose of illustrating how the apparatus operates. The reader is led to assume that the execution will be at the centre of the dramatic action. This interpretation is encouraged through the use of vocabulary which can be interpreted in the context of an artistic performance: the explorer has accepted an ‘invitation’, he is going to watch and ‘witness’ this process, and the reader is informed about the waning general ‘interest in this execution’ in the colony.48 In the past, the execution has taken twelve hours, thus respecting the unity of time. The natural setting of the scene reminds the reader of the original Greek theatre. The apparatus, in turn, could be considered as a performative unit itself, a ‘play within a play’, consisting of three parts, the ‘Bed’, the ‘Designer’ and the ‘Harrow’.49 Yet, before it comes to the execution, the apparatus takes centre stage, both in the first third of Kafka’s text and in Part 1 of Kosky’s production. Interpretations have stressed the wide range of possible interpretations for the apparatus. To take up a few, it could be associated with the war machinery at the time, ‘similar apparatus in hospitals’,50 milling, bureaucracy, torture, machines Kafka encountered at work51 and writing machines.52 What is most

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‘Von der Vorstellung des Theaters zur Theorie des Textes’, in Szenographien, pp. 113-44 (p. 124). Although Kafka’s texts have inspired numerous performances on the stage, they are not dramas in draft form and Kafka has never written directly for the theatre. Interpretations of the two characters which do not rely on this formal criterion either favour the officer or the explorer, e.g. Clayton Koelb, Kafka’s Rhetoric:The Passion of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Muir, p. 191. Muir, p. 193. Kafka, p. 206, writes, ‘das Bett’, ‘der Zeichner’, ‘die Egge’. The bed where the execution is taking place could thus be considered as a stage on stage. Muir, p. 196. Kafka, p. 209, writes, ‘ähnliche Apparate in Heilanstalten’. Cf. ‘Apparate’ in Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie. Eine Geschichte aus dem Jahre 1914. Mit Quellen, Abbildungen und Materialien aus der Chronik der ArbeiterUnfall-Versicherungsanstalt (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, 1975), pp. 69-77. Koelb, pp. 66-77. For a summary of overall interpretations of The Penal Colony, see Hecker, pp. 115-18.

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important for the present analysis, though, is the connection with art which is established in the text along with its immediate link to punishment from the beginning. For instance, in the second paragraph, the German sentence ‘Der Reisende hatte wenig Sinn für den Apparat’ (The traveller had little appreciation for the apparatus) 53 could be associated with a lack of appreciation of its artistic dimension. Similarly, other nouns could be interpreted as artistic metaphors, such as ‘devoted admirer’54 and ‘the Commandant’s work’ (with a clearer association in the German: ‘sein Werk ist’).55 Although the basic cruel and violent purpose of the apparatus is never denied, an uneasy association with Artaud’s Théâtre de la cruauté cannot be dismissed.56 The dis-‘play’ of the apparatus as artistic continues the ‘play’ on and performance of meaning with a particular emphasis on the aspect of ‘seeing’.57 However, this kind of ‘seeing’ does not result in comprehensive understanding and insight; depending on the context, it stresses either the transitory positioning ‘as if’ or the glimpse.58 The flipside of ‘seeing’ is ‘showing’, which characterises the text as the gesture of showing. This is also a critical feature in Part I of The Lost Breath, because it allows Kosky to take over and elaborate on the aspects of ‘play’, différance and theatricality already present in Kafka’s story. When transferring this gesture from the prose text to the stage, Kosky reinforced the role of the officer as the guide who explains the apparatus. For this purpose, he turned him into a Gaukler, called Rudolf Kafani, who made the theatrical aspect of ‘staging’ meaning explicit. Kafani presented the apparatus to his audience in a monologue inspired by the first part of The Penal Colony. In this monologue, he included a range of elements of ‘play’, which invite a close analysis. First, Kosky’s production was clearly based on intertexuality which is reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of interweaving texts, such as in Mallarmé’s

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Kafka, p. 204. ‘The explorer did not much care about the apparatus’ (Muir, p. 191) and ‘The Traveler had little interest in the apparatus’ (Johnston) do not render this connotation. Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, writes ‘Anhänger’. Muir, p. 193. Kafka, p. 206. Once again, the word ‘Sinn’ is important here, but even more the actual description of how the body experiences the message rather than analysing it intellectually. This, in turn, entails an element of shock on the part of the explorer and the reader. Cf. my earlier analysis of the metaphor. Unlike in the etymology of theasthai, here seeing is not immediately linked to understanding. For the loss of this immediate connection, see also Neumann, ‘Einleitung’, in Szenographien, pp. 20-22. If interpreted as above, seeing does not imply that there is ‘no refuge from an allseeing eye of public attention’, Mark M. Anderson, “[...] nicht mit großen Tönen gesagt”: On Theater and the Theatrical in Kafka’, Germanic Review, 78.3 (Summer 2003), 169.

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work.59 Kafka’s story already alludes to a net of chains with ‘communicating links’.60 Kosky developed this image further, made it resonate with the work of escapologist Harry Houdini and visualized it as ropes. The performance started with Kafani being tied to a box by several ropes until he managed to free himself. The idea of interweaving influences also applied to the character of Kafani. Played by Yehuda Almagor, Kafani thus represented ‘a mysterious vaudeville performer who appears to be a mutant hybrid of Harry Houdini, […] Franz Kafka’ 61 and his characters. On a formal level, The Lost Breath maintained a certain degree of closeness to Kafka’s prose because its first part consisted of no spoken words other than Kafani’s monologue, addressed to the audience. Like Kafka’s text, Kosky’s production contained a mediating system of communication;62 however, the Gaukler’s explanations turned out to be even less reliable as far as ‘true’ information was concerned than the officer’s explanations in Kafka’s text. Thus, the analysis has shown that Kafka’s text is characterised by a linear movement which consists of a series of ‘determinations in a circle’. For example, the officer starts an explanation of the apparatus with positive connotations, only for the explanation to be interrupted. Later in the text, the attention returns to the apparatus; this time, however, with seemingly negative undertones. Kafani, on the other hand, resembles a juggler of words and meanings who succeeds in keeping several meanings in the air, e.g. a mix of possible associations with a travelling sideshow. At the same time, the next possible meaning, e.g. that of an execution machine comes into ‘play’. In this context, the German etymology of Spielmann and its association with dance also comes to mind.63 The playful handling of a multiplicity of meanings corresponds also to Almagor’s general concept of an actor whom he considers ‘a very delicate version of a Jahrmarkt magician’, but ‘instead of pulling every time a new rabbit out of the hat, we [the actors] put a new mask on our face, or change the ‘frame’, or introduce a new thought into the scene, change the perspective, change the score, surprise our audience and keep them always active in thinking and playing with us. [...] wanted to play with ‘playing’ to unmask the

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Describing the ‘traces’ in Mallarmé’s texts, Derrida states: ‘This interweaving, this textile is the text produced only in transformation of another text’, ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Positions, p. 26. Muir, p. 191. Here, Muir’s translation is more obvious. Melbourne production program notes. See Wildgruber, ‘Die Instanz der Szene im Denken der Sprache’, in Szenographien, p. 38. Duden: Etymologie, p. 690: ‘Spielmann’ originally referred to Schautänzer und Gaukler’.

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illusion’.64 In this kind of performance, the focus is clearly on the ‘play’ with meaning, emphasising the ‘fun’ and creativity of ‘play’. Apart from the special role and skills involved in playing the central role of Kafani’s character, the successful ‘playing’ with possible meanings of the apparatus relied on it being represented by a suitable prop. Kosky avoided the problem of how best to re-produce ‘the infamous apparatus’65 by using a huge box which dominated the performance space throughout the evening. Its multiple functions served as an indicator of the evening’s leitmotiv of metamorphosis, wrapping and unwrapping, disappearing and escaping.66 In keeping with the metamorphosis of the characters, the box grew in size during the evening. During the first part of The Lost Breath, it was at the centre of the explanations which developed the concept of différance on stage. The following description will illustrate that the box facilitated the experience of différance because it was extremely versatile despite it looking deceptively simple. Initially, Kafani presented the box as an object of curiosity, a kind of travelling sideshow, which ultimately revealed, as one of its possible meanings, the execution apparatus from The Penal Colony. In the beginning, his intention was clearly to win his audience’s trust with the help of three elements, which were unfamiliar to the audience, but familiar to him.67 These consisted of the development of the performance to come, of the box’s functions and of the elements of foreign languages he was going to use. He thus established himself as the compère of the evening, guiding spectators into the performance. Kafani then embarked on a series of addresses to the audience which alternated between serious, playful and provocative tones. In these addresses, he ‘played’ with his audience’s expectations of the box and juggled its possible meanings. Once again, ‘[t]he one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other’,68 but this time it is happening on stage. This ‘play’ with différance was reinforced by the use of foreign languages.69 Its effects are best illustrated by Kafani’s use of unfamiliar German 64 65

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Yeluda Almagor, personal communication, 6 February 2004. Shawn-Marie Garrett, ‘The Kafka Theater of New York’, Germanic Review, 78.3 (Summer 2003), 250-60. Garrett refers to JoAnne Akalaitis’s 2001 production of The Penal Colony, with music by Philip Glass, as a ‘pocket opera’. See also Garrett’s appendix, ‘Kafka – A Selected Production History’, pp. 257-60. Melbourne production program notes. In this context, it would be worthwhile to take up Ulrike Landfester’s suggestion to embark on another analysis which focuses on the Kafani as a ‘fool’. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp. 19-20. The implications of not understanding a foreign language is alluded to in The Penal Colony, p. 207, when the officer speaks French which – certainly, as the text has it – was understood neither by the soldier nor the condemned man. Cf., Muir, p. 194.

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words. When explaining his box to the audience he used the word apparatus and maintained this term from then on. 70 This applied also to the word Filzstumpf (lump of felt, felt stopper or gag of felt),71 which denotes a small but important part of the torture mechanism inside the apparatus and, presumably, inside the box. However, whilst Apparat would be easily understood and remembered by English-speaking audiences, this does not apply to Filzstumpf. Nevertheless, Kafani kept using both terms exclusively in German, initially with additional explanations in English. The effect was twofold. First, with respect to the content, Kafani nourished a curiosity towards the function of the Apparat, whose mises en scène of meaning only shifted towards that of an execution machine at a later stage, by using an unfamiliar term. Secondly, the seemingly gratuitous ‘playing’ with a more complicated German word affected the making of meaning and the actor-audience relationship. Instead of trusting Kafani’s guidance, the audience was surprised and confused when he started to tease them, using the German technical term Filzstumpf and elements of Hebrew without further explanation followed by the provocative question ‘You understand?’. With the change in Kafani’s approach and the partial replacement of their mother tongue, the strategies of attributing meaning to this production had been removed for a large number of spectators. Unlike Kafka’s readers, who would have the opportunity to reread the story when they want to reorientate themselves in the ‘play’ of meaning and différance, Kosky’s audience could not resort to this due to the ephemeral nature of the theatre performance. Furthermore, Kosky had removed the character of the explorer and his mediated impressions, thus addressing the spectators as exclusive recipients of the explanations. As a result, audience members could only rely on their spontaneous conclusions as individuals based on the explanations provided on stage. This direct form of address, together with the challenging use of foreign languages, could result in the audience feeling more exposed to the ‘play’ with recipients’ expectations than the readers of Kafka’s text. In the end, Kafani reinforced the experience of shifting and displacing meaning by erasing the audience’s positive expectations of the box. Yet,

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While it is not clear how much Kafka enjoyed the ‘fun’ aspect of ‘play’, a hint of it can be felt in he onomatopoeia of ‘Apparat’. Lehmann, p. 217, points to Kafka’s diaries to emphasise how important the phonetic make-up of words was to Kafka, stressing ‘in welchem Ausmaß er Laute las schmerzhaft und lustvoll als körperliche Wirklichkeit empfand’ (to which extent he felt sounds as almost painful or pleasurable, as corporeal reality). The emphasis on the phonetic structure of ‘Apparat’ could be clearly felt in Kosky’s production. This is the only element which Kosky has taken from the last two thirds of Kafka’s text.

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when he revealed it as a possible instrument of execution, this did not result in a binary opposition between Apparat as an exciting sideshow and as an instrument of execution; the shift of meaning did not replace the first meaning by the second; instead, it put the first one sous rature.72 At this point, Kafani disappeared into the box himself.73 However, the shifts in the ‘play’ of meaning did not stop here. In the second part of The Lost Breath, the audience could hear Kafani groaning inside the box, having presumably undergone the metamorphosis described in Metamorphosis, while his family members outside attempted to deal with the horrifying transformation through song and dance until they transformed themselves ‘into a tap-dance group, eventually disappearing into the box’.74 Part 3 was inspired by A Fasting Artist and saw all of the characters in the box. The box was now open on one side and doubled up the already existing proscenium arch. The box thus also serves as an apparatus of différance which metamorphoses and ‘plays’ with the identities of the dramatis personae. Consequently, the entire production continued the ‘play’ with meaning that was so central to its first part. On the one hand, its emphasis was on the deferral of the possible final meaning and purpose of the box, on the ‘not yet’, which is so important in The Penal Colony.75 On the other hand, it stressed the wealth of possible meanings; as Almagor expressed it, this performance was about ‘playing, unmasking myself again and again and again, until nobody knows anymore where the real person is and what is the real frame [...] to relate to [sic]’. This continuous construction and deconstruction of meaning as far as Kafani and the box were concerned was not dissimilar to Derrida’s freeplay, which he defined as ‘a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble’.76 At the same time, other meanings of ‘playing’ also contributed to the wealth of playful elements in Kosky’s production. In Part 1, some of this ‘playing’ was not only unpredictable for the audience members but also to some degree to Kosky and Almagor. For example, at the very beginning of 72

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In this respect, ‘sous rature’ corresponds to the Spivak’s definition in Of Grammatology, ‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible’, Introduction, p. xiv. Helen Thomson speaks of the audience’s ‘shock’ at this moment, Age, 16 October 2003. Melbourne production program notes. To a certain extent, this deferral may be compared to ‘the discourse of the law [in Vor dem Gesetz]’ which says ‘not yet’ indefinitely; see Derrida, ‘Devant la Loi’, in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. by Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 141. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences’, in A Postmodern Reader, ed. by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutchon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 236.

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the performance, Kafani deflected any possible negative feelings which could have resulted from Kosky, Melbourne’s enfant terrible,77 returning to Australia as an ‘expat’ 78 with his new production. For this purpose, he turned to Kosky, who was accompanying the performance on the piano, and introduced him as the ‘boy who had come back home to visit his family’, half talking to Kosky, half addressing the audience. Kosky and Almagor adapted this humorous bridging of possible intercultural tensions specifically to Melbourne and Viennese audiences and left themselves plenty of room for spontaneous adjustments through improvisations.79 This ‘playing’ not only emphasised the elements of creativity and fun in the production; the playful belittling and teasing of Kosky, together with Kafani’s elevated position on stage and his breaking through the frame of the proscenium arch, also challenged authorities.80 It short, Kosky’s and Almagor’s attitude towards ‘play’ could be compared to Edwards’s definition of ‘play’ described at the outset. It is ‘an attitude of mind, a perspective on life or on being in the world, together with actions manifesting this attitude. It affirms freedom and possibility against restriction, resignation and closure, thus blurring distinctions between observation and participation, and between spectators and collaborators’.81 In summary, Kosky’s production was imbued with ‘play’. Unlike many directors before him, he did not try to reproduce the constellation of possible dramatis personae and the potentially dramatic conflict only to illustrate ‘the commonplace that dramatic adaptations of Kafka rarely “work”’.82 Nor did

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Cf. the ABC-TV’s Sunday Profile, 22 September 2002: ‘This week on Sunday Profile we spoke to the enfant terrible of Australian theatre, Barrie Kosky, who’s now working in Vienna.’ at (accessed 5 January 2005). For instance, in the Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 2003, David Davis examines why ‘the feelings of Australians toward their own diaspora are rarely positive’. For other sources, one only needs to look at articles commenting on visits by Robert Hughes, Helen Garner and other famous ‘expats’. According to Yehuda Almagor, in a personal communication of 6 February 2004, in Vienna, for instance, they challenged stereotypes of Australia as a vast landscape without much culture and Viennese self-perceptions as a highly cultured metropolis by turning Kosky into ‘the little Australian who had come from the desert to the big capital of the Western world’. For Helen Thomson, Age, 16 October 2003, Kafani ‘skilfully and energetically “works” his audience into complicity with his jokes, including some at the expense of Kosky himself.’ Edwards, p. 17. Garrett, p. 252. Kosky wrote in his program notes, ‘The Lost Breath is not a biographical or a documentary show. Nor is it an attempt to present Kafka’s stories on the stage. This is impossible. It is, rather, an attempt to weave and metamorphose echoes and dreams about Houdini and Kafka. Not to understand them. But to try and understand us.’ Wolfgang Kralicek praised Kosky’s production in Vienna as ‘um die Ecke gedacht’ (thinking around corners), Theater heute, May 2003.

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he simply transfer to the stage the movement of ‘play’ which is already inherent in Kafka’s text. Instead, his production was successful because he continued to explore various aspects of ‘play’, making différance and freeplay part of an all-encompassing attitude of ‘play’, which includes the challenge of authority, creativity and fun. Kosky’s and Almagor’s work thus illustrates how the ‘playing’ with meaning and the theatricality of making meaning can be realized in the theatre itself. Here, the ‘play within the play’ has turned into a ‘play with playing’.

Notes on Contributors Alessandro Abbate (Ph.D. University of New South Wales 2005) is currently guest lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales. His research interests include Shakespeare on film, media sociology and cultural studies. He also works as an independent filmmaker and has published two books of fiction. Yifen T. Beus received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University and is currently associate professor of International Cultural Studies at Brigham Young University Hawaii. Her research interests include irony and self-reflexivity in literature and film, postcolonial studies, and Romanticism. Donald Bewley is London-born and was educated in history, education and psychology at the universities of Oxford, Dublin, Edinburgh and Pavia. A teacher of educational theory and history, Emeritus Professor Don Bewley has been a researcher and practitioner in Asia-Pacific development education. His lifelong interest in opera has been focussed since his retirement on the Italian poet-librettist Metastasio and that writer’s reception in eighteenth century London. Theresia Birkenhauer, a scholar in theatre studies and a dramaturg, was professor for ‘New German Literature with Drama as Major Subject’ at the University of Hamburg. Monographs: Legende und Dichtung. Der Tod des Philosophen und Hölderlins Empedokles (Berlin 1996); Zeitlichkeiten – Zur Realität der Künste, (ed. with A. Storr, Berlin 1998); Schauplatz der Sprache – Das Theater als Ort der Literatur (Berlin 2005). Essays (among others) on Beckett, Tschechov, Hofmannsthal, Hölderlin, Lasker-Schüler, Heiner Müller, and on dramaturgy of the opera and the theatre. Maurice Blackman is head of the Department of French at the University of New South Wales. His main interests are nineteenth and twentieth century French poetry and theatre, Francophone poetry and the theatre of the Caribbean. His doctoral thesis was in the field of comparative literature, and this early interest reappears in his paper on intercultural appropriation in a play by the Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire.

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Zahava Caspi is senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Literature of Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. She is editor of Mikan. Journal for Literary Studies and a member of the editorial board of BGU Review. Her most recent book publication is Those who Sit in the Dark – The Dramatic World of Hanoch Levin: Subject, Author, Audience (Jerusalem 2005). Lada Cale Feldman is professor at the Department for Comparative Literature, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her areas of interest include drama theory, theatre and literary anthropology, gender studies. She co-edited Fear, Death and Resistance, an Ethnography of War: Croatia 1991-1992, and is the author of four books: Ivo Bresan’s Theatre (1989), The Play Within the Play in Croatian Drama (1997), Eurydices Turns (2001; Petar Brecic Award, 2002), and Femina ludens (2005). Gerhard Fischer is head of German Studies at the University of New South Wales and convenor of the Sydney German Studies Symposia. Research interests in modern German literature and drama/theatre (Grips. Geschichte eines modernen Theaters, 1966-2000; Munich 2002), World War I (Enemy Aliens. Internment and the Homefront Conflict in Australia, 1914-1920; St. Lucia 1989), migration studies and multiculturalism. Articles on modern German literature and theatre, editor of volumes of essays on Walter Benjamin, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Heiner Müller, Erich Kästner, on ‘multicultural identities’ (with John Docker) and ‘German literature since 1989’ (with David Roberts: Schreiben nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur, 1989-1999; Tübingen 2001). Kyriaki Frantzi, Modern Greek Studies, University of New South Wales. BA (in Archaeology) Athens, MA (in Mediterranean and Arabic studies) Athens, Ph.D. (in History of Education) Ioannina, Greece. Her research interests include gender issues in ancient myth and modern science; theatre and performance; the teaching of Modern Greek as a foreign language. Ulrike Garde is lecturer in the Department of European Languages at Macquarie University. She has researched extensively Australian-German cross-cultural relationships, with a focus on Australian productions of German drama, its reception and the underlying question of creating cultural identities in cross-cultural contexts. Her monograph Finding an Australian voice. Australian production and reception of Austrian, German and

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Swiss drama is forthcoming. She has collaborated with the Goethe Institute on the Webpage Playbill. German Theatre in Australia. John Golder is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media, Film & Theatre, University of New South Wales. His principal research interests are theatre architecture and stage practice in pre-Revolutionary France. He has written on Shakespeare in performance, especially on the stages of France and Australia, and has translated plays by Molière, Lesage, Pierre de Marivaux, Victor Hugo and Georges Feydeau. He edits Platform Papers, a series of quarterly essays on the performing arts, for Currency House, Sydney. Erika Greber is professor of literary theory and criticism and comparative literature, University of Munich. Ph.D. in Russian literature and literary theory, University of Constance. Co-editor of the journal Poetica (since 2001); co-editor of the book series ‘Münchener Komparatistische Studien’ (since 2004). Member of the Munich research group ‘Anfänge/Beginnings’ (since 2006). Recent books: Textile Texte (On Word Weaving and Combinatorics; 2002); Manier – Manieren – Manierismen, ed. with Bettine Menke (2003), and Intermedium Literatur, ed. with Roger Lüdeke (2004). Bernhard Greiner is professor of German literature at the University of Tübingen; from 2000-2002 he was the inaugural Walter Benjamin Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recent publications: Die Komödie: eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen, second, rev. and enlarged edition (Tübingen 2006); Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Experimente zum Fall der Kunst (Tübingen 2000); Beschneidung des Herzens. Konstellationen deutsch-jüdischer Literatur (München 2004). As editor: Arche Noah. Die Idee der Kultur im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs (Freiburg 2002); Placeless Topographies. Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile (Tübingen 2003); ‘Schillers Natur: Leben, Denken und literarisches Schaffen’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Special Volume, No. 6 (Hamburg 2005). Birgit Haas is lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter. From 1999-2004, she was a DAAD-Lecturer at the Universities of Keele und Bristol (GB). She completed her doctorate on George Tabori in 1998 at the University of Heidelberg. Major pub-

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lications include: Das Theater des George Tabori (2000); Modern German Political Drama (2003); Wendetheater – Theater der Wende (2004); Das Theater von Dea Loher (2006). As editor: Macht – Performanz, Performativität und Polittheater seit 1990 (2005). Herbert Herzmann was born in Vienna. He studied German and history and received his doctoral degree from the University of Salzburg in 1973. From 1975 to 2005 he was a senior lecturer in German at University College Dublin, Ireland. His publications include Tradition und Subversion. Das Volksstück und das epische Theater (Tübingen 1997) and ‘Mit Menschenseelen spiele ich’. Theater an der Grenze von Spiel und Wirklichkeit (Tübingen 2006). Alexander Honold, born in 1962 in Valdivia/Chile, is professor of German at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin. Among his publications are books on Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard. Manfred Jurgensen is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Queensland and an award-winning novelist and poet. An Alexander von Humboldt Fellow since 1972, he has published extensively in the area of modern German literature. He held visiting professorships at the universities of Hanover, Berlin, Basel, Cologne, Witwatersrand/Johannesburg and Florida and has been editor of the international series ‘German-Australian Studies’ since 1990. Jurgensen is currently completing a study on death in German literature, ‘The Most Fabulous Thing in the World’. Gad Kaynar is associate professor at the Theatre Department, Tel Aviv University, head of the directing section and director of the University Theatre. Numerous articles on Jewish, Israeli, German and Scandinavian theatre, dramaturgy, performance analysis, theatrical rhetoric and reception theory. His book The Reality Convention in Hebrew Theatre is due to appear in 2006. As editor: Revolution and Institutionalization in the Theatre (Tel Aviv 2000), and Bertolt Brecht: Performance and Philosophy (Tel Aviv 2005). He is also a drama translator, actor, director and dramaturg. Ulrike Landfester, born in 1962, studied German, English and medieval literature at the Universities of Freiburg and Munich where

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she finished her dissertation on The poetical function of clothing in Goethe’s early works in 1993 (publ. 1995) and her habilitation thesis on Bettine von Arnim’s political writings in 1998 (publ. 2000). After visiting professorships at the universities of Frankfurt/Main, Vienna and Constance, she is now professor for German language and literature at the University of St. Gallen/Switzerland. Shimon Levy is professor of theatre at Tel Aviv University. He has published on modern drama, on Samuel Beckett and on Hebrew drama. He has written The Bible as Theatre and The Israeli Theatre Canon (2002), and numerous articles in Hebrew, English and German. Levy has been a theatre critic and dramaturg, and he has translated over 140 plays into Hebrew. He has directed plays for theater and radio. Presently he also serves as Advisor in the Ministry of Culture. Tim Mehigan, formerly at the University of Melbourne, is foundation professor and chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published widely on Robert Musil and Heinrich von Kleist. His most recent publications include Robert Musil (2001), The Critical Response to Musil’s ‘Man without Qualities’ (2003) and, as co-editor, New Directions in German Studies: A Context of Interdisciplinarity (2005). He is the current president of the German Studies Association of Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Yvonne Noble is a scholar of eighteenth-century studies, centered in English literature. Besides John Gay, her current interests are in honeybee imagery, Anne Finch Countess of Winchilsea, and the anthologist Elizabeth Cooper. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University and has been tenured at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University, Melbourne. Recent publications include Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society. Crowds, Power, Transformation (with Johann Arnason; Camden House, 2004) and Dialectic of Romanticism. A Critique of Modernism (with Peter Murphy; Continuum, 2004), essays on Peter Handke, on 1968 and on transformations of the literary institution in New History of German Literature (Harvard UP 2004). He is currently working on the theory and history of the total work of art in European Modernism.

452

The Play within the Play

Klaus R. Scherpe is professor of modern German literature and cultural/media studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. Recent book publications include Stadt. Krieg. Fremde. Literatur und Kultur nach den Katastrophen (2002), How German Is It? Ironic Replays in Literature (2005) and Kontinent Kafka (ed. with Elisabeth Wagner, 2006). Helmut J. Schneider is professor of German at the University of Bonn. Previous positions at the University of California, Irvine (19831990) and Davis (1990-1993). Various guest professorships, e.g. at Stanford University, University of Virginia, Ohio State University, Beheshti University, Teheran (2003), Harvard University (2004/5). Publications on the history of pastoral and the German idyll; landscape and utopia; image and text; German and American reception of the holocaust; German literature of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, especially on Lessing, Kleist, and Goethe; body paradigms in the classical age and modernism; drama and theatre. Caroline Sheaffer-Jones teaches in the School of Modern Language Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has published on the works of twentieth-century French and Francophone writers, including Blanchot, Camus, Carrier, Cocteau and Kofman. Christian Sinn, born 1962. Studies in philosophy and German literature at the University of Constance (Ph.D. 2001; Habilitation 2002). Visiting professor in Iassi (Romania 2003) and Prague (2005). Currently professor at the University of Erfurt. Barnard Turner has taught at the National University of Singapore since 1989, and is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, where he teaches modernist English and European literature and theatre; he is also convenor of the European Studies programme. He has published on different aspects of these areas, including several articles on Heiner Müller and some half dozen on D.H. Lawrence. His book on the contemporary American West as metaphor, Cultural Tropes of the Contemporary American West, appeared in 2005. Ken Woodgate, born 1962, studied German and French at Melbourne, Monash, Karlsruhe and Bamberg. He wrote his doctoral thesis on The Fantastic in the Works of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Frankfurt, 1999). Employed as a lecturer in German and Film Studies at

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the University of Newcastle (Australia), 1999-2006. He has written numerous articles on German Romanticism, Wendeliteratur and the cinematic representation of German Reunification. Frank Zipfel, born 1963 in Luxembourg. Studies in comparative literature, German literature, philosophy, theology in Rome, Munich and Mainz. 1994-2005 assistant professor, since 2005 Akademischer Rat at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Publications include: Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. (Berlin 2001); Was sollen Komparatisten lesen? (with Dieter Lamping, Berlin 2005), as well as articles on literary theory, narratology, libretto, Goethe, Rilke, Hofmannsthal.

Index of Names Abramson, Glenda 174, 175 Albee, Edward 310, 313 Albinoni, Tomaso 340 Allen, Woody 23, 373 Almereyda, Michael 377–378, 380, 388–391 Alon, Azaria 155 Alon, Yigal 153 Aloni, Nissim 147, 167, 177–182, 189, 192, 195–196 Alterman, Nathan 147 Andreyev, Leonid 116 Anouilh, Jean 308 Anski, Shlomo 169, 171 Arbuthnot, John 322, 331 Aristophanes xiii, 158 Aristotle 48, 215, 346 Arne, Thomas 340, 342, 344 Artaud, Antonin 37, 45, 47, 49, 55, 260, 273, 277, 440 Avneri, Uri 156 Balzac, Guez de 85, 86 Barba, Eugenio 118 Baro, Balthasar 77, 78, 86 Bataille, Georges 49, 54 Beaumont, Francis 115, 116, 120 Beck, Julian 120 Beckerman, Bernard 280 Beckett, Samuel 118, 148, 159, 164 Beethoven, Ludwig van 41, 229 Begovic, Milan 286 Ben Shaul, Moshe 155 Benda, Georg 349 Benjamin, Walter 28, 30, 33, 275– 276, 280, 378 Berio, Luciano 337 Bhabha, Homi K. 30 Bidermann, Jacob 61–66, 68–75

Billington, Michael 122 Blei, Franz 351 Blin, Roger 50 Blok, Alexander 115 Bloom, Harold 3, 7, 114, 124 Boccaccio, Giovanni 20 Böcklin, Arnold 355 Borges, Jorge Luis 36 Bosse, Abraham 83–85 Botticelli, Sandro 354 Brandes, Johann Christian 349 Brecht, Bertolt xiii, 22, 123, 124, 158, 249, 252–258, 260, 261 273, 276–278, 280, 321 Brentano, Clemens 134, 135 Bresan, Ivo 292 Britten, Benjamin 336 Brod, Max 36 Brown, G. Spencer 39 Bruce, Lenny 158 Bruckner, Ferdinand 294–295 Brustein, Robert 49 Büchner, Georg 237, 238, 246–247, 249–251, 258, 261 Buhler, Stephen 383, 385 Burney, Charles 345 Byron, Lord George Gordon 18, 369, 375 Caillois, Roger 425, 428 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 37, 38, 40, 43, 83, 221–225, 227, 230 Callot, Jacques 354 Castiglione, Baldassarre 4 Césaire, Aimé 297–305 Chekhov, Anton 101, 102, 104, 105 Chimonas, Giorgos 318 Chirico, Giorgio De 354 Christie, Agatha 115

456

The Play within the Play

Cibber, Colley 341, 342 Clérambault, Louis-Nicholas 310 Conrad, Joseph 27, 28, 33 Corigliano, John 337 Corneille, Pierre 47, 77, 78, 81–83, 85, 88, 92, 98, 213, 215–216 Couton, Georges 88 Coveney, Michael 122 Craig, Gordon 354 Crow, Joan 79 Culler, Jonathan 24 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 229, 230 Dallenbach, Lucien 191 Dassin, Jules 308 Davidts, Hermann 418 Dayan, Moshe 150, 153, 154 De Marinis, Marco 287 Deierkauf-Holsboer, Wilma 90 Delaney, Paul 115 Derrida, Jacques 37, 47, 48, 49, 431–434, 440, 444 Diderot, Denis 19 Donatus, Aelius 64 Dort, Bernard 49 Dresher, Melvin 408 Dreyer, Carl 308 Drzic, Marin 285, 286 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 37, 40, 43, 44, 249 Duvignaud, Jean 289 Eban, Abba 150 Eco, Umberto 333, 383 Edwards, Brian 432, 434 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 277 Esslin, Martin 49 Ettedgui, Peter 367 Euripides, 64, 307, 308 Fanon, Frantz 298 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 277, 309 Fellini, Federico 23

Feuer, Jane 401 Fichte, Hubert 29, 35 Fischer, John 308 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 119 Ford, John 124–126 Ford, Merrill 408 Foreman, Richard 273 Forestier, Georges 77, 216, 217 Fosse, Bob 400 Foucault, Michel xiii, 25 Frisch, Max 101–110, 249, 270 Fry, Northrop 238 Galliard, John Ernest 340, 341, 344 Gavras, Costa 154, 158 Gay, John 321–323, 326, 328–333 Geertz, Clifford 28 Gelbart, Steven 155 Genet, Jean 27, 28–29, 30, 35, 36, 47–51, 53–56, 58, 288, 302 Gide, André 121, 350 Gigli, Ormond 386 Gilliam, Terry 16, 23, 24 Glissant, Édouard 298 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 41 Godard, Jean-Luc 401 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang xvi, 7, 41, 42, 45, 205, 237, 238, 246, 247, 294, 411, 419, 422 Goetz, Rainald 267–273, 278, 280 Goffman, Erving 113, 118, 120, 172, 289-291 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 64, 134 Gougenot, N. (Le Sieur de) 77–81, 83, 85–87, 90–92, 94, 97 Gozzi, Carlo 354 Graham, Martha 308 Grass, Günther 249, 288, 292 Greenblatt, Stephen 28, 367 Grosz, George 158

Index of Names

Grotius, Hugo 69 Gruber, William E. 116 Grünberg, Arnon 185 Gryphius, Andreas 62 Guarini, G.B. 64 Guri, Haim 155 Ha’Meagel, Choni 185 Habermas, Jürgen 258, 259 Händel, Georg Friedrich 322, 323, Handke, Peter 119 Hardison Londré, Felicia 115 Hargreaves-Heap, Shaun 409 Harrison, Tony 308 Herder, Johann Gottfried 349 Herzog, Chaim 156 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von xv, 40– 44, 61, 217–220, 230, 336, 347– 357 Hofstadter, Douglas 364, 369 Holbein, Hans 121 Honecker, Erich 261 Hornby, Richard 197, 268, 273 Huizinga, Johan 425 Hulbert, Dan 382 Hume, David 406 Humperdinck, Engelbert 42 Hutcheon, Linda 286 Huyssen, Andreas 272, 279 Idle, Eric 23 Ignatieff, Michael 367 Ionesco, Eugène 114, 179, 288, 291, 292 James, Henry 75, 115 Jameson, Fredric 378, 379, 387 Jeffers, Robinson 308 Jenkins, Anthony 118 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 373 Jung, Ursula 287 Kafka, Franz 28, 30–31, 36, 431, 434–436, 438–443, 445, 446

457

Kandinsky, Wassily 123 Kant, Immanuel 406, 415 Kellaway, Nigel 307, 309, 310, 312 Keller, Gottfried xvi, 43, 421–423, 425, 428–430 King, Martin Luther 299 Kleist, Heinrich von 237, 238, 246, 405–406, 410–411, 415, 417– 419 König, Rosemarie 228–229 Kosky, Barrie 431–434, 439– 446 Krauss, Karl 159 Krleza, Miroslav 286 Kruger, Barbara 267 Kyd, Thomas 204, 206, 288 La Fontaine, Jean de 322 Lacan, Jacques 49 Lacy, John 341, 342 Lampe, John Frederick 336, 344 Lancaster, H.C. 93 Lanham, Richard 7 Latham, Barbara 379 Lautenschläger, Karl 18 Lee, Vernon 339 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 436 Leo, Leonardo 340 Leoncavallo, Ruggero 336 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 237– 241, 243–247 Levin, Hanoch 145–146, 148, 150, 154–164, 167, 177, 189, 192, 196–199 Li, Hsing-tao 252 Lipsius, Justus 70 Loehlin, James 390 Lohenstein, Daniel Caspar von 62 Loyola, Ignatius 73 Luhmann, Niklas 290, 405–506 Luhrmann, Baz 377, 382–383, 385, 387–390

458

The Play within the Play

Lyotard, Jean-François 130 Machiavelli, Niccolò 5 Magritte, René 122 Malcolm X, 299 Malina, Judith 120 Mallarmé, Stéphane 439, 440 Mann, William 229 Manning, John 379 Marcuse, Herbert 158 Markus, Yoel 155 Martini, Father G.B. 340 Masens, Jacob 73 Massinger, Philip 205– 208, 220 Mast, Gerald 400 Matala de Mazza, Ethel 423 Matmor, Yoram 173–176 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 373 Mayer, Hans 29 McHale, Brian 135 Megson, Chris 183 Meir, Golda 150 Metastasio, Pietro 335, 337, 339– 341, 345–346 Mittelpunkt, Hillel 148 Mitterer, Felix 221, 222 Molière, 48, 77, 96, 286, 350, 351 Monteverdi, Claudio 335, 348 Moore, Henri 354 Morgan, Evelyn de 354 Morley, Sheridan 123 Morris, Meaghan 272 Morrison, Toni 308 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 41, 42, 221, 224, 226–230, 386 Mudrooroo, 262, 263–264 Müller, Heiner xv, 123, 134, 249, 260–265, 292, 308, 310, 311, 313 Mundi, Josef 147–148, 185 Musset, Alfred de 15, 18 Nancy, Jean-Luc 30, 33

Nash, John 409, 411, 413 Nathan, Moshe 178 Nelson, Robert 288 Nestroy, Johannes xv Neumann, Erich 316 Neumann, Gerhard 423, 433 Niessen, Nikolaus von 229 Nietzsche, Friedrich 350 Ninagawa, Yukio 308, 311 Nordenskjold, Erland 31 Norman, Marc 367 Noverre, Jean-Georges 308 O’Toole, John 168, 184 Ofrat, Gideon 173, 177 Opitz, Martin 64 Oren, Moshe 155 Orwell, George 27, 28, 33–35 Ossowski, Leonie 263 Ostermaier, 267, 268, 273–280 Ovid, 70–71, 206, 355 Pahlen, Kurt 227–230 Paljetak, Luko 293 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 29, 308 Pavis, Patrice 197 Peter, John 122 Petrarca, Francesco 20 Pindar, 316 Pinter, Harold 174 Pirandello, Luigi 15, 103, 115, 176, 286, 288 Piscator, Erwin 158 Plautus, 65 Pontanus, Jacob 62 Pope, Alexander 322, 323, 331– 333, 339, Poussin, Nicolas 355, 356 Preston, Thomas 211 Prigogine, Ilya 225 Prokofiev, Sergei 386 Puccini, Giacomo 335

Index of Names

Pufendorf, Samuel von 69 Pushkin, Alexander xvi, 361–364, 366–371, 373–376 Rabin, Yitzhak 196 Rankus, Edward 379 Rapp, Uri 187 Reinhardt, Max 42, 221, 351, 354 Reuss, Leo 221 Rosenthal, Rubik 155 Rouch, Jean 27, 32 Sajko, Ivana 295 Shaphira, Amos 155 Sarro, Domenico 337, 340 Sartre, Jean-Paul 49 Scaliger, J.C. 64 Schechner, Richard 116, 289, 290 Schiller, Friedrich 27, 28–30, 35, 41, 45, 222, 245, 268, 422, 426 Schlegel, Friedrich 15–21, 23–25 Schlueter, June M. 115 Schmeling, Manfred 288 Schmitt, Carl 237, 238, 242–245 Schnitzler, Arthur 135, 137–138, 141, 221, 225, 230, 231, 234, 249 Schönberg, Arnold 350 Schwanitz, Dieter 290–292, 296 Scott, James C. 27, 28, 34 Scudéry, Georges de 77–81, 83–87, 89–93, 94, 96 Seghers, Anna 260 Segre, Cesare 287 Seneca, 307, 311 Senghor, Léopold 297, 298 Senker, Boris 294 Serban, Andrei 308 Serreau, Jean-Marie 298 Seth, Vikram 369 Shabtai, Ya’akov 147–148

459

Shakespeare, William xiv, xv, 15, 24, 38, 41, 83, 91, 129, 133, 152, 204, 209, 220, 237, 242, 285, 288, 292, 297, 298, 302, 304, 306, 336, 344, 366, 367, 370, 377, 380, 383, 387, 390 Shamir, Moshe 189, 191 Shapira, Amos 155 Shaw, George Bernard 291 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 18 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 121 Simon, Neil 152 Snajder, Slobodan 293, 294 Soarez, Cyprian 73 Sobol, Joshua 176 Socé, Ousmane 297 Sokurov, Alexander 373 Sophocles, 178 Sterne, Laurence 19, 369, 375 Stoppard, Tom 113–116, 118–120, 122–124, 127, 288, 292, 367 Storey, John 378 Strauss, Botho 129–131, 138, 141– 142 Strauss, Johann 225 Strauss, Richard xv, 41, 217, 336, 347, 348, 352, 354, 356 Strindberg, August 119 Suvin, Darko 252, 254 Swift, Jonathan 159, 322, 323, 325 Syron, Brian 264 Taussig, Michael 27, 28, 31 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 368, 379 Terence 65 Terzopoulos, Theodoros 308 Theobald, Lewis 340, 341, 342 Thomas, Ambroise 336 Tieck, Ludwig 15, 16, 21–22, 134, 137

460

The Play within the Play

Tolstoi, Léo 426 Trier, Lars von 308, 393–395, 398– 402 Turner, Victor 32, 289 Twitchell, James B. 386 Ubersfeld, Anne 287 Vakhtangov, Yevgeney 169–172 Van Eyck, Jan 121, 122 Varoufakis, Yanis 409 Vega, Lope de 64 Velázquez, Diego 16, 21, 121 Vermeer, Johannes 121 Virgil, 323, 376 Vojnovic, Ivo 286 Vollmüller, Karl 42

Wagner, Richard 64, 229, 421 Walpole, Robert 323, 329 Watt, Stephen 280 Weber, Max 33 Weir, Judith 337 Weiss, Peter 134, 148, 249, 257– 260 Whitaker, Thomas R. 122 Wieland, Christoph Martin 375 Wild, Jonathan 323 Wolf, Christa 308 Yehoshua, A.B. 147 Zantop, Susanne 413 Zinman, Toby 123 Zola, Émile 426